The Grim Battle for Unisex Liminality in a Grotesquely Gendered Mall World

I ran across this yesterday and decided to re-work it a little. A short piece uncovering the slime that spawned The Spiderboi Files.


Most people think Crocs are gay, but really the shoe inhabits a liminal zone. Born as a boat shoe it now treads all kinds of ground, from hiking trails to beaches. It is suspended between what people think is plastic and what is really a complex synthetic material of (perhaps) extraterrestrial origin, between fucking ugly ("fugly") and fagadelic, between cute and comfy, airy and airtight, porous and close-toed. It stoically identifies as unisex in a world of "Men’s 6, Women’s 8."

The kiosk stands in the middle of a mall corridor between Pumpkin Patch and Abercrombie Kids, FYE and Pottery Barn, between suburbia and the highway, between cheap and expensive, between spa and HerStyler, JCPenny and Sears. I circle the "kart" selling from a liminal zone a hated and beloved liminal shoe. This is my last day working here, commuting four hours a day to where the Cali kids grow. When I took this job I decided to do a little undercover ethnographic research on the ways in which mall culture constructs gender, beginning with babies and the near violent gendering of color.

While often disgusted, I never ceased to be amused. A dentist has every hue to match her scrubs. A woman in stiletto heels exuded a sigh of relief when she stepped her mall-pounding feet into a pair--and bought it on the spot. A cookie-chewing, glitter-stockinged dame once dropped 200 bucks. They ask me, do your feet sweat? And I wonder, do you? But instead I launch into the antimicrobial properties of such wondrous material and she hands over 32.61. Is it always this easy?

Definitely not. I stood for eight hours a day and blankly regurgitated things like "do you have any questions" and "can I see your I.D." Gradually my answers to "are you a boy or a girl," and "excuse me this is the women's restroom" ran short and wore me down. The foot bed molds to the shape of your foot and you can stick all those things in the holes, but after three months the tread wears thin and you find yourself back at square one, having to replace what you can't afford.

One day I sold a pair to a person of color I later realized was a trans woman. I had automatically launched into trying to figure out what size they were--Men's 6, Women's 8?; Man...or Woman? I felt completely stupid and disrespectful and unable to reach out to this person I considered an ally. The liminal world of the mall kart had prohibited me from seeing myself, and from seeing anything other than pink or blue. How cruel, to rob me of my own language. How cruel.

"!smileyfaceheart" debuts at TRANNY FEST November 7

!smileyfaceheart (Jai Arun Ravine, 2009, 6 min.) is a short experimental film that navigates trans-faggotry through femme drag and junior high school diary crushes, in an effort to access desires that have been culturally silenced, erased, and denied.
Costume Design and Art Direction: Iraya Robles
Camera Operator: Ami Puri
Screening: November 7

NOVEMBER 6 & 7: TRANNY FEST FILM PROGRAMS

Date:
SHORTS PROGRAM 1: R is for Revolution: Friday November 6
SHORTS PROGRAM 2: G is for Glitter (18+): Saturday November 7
Time:
8pm
Location:
Mama Calizo's Voice Factory
1519 Mission at 11th Street, San Francisco
Tickets:
$12 at the door

West Coast Kundiman Poets Anthology and Fundraiser Readings, September 17 & 19

Two upcoming fundraiser readings for Kundiman!
Free and open to the public.
Tell yer friends!

UC Berkeley
Thursday, September 17 - 11:30AM-2:00 PM
The Barbara T. Christian Room
554 Barrows Hall

Joseph O. Legaspi
Oliver de la Paz
Debbie Yee
Ching-In Chen
Neil Aitken

PAWA Arkipelago Reading Series
Saturday, September 19 - 2 PM
Bayanihan Community Center
1010 Mission Street @ 6th Street, SF

Oliver de la Paz
Joseph O. Legaspi
Mari L'Esperance
Theresa Calpotura (guitar)

Also, my poem "berdache" from my Spiderboi Files series has been published in Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets and is available for only $7 from Achiote Press!

Butch Voices Conference

I presented my performance piece "letters of a drag language" at this panel for the 2009 Butch Voices Conference in Oakland, Sunday August 23.

Gender Transgressive Individuals of the Asian Diaspora - Willy Wilkinson, Bobby Cheung, Jai Arun Ravine, Mel Chen, and Ami Puri
Whether we call ourselves butch, trans, stud, male, transmasculine, or any number of other terms, gender non-conforming, female-born individuals have always rebelled against the expectations of Asian family and community. We also reject the ignorance and objectification inherent in the popular depiction of Asians as a hyperfeminine race. Come hear a diverse panel of gender transgressive individuals from the Asian Diaspora speak about how we define and express our gender within varied cultural, family, historical, and geographic contexts. Panelists will also express themselves creatively with video, spoken word, and visual art. We look forward to a discussion with the group. Everyone welcome.

