I was asked to present the book Queered: What's to be Done with XCentric Art for Women's History Month at Northeastern University, March 27, 2012. Queered is the first queer Armenian publication (co-edited by Arpi Adamyan, Lucine Talalyan and Shushan Avagyan), which is a compilation of correspondence, essays, short stories, and reproductions of artworks and performances over the last four years by the collective Queering Yerevan. The members of the collective are queer and queer friendly activists, artists and writers from Armenia and the Diaspora hoping to inspire dialogue in the Armenian community and abroad about various forms of systemic oppression within Armenian culture. Being asked to present Queered left me in a kind of conundrum. How do I best represent the group, whose work should I show from the book and do I have the right to act as a spokesperson for the collective whose members come from very different geographies? While I am a member I was the only one that could be in attendance. I couldn't possibly present everything in the book and couldn't fathom doing a dry presentation. As with anything, I can only express something from my own lived experience. I decided to do a portion of the presentation as a performance in response to a performative essay from Angela Harutunyan's Live from Angela: Apart We Are Together, from the Coming to You Not to be With You exhibition of the collective in 2008. I thought this would be a way of not just presenting the book, but responding to a part of the book live and pointing to the continuation of QY projects. The essay discusses the process of the group’s coming to fruition and finding grounds on which to relate: a task inevitably difficult given the vast experiences of the group members. She warns against claiming a too clearly defined identitarian politics for fear that the already largely invisible queer individuals will become marginalized to the status of “other,” hence legitimizing an opposing category of “normal.” She fears that a dichotomous position cannot be afforded in Armenian society because individuals could fall prey to becoming socially, politically and economically outcast. Live from the Flesh is performed through a live video feed, which is projected to the audience while my physical body is performing from a nearby room wearing a green screen suit and green face makeup. I have a live green screen keying software plugged into the live feed, which obliterates my projected presence. On the projection screen I begin the performance in near blackness calling out words which hold a negative connotation (in relation to colonialism, notions of progressiveness and loaded dichotomies) mixed with words of multiplicity, ambiguity and queerness. While calling out the words my televisual presence begins to surface as I wipe my flesh. There is a gap between my image and the audio, the latter reaching the audience beforehand. Performing through a live feed is a way of contextualizing the virtuality of the group as well as responding to Harutunyan’s essay. In Amelia Jones’ essay Cinematic Self-Imaging, Jones uses Merleau Ponty’s theory on subjectivization and embodiment in which Ponty insists that we relate to the world as both embodied subject and embodied object that is both the seer and the seen. Jones argues that the screen can be thought of not as a border separating self from other, but as a place for exchange where self and other realize their reciprocal and simultaneous relationships that are mutating entities. This breaks down the oppositional model of subjectivity between self and other. My presence becomes embodied through the revealing of my face and body within the projection screen.