what if I told you it was an accident?

(originally published in the Toronto Tempest)

Somewhere in the meandered haze of the lower east side, one of the steel beams of what could be any New York City subway platform, was supporting the additional weight of my propped up torso, as it straddled a drunk decision to do the unimaginable.

It was a fantastic visit to the Big Apple. Less the adventure of a Canadian tourist wide-eyed at Times Square, and more that of a queer artist in search of inspiration through the hospitality of the international ‘crip fam’ beyond borders, I found myself in Coney Island, in a dress, in November, with a whole lotta room to run.

During a day filled with discussions of histories, both ours and disabled, urban and legislative, Em had been kind enough to ‘show me the sights’ and share with me her immense knowledge of the city, learned courtesy of her Italian-American family’s business in NYC tourism.

Elle, who I was staying with, lived in the house of the Coney Island Sideshow mama, where sie worked as a dancer in exchange for room and board in this cute commune of talented freaks. We had met almost five years prior, in two other American cities—Burlington, Vermont, then a few months later in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—both occasions to attend trans conferences (hir as a speaker, me as a patron). What I discovered, was queer disabled writers, artists, activists, organizers, so visibly ‘crip’ and so complicatedly ‘family’. I had come home.

Perhaps my ongoing fascination with and affinity for American crip community is in the telling of its histories. Located within such a close physical and cultural proximity to me, exists an increasingly loud and visible emancipatory movement for the rights of the disabled, alongside decades of diverse personal narratives. Difference is not denied – it is pointed out, and it forges community in the fire of disenfranchisement.

Wandering around the empty freak show museum after hours at the tail end of my trip, each footstep sounding a quiet reverence, I released languid breaths beside rows of countless historic photographs of once-clamoring patrons.

A balloon-headed fawn juts out from around one corner of the main showroom, gaze temporally frozen at the hand of the taxidermist, beside a wall mounted reflection from someone simply quoted as ‘J.E.’: “The desire to look remains, though the frame has changed.”

Em’s canes made a sexy clack-clack sound against the concrete as we limped out of a bar that had fulfilled its debaucherous promise of five shots for ten dollars. Tequila turn-ons and a city of sparkle became the inviting backdrop to public displays of affection. After spending hours talking about radicalizing pop art and pop culture with crip bodies and personalities, the excitement continued its exercise into the evening. Disability is a living experience, one could cheekily posit.

Our carefree strolling turned into hastened mission however, when Em discovered she had to go to the washroom. Quickening our pace, we scoured the streets for an accessible facility. Nothing looked promising. When, all at once, Em stopped, let out a laugh, and declared ‘Ah well. It’s gonna happen!’ She leaned forward on her canes indignantly, poised to piss.

I was still shaking disbelief as the trickle of urine began to form and make its way seductively down her jeans, pooling politely at the base of her leg and escaping onto the sidewalk. My eyes were lit up and locked on her; I wanted to take a piss too.

For bodies already entering the world apologizing, peeing your pants in public is an act of visible shame that at once marks you and revokes your passport to personhood. In a discussion of accessibility and design at OCAD University, Judith Huemann shared a story of once suggesting that, if airlines deemed it impossible to afford the space for accessible washrooms, all persons be required to wear adult briefs while flying. Her remark was met with an eruption of laughter. Wetting oneself is undignified, and certainly not a request that can be made of any ‘person.’ Yet it is one that is made all the time, across very clear lines.

Pissing your pants in defiance of such self-regulated oppression is an act of willful and civil disobedience. Pissing yourself with pride however, is public protest; is art.

In Canada, there is an invisbilizing politic of ‘inclusion,’ when in it comes to speaking about disability. Somewhere along its way, this country has convinced itself that if we just don’t say the words, the bad things didn’t happen. The language of disability for example, is an ever shape-shifting dance of ‘I see a person, not a disability’ which simultaneously denies experience and legitimacy of voice. Without the power to self-advocate, which is allegedly enshrined in the politically correct language, the so-censored discourse creates repetitively flaccid dialogues, out of which provocative and momentous thinking and art cannot grow.

As an emerging artist, being given small platforms in and just outside the overlapping bubbles of academia and radical queer networks, has afforded me the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be an artist in Canada. National identity is something that this country strives to protect and perpetually manicure.

With that in mind, my interest in collaboratively participating in the public exhibition of American Able, a photograph series critiquing the notorious fashion faux-papa Dov Charney’s American Apparel ads, lay squarely in the arena of political satire.

The public platform for the series came as quite a gift. Having already participated in the CONTACT Photography Festival in 2009, and registered to showcase in 2010, I received a call for submissions from a jury working with the Toronto Transit Commission. 69 digital subway screens would be transformed into a new informal gallery space; a venue which already had on its walls a rotating regularity of actual American Apparel advertisements.

