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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Medieval Space Travel in Dante, Lewis and Tolkien

"A man who travels into another world does not return unchanged" 

CS Lewis, Peralandra

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Dante's Divine Comedy

"Thence we came forth to behold the stars."

Dante Alighieri, the Inferno

In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri describes his journey through the heavens until at last he passes between the fixed stars, the Primium Mobile and into the presence of the Unmoved-Mover. Time and Space take on not only a fixed place in regards to specific moments and places but the whole engine that dimensions them is illustrated as if frozen in an instant, like a medieval tapestry, to be moved along only to give the eye a survey of the whole, inevitably to further totalize it.

Time and Space become fixed like the stars, not as a net-work but as a grid in which things settle into designated seats, cells, steps on a latter, eternally alienated from each other. While in the Inferno persons are lost in-to themselves, in the Paradisio persons are lost out-of themselves; with a few notable (even named) exceptions, it is primarily in the Purgatorio that we get any sense of community, motion-oriented becoming or mediation.

In prior posts I discussed how a trans-forming model of the universe positions all-in-one and one-in-all, which  distinguishes itself from pantheistic or nihilistic models in which things are all totally identified or totally alienated; this is done by positive a force of becoming in which things hold a degree of alienation from each other, while admitting a degree of identification / slippage between them thus creating queer and permeable forms but forms nonetheless.

Time / Space as a result becomes an expression of the queer tension between things. In terms of Space-Time (the principle fabric of the universe predominantly attested by physicists from Eisenstein to Hawking) the universe actualizes itself through expansion or compression, (arguments vary as to which) as well as bending, allowing for matter-energy to express itself in its perceived forms.

There is then no Primium Mobile internal in(ternal to) the transforming universe which orients things on a fixed axis of time or space but rather correspondence manifests through an enacting of things/forces on one another. A here and a there exist in this model because of a certain trans-formative force that enacts the relationship of distance over a period of time.

To become identified is to become positioned in relationship to other things. Or rather, to become temporal or spacial is to become transitional, as we can as such admit no set position; no fixed place or land, no metered time or stars to call our own.

Things take part in ordering time / space as they become contingently ordered by the collective force of other things, allowing for different frames of place and temporality to be conceptualized. Things become alienated from one another according to degrees of energy/intensity which warp not only the mathematical dimensions of time / space but also our perception of them. Things touch (even overlap as palimpsests) at diverse spacial and temporal points, hold diverse relationships to things between the points and compete to assert orders/patterns upon each other.

We simultaneously becoming oriented and orient others by the forces of our material presence / motions, thus bodies push and pull via different means on one another causing different perceptible patterns to form. An object which catches on our erotic or gravitational forces will assert a certain sense of space / time on us, drawing certain things to be regarded as more central and others to be regarded as more marginal. But this push, pull and sliding occurs between multiple things at once, internally and externally. We may have numerous erotic/love objects directing us at once in the same way the Moon, the Earth and the Sun all have their effects on our motion / orientations gravitationally.

As we too exert these forces, we are at the same time marginalized and centralized by different things and we can perform our body, taking advantage of these dynamic positions, to various effects. We can make ourselves attractive to multiple partners and elicit certain pleasures of cuckolding or direct our fall towards the Sun in a way which will cause us to miss it and slingshot around until we get pulled back for another pass (the basic model of how an orbit works). Everything and everyone at once enacts their spacial/temporal relations from the position of margins in the middle of things.

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CS Lewis's Space Trilogy

"Loads and loads of land, all tied down. 

Does not the thought of it crush you?"

CS Lewis, Peralandra

In the Space / Ransom Trilogy by CS Lewis, Dr. Erwin Ransom travels first to Mars, finding a land of mountains and desserts but also deep canyons which harbor the highly ordered remnants of three species with an estate-like distribution of labor. On Mars, Ransom learns about the Eldila, a race of undying, nearly invisible beings that occupy all of "deep heaven" in which the planets, stars and the like move on their orbits and rotations. In meeting an Eldil, Ransom (and, in a later book, Lewis himself) first thinks that they are standing slanted, huge and ever in motion but quickly is converted to the perspective that it is the Eldil that exist according to the true dimension axis that orders "deep heaven" and the reason for their appearances is that standing on a spherical, relatively small (compared to the Eldils) and ever moving planet, Ransom (like Lewis) is ever bent, small and falling away from them. Ransom also learns on this planet the universal "solar" language and the "true" hierarchy and history of being.

