Disabling Acceptance: Compulsory Narratives of Failure

"I know I need to be strong 

for the kids, for all the people...

but I can't, I'm so tired"

Cassidy Lynn Campbell, 

Marina Highschool Homecoming Queen

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Compulsory Narratives

"I always felt like a girl. I was lying for so long. I'm happy now (that I transitioned and begun medical treatment) but it's so hard. I need to do this for all the others out there." These are part of a script that most trans people learn in one way or another. It may very well all be true and sincerely expressed, but saying these words or some variation on it are a part of the initiation into public life as a trans person.

The public demands to know about your past as a trans person. Even if they never met you before you transitioned, they still ache to hear the Story. Personal details add spice, but the narrative demands of doctors, lawyers, school-systems, insurance companies, the media, friends, family & strangers have become intolerably standardized and compulsory. To be regarded as Trans is to be a kind of story-teller.

Why trans life-histories are demanded are fairly easy to parse out. Changing your body and identity threatens the immutable status of gender, and increasingly sexuality as well. The public needs to have affirmed that if appearances were ever deceiving, the reality and trajectory of the trans people's life must be deterministic. They must always already be their gender - and this must be made clear to everyone.

Far from simply demanding the firming up of an essentialized gender category, there is also a critical danger towards the nature of able-bodied development. Problems must be fixed. Dis-cordances in the body must be brought in line. There must be a Restoration Narrative if Trans-people are going to be accepted into fold of ableist gender norms. Crip children are regarded as an intolerable tragedy.

But there is a price for having transgressed these norms: the Compulsory Narrative of Transgender must not simply be Essential and Restorative, it must also be a Failure. Someone has to pay for the fact that this group was not a part of the fold to begin with, the dangers of emerging as a new protected minority must be expressed, our fears (even or especially of the sympathetic) must be justified. We need struggle.

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Acceptance through Failure

The recent news of Miss Cassidy Lynn Campbell's crowning as the 2013 Homecoming Queen at Marina High School in Huntington Beach California was lauded momentarily for being (perhaps, it is speculated) the first election of a transgender person to a Homecoming Court at a public school.

A social and literary critic's job is to not simply look at the content, but at the words and framing of the discussion. The very emphasis on "first" should be a sign that Ms. Campbell's life is being positioned in a narrative of progress. News outlets (such as MSN), Blogs (such as I Should be Laughing), and TV Stations (such as WSB-TV Atlanta) announce in their headlines and analysis the place in foreseen history of Transgender Progress.

But even before that news broke nationally, the process stories had already drummed up a more tantalizing, and socially safe narrative: the public bullying of the trans teenager, largely by adult professional and political groups in the media, and her inevitable suffering.

The result was almost systematic. Within a day of being crowned, Ms. Campbell recorded a video on Youtube affirming her Essentializing, Restorative narrative and its inevitable Failure. Let me be clear, I have every belief in the sincerity and even confidence in the truth of Campbell's words. What I object to and where the Artifice lies is in the public and in the media for being so hungry for it that the developing coverage almost assured that Campbell would experience (at the tender age of 16) a systematic sacrifice on the altar of social progress.

The series of headlines from media sources shows the narrative that the public wants to construct, with many (if not most) of the big news outlets only getting interested in Ms. Campbell's success only after it became a story of tragedy:

• Transgender homecoming queen later wonders if it was 'worth it' (LA Times)

• Cassidy Lynn Campbell, Transgender Homecoming Queen, Says She's Been Targeted By Bullies In Tearful Video (Huffington Post)

• Transgender Teen Crowned Homecoming Queen Wipes Away Tears: 'I Can't Even Be Happy' (ABC News)

• Transgender Homecoming Queen Faces Negative Backlash To Historic Win (ThingProgress.org)

• Bigot Jerks Are Being Bigot Jerks to Trans Girl Homecoming Queen (Jezebel)

Pro-Trans, Anti-Trans, or just Neutrally Interested, Ms. Campbell is being made an example for others. Whether as the boundary marker on the road to a wider integration into the norm and/or as a warning to those who buck the system and/or as the "inevitable" result of doing anything that will get you noticed, the media is setting up (and contextually excusing) the bullying of this teenager with the silent implication that she was "asking for it". 

