Falling Through the Digital W/Hole : The Trans*-Catfish* and the remaining digital visage.

This Object is an element-organ with ligament-relations with two of my other works. At the core of the inquiry is the figure of the trans*catfish*. The object is an organ that questions the digital body of the catfish* as a field marked by absence and remaining. I wish to look at the membrane that “remaining” and the category of “absence” settle on the catfish*’s digital-body. 

CENTRAL ORGAN: THE CATFISH*

The impulse of the central-organ comes from an attempt to write an auto-theoretical telling of my own account of inhabiting a digital cis-womanhood named “Aditi” across chatrooms and social-media. The paper explored the figure of the Trans*catfish* as a disruptive site of inhabiting bodies and intimacies across the digital, where I examined how catfishing constitutes a mode of trans* self-ness and the survival of that self-ness against normative narratives that tether authenticity to a “biological truth,” I argue that digital deception opens a (tactical) refusal of compulsory-legibility, allowing trans bodies to (re)negotiate intimacy beyond the violent logics of “discovery” and “exposure”, to give rise to another kind of (em)body-mind relation and sociality on the digital platform.

By theorising/Analysing deception as an aesthetic and political practice, the inquiry contributes to conversations in queer-trans* studies and posthumanism on the porousness of bodies, the instability of the “real,” and the generative potential of digital self-fashioning in the face of erasure.

The method of the project is housed in virtual ethnography, to find such ex-cursive identities on the internet which constitute their own cybertopic-worldings [cybertopic/cybertopia/cyber-to-pic/cyber-टोपी] and hold their experiences and worlds within a volume of testimonies. This cybertopic is a subset of cyberspace, where exists a con-sensuality between a tautology of two sets--the two (or many) bodies of the catfish*, as well as, the singular bodies of the catfish and the catfished. The method is also deeply invested in the various temporalities that the catfish* opens within its ex-cursion, the catfish* chronos--the catfish* has a history which is either in adjacency with one's corporeal history or constructed by it, and the history has certain birth-investments in the assumed/ dreamed futurity of its existence, whereas in some other instances, the catfish presences a present every time it interacts--it has a present in every conversation that it makes.

LIGAMENT 1: ABSENCE

I wrote a phenomenological-essay, for a grad-studies course, earlier in 2025 called “keeping thing w/hole”, which dealt with the heautophanous nature of absence in constructing the figure of my trans* body as a continually absens(e)ing figure, in an attempt to situate (my) trans-ness beyond the critical insistence of presence—to configure transness as beyond lack, and insist on an absential evidentiary.

In the essay, I draw Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the “phantom” over my entire body, to constitute the “phantom-body” which “remains legible to only one sense, the ‘felt sense’, of my body.” I formulate this relationship between the body and its trans-ness as body(phantom) [“phantom” written in subscript: where the phantom body exists below/behind the real only available through a function “( )” of proprioceptive “felt sense”.]

Rather than framing dysphoria as a lack, I trace how absence constitutes my trans*queer body, not as something missing, but as something that is originally absent--absence as the primary-perceptual sensibility. Through the concept of the “phantom body”, I consider how dysphoria functions as communication between the corporeal and the absent, unfixing the notions of presence while foregrounding absence as a generative ground---I term this social-inter/nal proprioceptive phenomenon as

By refusing the logic of wholeness--and moving into a fractured sense of w/hole-ness, the inquiry moves toward an ethic of absence, of incoherence— to attempt to “keep things w/hole”.

LIGAMENT 2: REMAINING

The project aimed to look at the grammar of remaining and what it means to be “left-” —it is important to note the hyphen, the hyphen-space signifies the future-life of remaining and the temporal-collapse that becomes of the one who remains—as it occurs within trans*queer bodies. The “left-” space resists the spatial orientations in becoming “left-over” and “left-behind”, the latter removes agency from the body and gives it its orientation—I still use “left”, in order to rethink its possibilities within remaining, and bring it close to remaining.

The project asks the trans*queer imaginary: what does it mean to remain? what does it mean to be in the "left-" space? How does one remember oneself within this “left-”-space and how does one remember oneself anew? What is the work of care in this after-memory of remaining? The project investigates an existence of the trans*queer bodies as it occurs within queer-residues, it works through the senses of a/lone-d—a/loan(ed)—queer bodies. The queer body is not to be read the same as a non-cis-heterosexual body, the project believes in queerness as an expansive framework that reads a variety of bodies as queer/trans. [although the inquiry is a queering inquiry, in-queer-y, it is not necessarily a queer-exclusive inquiry, the fact of remaining is also posited as an undergirder in the project of experience. residue within much and everything].

idea board 1: branching remaining

I work through bodies surviving an aftermath-existence to arrive at a body of work that spans landscape of one-medium and spills and invades others—and therefore, an important ambition of the project is that it is trans-modal, and built on the conversation of various mediums of telling and showing the rich inner lives of “left-“-beings. The project's trans-modalities span from graphic narratives to paintings to sculptures to skewing-installations on the labour of remaining--it aims at building an intermedium surface of inquiry that functions to house the anxieties of remaining within it.

idea board 2: remaining and art-objects

I am currently in the process of writing my graduate thesis on an anthropological account of Trans*-Queer* Catfish*es across India, where I gather primary accounts of digital performances and experiences, in order to establish an evidentiary, of which there is a lack.

I wish to realise how the two ligaments of the organ (mis/)communicate with and mis/read each other; how is a digital-remaining sensed? What is the absential-constitution of the digital body? What occlusions occur within the pixels of digital remaining? How are these translated into my visual-arts practice? To what methods does the felt-sense of a sensuous-supra-sensuous digital body of the catfish orient us? And perhaps, most importantly, how does one experience a digital trans*body?