#transmad

Both horror and poetry provide me the same combination of tension and release I find deeply satisfying and also, in many ways, unsettling. I invent a world that is dark, even to me, and as I navigate it, I discover it conceals things that can hurt me. I am compelled, line by line, to seek out the hurt, share in its exquisite effects. My first-beloved horror film, Carrie (1972), did this to me, just as does my now-favorite poet, Kim Hyesoon. Both identify processes fundamental to human bodies — particularly, in this case, to feminized ones — and render them startlingly close and yet distressingly alien.  Carrie was the comrade I needed when I started my period; Hyesoon when I was in what some call the “depths” of an eating disorder. The draw of horror/poetics involves a willful, willing return to these depths. Just a visit, a blend of the real and the fantastical: a body, covered in holes, dripping in blood, wielding the power to destroy its enemies the way it has so effectively destroyed itself.  In a sociopolitical environment in which trans bodies and Mad bodies (“transMad” bodies, as I tend to stylize them in my work) are understood increasingly both as vectors of contagion and as contagious in and of themselves, I am as invested in reclaiming and reexamining the inherent horror of living in an ableist, transphobic world as I am in reclaiming and reexamining what makes bodily noncompliance so scary to those outside of it.  I have found horror in looking in the mirror at a body I don’t recognize, hearing in my head a voice that is not my own, the visceral understanding that I am coming up to the very limits of my own survival. I feel able to look at subjugation frankly in this way, even and especially if what comes out doesn’t “make sense.” Instead, it is a generative nonsense-making, generative in that it makes not sense but space for something else, someone else. That someone is me, and maybe you, too. 

I’ve actually become mutuals with the author since they wrote this, the lovely cav @librarycards. There are some big words, but this version explains them in text. It explores a world beyond mainstream understandings of knowledge, and I hope you will take a look! (I’m also pointing to their TransMad tag, which has some relevant posts and follow up questions.) What do you think about it?

Disability studies has traditionally presented “access” as an unqualified good and a material one at that. However, engaging with the potentialities of mad opacity show us the way in which demand for access to transparency and frictionless understanding reproduces ableist institutional violence. Engaging with various strategies of opacity practice by users on Tumblr, particularly those that participate in what the author calls xenoidentity /alterhuman spaces, this article will address the stakes of both maintaining and questioning the importance of opacity. The author also offers the opportunity to consider what kinds of knowledges are inextricably linked to practices and indeed policies of opacity and opaque care. Rather than offering simplistic solutions, the author invites the reader to sit together in a position of access friction engendered by not only the presence of people who happen to be racialized, trans, and/or Mad in a disability space, but also by thinking capaciously with transmad histology, methodologies, and localities.

and three, that given these realities, solidarity among all Mad and Maddened people –– including those Maddened on the basis of sexgender difference –– is necessary to disrupt a fascist medical/social system bent on eliminating all forms of difference. the same can be said for other forms of oppression/alternative forms of knowledge production, too, but i focus on the transMad because i think that's where i can make the most difference & have the most expertise.