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Disabling Media

I have every hope and cautious confidence that Ms. Campbell, after her plea that she is "so tired" and can't keep a brave face on for "all the kids, all the people I did this for," will find her strength and grace to press on through the harassment and abuse she is receiving publicly right now. She is and can be a role-model and her life, and her narratives, however forced, can have a positive impact.

What makes me less hopeful is the media feeding frenzy around the story. Granted, most coverage isn't going anywhere near to stating overtly the compulsory Martyring of Campbell as part of their narrative of social change and acceptance. 

The media says enough simply by framing and distributing the events in a particular way which emphasizes the failures as a kind of correlative to the success of having a trans Homecoming Queen. In the process the particularities which make Campbell's life and her community so special are silenced and pushed into the background of a larger symbolic event.

This process is disgusting and exploitative on adults, but when we rail-road the life of a 16 year old towards the genre of tragic heroism, we should be shaken enough to look around at the very premise of the public drama. 

Of course anyone paying even begrudging attention to past and current headlines about Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus, we can see that adults professionally and recreationally make stalking, judging, gossiping and throwing abusing language around teens and other young adults the activity of their daily lives.

In past posts I've discussed the "Professionally Trans," i.e. people willing to publicly and even systematically engage in public discourse around their bodies and communities, but there too I warned that we need to be able and willing to turn our mega/micro-phones off and leave people to their lives. Bullying in the media and public discourse is responsible for seeing many acclaimed people of privilege and means to painful and short-lives, and in the case of people many times over within vulnerable and marginalized social positions, the offense is even greater.

It is not enough that the media must be able to tell stories, they need to have a sense of responsibility, culpability for the frenzies they inspire and enough respect for their subjects to know when to call off the coverage. The lady is tired. Let her rest.

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"I refuse to answer, 

talk about the past, sir.

I wrote this for the ones who want to get away: 

keep running"

Sing,MCR

Tiny Ecologies & Boundary Stones (Part 2)

"Earth is a 'serving bearer' that is capable of emerging, rising forth, and issuing upward... the earth withholds from our attempts to fathom it."
Elemental Philosophy, David Macauley

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The Tiny Ecology project is focused on intense ecological attentiveness of a particular place. Frequent visits to the site will be made between late August and early December. Critical attention will be paid to human influence and neglect, nonhuman forces (weather, sunlight, microclimates, pollution, decay, gentrification), and the surfacings of particular histories. This project arises from an engagement with the Ecologies of Conquest / Contact Ecologies seminar being taught by Prof. Jeffrey J Cohen at the G.W.U.

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Herma

Communication requires contact. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, derives his name from the Greek word for boundary stone, herma. Digging into the earth in my tiny ecology, "the Strip," implicates place and person together through touch, affect and change.

In order to pursue the leading question of my project, "how does otherwise arid soil give life to a host of green vegetation?", I've begun breaking open the top-soil in order to get a look deeper in and further down. This is an act of penetration and a crossing of a boundary marker which makes me responsible in new ways for the destruction, alteration and growth of this environment.

The object of my study nonetheless speaks back to me in surprising ways and gets under my skin (and finger nails) in the process. Hermes marks borders, not as absolute divisions of self & other, subject & object, but rather as points of contact, exchange, hybridity and inter-being. It is at the same time a meeting-of-worlds which maintain their own kind of interiority (and interiority-of-kind which philosopher Ian Bogost has termed "darkness"), that in the process forms, through this information-exchange, a shared ecology.

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Stoney Exteriors

A cursory return to the Strip after a series of thunder showers, I find the land has surprisingly changed little in appearance. The clover looks slightly greener (an effect of lightning releasing nitrogen into the air) and there are a few more cigarette butts (apparently many residents in my building use this out-of-sight space to smoke), but the soil itself seems rather the same.

