Abstract
This experimentally presented chapter examines the phenomenological dimensions of blood, duration, and queer embodiment in the performance art of MC Coble, exploring how their durational works unmute bodily language and generate queer bloodlines beyond the visible. Drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and queer theory, Truax develops the concept of phenomenological unmuting—a process wherein blood is not only a material substance but also a communicative force that transcends individual corporeality.
Coble’s durational works such as Note to Self (2005) and the PULSE (2016–2018) performance series interrogate queer loss, resilience, and the circulation of bodies across time. In Note to Self, Coble endures a twelve-hour tattooing process, inscribing the names of 436 queer individuals murdered in hate crimes with invisible ink. Each name is accompanied by a blood print, rendering the presence of queer lives as both ephemeral and permanently embedded in the body. The performance challenges the politics of visibility, illustrating how queer histories are often erased yet persist through intercorporeal memory and collective grief.
In PULSE, Coble shifts from bodily inscription to light as a pulsating medium of resistance. Responding to the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, Coble scales Toronto’s Cinesphere and transmits Morse code messages of protest into the night sky. This act of embodied signal transmission reconfigures the pulse—not as a mere biological function but as a shared frequency of mourning, endurance, and queer futurity. By replacing verbal speech with light, PULSE reclaims silence as a powerful mode of resistance, critiquing state violence and the erasure of queer and trans lives.
Truax argues that Coble’s durational performances materialize queer bloodlines that refuse linear narratives of survival. Through bodily endurance, repetition, and sensory attunement, their work redefines the temporality of queer existence—foregrounding pulsation, fragility, and the radical potential of unmuting bodily knowledge as a site of communal resistance.
Coble’s durational works such as Note to Self (2005) and the PULSE (2016–2018) performance series interrogate queer loss, resilience, and the circulation of bodies across time. In Note to Self, Coble endures a twelve-hour tattooing process, inscribing the names of 436 queer individuals murdered in hate crimes with invisible ink. Each name is accompanied by a blood print, rendering the presence of queer lives as both ephemeral and permanently embedded in the body. The performance challenges the politics of visibility, illustrating how queer histories are often erased yet persist through intercorporeal memory and collective grief.
In PULSE, Coble shifts from bodily inscription to light as a pulsating medium of resistance. Responding to the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, Coble scales Toronto’s Cinesphere and transmits Morse code messages of protest into the night sky. This act of embodied signal transmission reconfigures the pulse—not as a mere biological function but as a shared frequency of mourning, endurance, and queer futurity. By replacing verbal speech with light, PULSE reclaims silence as a powerful mode of resistance, critiquing state violence and the erasure of queer and trans lives.
Truax argues that Coble’s durational performances materialize queer bloodlines that refuse linear narratives of survival. Through bodily endurance, repetition, and sensory attunement, their work redefines the temporality of queer existence—foregrounding pulsation, fragility, and the radical potential of unmuting bodily knowledge as a site of communal resistance.
| Original language | English |
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| Publisher | Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 28 Feb 2025 |