Death, Diagrams, and Drawing Freedom

This essay is part of a series on “Freedom,” the theme of the 2026 Cleveland Humanities Festival.

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Death

To become an image is to experience a form of death. On a weekend of sweltering heat in September, I remove my overshirt to walk down the street in Cleveland in just a white tank top. I see people see me but not really see me. They look at both my face and my chest in confusion that happens in mere seconds, in passing. Passing, I’m not. Confusion doesn’t hide when an image passes by that doesn’t cohere as an image. Most days, I feel more like an imperceivable image than a body. 

My chest is an image, born out of death but not of death. Surgery is the passage of death wherein my old chest became my new one. Two lines now exist where there was once a shadow. Two darker oval forms have been grafted onto my skin, no longer carrying their prior functions. They are mere skin marks. You could say my surgeon drew my new chest. 

My chest is a drawing, created by marks. In the specific way my scar lines have formed—red-mauve, ropey, hypertrophic, and very visible—it is undeniably a trans masculine chest. The post-surgery marks on my chest diagram my chest to be read as such. For some, it acts as “proof” that I am trans. 

Diagrams 

My chest is a drawing that can be read as a diagram towards proof. To prove something is to reach absolute truth. With my chest, people reach the conclusion that Mei is trans, which is true. Another conclusion that is repeatedly made is, Mei is becoming a man, which is not true.¹ Here, the association that is made between the lines on my chest and my body is one where the lines on my chest diagram towards an essentialist, binaristic, and categorizable interpretation of the body and gender. In this way, my chest becomes a diagram.

Diagrams are systems that serve as the structure or formula for interpretations. Diagrams often represent established ideologies to confirm hegemonic logic as we know it. Diagrams formulate image and language, and they shape something unformed into a knowable form. Put another way, diagrams are about syntax and semantics.²  

When I think of diagrams, I can’t help but think of mathematical proofs. Mathematician Juliette Kennedy describes them as grounded in visual diagrams. Euclidean diagrams are “radiant with absoluteness.”³ Knowledge is found by locating reasoning solely within the diagram, and Euclidean diagrams have been called a metonym for epiphany.⁴ The word “epiphany,” with roots in revelation and Christianity, pertains to perceiving the essential nature of something. In this way, Euclidean diagrams and their systems of locating reasoning and absolute truth are historically bound to colonial ideology. With the lineage of Euclidean diagrams and mathematical proofs being strongly connected to the genealogies of logic and philosophy, this essentialist function of the diagram extends beyond diagrams in math to diagrams at large. 

Diagrams of numerous forms, considerations, and epistemological implications are prevalent in art. Gilles Deleuze poses painting alongside philosophy and describes how painters engage with diagrams to make, as he calls, “catastrophe” or the “pre-pictorial moment” comprehensible. Deleuze follows the logic of Euclidean diagrams, where a painter finds a formula within a diagram that emerges from catastrophe, and a form or figure takes shape by remaining within its logic.⁵ Although Deleuze speaks of the diagram as a potential way to understand transfiguration, his contextualization grounds the diagram as a process of teleological control. The painter’s concern with genesis and the beginning of the world informs how Deleuze contextualizes catastrophe.⁶ Deleuze’s characterization of the temporality of painting as “a properly pictorial synthesis of time”⁷ also creates an order of before, during, and after in navigating from catastrophe, to diagram, and to the pictorial, respectively. This can create a foundation within diagrams that centers the problematics of Western nameability, where the potential of the unknown is tamped down through dominant diagrammatic determinations of material, form, and meaning.

Diagrams also function as matrices that connect bodies to ideology and language that determine how bodies are defined. Amy Sillman, in her moment of fundamental realization about diagrams, registers that diagrams reflect externally established matrices of conditions and can be a form of control and violence.⁸ This is a truth made evident by my life as a transgender person, and as Eva Hayward claims, “Attempts to name, chart, and absolutely frame all matrices of transitioning are among the injustices committed against transsexuals.”⁹ The interaction of dominant ideological diagrams against a body establishes essentialist knowledge such as sex-based gender associations, determining which bodies are legible and valuable and which are not. Such violent determinations consequently negate the potential in felt embodiment that exists beyond diagrams and that informs expansive understandings of bodies and gender. Even so, I maintain that diagrams, in their largest capacity and expression, carry not just the limits of the negative but also possibility. 

How does the diagram channel possibility, and what does it mean to see diagrams beyond finite essentialism and towards the infinite realm of trans becoming? Sillman suggests that going beyond the diagram is situated “in something messy: accidents, negations, a spill.”¹⁰ She connects this to “the not-knowing part of the art-making process,” immediately followed with the disconcerting statement, “the drawing process as entirely separate from value-formation.”¹¹ Deviations are important to finding meaning beyond definable language and form, and drawing is where deviations reside because drawing inhabits the unknown without centering nameability. 

