The shelled gastropod: Trans-corporeality in necro-ecologies

This article brings together queer and trans* dialogues to explore posthumous agentiality, in conversation with the author’s artistic practice. Using the prefix trans- as a signifier of material becoming, it examines sympoietic necro-ecological conditions that transect ontologies and fold binary sensibilities, thereby unsettling assumptions of bodily closure. Beginning from the premise that bodies are permeable and processual, the article articulates matter as co-constitutive and unending. Through a diffractive methodology, it reads through and across New Materialist texts in dialogue with sculptural practices that apply strategies of inversion, transposition, and relationality. The figure of the shelled gastropod operates as a dialectical figure through which these concerns are explored, attending to the performativity of bodies-in-progress .