(On The) Body As Book

Written in the spirit of Maggie Nelson's "autotheory," this essay takes up Jose Esteban Munoz's notion of "ephemera as evidence" to explore how the body-as-object (i.e., the body-as-book) might reformulate understandings of materiality as an ephemerality of "traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things." Bodies-as-books are distinctly material, though not always solid, and can be written and read as artifact-ephemera that end but do not disappear.