In the second book, Ransom travels to Venus and discovers that the planet consists of one massive ocean on which floating islands of vegetation support a variety of terrestrial plants and animals which live atop their ever bending, rippling surfaces that form hills, valleys and divides according to the motion of the waves underneath. It is said that walking on the islands is like walking on the waves themselves only you don't fall through. Exploring the islands, Ransom finds that each of the islands contains a distinct and diverse set of fantastic plants and animals (from bubble-trees to tiny dog-like dragons). As flexible and floating surfaces, the islands not only change in the shape of their parameters and elevations constantly, but their relation to each other; making cartography an impossible venture. In meeting one of the islands two "intelligent" occupants, an Eve-goddess-like woman, he comes to learn to "accept the good that is given" and not to long for the good that was expected, that each wave that comes is different, the best and will never come again. She questions Ransom's idea that time can be measured by set internals and reacts in horror to the news that on Earth people live on fixed land; the one fixed land (that they know of) on Venus is forbidden.

At the close of the second book, Ransom meets the residential Eldil rulers of the two planets and bear their planets names (Mars and Venus respectively according to "terrestrial" or earthly titles). Each Eldil effects his brain so that he may perceive them as human-like bodies and take on mythological, gendered characteristics of Mars and Venus. Ransom, via Lewis who is said to be simply recording and at times elaborating a dictated account, describes each as sexless but with a distinct masculine and feminine gender (which he asserts in a way very different than Judith Butler) that sex is always already gender which exists as some higher polar quality in things. He admits that in the particularities there may be "confusion," even in regards to sex, but that certain bodies, things and planets have a definite gender which defines them.

According to this logic, Mars offers a masculine embodiment and model of time and space: set points and relations which live in certain spheres and according to a set clock (which is mentioned to be running out for the species of Mars, all of whom will die out "soon").
Venus offers a feminine embodiment and model of time & space (similar in some ways to those suggested by Elizabeth Groz in Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism): things change and move, becoming themselves always in relation to the changes and movements of other things. Even the number of sentient species on the planet are not set but are said to change as certain ones slowly develop consciousnesses. Allusions to the Edenic bounty of Venus as being womb-like and the reflecting skies and waves to be like Venus's mirror.

What strikes me in the dualism of forms (or relationships to form) asserted in Lewis's Space Trilogy as well as in Elizabeth Grosz's Volatile Bodies (and her book Chaos, Territory Art) is that in each the authors present qualities that seem inherent to all things but insist that they are separated, personified and perceived distinctly according to two essential categorized ways of being: according arranged into two sexes/genders.

I could here take on the argument, which is due but in the context of these entries and my work almost too obvious, that: such dualism of gendered materialities (of bodies, space and time) are fraught with failure to define essential definitions, material evidence or even psychological/psychoanalytic justifications; that dualistic poles or even dialectic alienation either fails to hold up to logical scrutiny or are based on faulty nihilistic presumptions.

But I will here eschew such an important but currently tangential argument for the sake of getting to the pressing matter that taken without their quintessential gendered duality, that these two planets/gods/books express different qualities of time and space in a transitional (queer materialist) perspective.

Venus (and Grotz's definitions of female corporeality) offer a beautiful illustration of the ever transforming and transitional qualities of the material universe. Time and Space constantly undermine their motions towards ontological states as Space-Time and other bodies move, grow, intermix, merge and bend. The "life lessons" Ransom learns about living in such a state of constant surprise and wonder are debatably harmonizing with an ethics of queer materiality.
Mars offers an illustration of a transforming universe if taken in a very qualified way. The resistance to being undermined that things exert, the "no" of stone discussed in my article on Tempests (borrowed from Jane Bennett) are integral to understanding that queerness does not mean that things flow in any course without resistance or never assert norms. Queerness, and performativity, in fact assert that things constantly assert norms AS they undermine them. Trans-forming is in a manner about forming. Things exist distinctly as somewhere, at sometime, in some form and are NOT in all possible places, times and forms at once. Things move and change but not in all possible manners and intensities at once. Queer things are the systems as well as the things that disturb, defy and escape the system.

Things are like Venus in undermining time and like Mars in performing clocks, but in that performativity ever mocking essentialist models of female and male.

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JRR Tolkien's Middle-Earth

"The Elves call 'death' the Gift of God (to Men). 

Their temptation is different: towards a faint melancholy, 

burdened with Memory, leading to an attempt to halt Time."