Getting down on my knees, a few shiny rocks call out to me. While the bits of concrete, red brick and clumps of dirt seem to withdraw from my senses into a sort of aggregate-background, several polished hunks of quartz, bits of metal and a flattened glass marble stand out from the rest. This is an active ability in the rocks on me which brings about a response, not simply a pre-concieved process in my own mind, which Jane Bennett calls "vibrancy" or "thing power".I feel this power as I document the stones with my camera and struggle to pull myself from them towards the other earths.

The skin on my knees already feel the dryness of the compact soil  as they press into one another. Pushing my fingers against the dirt, it holds together and rebuffs my attempt to push through. As I take out my metal measuring and digging instruments, I prepare to push through, expecting as little response as I got in my last attempt at exploring the interior the the earth.

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Darkness takes Roots

Suddenly the land breaks open and I get a glimpse through and into the darkness of the earth. Physically pealing away a chunk of the top-soil, my hands discover a much softer layer about half an inch down. This moist collection of earth and water folds together for about 3-4 inches above another rocky foundation.

Plumbing down through this dark damp earth involved both fingers and tool, for while the soil could be molded by hand it was interlaced (even structured) by a strong mesh of roots coming down, up and across from the plant-life. And so I become opened to another contact ecology. The roots of the plants dig down to draw up moisture from this layer of soil, and in turn they protect and buttress the dark earth. 

This revelation however came at the expense of breaking apart a portion of this meshwork (to borrow a term from Timothy Morton). In the process I've become responsible in new unexpected ways to my tiny ecology and in turn the vibrancy and darkness reaches out and pulls me closer. There is hardness and alienation which distances the Strip from me, but increasingly intimacy and responsibility has pulled us closer together; changing both of our narratives through contact at the boundary stones of our inter-being.

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Tiny Ecologies & Transitional Spaces (Part 1)

"You put your walls up, with your phone and your attitude. 

Your walls are put up so tight not even a blade of grass could go through them. 

But even if it did, you wouldn’t appreciate it."

Professor Kane, Biology 101, Community, NBC

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The Tiny Ecology project is focused on intense ecological attentiveness of a particular place. Frequent visits to the site will be made between late August and early December. Critical attention will be paid to human influence and neglect, nonhuman forces (weather, sunlight, microclimates, pollution, decay, gentrification), and the surfacings of particular histories. This project arises from an engagement with the Ecologies of Conquest / Contact Ecologies seminar being taught by Prof. Jeffrey J Cohen at the G.W.U.

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Liminal Ecologies

For the purpose of my study, I chose a strip of earth between my apartment building and the house next door. On the one side, a 16 floor concrete monolith and a 2 floor brick house on the other. The space was chosen because it combines a variety of actants (animal, rock, vegetable), in a semi-domesticated space, but most of all because it is a liminal ecology which often goes unnoticed.

The no-man's land (enforced by a metal gate), that spans these two buildings, shares their material circumstances. Mixed in with compacted, rocky soil are a variety of vegetation, rocks (decorative and native), bits of concrete and brick, screws, bottle-caps, a cable-wire. It plays host also to an assortment of insects, ants and spiders, as well as the space's most recent addition: me.

I have limited my environ (encirclement) to the 147" by 121" plot of land between the two buildings, starting at the sidewalk and extending to the gate. Personal observations and experiences with the space will be noted frequently, with close study occurring once a week on Fridays, as well as during & after any significant weather event.

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Earth

The elemental focus of this study will be Earth. The compacted and rocky soil is extremely harsh to the touch and when I attempted to take samples of it I was at first completely unable to get more than a dusting. Even when I came back with a more advanced metal gardening instrument, there was minimum response to a high level of effort made to break open a hole. After several minutes I only produced a hole a few inches deep.

When I brought the samples back to my work-space and I applied a series of tests, measuring for PH and nitrogen levels, the amount of potash and moisture, the results were grim. The soil is highly alkaline and low in several critical nutrients. Furthermore, the dryness which I could feel in my hand and knees was sured by the instruments. This was currently a very arid environment. 

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Carpets of Clover

This lead to the question: how does so much vegetation and a few delicate flowers survive and thrive in such a harsh, inhospitable environment? How do these green and white friends of mine fend of starvation, potentially toxic surroundings, and not dry up?