The narratives told by American Able bump up against the politic governing how we are allowed to view disability. Through the mimicry of a ubiquitous and controversial fashion advertisement, all of a sudden, an awareness of oneself is made in the process of being invitated to gaze at disability; at visible difference. An obvious disabled sexuality is met with confusion and resistance. The work challenges through art the history we’ve memorized and boldly rewrites it as a history we’ve ignored.

This disruption of static cultural images draws large inspiration from artists like Kent Monkman and Shelley Niro, who have deployed their own brilliant and dedicated commentaries in a landscape of Canadian art sparse with like-minded sass, and very ignorant of Indigenous identities and lived realities.

To depict the eroticized grotesque female form on a public stage breaks implied ordinances around which bodies are permissible to be seen. A century and a half of institutionalized residences for those deemed too disabled to be a part of society existed in Canada until as recently as 2005, when the largest, Huronia Regional Centre, was closed. A full 30 years after the federal government had been informed of the widespread abuse and violations of human rights at these institutions. And not before the vacant facility was exhibited for the sensationalizing whims of the media.

On Sunday morning, we had packed our bags for a day of protest. The perimeter of Zuccotti Park had been barricaded since the police raided the Occupy Wall Street camp – dismantling the library, medical centre, and kitchen that had been laboriously assembled.

With the Krips Occupy Wall Street contingent (spelled with K as not confuse the American media with the prominent gang ‘crips’) positioned at the foremost gate, I stood shielded only by my round Patti Smithesque sunglass frames and tattered cardboard “DECOLONIZE DISABILITY” placard, watching the Wall Street passersby with about as much fascination as they returned.

Strangers, people with cameras, were coming right up to the iron barricade, like it was a shield of museum plexiglass, to hungrily take our photographs. Or stare.

These strange-r interactions included a 60 year old man who took the insult-and-dash opportunity to yell ‘Get a job!’, face hot and reddening, at Jay, a young power-chair-rockin crip organizer, who gracefully excused herself from our conversation long enough to snap ‘I have a fucking job! How about you stop participating in a system that…” her voice trailed off on my hard of hearing side, but I held my sidekick tough-guy gaze at the man with disgust. She turned back around and smiled. “Anyway. Where were we?”

I now live in Toronto full-time. Trekking across the vast expanse of city blocks in a limping frame, my mind is frequently occupied observing the metropolis interact with itself. Where do visible displays of disability fit in? Where are the honest considerations of disabled history and art world ablelism? When will this country’s art scene honestly consider this country’s history and landscape?

Giggling with my dress hoisted around me, I was decidedly poised to pee too that night. I let the warmth escape down my own legs, trickling excitedly onto the literal and figurative platform beneath my weary sojourning combat boots.  Those around waiting for the R train to Brooklyn, or somewhere in between, paid little mind to my criminal activity, or my enthusiasm, but Em and I exchanged knowing smirks as I finished my business.

In Toronto, I thought, I could perhaps have pulled the same stunt. But he bullshitting and pissing is a little more hidden, and a little more packaged. As a disabled person, I am reminded to climb the ladder toward the hypocrisy of normal in all ways that I can. Disabled is not a point of pride, it is a place of shame, and I must use all my energy to distract you from that it. And if I do attempt to strike out against stigma and stereotype, it is always an inspiring metaphor for the nondisabled reality. I am a cause for you to consider donating to, not a casualty of a tidied history unable to be aired publicly. All this poses an extreme challenge when identifying as not only ‘disabled’ but as a disabled artist.

Recent provincial legislature is nudging us towards province-wide accessibility by 2025; these policy are being worded to encourage small and large businesses alike to consider disabled people as an untapped market. We are comfortable discussing ‘accessibility’ because it signifies inclusion; simulates ‘everybody’. Like the concept of the ramp – if you build it, they will come. But if I pee on your ramp, am I still allowed inside [the notion of Canadian artistic identity]? What if I tell you it was an accident?

you just can’t demand love. you have to be lovable.

i’m in the middle of watching the film ‘breathing lessons‘ for the first time. i’ve interrupted it to blog. but mostly, i needed a break.

i haven’t blogged on my wordpress blog for a while, because i’ve been adjusting to my new city, and ideas of future projects are still ruminating. and i haven’t blogged on my feelings blog (blogspot) because i’ve been trying to fall out of love.

i haven’t created any neew work of my own lately, and i can’t entirely pinpoint a reason as to why that is, but certainly the recovering heart is an easy answer. but an inaccurate one too, because hasn’t ‘love lost’ preoccupied art for centuries?

