Pushmi-Pullyu (pronounced "push-me—pull-you") is made in collaboration with Aja Jacques. "Bodies remain trouble. Irrefutable, unknowable, and seductive, bodies are what thought wants to escape but never can. All thought emanates from bone, muscle, skin, and nerve, and yet to think is as far as we can feel our own disembodiment. Audre Lorde and Judith Butler puzzled over the contradictions of embodiment, recognizing how systems of power and domination—particularly white supremacy and patriarchy—shape and reshape bodies as well as the feeling of bodily life. Even as they both suggested bodies are potentials—erotic and performative, respectively—everywhere violence defines the concatenation of bodies. They recognized that the unbearableness of bodily being thwarts every effort to represent—to think—bodily potential or plentitude. It is no wonder that thought—for this thinker—longs for a reprieve from—to literally, get out from—the impossible demands of bodily existence. And yet, Lorde and Butler both understood that disembodiment or transcendentalism were the very drive of white supremacist patriarchy." - Eva Hayward
