words for friends

You are reminded daily or occasionally, but you are reminded nonetheless: you are “other.” To you, I declare that community is not passé. It is the foundation upon which we stand, no matter how post-modern, irreverent, or solitary our practices. Also, I propose that heritage and the history of those who came before you is not a burden, but a source of strength. Tribute, homage, and respect are not just generational mandates – it is how your foundation is continually fortified. Community is how artists survive perpetual historical amnesia at the hands of the gatekeepers of the canon from which we seek acceptance. I’m not going to lie to you. There are rewards for this amnesia – people will call you avant-garde or controversial, you don’t seem hindered by oppression, you aren’t didactic, you will gain access into places – alone – because you are one of the chosen ones who don’t challenge the institution. But you will be in the ivory tower, alone. We can explore such ideas as the post-black, the post-racial, and the post-feminist because our ancestors’ world was a world of firsts before the post. I appeal to you to acknowledge your influences, publicly and loudly. I implore you to do your research and cite your sources. I ask you to share. Do not be lulled by the open gate or window, and then close it behind you so no one else like you can enter. A sense of competition is bred into the art world that makes you feel like you will lose if you aren’t the chosen one. Especially to the radiant child and the wunderkind, I ask you to open your hands and release your anxiety.

if he makes you feel further away from god

song, allen ginsberg

First, there is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies, just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination. To see trans body alteration as participating and furthering binary gender, to put trans people’s gender practices under a microscope while maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional, but no less active and important gender practices of non-trans people, is exactly what the transphobic medical establishment has always done.

All of which is to say: leaning against other texts, thinking with other minds, letting another person’s writing (or art, or being) haunt you, inhabit you, inspire you, bother you, quite thoroughly, isn’t just a means of spurring one to produce thoughts or books. It’s also a wager about how deeply intertwined our consciousnesses may be. It is to wonder (as Henry James did, in his late novels), whether consciousness exists between us, in the air, rather than within individual minds. The wild and productive gambit of “leaning against” is that we’re not really leaning against others, but against a great throbbing consciousness, a soup of soul and mind in which we all share, even if that sharing is characterized by dissensus or a mirage of separateness rather than a blurry unity.

We have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it.

i aint gotta do it but fuck it somebody gotta do it hate if someone else did it fuck i may as well do it damn!