in the meantime, i have found employment at starbucks. it’s decent enough, my coworkers funny and engaging. and i can handle & find enjoyment in a joe-job because i much prefer to be working. but i’ve noticed the subtleties of my…difference. people hired after me getting more hours, though i was promised full-time. frustrations with my clutching claw hands that can’t quite keep up with assembly-line speeds.

my mom has been a bit of a rock during this transition. helping me clean my room, with her swiffering altruism, during the weeks when my head falls below water. trying to assure me that if i just work hard enough, i’ll be able to save money with this job, and continue following my dreams. and during my break up, the ‘it’s her loss’ and ‘you’ll find love again’  breathed repetitively like catechisms.

the truth is, i know i will heal. i know i will heal because i am disabled and if there’s one thing my body knows how to do is harden itself. back to rock. island. an ossification so memorized, it has a rhythm i lock into with my half-a-second quicker right clubbed foot step into click-click of hips. it’s raining in toronto. it’s supposed to be frozen.

in the process of the re-burial of my messy vestiges, i have been delivering proposals to different conferences, most recently accepted to ryerson’s upcoming conference – reclaiming our bodies and minds: disability, oppression, action!

ever since criptonite, i’ve been meditating on the application of post-disablism to a curatorial process and practice. pondering the ways in which a disabled experience can inspire the spaces we consume art, and the ability of public art to disrupt shared spaces. to make visible the invisible.

i went to a lecture at ocad last week delivered by judith halberstein and found the dialogue quite stimulating. i guess they plan to re-do/re-envision grange park by making plans for it to be ‘EVEN MORE ACCESSIBLE’. walking to meet chris at bistro last night, power-limping across the wide expanse of spadina along college, i thought: i’m tired of going to things that are “accessible”. i want to go to the circus.

there was a story in the star last week about a man with a physical disability by whatever name that is causing his body to deteriorate. much like o’brien’s. and, like o’brien, the topic of women and love unsurprisingly nestles itself at the core of the memoiric tale of barriers, brilliance, angst and- you guessed it, loneliness. i paused the film when o’brien said the line that titles this entry.

“you just can’t demand love. you have to be lovable.”

it was hard not to choke up. not for him, but for the endless palpability of his words. in my journeys to learn in love, i have, with time, bumped less and less against my early desperation and demands. we can outgrow these fears, if we have the opportunity to nurture ourselves as singular, capable, fantastic beings. but the reality is this: i may not find love again. mark might not. the guy in the star might not. it is MY loss, too.

we are not living in an age and experience where disabled people and human oddities are easy and eager to be loved. maybe this will change. and maybe it won’t ever. that does not mean i have not and won’t ever again be able to access love. nor is this pitying. but humans just don’t think this way. not a lot of them.

Front and Centre: Disability and Deaf Arts in Ontario (speaking notes, June 23, 2011)

My name is jes sachse, and I have been a practicing artist for five years now, choosing such mediums as creative non-fiction, poetry, photography, and most recently curating.

It was into the process of my post-secondary education that I began my journey as a self-identified disabled artist, dealing with themes of disability and sexuality. I grew to notice and harbour frustration with the severe disconnect between the politics I had begun to adopt and develop, as a young queer, post-structural feminist-leaning thinker living in a postmodern culture that remains patriarchal and ableist, and my actual views of my body, informed largely by lived experience.

In plain thought, I was a nervous little homo hunchback, lookin for some goddamn answers. And the more exposure my visual work and writing has been fortunate to receive, the more I realize there are so many struggling as I have struggled, and as I continue to – with the inaccessibility the pervades the art world, and (inextricably linked) as well, the invisibility of disabled narratives in those canons.

There is a huge resistance to a conceptualization of disability free from the system which disables, due largely to the responsibility of disability to uphold the supercrip/helpless invalid identity dichotomy. Therefore, the choice for an artist, particularly varieties of visual artists, to identify as disabled and even situate that identity in their work, is a complicated one.

To apply a well-known quote from Simone deBeauvoir, ‘one is not born, but becomes disabled.’ She was referring to the functioning of normative society to exclude and determine what being ‘a woman’ inherently implied. Subservient to ‘man’ under the phallocentric order of things, disabled in turn submits itself through naming to the subset of abled/disabled; more generally normal/abnormal.

What is required is a queering or reclamation of the term and notion of ‘disabled.’ Many have refuted the term, for reasons above, and opt for different language entirely, but personally I see strength and opportunity in using disability for what it is, and attempting, through re-definition, to name an experience, connect a (albeit diverse) community, and ascribe a unique and intersectional pride, as we have witnessed in the queer movement.