The road to discover may begin with the identification of the different species living in the soil (white clover, curly dock, dalligrass, and plantains, to name a few), noting their special needs and abilities in relating to the Earth. What more secrets and changes will my Tiny Ecology and I experience together? Stay tuned to find out!

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The Morpheus Database: Reading the Data (Part 2)

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The Morpheus Database (Mark 1): By the end of the summer this program will allow me to cross-reference data on transformations from over 100 classical, medieval and early modern tales for each form taken, sequence, reason for change, type of change and possible relevance for gender, disability, queer, race, class, animal and object studies.

The aim of the project is to help (1) translate my thoughts into more easily comprehended forms, (2) allow for a quick review of a large amount of texts & notes and (3) eventually to allow for the production of data-clusters where corresponding tales can be called up at the press of a search-key. For instance, as the database gets better, I'd be able to stack information on instances where a body was transformed via surgical intervention or where the resulting form was considered to be hybrid instead of a new whole. It will start rough, then change and change again.

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Creating Queries

As my summer research period comes to a close, I have moved into a different phase of the Morpheus Database, compiling and theorizing some of the data that has been collected over the past few months.

While the Database is ongoing, I thought this would be a good time to share a few more Queries and graphs based on the some 650 instances of transformation currently coded from hundreds of Medieval tales.

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Q6. Who Rules the World?

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A6. "Man Shapes, God Creates"

The medieval sentiment that God creates and humanity shapes hits at the problematic but closely tied relationship between emergence and persistence. When a hunk of stone (or flesh) is formed into the shape of a person, is this a transformation of an already existent body or is this the birth of an entirely new being?

The literature sampled splits the difference. Medieval thinkers ascribed humanoids (48%) with the majority of the power in shaping and re-shaping the bodies around them. Divine agents (40%) nonetheless take dominion over a substantial percentage of the transformations.

Beyond the "rational" beings, the numbers drop off, but minerals (9%) effect a substantial minority of the changes, testifying to the recognized powers or "virtues" of stones, minerals, artifacts & drugs. Animals (3%) & Vegetables (1%) make up a tiny fraction of the actors of change, but are often involved instrumentally in the process.

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 Q7. What Changes Your Life?

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A7. Clothes

Moving on from actors to instruments (although the theoretical difference between them can be expounded and challenged), the results are far more split between a wide arrange of powerful bodies.

Clothes (30%) do seem to make the human, monster, object, etc. Well before the Early Modern fascination and fear of the power of clothing to effectively change the identity of an individual, medieval thinkers recognized that a change in the appearance of a thing often changed its qualities enough to constitute a real change in persona.

Blades (15%) and Eros (15%) tie for the next most powerful transformers. Blades (including knives, swords, and axes) are most commonly used to make changes to the physical body; strongly correlating to the codes for amputation. Eros (sex, desire and loyalty) are most commonly he cause for mental changes to the body; with madness of various kinds often sparked by some traumatic erotic fire.

Words (13%) and Water (12%) make a substantial showing in the data, largely within the realm of ritual. Words (rhetoric, vows, and name-changes) have well underlined by literary and performance study scholars for their ability to define and redefine a personality. Water (tears, rivers, springs, oceans, pools, rain) are also frequent agents of transformation both within ritual practices and more ecological means.

This statistic may need to be revisited later to account for the "transformative" status of such things as coronations, baptisms or marriage vows.

Drugs (7%) appears more straightforward than Magic (8%) in terms of cause and effect, but partially because of our current knowledge and philosophical paradigm. Both combine some knowledge of the recorded virtues of minerals, vegetables, blood sacrifices, the stars as well as a certain secret or even unconscious invocation of hidden powers.

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Q8. They Cut Off What?

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A8. A Penis

Blades being the second most used tool for transformation and amputation being the second most common "disability" on record, it is worthwhile to consider what body parts are being removed in all this hack-and-slashing.

The most common body part is the Penis. Whether identified as Eunuchs, Geldings or not at all, the production of castrated bodies in Medieval Literature is notably high. This will be an important statistic to underline the importance of "eunuch" models of transformation in my work.

