Unbinding the Archive: A Senior Thesis Performance on Queer History and Memory

Isaac Heller ’23 sat in the center of the room, surrounded by a hushed audience. As the final performance of his senior thesis unfolded, he took up his hair clippers and began to shave his head, a bold and symbolic gesture that would come to embody the themes of the evening. Titled “Unbind This Book, Unstitch This Body,” the performance was a four-part journey through archival research, queer history, and the deeply personal process of gender affirmation.

The first part of Heller’s performance was an audio tour of the zine “Timtum”. The second was a live reading by Heller of “Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg. The third was a zine-making workshop. The final performance saw Heller sitting center stage in silence. Several minutes later, he began transforming his body by shaving his head as an audio recording played in which he and his longtime roommate and friend discussed their experiences with brain surgery and top surgery, respectively. All four of the performances gathered together to tell a story of an archive, history, and memory.

“What I was hoping to do with my project was to really explore the ways in which different institutions record histories of people's lived experiences, and particularly how systems of power inform those structures and what narratives are recorded and how they're recorded,” Heller said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson.

Heller’s choice to have four separate segments of the performance was influenced by his desire to keep to the theme of the archive.

“With the performances, I think I was really interested in having separate but connected instances that can be experienced by an audience member either individually or as a set, because I thought that that was one way of mirroring that archival structure of having disconnected objects that are still being grouped together by this larger kind of knowledge system,” Heller said.

Heller chose to highlight historical queer figures such as Leslie Feinberg and Susan Stryker to give a voice to the figures who have shaped both him and queer history as a whole.

“I really wanted to take a book that had been really important for my own kind of identity, understanding my own identity, and then give voice to that,” Heller said.

The final performance — consisting of an audio recording discussing surgery, the shaving of Heller’s head, and images displaying Heller’s naked torso overlayed with drawings of how he wished he appeared — served to show a transformation and an opening of the body. Heller wanted to show how the body can be used as a tool of expression and of memory.

“I was really interested in thinking about my body as a source of memory and talking through some of these ideas of visible and invisible transformation and how those are recorded in my body and in my memory, and then how they can be brought to life through performance,” said Heller.

Shaving his head in particular served as a symbolic representation of transformation and gender affirmation for Heller.

“Yeah, so I think that for me, it's very connected to this question of transformation. And a theme throughout my work that I'm really interested in exploring is sort of change through some sort of loss or potentially destructive act, but trying to reframe that in a way that acknowledges that loss, but is also open to the potential that that loss could be somehow generative” Heller shared. “So I think for me, shaving my head, it was a way of referencing surgery. It was a way of referencing gender affirmation in my case, because I think hair is really tied up with gender for me,” said Heller.

Audience members were incredibly moved by Heller’s performance. In particular, Cyrus Gray, one of the attendees, found he was able to connect his own experience as a trans man with Heller’s performance especially through Heller’s choice of shaving his head.

“For me, haircuts are a very gender affirming experience. And so being able to witness that gender affirming experience while listening to another one was really powerful,” Gray said.

Gray also found himself being moved by the pictures and drawings present throughout the performance.

“I really appreciated the drawings on the table where there's photos, and then on top of it, the dreaming of what the artist wished they could be or wish they'd look like,” Gray said. “The future planning, the queer futurity of it, of the becoming. And so, yeah, the trying to create oneself.”

Gray wasn’t the only audience member who felt a connection to the performance. Ariel G. Silverman ’23 was able to connect to the performance through Her own shared queer experiences. She, like several other audience members, was moved by the vulnerability displayed by Heller.

“I'm queer, so I relate to, I guess the aspect of making certain decisions about perhaps appearance and sort of coming out of it and the challenge of making that transition, but nothing to this extent. Yeah, so I think their vulnerability and the vulnerability and honestness and honesty of this thesis was incredible and shined a lot of light on the experience,” Silverman said.

Ryan D. Morillo ’23 also commented on the vulnerability of Heller’s performance.

“I definitely think it came from a place of vulnerability and it was just so raw, and it feels very, not out of the ordinary, but very unique because I think in spaces like these, we don't really get to have such intimacy and vulnerability, and so this was a really important piece,” Morillo said.