For any artist working to critique as well as contribute to disabled arts, post-disablism demands a subversion and rewriting of past artistic documentations and representations of disability, wherein an intimate relationship with advocacy is forged quite necessarily and indisputably.

Approaching my artist practice meant a decision to plant my academic learning at the core of my art. Examining the employment of post-colonial theory as a strategy, as with such Canadian artists as Kent Monkman and Shelley Niro can be seen to have done, to rewrite history through artistic artifacts or symbols of popular culture, I think too we can challenge visual representations of disability in the presence of a theoretical framework looking to conceptualize a post-disabling world.

Separating colonialism from disability is not my attempt here (as they are deeply married concepts and histories), but rather to draw attention to the differing operational nature of each within the systemic oppression of the Other.

This has very little to do with me, and everything to do with persuasion. Hence the birth of the American Able series with photographer Holly Norris, and the choice of vehicle and venue: fashion and advertising. (using the Toronto Transit Commission’s digital screens to display the work during Contact Photography Festival 2010).

Prominent disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thompson expressed fascination with the ubiquity of fashion and commercial imagery, as one of the most powerful tools for shaping public consciousness, simply by virtue of its utterly pervasive presence.

As she states, to be incorporated into such imagery would provide the strongest challenge yet to what has previously been the prevalent representation of disability – images which demand pity or an objectifying stare. Moving outside of this limited paradox demands a simultaneous responding to and reflection of past representations of disability in pop culture and media (and further medical, historical, and artistic documentation for centuries), and the creation new spaces for post-disablism. Diane Arbus, Victor Hugo, Rain Man, Artie from Glee – the nexus of narrative prosthesis examined and challenged.

In one of my favourite pieces of literature, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s room, the main character David undergoes a queer transformation, or coming out, wherein he is for the first time able to see heteronormativity and understand his connection to it through his overwhelming attraction to another man (Giovanni’s Room).

“I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm [...] I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.”

It was and is these insistent possibilities that continue to inspire my work, despite at times large personal risks (amidst privilege). From scholars to disability service providers to the average blogger, responses to my work as well as the American Able series have fueled what began, as you will see in these samples of my work, as an attempt to mimic medical text documentations of visibly disabled bodies, intersect queer and trans identities, and later the eroticism of medical garb and sterile spaces.

Recently, Carleton University held a Youth Activist Forum for youth with disabilities, which served as a hub for networking, learning, and idea sharing. Leading a discussion on sexuality and disability and art as advocacy unearthed some startling reminders that the messages communicated to people with disabilities about their bodies and sexualities still severely lacks any indication that autonomy, and hell, pleasure is possible.

Without the presence of a different kind of message, this attitude, held even by the many disability scholars and disability service organizations who found American Able to be disability exploitation; a set back to the movement (because of its sexually lewd nature), will not shift.

Recently employed by the YWCA, I was assigned to a project focused on creating strategies to address the high rates abuse that specifically women with disabilities face. Much research has indicated that the main causes are myths and stereotypes surrounding disabled identities, including the prominent: ‘disabled people aren’t sexual/don’t have sex’ (and therefore cannot be raped).

Better education has long been the answer: people with various disabilities can and do enjoy sex, and should be equipped with the education of what sex is, how it can be adapted, in order to not only access sexualities, but identify abuse. Can art too be a vehicle to address this issue?

We have much to celebrate, in terms of increased access (much credit to the digital age) but also a long way to go. I hold a secret dream that Canadian art (my context) will take on a legacy of post-disablist work, visual and otherwise. Such a legacy would need to speak to the barriers still omnipresent in a culture that is content to ignore them, complacent to the erasure of these histories and the rendering invisible of needs in mainstream discourses.

Artsweek Peterborough presents CRIPTONITE

Performance, video, and installation series curated by jes sachse. Featuring works by Deaf and disabled Canadian artists Chantal Deguire, Kazumi Tsuruoka, Jeff Preston, and others. 

Saturday, September 10 – 216 Simcoe Street

Comic art wheat-pasting installation featuring Canadian webcomic ‘Cripz’ duo, Jeff Preston and Clara Madrenas, located on the side of the YWCA building.

Jeff Preston (writer, web designer, photographer) was born and raised in Port Elgin, Ontario and was lured to the big city lights of London Ontario in 2002 to attend the University of Western Ontario. A bit of a trouble maker who has a big mouth, he has spent much of the last 20 years advocating for people with disabilities across the province. One of his biggest recent achievements was driving his electric wheelchair from London to Ottawa in 2008 to raise awareness for the lack of accessible transportation in Ontario.