Breasts are the 3rd most common body parts to be cut off, making alternative feminine or Female-to-Male (Ftm)-like bodies statistically significant presences in the data.

Heads as the 2nd highest percentage of missing body-parts are interesting, because as noted previously I did not count beheadings that ended in death. Thus in each of these instances the person lived on or were brought back to life via magic or miracle after physically losing their head.

The severing of Arms & Legs which make up the 3rd and 4th largest group of missing body-parts are significant not only because of their related disability-communities, but because they often relate to the person's subsequent ability to fight. When thinking abilism and disability in a period of close-combat, mobility and the ability to steer a horse or swing a sword are key factors.

The next most common body parts to lose cluster around the ability to sense or communicate with the outside world: tongue, nose, and eyes. In most cases these changes come as the result of punishment for seeing, saying or prying a forbidden thing or else as a preventative measure to ensure a person cannot speak the information they've gained.

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Q9. Most Transformative Woman?

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A9. Medusa

Women make up a significant portion of the bodies undergoing transformation in the texts sampled, and so I wanted to compile a list of the top players. Most of them are notably the passive or resistant recipients of much of this change, underlining the issue of agency in the gender split.

Margery Kempe after a series of pregnancies, develops a series of illnesses in which she loses the power of speech, sight, hearing and movement (in different arrangements). During several of these fits, she has visions of Christ who visits her, has sex with her and marries her. In the process, despite the outer signs of her body, she affirms a spiritual identity of a Virgin, taking on the relevant clothes and cultural signifiers.

Callisto undergoes a series of forced changes after being tricked by Jupiter (in the form of Diana) into letting down her guard. After he rapes her, she becomes pregnant. The angry Diana slays her supposed-virgin follower once it is discovered that she is with-child. Jupiter in turn makes her into a bear. Her adult child, saved in the fray, upon growing up attempts to hunt her; at which time both are transformed into constellations.

Philomela is likewise transformed via a number of violent attacks. Tereus, her brother-in-law, rapes her and cuts out her tongue so she cannot tell the tale. Subsequently she gets her story told on a tapestry she knits in captivity. After her sister kills, cooks and serves their child to Tereus, he seeks revenge on them and they women are transformed into birds as an escape from death and exile.

Medusa, famed for her beautiful hair, attracts the attention of Jupiter's brother Neptune. Like his sibling, he too rapes her in the sacred space of a goddess (Minerva) who likewise takes vengeance on the woman, changing her hair into snakes. In the process she gains the ability/curse of transforming all she sees into stone. Perseus subsequently hunts down and kills her, taking her head as a prize and a weapon (as it retains the power of turning flesh to stone). From her blood, however, springs a dragon, the Pegasus, a coral reef, and a family of snakes.

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Q10. Big Men, Big Trannys?

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A10. Jupiter & Jesus

The list of "Trans" or non-gender binary persons noted in the database are rather extensive. The list of persons included are interesting in many respects, but for the moment I will draw out just a few. Specifically, I will focus on a few persons that traditionally are figured in decidedly masculine terms.

Jupiter for all his over-articulated masculinity and insatiable sex drive for young women, in several instances takes on not only male lovers but changes his gender. Often the gender change occurs as a means to an end to gain access to women he wishes to deceive and fuck, but he momentary adoption of another gender station is nonetheless significant.

Jesus, a figure whose masculinity is so underlined that it was and is standard practice in many communities to write his masculine pronoun in the upper-case (His). Furthermore, with the prominence of crucifixes in Medieval art, the naked male body is strongly associated with the figure of Christ. Nonetheless, through word and symbolic images, Christ frequently is stressed as not only a feminine personality but having a female-like body across medieval literature.

The remaining retinue of "Big Men" who have some "Tranny" in them are clustered behind these figures. Besides Jupiter, Hercules, Achilles and Mercury are known to take on female-form. Under the sign of the cross, several of King Arthur's knights, Lancelot & Gawain, adopt feminine clothing and identities on their adventures and even in battle.