*Note: The performance has been edited down for clarity and includes uncensored swearing. Also...ignore our discord usernames, we forgot they would appear on the recording until after the funeral.
For my performance art project, I hosted a funeral in my personal friend group's Discord server, the funeral being for the per-transition selves of me and my good friend, Alyx from New Zeland. I met Alyx during the pandemic through a gaming server after she had come out as trans for multiple years. Very early in our friendship, Alyx was one of my many trans friends who helped me understand my own gender identity and among the first group of people I came out to. Though I have many trans friends who could've participated in this event, Alyx is one who I was really hoping would be down to participate due to our personal history. As for the attendees who also participated in the funeral, though mostly my close friends, quite of few of them have also developed a close relationship with Alyx, and a few of them knew me before and after my transition. I made the intentional decision to host this funeral in our Discord server to allow our friends the chance to join and participate in a forum we all knew.
The funeral opened with a string quartet cover of Slipping Through My Fingers by ABBA, a song with personal connection to me, but also a song that I've seen reframed as one of a trans-masculine person reflecting on their childhood socialized as a little girl. This reframing is one that stuck with me and is still my preferred interpretation of this song. After this introduction, the attendees were greeted to the event by the presider, a character I invented called "The Gender Man". The Gender Man was heavily inspired by internet culture in left-political leaning spaces. These spaces take a modern meme approach to gender, overall considering gender transition a positive but also showing a more absurdist lens to gender identity (i.e. jokes about getting gender envy from a tree). The proceeding eulogies written by me and Alyx for our pre-trans selves were meant to show contrast between perspectives on transition. While both of us showed appreciation for our younger, pre-transition selves for getting us where we were today, I took a more sympathetic view while Alyx was a bit more aggressive towards who they were. Both of these perspectives are valid as everyone's trans experience is different. The next part of the funeral was impromptu speeches from the attendees, all of whom I appreciated for their heartfelt words about our transitions. The end of the funeral being marked by my friend Logan playing live music (let's be honest, my actual funeral will have live music, or I'm personally coming back from the dead to fight whoever planned it) but with a contrast between Amazing Grace and a dance song conveyed the message I wanted with this funeral: while it is valid to miss and even mourn the person someone was before they transitioned, that shouldn't be the only emotion one feels when someone transitions, and it should in fact be celebrated.
In her essay for Khan Academy, Spivey states that "[Performance art] often forces us to think about issues in a way that can be disturbing and uncomfortable, but it can also make us laugh by calling attention to the absurdities in life and the idiosyncrasies of human behavior." When I first proposed this idea to the friend group that participated in it, some were a bit confused about the tonality I was going for. Questions like "Are we celebrating your pre-trans self?" or "Is this just going to be a roast?" popped up in the timeframe leading up to the actual funeral. For me honestly, I wanted it to be uncomfortable. I wanted my friends, especially those who have known me both pre and post transition to consider who I was pre-transition in a light that they probably didn't before, and also force me and Alyx to contend with what kind of people we were before we transitioned. All the while, the absurdity of having such a performative character in The Gender Man also made us acknowledge the culture that most of us met through and how we navigate our queerness.
One notable thing about this performance is the use of Discord calls. While I made the choice to use specifically Discord because of the group, the general use of an online messaging platform for performance art seems a bit unorthodox. After all, a large part of of performance art is the physicality behind it. However, in the way that art adapts to the time period, I believe that if performance art as a medium is to evolve, it must allow for performance art in the digital space. Yoko Ono's style involves "'dematerialization of the art object'...the practice of turning away from objects and towards ideas", and while she applied that to making art more in the moment and less of a static object, I believe the next step in that process is allowing ideas to be transmitted completely immaterially. If we are moving into a more digital world, I believe any medium that allows us to express ourselves to people, no matter where they are, and allow them to participate is an important step in spreading our ideas.
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