Wednesday, September 14, 7pm – 216 Simcoe Street (YWCA lot venue)

YWCA Peterborough invites you this Artsweek to join us for an evening of Deaf and disabled performance and film works. The event is located in a created stage in the YWCA parking lot (near the downtown bus terminal), and is wheelchair accessible, and will be closed captioned using CART (speech-to-text) technologies.

7pm – CP SALON: It’s about Love. It’s about Cerebral Palsy. It’s about a Man with a Disability.

Singer/storyteller Kazumi Tsuruoka is joined by pianist Tania Gill: through rhythm and blues they tell the love story of a man with cerebral palsy. The 50-minute music-driven piece, produced and directed by Fides Krucker of Good Hair Day Productions, premiered in Toronto and has toured to Vancouver, Regina and Whitehorse.

What is performance? What is disability? What is embodiment?

“We are rarely given the opportunity to see art that is created from such a place of profound truth, that combines exquisite skill, raw emotion and both passion and humour. The music is searing and hooks deep into the hearts of the audience, both embracing us and bringing us nose to nose with our own preconceptions and prejudices. It creates an emotional and intellectual journey that demands and engages in equal part.” (Diana Belshaw)

Kazumi Tsuruoka is a charismatic performer and speaker who was a disability-rights’ activist during the 1970’s and toured the Toronto school system speaking about disability through the prism of his own experience with Cerebral Palsy. In 1999 he became a core member of the Toronto Theatre Alliance’s DIS THIS! Artists Group and has since trained in movement, voice and theatre performance. 

Kazumi co-created with Fides Krucker and performed in the inaugural CP Salon in Toronto, February 2004. The show has toured 3 times – to Regina and Vancouver (2006), to Whitehorse (2008) and to three Toronto campuses (2009). He is the featured artist in the documentary film “How Does It Feel” by Lawrence Jackman, poised to premiere at this year’s Abilities Festival in Toronto in October. Most recently Kazumi performed with Tania Gill at ‘Front and Centre’, a celebration of disability arts and culture co-presented by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), June 2011.

8pm – Four films by media artist, Chantal Deguire

Dégénération

Genre: Music Video (Interpreted in LSQ)

3:20 Minutes, Starring: Chloë Caissie

The “SignSync”(lipsync) is based on an excerpt from the song titled “Dégénération” composed by the famous Québec music group “Mes aïeux”. What’s new? The song is signed in Langue des signes québécoise (LSQ). 

Rien n’est impossible

Genre: Music Video (Deaf Music in LSQ)

3:12 Minutes, Starring: Tiphaine Girault

Accompanied by the sound of a drum, these rythmic signs are the unique expression of Deaf artist Tiphaine Girault’s poetic creation. Drums frequently accompany signed poems in the Deaf community. For the Deaf community, the drum is the best instrument for this purpose, since it creates strong vibrations and can be easily felt instead of heard. Here, the drum is used to created some kind of enhancement to the visuals. Girault used the LSQ sign “Can’t” repeatedly in order to convey her message. She breaks, bites, smashes, and burns the sign and transforms it into “can”. 

Métamorphose

Genre: Music Video (Deaf Music in LSQ)

3:12 Minutes, Starring: Hodan Youssouf, Kim Pelletier, Roxanne Charron

This video consists of three frames. In the middle, Hodan Youssouf takes the viewer through the various steps of the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, symbolizing thus the transformation that occurs to a deaf person when he/she finds his/her identity. The butterfly is a commonly used symbol for deafness in the community. The rhymes of the poems consists in the restricted usage of only 3 hand configurations to convey the entire message and the creative use of these three configurations. However, Hodan has removed all facial expression and sign language grammar from her face. On the left, Kim Pelletier is doing the work of the facial expression for the story, and on the right, Roxanne Labrèche interprets the story through symbols and actions signs. The position of these frames alternate from left or right. To bring more emphasis on the rhythm, the poem is accompanied by the sound of drum, which is a frequent instrument used for this kind of purpose in the Deaf community.

Alors on danse

Genre: Music Video (Interpreted in LSQ)

3:23 Minutes, Starring: Chloë Caissie, Jonathan Poulin-Desbiens 

‘Alors on danse’ (So we dance) is a song by Belgium singer Stromae, interpreted in Quebec Sign Language. Observe how the editor’s work brings dynamism to the signers/dancers and humour.

8:30pm – Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference

A screening of three digital short stories from women with disabilities living in Sudbury, Peterborough and Toronto.

Over the last three years, women living with disabilities and physical differences took part in arts-based workshops. Workshop activities and discussions explored identity and the meaning we find in our experiences. How do we want to be seen? What is important to us?

