Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The Lives and Afterlives of Leelah (Josh) Alcorn: Remaking Meaning from Transgender Suicide


"#LeelahAlcorn was buried in a suit with the wrong name. Please remember her as a beautiful young woman."

@Lets_Stop_Here
Bullying Stops Here

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"No Winning, No Way Out"

In Canto XIII of Dante's Divine Comedy, the poet imagines the Wood of Suicides, where the damned find themselves denied the dignity of their lived form after death. When suicides arrive in Dante's Hell, they are cast to the second ring of the seventh circle by Minos, where they plunge into the ground like seeds and grow into the form of trees. If this is not enough, they are continually torn to pieces by Harpies. Even after the time of the resurrection, when all souls return to their bodies, the suicides will be denied this honor:  "Come l'altre verrem per nostre spoglie, / ma non però ch'alcuna sen rivesta, / ché non è giusto aver ciò ch'om si toglie" ("We will come to claim our cast-off bodies / like the others. But it would not be just if we again / put on the flesh we robbed from our own souls." Dante, Inferno.XIII.103-105). Punishment by the refusal of embodiment is a consistent theme throughout the Divine Comedy, repeated again in the shifting forms of the cheats and liars. Changing the form determined for one's substance by Dante's God is tantamount to a rebellion against Natural and Divine Law, a privilege of shape which is then revoked. 

While the Inferno imagines the enforcement of such prescribed genres of embodiment in an epic fantasy, we witness the same logic of punishment active today against those who break from the confinement of unlivable shapes of gender. I've written previously, asking the question "What Name Will You Put on My Gravestone?" calling out the responsibility we have to fight the battles of the Trans lives after their death. Every trans person experiences vulnerability and the need for community support, but when that fight claims the life of another, the dead become even more dependent on others to re-make the meaning that has oppressively structured their lives. Between 50-60% of trans persons attempt suicide by the age of 20 and all too often the same forces that pressured the trans person into annihilation, continues to erase their existence by refusing them the dignity in death of keeping the form of gender they fought (and died) to preserve in life. Burying trans women in suits and ties and marking the graves of trans men in their birth names perpetrates the same violence of the imagination and memory that Dante's Inferno enforces on his damned souls in the Wood of Suicides.



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"Transgender Queen of Hell"


In the last days of 2014, we have been reminded again of the battle for the lives and after-lives of Leelah (Josh) Alcorn, age 17. On a late December day, Leelah posted a note on her tumblr page entitled  "Suicide Note" and proceeded to end her life by walking in front of a trailer tractor truck on Interstate 71. In the note, she admits to feeling that despite repeated attempts to make a livable life for herself through gender transition, she faced seemingly impenetrable barriers put forth by her parents and her community. Thus, while it was her legs that cast her into the way of death, she was clearly pushed by a society that wished to deny Leelah a dignified existence. "There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already," writes Alcorn. "I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse" (LazerPrincess). While contemporary secular doctors might describe Alcorn as mentally ill, as we see in the case of medieval stories of sin and transgender suicide, the illness is more accurately a social disease rather than a personal one. In fact, the resonance between Alcorn's online confession and John Gower's description of the death of a trans feminine Narcissus in the Confessio Amantis's description of the deadly sin of Pride is striking: a life is isolated from community, where the expectations to be a "perfect little straight Christian boy" causes an unsustainable division within the self, that because of a lack of support, resolves itself in death.

Yet death is never the end, as the battle over the life of trans persons turns into a war over their afterlives. Conscious that her story existed as part of a genre of transgender lives (often ending the same way), Alcorn reached out to an online community and called on them to guard her memory. "My death needs to mean something," writes Alcorn. "My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please." (LazerPrincess). An articulate young woman, Alcorn's note does what Gower's Tale of Narcissus and Dante's Wood of Suicides does: take a story of isolation and connect it with an imagined community of lives and texts. This imprisonment in an unlivable form of embodiment and sense of isolation bred out of being cut off from contact with a community of support constitutes what CS Lewis has defined as Hell itself. In the Great Divorce, Lewis describes Heaven as a single expansive multiplicity but also that there are as many hells as there are those who would reject or be rejected by everything else: "For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself." In this way, Alcorn was damned by her family and society to become how she describes herself in the tagline to her blog: a "transgender queen of hell" (LazerPrincess). 

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"Death Needs to Mean Something"

Trans activism and scholarship has been characterized not merely as either encompassed by the constructions nor the destructions of body and narrative, but by a continual re-construction. In 1991, Sandy Stone wrote her seminal trans theory essay, a "Post-Transsexual Manifesto" in which she called for a transformation of how we approach our personal and collective histories: “To begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written.” This act of asserting change does not deny the work nor the violence of social forces, but seeks to assert agency over the technologies by which their lives and afterlives are made and unmade. “Transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history,” writes Stone, “to begin to articulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the reconfigured and reinscribed body.” This battle over the reins of discourse seeks to wrestle matter and meaning away from the eternal fixity of supposed Natural and Divine Law as well as from the eternal nihilism of a denied existence. This occurs not by denying scripts and erasures, but by giving new meanings to life and death.

