#gynocriticism

An older trans woman once told me that she sits to pee, which occasionally results in her peeing on herself, because that’s how hard she’s worked to block out the fact that she’s still retained her original organ all of these years. That’s what girls do: we deal in affect–feelings, vibes, emotions, moods—to counteract dissonance. If you feel like a girl, you are a girl. Serving cunt is the law of assumption. Pussy-stunting is a mindset. Delusion is a lifestyle. And dissociation is effortless, unselfconscious, easy.

After white men, only white women and girls are afforded an unstudied ease, a universalizing, pedestalizing canvas-like blankness free of aesthetic assumptions, charged with authority and unburdened by race and gender. The rest of us are seen as open wounds. I used to try to fight how I am perceived by feigning a sense of aloofness, insouciance and smallness. I did so by tucking my hair behind my ear, wistfully, longingly staring off into the distance, dissociating from my body to temporarily transport to a place where I could write like a white girl.

I would conjure the white girl vibe instantaneously when I’d listen to music, especially if the music I am listening to is really loud, almost dulling my other senses and causing me to feel what can only be described as the opposite of embodied: void-like. There, I could exist as an empty, diaphanous vessel unfilled by anything at all. There’s no burden of “identity” in the club or the bedroom or the hammam or the garden or online as the avatar of your choosing–anywhere deemed a feminine space worth inhabiting. Online, especially, is where anyone can lay down their burdens—the thick coating of class and race, geography and gender–and escape the indignities of womanhood, blackness, otherness. No fat…no trauma…no spiritual heaviness…no intensity…only purity. A blank canvas no one can ascribe assumptions and project onto. You’re the default player in the game. A babygirl.

As a terminally concerned girl teeming with big, electrical emotions, presenting myself as an open wound–where the id is steering the ship despite societal expectations and pressures to the contrary to flatten and suppress– has never quite appealed to me because I know it doesn’t appeal much to anyone else. I think of myself in relation to others, in a sort of triangulation with the world. I don’t want to be a spectacle, if I can help it, because I know I already am, that there is an audience baked into my experience, mercilessly ascribing the same assumptions to me that they would someone engaging with hallucinations on a city bus. On a city bus, to witness someone mumbling to themselves, smiling exuberantly, screaming, singing terribly or sobbing loudly in public, is to have a front row seat to an undesired excess, intensity and earnestness. That person has unconsciously chosen to present themselves, to the subtly disciplinary gaze of surveilling strangers, like a spectacle to be gawked at. They’ve interrupted the homogenizing edicts of polite society in a manner considered vulnerable, neurotic, unusual, boundaryless, histrionic, unrefined, unserious, grotesque, eccentric, amoral, out of control, shameless and cringe-worthy. Their vivid displays of animatedness, too gauche for “normal” sensibilities, so we’d rather tuck them away like an unsightly pile of rags on the floor, undermining them like we do our own id in the company of others.

This image is commonly associated with the mentally ill and the homeless, whom the public bodies and perceptions of are heavily policed and politicized. States of animatedness, of excess, are also racialized and gendered. Femininity and blackness, its sincerest expressions, deemed maximalist, evidence of effort, and therefore, failure. Too much.

To transcend our animatedness, we must turn our disciplining gaze to ourselves, self-effacing to make space for whiteness and maleness, totally erase ourselves. This palimpsestic quality is achieved through minimalist attire (no garish, colorful clothes re: avant basic), eliminating girlish and black vocal tics, adapting middlebrow tastes, writing in 3rd person, muting one’s melanated state with black and white photography, aspirational thinness so there is less of you, and an attitude that communicates aloofness so severe that you don’t even care about yourself.

These attempts at minimization, of disciplining your public animated body, will allow you to enjoy a certain remove from the wider world. You’ll be cured, no longer teeming with niggerishness and schlepping the mantle of womanhood into every room you walk into for the rest of your life. You’ll be the babygirl again, who you were before you ever knew that you occupy a subordinate role in society, and before you were privy to the myths and ideologies that have been created around your image and identity.

Like a princess, your girlhood and daughterhood had a sense of prestige, making the fact of your consanguinity almost secondary, except as a matter of differentiation from the masses of non-princesses. There wasn’t yet a force larger than life requiring self-minimization as a necessary boon. You were presumed to be a pure, guileless blank canvas of a girl. You didn’t have to arm yourself with knowledge of that—or any truth—to feel a claim to safety and purity because the fact of it was informed by your singularity.

The babygirl, elegantly inert and slow, never had to run outside of the context of a freewheeling and uninterrupted playtime. She was never embarrassed into velocity. She never had to be strong or work hard. She’s never had to learn to self-preserve because her existence hadn’t called for that skill set. Self-preservation is the ministry of wounded girls. The babygirl has never been wounded.

The babygirl is light, buoyant with a feeling she belongs right where she is. She’s preternaturally interested and keenly aware, with an insatiable attention and curiosity for entertainment, her commodities, the objects in her bedroom. She prefers living in a rapt state, the romantic eye of her mind transporting her from her present surroundings and the inherent ennui of girlhood into her imagination.

The babygirl’s emotions don’t give the appearance of an overflowing volcano of lava curdling into evidence of effort and maintenance and failure and toxicity, clumps for other people to step over, ignore, forget, apply a disciplining gaze to. She is like the waves in the ocean crashing freely into each other, free to express the gamut of her emotions, whether sad, irritable, annoyed or enraged, without it sweeping up the rest of her image and identity until there’s nothing left of her but her feelings, in the unforgiving, cynical eyes of the strangers she will meet in the world who will, inevitably, only see animatedness.

What makes me a babygirl–and what unifies me with all the other babygirls online who’re so hotly debated and contested and disbelieved–is our sensitivity and an unrelenting over-identification with objects and other people. Babygirls are committed to the aesthetic reading and viewing of still images, films and the internet, which informs a girly canon of derealization ephemera not intended to be over-identified with: antiheroines, dreams, the moon, theory, book spines, social outcasts, fonts, hysterical and ribald women, “invalid” women who live in their beds, dolls, numbers, voids, the color pink, avatars on social media, God.

All that is ostensibly facile and self-explanatory, for the babygirl, is gleaned through persistent observation. The babygirl fills emptiness with a divine estuary from which an embodied and pillow-soft love audaciously converges with nature’s brutal architecture—pulsating alive with blood and flesh.

Being a babygirl is like the infinitude of the world contained in a pop song or the gaze of someone staring down the barrel of a gun; it stretches on and on forever. Anyone, then, who sees through people like they are vacant homes waiting to be occupied by her, who thinks they know others with the cultic conviction of a true believer, who is wildly and wholeheartedly alert, is a babygirl.

And I am Princess Babygirl.

I am novelty combined with appropriation like collage art, music sampling and recipes. My palimpsest quality is not an encryption of the self; but rather, an illuminating synthesis of my embodied experience. I have been the host to various narratives, epistemes, connections and dreams that I’ve neither fully abandoned nor refined. I’ve imprinted my affects and vibes forever–going on and on like the perfect pop song on repeat–so I can never be erased. Princess Babygirl is who I was before all of the sublimated tensions, marketplace competitions, traumas, vulnerabilities, anxieties, mimetic rivalries, delusions, dreams and violence of womanhood happened to me.