The photography workshops put cameras in the hands of the participants who used them to capture images related to self-representation. Women also had the opportunity to make their own digital story to capture their perspective on life with a disability or difference.

The result is the dynamic multimedia Envisioning exhibit featuring 34 photographs and 12 digital stories. By creating their art, women use the power of image to share their life experiences, expertise, and imagination.

9pm – Reception with the artists 

Thursday, September 15, 3pm – Peterborough Public Library

A second screening will take place in the downstairs of the Peterborough Public Library, which is wheelchair accessible, and will be closed captioned using CART (speech-to-text).

3pm – Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference

3:30pm – Four films by media artist, Chantal Deguire, followed by a discussion

Chantal Deguire is a media artist and filmmaker currently based in Toronto, Ontario. A graduate of Gallaudet University, Chantal is the passionate Deaf francophone artist entraprenneur behind Outer Creations, which will soon be releasing Chantal’s latest, feature-length work – the first feature-length film in Canada to be entirely in ASL/LSQ.

All CRIPTONITE events are free, and will include refreshments.

ohai.

dear blog

i miss you.

goddammit. editing a newspaper sorta sucks all of my creativity. not sucks. but, requires. i have neglected you AND my lovely pen pals.

but, as i get ready to catch another lovely tfs film screening, i will give you a little somethin somethin.

violence. there’s been a lot of hate on the streets of peterborough lately. and i’ve been seriously challenging myself to talk about it more. its hard to explain, but it’s different. in my brain, its just different. the hate i get when im alone. its most always connects to my disability. not my gender, not my queerness. but my face. and its hard to negotiate a way to reach out to friends, my community without…re-living hate that really can’t be ‘explained’.

my friends ask… ‘what happened?!!’

and i’m…sorta at a loss. usually i laugh and say it doesn’t matter. trivializing the actual event in no way ‘deals with it’ for me. but it avoids feeling vulnerable the way i usually do when it happens.

but…what happened?

i can’t help but getting all kristieva on this one. i represent the abject, for a lot of people. one time, i was alone on an elevator in the charlotte towers (i hate that place.) and when the doors opened, the young man on the other side waiting for the elevator shrieked.

shrieked.

he immediately apologized and got flustered. i can’t remember if he took the elevator with me or not. but i just wanted to run. and vomit. but mostly run. that was an extreme case, but they’re all kinda like that. yelling, gasping, or laughing. which is how we deal with trauma. it’s hard feeling like a trauma for humans.

and it’s hard telling you about it because i don’t know how to explain it really. are these people assholes? i can’t say. because there are so many. and if you didn’t know me, maybe you’d scream. maybe i would.

this might take my whole life to figure out. or maybe it’s self righteous to think i ever will.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: The Sexual Semiotic Odyssey and the Real

ENGL 3603H
Sara Humphreys
June 18, 2010

In the conclusion of a class focused on feminism, gender and sexuality through literature, our dear professor, Dr. Sara Humphreys presented us with an argument in support of the multimodality featured in Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed tragicomic Fun Home.

If the comicbook hadn’t sanctified itself in the world of literature with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, then surely contemporary graphic memoirs like Fun Home will make the case impossible to ignore.

Sara refers us back to the example of Jessica Simpson on the cover of Esquire, to calibrate a visual understanding of semiotic codes. Through a textual multimodality that truly reflects the layers of language rooted in heteronormatively gendered sensibilities we read on a daily basis, Bechdel is able to argue for the multimodality of the self.

While the text ostensibly revolves around the journey of young Alison’s narrative toward acknowledging and speaking the word ‘lesbian’, theoretically and non-linearly Bechdel is navigating the reader multimodaly with a queer sensibility. “Whereas ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ might refer to specific and recognizable sexual identities, queer evinced a thoroughgoing skepticism about the stability and usefulness of such categories.” (Plain & Sellers 302).

Heather Love, in an article on feminist criticism and queer theory, poses the question of queer coming out of feminism – is queer theory indebted to feminism, or has it left feminism behind? Queer presents a distinction between gender and sexuality, and a fear held by some that this newfound prestige offered a space to reassert age-old hierarchies and male privilege. (Plain & Sellers 302-3)

As much as this text is memoir, it is also a theoretical text. And though both Love and Lisa Duggan might be able to locate feminism and ‘lesbian’ within the queer movement, in the context of this still-heteronormative, phallocentric order, not acknowledging that voice and its profound limitations is a message lost in Bechdel’s story. In her argument for the reading and writing of identity, Sara cites page 86 from Bechdel, and the visual point of view provided for us. We are made to observe a very careful scene between Bruce and Alison, wherein Alison is asked to write by her father, as he sits opposite, reading.