More critically, what is fundamental to locating the potential of the deviatory and the generative function that drawing posits to diagrams is understanding that drawing is inherently connected to systems of value-formation and knowledge both dominant and otherwise. Through a framework of drawing as destination, we can ask: how can we go beyond the limits of the diagram? How, precisely, does that happen? How do we locate alternatives without a dismissal of the violent conditions of the diagram? It becomes crucial to center drawing in relation to diagrams, to initiate motion beyond regimes of essentialism and towards materiality, sensation, and expansion. How can my chest be read not as diagram, but rather as drawing? 

Drawing Freedom

Drawing is fundamental to diagrams. It is drawing by hand in which the diagram is born. Kennedy describes the importance of the movement and sensitivity of the hand in the incidental drawing that is the source and formation of the Euclidean diagram. Architect Juhani Pallasmaa claims the importance of the “thinking hand” in architectural ideas, and the hand as the periphery between self and world makes the body an inherent part of drawing.¹² The body, its capacity for embodiment, and application of embodiment towards knowledge is inherent and fundamental to drawing. What is the relationship between diagram, drawing, and embodiment? 

To locate possibility in diagrams, it is necessary to (re)consider the diagram through a framework of drawing. It also requires an understanding that there are multiple frameworks of drawing with vastly different implications. I propose that diagrams can be read under two distinct approaches to drawing. One perpetuates the diagram’s attempt to create absolute truth, nameability, accuracy, and perfect logic through exact and co-exact properties. I call this drawing as translation. Reasoning and definitions maintain (even if false) constancy when moving within and between established structures of language, systems of naming, and ideologies within which limits can be imposed. 

In contrast, there is drawing as transposition. This approach offers an expansive consideration around diagrams and creates space for possibility. Drawing and transposition are connected because drawing necessitates consideration of the body, and the body is central to transposition. In her analysis of transposition in the context of trans bodies and transition, Eva Hayward describes it as “both cause and effect – the everyday act of becoming otherwise, as well as its foreclosures, refusals, and limits. […] a deviation that discomposes order.”¹³ Transposition does not negate the realities of limiting regimes expressed through structure or diagram, but it creates potential beyond systems of nameability. It also is not merely the act of changing something into another form. Transposition highlights material, texture, and description, and as such, it necessitates embodiment and sensation.¹⁴ It is engagement towards knowledge with sensation that is not bound by the predetermined structures of the diagram. It interweaves matrices with embodiment, like Hayward’s description of a spider drawing its web with material from its own body,¹⁵ creating a matrix of material sensation of and with the body through various interactions, expressions, and understandings.

Transposition’s material possibility is also present in the musical definition of the term. When a song becomes transposed, the key signature shifts the five lines that structure sheet music to become new diagrammatical lines of relational sound. As E minor becomes C minor, for example, the diagrammatical line for F sharp becomes F and B becomes a B flat. The same note becomes a different one, but it is of the “same” note in relation to and with the rest of the song. It is less about an unchanging representation or the absolute sound of that note. Rather, it ushers an expansion of its expressive qualities, as the whole body of the song shifts along a new key signature matrix through which expression occurs.

Similarly, matrices of meaning making have the capacity to shift in drawing as transposition. Moving on the temporality of the continuous present of drawing,¹⁶ one thing becomes another as matrices transform. Through matrices made anew or alternative ones gaining presence, new possibilities of materiality, form, and meaning manifest. Drawing as transposition is not about negating the diagram, and it simultaneously does not attempt to name through hegemonic diagrams and structures of knowledge. And so, my chest as drawing is not subject to or constrained by a concrete image. It instead has potential towards becoming musical note becoming sound, becoming phonic, becoming annunciation, becoming punctuation, becoming oval, becoming mark, becoming material, becoming possibility, and becoming. With embodied sensation, drawing as transposition makes present alternative matrices that motion towards vision. Reading my chest as drawing is not to see a diagram that makes an image of a chest—it is to see freedom. 

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1. I identify as transmasc nonbinary, and I am not trying to nor have any desire to become a man as defined within a binaristic and hierarchical way of understanding this category. ↩︎
2. Juliette Kennedy, “Notes on the Syntax and Semantics Distinction, or Three Moments in the Life of the Mathematical Drawing” in What Is a Mathematical Concept (Cambridge University Press, 2017). ↩︎
3. Kennedy, 57. ↩︎
4. Kennedy, 55. ↩︎
5. Gilles Deleuze, “Catastrophe and Diagram,” On Painting (The University of Minnesota Press, 2025), 25. ↩︎
6. Deleuze, 8, 21. ↩︎
7. Deleuze, 16. ↩︎
8. Amy Sillman, “Notes on the Diagram,” Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings (After 8 Books, 2023), 150. ↩︎
9. Eva Hayward, “Spiderwomen,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017), 256. ↩︎
10. Sillman, 151. ↩︎
11. Sillman, 151. ↩︎
12. Kennedy, 66-68. ↩︎
13. Hayward, 255. ↩︎
14. Hayward, 267.
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15. Hayward, 262. ↩︎
16. By way of Sillman, and as I elaborate in “Drawing as Destination.” ↩︎

All images are courtesy of Mei Kazama, and all rights and permissions belong to the artist.