Language is a Trap. Dominant knowledge forms fail to contain the ambivalent subjectivities of trans actors. A differential subjectivity constituted by a litany of elisions: present and past arcs of loss, injury, and erasure. Rendered also in the overflows, those experiences and knowledge-forms which defy definition, or refuse to conform to the standards of rigor. I consider trans erotic fantasy as one such overflowing site: jouissance in excess of language. In my work, holes, both visual and lexical, serve as a metaphor for erasures and exclusions, but also for these junctions where the excess of affect and meaning disables articulation. In such zones of inscrutability lies not a lack of meaning, but an aberrant abundance. I employ “Hole-iness” to describe a methodology of digging in excess. Not a digging-up—though much is overturned in the process—but a digging-in, digging-through, the vision of digging so far you come out the other side. “Hole-iness” also imagines the eventual ecstasy of having exhumed desire from emptiness. It is a movement out of psychoanalytic constructions of lack, toward a generative relationship to orifices, wounds, tombs, and treasure troves.

“Hole Miner” is a performative lecture combining spoken word, projection, diagrammatic live drawing, choreographed movement, and interactive Q&A in order to expand potentials for trans embodiment and erotic self-making. I begin from pseudoscientific explication of the nature of holes in visual cognition, an unstable theoretical base, which rapidly morphs into a fantastic odyssey through corporeal “hole-iness” as a frame for thinking through and with the body-as-material. Schematics cover the walls. Charcoal scrawls diagram this excavation of self disturbing the distinctions between archaeology and mythology, between critical theory and conspiracy theory. Fantasy and autobiography blend indiscriminately with humor and eroticism, exposing the ruptures and occlusions of hegemonic medical, psychoanalytic, and sexual discourses surrounding the trans masculine body. I repurpose these contradictions as errant accomplices in the construction of a new cosmology which centers the fantastic, the abject, and the paradoxical. In undertaking a radical reinscription of my own body, its form and function, I potentiate alternative strategies for reading bodies, sensations, and interactions in transition narratives.