While Bruce escapes the internal grasp of heteronormativity by living fantastically in his collection of literature (the allusions by which he lives), Alison signifies her world by the act of writing (these into her story). What I fear has gone unexamined, is the perspective which we are granted in this scene and throughout the text. Although the story on this image-page is multimodal, its is a singular perspective, some of which is lost or misplaced. This pseudo-voyeurism, demonstratively illustrated on page 100, and again on 120, reveals adult Alison’s hands as we look at a series of photograph-to-etching depictions of Bruce’s gender and sexual deviance. Which, in essence, is the nature of this work. Alison signifies a world in which which her father can continue to live, both in the truths and illusions of his real life.

The methods used by Bechdel to visually depict the story required her posing for her digital camera in order to draw each of the characters throughout the book. In essence, every element, from posture to literary reference to advertisement placement is of young Alison’s memory and adult Bechdel’s choosing and resultant signification for the reader. Nancy Miller notes that the narratives of the referenced literary texts in Fun Home  ”provide clues, both true and false, to the mysteries” of our relationships within our family, arguably (Miller 543).

As literature students, we are taught to read codes like these in prose as an invitation to find the subject. Metaphor is the ability of an author to transport us outside of the page into other lived histories and dimensions. Beyond post-structurally questioning authorship, Lacan would push us to examine the two registers that we rely upon to create worlds such as Bechdel’s. While multimodality is present in our consciousness when reading prose such as Gionvanni’s Room by James Baldwin, the alternate piece of literature in this course, our subjective application of the story to symbolic and imaginary registers goes without much interrogation, and remains the personal experience or sentimentality of the reader.

It is not simply the multiple modes that Bechdel draws our attention to – the looming presence of the ornate Gothic revival mansion that sequestered her father’s constant devotion – but singular subjective relationship between them. In one of the scenes cited by Sara, on pages 111-113, Alison is confronted with ‘woman as object’, and resignifies as male, after feeling “inexplicably ashamed”, likened to the myth of Adam and Eve. This child memory expresses the X by an adult Bechdel, and a quietly precocious queer moment, under the deafening pervasiveness of heteronormativity.

In the queer communities of today, it is defenseble stereotype that gay men are more apt to consumer-orientated and apolitical lifestyles then queer women-identified folk. There is a divide between cultures, not arbitrarily, but because of an access to power, rooted in a relationship between phallocentricism and capitalism. Bruce’s decision not to ‘come out’ and live as an openly gay man, and his constant effort to garnish the appearance of his family’s home and life with tokens of heteronormative culture are inextricably linked. True, as a letter from Bruce to Alison indicates, it may have been ‘the times’ (being openly gay is much easier now than it was in Bruce’s youth), however being queer is still a challenge; a challenge to the heteronormative order.

Turning once again to the Greek myths that resurface throughout the book, it seems to be upheld in Sara’s argument that Bechdel is positing an opportunity to defy the Law of the Father, and in fact bypass the death of Laius. But is this a new myth that relies on the old myths to create and recreate itself?

I believe that the ‘fluid waters’ in which Bruce stands in the concluding cells of the book, ready to catch young Alison do represent a fluidity inherent in our sexual modalities. And these always stand open for change and resignification. However, I also find “the sunbeam truck of heteronormative demand” to be ever-present on the horizon (Humphreys). The myths present in Bechdel’s book, both Greek and American (from Daedulus to It’s a Wonderful Life and the Architecture Digest) are the trucks, allen keys, instruction manuals to participate in the heteronormative happy days.

Bruce’s death was an event of the Real. In fact, it was noted in this ‘memoir’ as a more remarkable instance of the Real than her first queer sexual encounter. As a storyteller, Bechdel is choosing to tell us about her father’s death – from the first few cells of the collection, to the very last, this mortal fall brackets a tale of tragedy. Bechdel chooses the genre title ‘tragicomic’ – which in and of itself, is a portmanteau and tribute to Sara’s assertion of the presence multimodality. The replacement of the word ‘comedy’ in the phrase with ‘comic’ begs examination.

Tragedies have heroes, comedies have an ultimate triumph over adversity, however stated plainly in a letter to Alison, in a statement repeated to bracket her sex with Joan, her father’s voice appears stating that he is “not a hero”. But is Bruce an antihero? Or is he ‘either and’?

Psychoanalytically, Fun Home demonstrates our inability to symbolize the Real – an achievement also made by Giovanni’s Room. Resignification is no more honest as a young queer today, then it may have been as a closeted ‘lesbian’ thirty years ago. The contemporary queer constantly succumbs to the pressure of signification within the heteronormative symbolic order, even within the queer community.