JRR Tolkien, Letter to C Ouboter (10 April 1958)

In Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, the Silmarillion and numerous other finished and unfinished tales JRR Tolkien center around persons and objects which simultaneously draw all things into themselves and alienate all things, bending time and space in the process.

In the Simarillion, one among the great spirits (later called Melkor or Morgoth) which played the song of creation turned away from the community of spirits and in towards itself; and in doing so finds himself empty/emptied. Morgoth breaks rank from the spirits to play his own melody, which draws others to gaze upon him and the song changes, orienting its tune closer to Morgoth's. When the conflict deepens between the God of this universe, its spirits and Morgoth, he flees the community, drawing others with him. When the time and space that define the universe of Middle-Earth are created, Morgoth enters into it and begins twisting it into orientation around himself, as he had the song. The landscape literally transforms around him and the great trees of light in immortal lands of this creation are destroyed by his works; resulting eventually in the passing of the immortals from Middle-Earth and the bending of the world into a sphere. Eventually Morgoth is destroyed, after the domination and alienation of many.

The Valar and the elves too create objects which orient time and space, two shining trees which bear the light of the heavens, then three jewels that bear the light of the trees. As the light passes from heaven to tree to gems, there continues to be an effort to preserve and fix these powers in place along with all things their power touches. In time these objects become the center of conflict as different persons fight for their possession; some wishing to keep them for the mutual ordering of the community, others to orient the world towards them. Eventually all these are destroyed, after the domination and alienation of many.

In the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings, after the destruction of Morgoth and the Gems, Sauron Morgoth's assistant rises in Middle-Earth and begins to likewise draw all things towards himself and towards their own alienation/destruction. To accomplish this he creates a Great Ring and many other rings of power that give its possessors long life and the ability to order their surroundings, its people and environment, even to hold them in a kind of stasis; they also allow them to become at the same time intensely prominent with power and invisible. A great war and the makings of a second eventually see Sauron killed and the rings destroyed but only after the domination and alienation of many.

Great spirits, music, trees, gems, rings are a few of the prominent things in Tolkien's Middle-Earth which exercise power over time and space as well as the temporalities and orientations of other things. These things lend power to the narcissism present in them and their bearers. Narcissism here is defined as the simultaneous desire to make all things one in and under the self and a deep repulsion of others and the self which desires the alienation and destruction of them all. It is the negative-face of psychoanalysis's dialectical reading of the subject as being defined by an inherent "lack" that drives them to desire and hate "O/others" out of an anxiety about its own nullity. This mentality can effect the perceptions of immortal and mortal alike in Tolkien's world, as the anxiety either about the passing of things out of one's grasp in space and time cause them to desire the domination and ultimately the destruction of many of these things.

The story which repeats itself in various ways throughout Tolkien's writings is then the battle of the One which seeks to set up a single orientation schema fighting and being defeated by the many (and ultimately the self-undermining of such monomaniacal intents). There is a God present in Tolkien's universe, but it is not one that orients all things into a fixed place around itself as in Dante, nor imposes an invisible grid as in Lewis, but which gives each thing a power of its own to orient and sub-create the universe. It is this multiplicity of space-time-thing benders that allows for both the narcissistic and the pluralistic worlds to form and do battle. Tolkien is also not timid in stating that the desire to be the one is evil and that the desire to be one in and among many is good; however he consistently demonstrates that the particular events and persons, which polarize at times their qualities are not singular but molecular, nor are they set but constantly transforming (along with their surroundings).

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More Medieval Travels to Come
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"Those that sailed furthest set but a girdle about the Earth and returned weary at last to the place of their beginning; and they said: 'All roads are now bent.'

Thus in after days, what by the voyages of ships, what by lore and star-craft, the kings of Men knew that the world was indeed made round, and yet the Eldar were permitted still to depart and to come to the Ancient West and to Avallуnл, if they would. Therefore the loremasters of Men said that a Straight Road must still be, for those that were permitted to find it. And they taught that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the West still went on, as it were a mighty bridge invisible that passed through the air of breath and of flight (which were bent now as the world was bent)."

JRR Tolkien, the Silmarillion

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"[Priscilla's] just read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra; and with good taste preferred the latter. But she finds it hard to  realize that Ransom is not meant to be a portrait of me  (though as a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him)"

JRR Tolkien, Letter to Christopher Tolkien (31 July 1944)

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