This is the vein that frames Alcorns plea, "My death needs to mean something" (LazerPrincess). In her final days, Alcorn was overwhelmed by the solitude and nihilism of a personal hell, and looked for "something" rather than nothing. The force of her words and death has sparked a viral response with numerous artists, activists and scholars adding the force to re-inscribe the history that others have set for Alcorn: burying her in a suit and under her birth name. Rather than letting this grave have the final word, photos taken by Alcorn herself have been circulated and paintings of her have been made. On Facebook, Robert McRuer writes, "RIP Leelah Alcorn. That pressure to be a "perfect little straight Christian boy" is real and I hope we honor your memory by refusing and negating that pressure in whatever way possible." On Twitter we hear voices reacting to the societies that made and unmade Leelah. Tara Jayn (@TaraJayn)writes "Guess the parents overlooked the fact that maybe God gave them  #LeelahAlcorn  as their chance to learn unconditional love. #TransLivesMatter," while Sophia Banks (@SophiaPhotos) writes, "I am not religious but nor will I blame religion for the suicide of #LeelahAlcorn lots of transphobia from atheists too." Whether or not one believes in Dante's hell of torment, Lewis's hell of isolation, or Alcorn's parents' hell of cisgender expectations, Leelah's death need not be the final everlasting word for her afterlife in the wider community.

We failed to save Leelah's life, but how can we honor it and give her a better afterlife on this world? Re-inscribing her image and story are great starts. As Alcorn writes in her sign off, "Goodbye,(Leelah) Josh Alcorn" the specter of past lives remain with us and we have the power to transform them. Yet we need to also liberate Leelah in ways that she could not do alone. We need to free "(Leelah)" from the confines of being stated parenthetically, separated off as an isolated life or failed potential. Alcorn points us in the direction of how to do this: "My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please." In life she was made to be too alone, in death she has the potential to join a community. We need to connect her story to those that have come before (like Dante, Gower, Lewis) and give her afterlife a place among us. This is not merely a plea to "Save Leelah" but an affirmation that we never will totally lose her and she may yet save us.


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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Scars of the Pardoner: Recollecting Fragment VI (5/5)


"I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond 
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie"

The Pardoner's Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer

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Conversations about medieval gender appear drawn to touch upon the Pardoner, adding to the sense that he is oversexed, yet following on the work of queer readings of Carolyn Dinshaw, Glenn Burger, and Will Stockton, I argue that it is the the text’s ability to sustain so many different readings and operate across so many genres of embodiment (eunuchs, queers, hermaphrodites, etc.), that announces its trans-operative mode of treacherously relating across existing barriers of identification and historical context.[1] This willingness to operate across dividing lines is an integral aspect in how the Pardoner frames the cut up bodies in his Prologue and Tale, recollecting the persistent political danger of parts. Unlike the Physician, who hardly thinks of his own contingency and saving his own skin, the Pardoner is weary, however, admitting that his pardons and relics, “my body to warente.”[2] The critical work of recollection is not merely salvaging the past but rebuilding a continuum that allows operatives a new lease on the future.

This ontological indeterminacy is a part of the riddle the Pardoner establishes with his relics in his prologue when he tells the pilgrims that “any woman…that hath ymaked hir housbonde cokewold,” to stand back because “Swich folk shal have no power ne no grace / To offren to my relikes in this place.”[3] Scholars have noted this as a mode of shaming or making fun of the sexually inconstant, yet it also marks those who, like Pardoner, may be insatiably promiscuous in their associations.[4] Indeed, his relics, like his Tale, may do no good for those unrestricted by conventional barriers of sex, because they may not need the lessons that the Pardoner offers: if you have a problem, let it scar. By bringing the discarded from a forgotten site of burial to the social status of relics, scarred fragments of the body and society are allowed new life giving associations.[5]




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While progressive thought eschews part for the sake of the whole, the Pardoner’s approach to relics shifts cultural values to consider alternative modes of wholeness. Taking the case of one relic, “a sholder-boon / which that was of an hooly Jewes sheep,” which otherwise might have been discarded as trash and forgotten (like other Jewish bodies expelled from England), the Pardoner promises that if this bone is put in a well, first it has the power to make “hool anon” an animal whose body plagued by a “worm.”[6] Furermore, it will make “hool” a body covered in “pokkes,” “scabbe,” or a “soore,” and if a master is willing drink the water himself, “His beestes and his stoor shal multiplie.”[7] Taken literally, this inverts the Physician’s drive towards division by using fragmented bodies to return other bodies to wholeness. Metaphorically, the bone redefines to wholes in their own right. This alternative would not deny the violent history of scarred bodies but multiply the number and forms of lives for the divided, segregated, and forgotten 