“I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm [...] I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.” (Baldwin 42)
Why does that passage move me so much? The unquantifiable responsibility of the Real in our emotional existence is to rush like the waters, not to be stood in, but to flow through and over us in the moments they appear, and echo long after. This was a truth that Bruce held onto like his library, like his photos of lovers, inside the tinderbox of his performative world.

Alison is not like Bruce…or perhaps she is much like Bruce. She too is lured by myth and literature; the literary lure of Collette and a sensuality plucked with a tenderly inverted femininity, and the myth of Homer’s cyclops,”the colossal strength and ferocity” between Joan’s legs (Bechdel 214). But Bruce’s cyclops would only be the chapter of Joyce which found a fatherless Stephen refusing a sonless Bloom’s offer of a place to stay for the night. Written like a catechism rather than an epic poem, the two men urinate in the backyard, and then Bloom retires, leaving Stephen to wander into the night. ‘The Ithaca moment’ (Bechdel 222).

Alison believes Bruce said ‘no’ to his own life, and only yes to the prose and misinterpreted passion of Joyce. Just like Ulysses, Fun Home received bans too, by people who found its content explicit, or perhaps “by people who found it’s honesty obscene” (Bechdel 228).

The connection between the way Joyce treated the women responsible for risking prosecution to first publish Ulysses (that is, a lack of honour), remains relevant in Alison’s telling of her father. Alison acknowledges the difference between them unfairly, claiming to require a myth of her own to keep.

Rather than being a selfish assertion, this…Ithaca relationship with her father has influence from heteronormative decree. Bruce is responsible, like David in Giovanni’s Room, for upholding the phallus, while Alison, by virtue of being ‘woman’, is ruled by it. By identifying as butch, she inverts this order, and operates inside a sexuality or erotic truth claiming pursuit of the phallus for herself, rather than not necessitating it. But by virtue, this makes her voice, as a person and a writer, less notable- like Sylvia Beach, Joyce’s publisher before Joyce broke his contract for Random House (in an interview, Bechdel jokes that her book is often shelved in quirky places (never memoirs) – from Lesbian and Gay studies, to Graphic Novels, to once, in Lesbian Mystery).

Bechdel has indeed created the possibility for a new myth, but that new myth is subject to governance of the heteronormative order as a ‘lesbian memoir’ as much as a classic Greek tale. The Spiegelman reference at the onset of this paper was not arbitrary. In a moment with a psychologist, Artie reflects on the discourse around survival in the case of genocide, as the psychologist states:

“[Life] always takes the side of life and somehow the victims are blamed. But it wasn’t the BEST people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was RAMDOM. I’m not talking about your book now, but look how many books have been written about the Holocaust. What’s the point? People haven’t changed… Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust. (Speigelman 45)
Or maybe, the episodes induced by the malevolent climb toward territorial ego Ideals will always require redemption from the tragedy of the Real.

Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. Concord, CA. Delta Books, 1956. 42. Print

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A family tragicomic. Boston, NY: Mariner Books, 2006. 86, 100, 120, 111-113, 214, 228, 230. Print.

Humphreys, Sara. June 14, 2010. Oshawa, ON. Arugment Presentation: The Multimodal Text and Multimodal Sex.

Plain, Gill & Susan Sellers, eds. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism: Feminist Criticism and Queer Theory. London: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 302-303 Print.

Miller, Nancy K. The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir. PMLA 122 (2): ISSN 0030-8129, March 2007. 543-544. Print

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I. Toronto, ON: Random House of Canada Ltd. 1986. 45. Print.

a cheetah can change its spots?

stumbled across this interesting article. former paralympian and model aimee mullins asserts that disability…

… is no longer a conversation about ‘overcoming deficiency’. It’s a conversation about augmentation. It’s a conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn’t represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is they want to create in that space. So people that society once considered disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment.

marilyn carr-haris seems to find this not only inspirational, but edgy. she bestows trailblazing status on mullins. but after writing several posts on disability and fashion, and probing the idea, i wonder about the… not-so-covert presence of consumer culture and fashion. mullins is not poor.

true, her custom prosthetics aesthetically work to resignify what disability looks like. or should look like. but i worry that this revolution is being paid for with our on-going consent to the capitialist framework that necessitates the place of disability in the first place.

think about it. and, though our influence from classical greek sculpture and myth is perhaps true to an extent, i do not believe that this alone is the site of our deviance from a world where beauty and disability remained mutually exclusive. this video is a TED talk given by mullins. its quite interesting – she’s a really well-spoken lady. also, the pam anderson comment is priceless.

poetry matters. poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object into a realm of art. it can transform the thing that might have made people fearful, into something that invites them to look. and look a little longer. and maybe even understand. -a.m.