While scholars have emphasize the Pardoner’s double speak in his prologue where he admits questions over the sincerity of his pardons and relics, after the Tale when he again defines them as relics, the relics have again shifted and the pilgrims seem to generally go along with the change.[8] This shows both the reconstructive power of narrative and the indeterminacy of body parts. “Pigges bones” can be constructed to be effectively indistinguishable from a saint’s bone when encased as a relic.[9] The insistence on lie/truth, real/unreal distinctions depends on the ahistorical belief that things properly remain what they are, animals stay animals, humans are human, just as women are women and men are men; or else falls into progressive binaries that assert the final shift between natural and manufactured bodies.[10] This dynamic artifice is not the nullification in meaning but the trans-operative inconstancy of the body and social significance.


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This reconstruction is not done without dangers of treachery, however, as the Pardoner makes clear in his Tale. The Pardoner bills the lesson of his Tale as being on greed and false-witness, but a close examination testifies that the treachery underlying it may come, as for the Pardoner, from being hyper-relational. In the Tale, three friends sit drinking when they overhear a bell signaling a passing funeral procession. The party finds out that the departed was their friend, an “old felawe,” and his killer is none other than “Deeth.”[11] The theme of forgotten division is already evident by the loss of this who had long sat among them, whose passing they had hardly noticed. The community seeks to rectify this absence by swearing together, “we thre been al ones… bicomen otheres brother, / And we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth.”[12] Soon after they encounter an old man, who literally seeks death (to die), who directs them to a bag of gold if they wish to find death. After a series of betrayals for the gold, all of them end up killing one another.

The premise that one can “kill death” may be the humor the Host demanded, but is the tale also responds to the Physicians Tale of cut-throat solutions by begging the question: isn’t the work of a surgeon another attempt to conquer mortality through bloody knife work? If operations save the futurity of the whole by sacrificing the part, who gets to determine who is the whole and who is the part? In the final bloody scene, each man is effectively equal in moral and social value, but each determines they he must be most deserving of the futurity the gold would provide and all their lives are cut off. In short, as in the Physicians Tale, violence is what happens when one too quickly attempts to reestablish a sense of collective wholeness without taking head the actual and potential divisions in a community. The trans-operative body is never fixed but in a constant state of alliance and betrayal as it cuts across all manner of social barriers and compacts.

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After the Tale has concluded, the effectiveness of the Pardoner’s narrative skills recaptures the attraction of his fellow pilgrims as he calls them, “Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun, And mekely receyveth my pardoun.”[13] Not everyone, however, are open the responsibilities and treacherous implications of claiming the power of parts. When called on to be the first to be to first to “kisse the relikes,” the Host shrinks back. “Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech, And swere it were a relyk of a seint,” he claims, “Though it were with thy fundement depeint!”[14] The Host is not willing to associate with trans-operatives on their own reconstructed terms. Instead, the Host reasserts his privilege as a normative male authority to lay hands on the Pardoner. “I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond / In stide of relikes or of seintuarie,” threatens the Host, “Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; / They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!”[15] In calling for further violent operations on the Pardoner, invoking a history of castration that the Pardoner may already be tied, the Host rejects the lessons of his scars.

The story told from the wound can be hard to hear, notes Arthur Frank.[16] For this progressive male authority, there is not turning divided bodies into relics. Cutting up bodies turns them into shit and marks them for decomposition in the past. Yet the trans-operative is nothing without his social relations and the Knight, who perhaps better hears the lesson of Pardoner’s scars, comes to his aid and reestablishes peace in the community. Yet as the pilgrims move on, they carry the scars of actual and potential divisions with them. These operations mark the weight of violent times on the body of eunuchs, slaves, women, the disabled, transsexuals, and other operatives whose bodies are forgotten or erased from history, demanding that we recollect their fragments and stories so that we never foreclose the possibilities that come from “thinking too much about gender.”


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[1] The Pardoner’s Tale produces an extensive bibliography of fascinating scholarship. In particular, this reading has been greatly influenced by Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory; Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. London: Duke University Press, 1999; Burger, Glenn. Chaucer’s Queer Nation. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2003; and Stockton, Will. Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2011. 
[2] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 338. 
[3] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 381-384. 
[4] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 102-139. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 121-136; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 140-156; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 
[5] For an excellent historical examination of relics see: Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. N.Y. Zone Books, 2011. 
[6] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 350-357. 
[7] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 358-365. 
[8] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 63-80; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 133-136; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 114-156; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 
[9] Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 700. 
[10] Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 74-75; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 127-133; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 119-159; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 
[11] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 670-678. 
[12] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 692-701. 
[13] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 925-926. 
[14] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 946-950. 
[15] Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 952-955. 
[16] Arthur Frank. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 101. 


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