Kundiman

On the final day of the my first Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat, my mother and brother drove down four hours from West Virginia, where I had grown up, to come see me in Charlottesville for the first time in about three years. Having spent my undergraduate years in Roanoke, my homecoming to the Virginia hills, to the Blue Ridge Mountains, was one of a familiar landscape; it was one of joy, surrender, and anxiety. I had just come out to my mother as transgender a couple of months prior, and she was coming to see me—not in the landscape of the San Francisco bay where I had come to discover my relationship to gender and my body—but in the landscape I had known to be so viscerally connected to my female form. What was this encounter going to be like? What would I come to learn?

Before Kundiman I hadn’t written a poem in six months. I was struggling with how to reach outside of myself, with making myself and my writing public. I didn’t want to be another queer performer of color getting up on stage to talk about my identity; I wasn’t sure what I wanted to communicate and share with my writing, or how much of myself I was actually allowed to be in the poem. I was becoming skeptical about the strength of the poem, about what it could actually do.

Kundiman made me fall in love with language again. Kundiman let me write joyfully and fearlessly. Kundiman let me risk myself and bore witness to that courageous act. Kundiman showed me how strong the poem could be, and reflected back my own strength. Kundiman embraced me, gave me back my family, and gave me a new community. Kundiman provided a lineage of other Asian American writers and activists alongside which I could reference my own experience, and from whose work I could gather momentum.

Kundiman creates a space in which poets can encounter what it means to be Asian and what it means to be a writer without having to prove anything. Kundiman creates a space in which we can encounter our relationship to being Asian, to poetry, and act on it however we choose. Kundiman creates a space in which we can claim Asianness, claim poetry, at our own pace, without shame.

Kundiman creates spaces in which we can have conversations that will feed and foster our artistic growth and exploration in ways the larger world of poetry and graduate programs often lacks. Kundiman creates a continuous space in which fellows can return and develop lasting relationships with other fellows and mentors. Kundiman is a family that holds everyone within it and keeps growing. Kundiman needs to be kept alive.

Uni-T: Trans March 2009 Benefit

I read at Uni-T, a Trans March 2009 benefit at El Rio in San Francisco on May 28, 2009.

Queef Zine

2 poems ("engendered intestines" and "suspicious package") and 1 Spiderboi panel ("cute little dyke") have been published online in Issue #1 of Queef Zine.

Shame and Shaman: Transgendered Bodies Performing the Erotic

You can now view my essay, Shame and Shaman: Transgendered Bodies Performing the Erotic, in the online journal The Body as a Site of Discrimination.

I also read an excerpt of the essay at the June 19, 2009 Launch Party at El Rio in San Francisco.

Follow "The Spiderboi Files"

Read web comix. Get thumbnail zines. Choose your own gender.
Follow "The Spiderboi Files" here.

"Yellow as Tumeric, Fragrant as Cloves"

Three poems of mine have been published in Yellow as Tumeric, Fragrant as Cloves: A Contemporary Anthology of Asian American Women's Poetry (2008) by Deep Bowl Press, alongside such poets as Wang Ping and Kimiko Hahn.

I submitted these poems when I identified as a woman, and they are published under my given name, Alysha Wood. Although I no longer identify as a woman, these poems speak to the silence and the struggle of being socialized as female and as the daughter of an immigrant mother.

Two of the poems, written in Thai and English, are from Teakwood & Coal, a chapbook written as part of my undergraduate senior thesis. The final poem is from a more current chapbook, IS THIS JANUARY, which is due out from Corollary Press within the next year. I would like to thank T.J. Anderson III and Akilah Oliver, under whose mentorship and teaching these poems were written.

Copies of the anthology are available for ordering here.

Sean Dorsey's "Uncovered: The Diary Project" and I

I.

I began and continue this blog in an attempt to create an archival lineage of people, performances and books with which I see my own body and work in conversation. It is a way to define my aesthetics and participate in active criticism and engagement. I did not intend to stumble emotionally here, like I previously did on livejournal and xanga--like I would in my diary.

I.

I have hesitated to insert "I" into my posts for some time now. I do not like to be vulnerable in front of those I do not trust, but I have noticed that the center now becomes that very thing: my relationship to being vulnerable, what parts those are, and how much of me becomes swallowed.

I.

I get mail from the Office of Alumnae Relations at Hollins University, addressed to a “Ms. Alysha L. Wood.” They ask me to give money to continue women’s college education. They still consider me part of their community.

I.

I no longer identify as a woman, or as part of women’s community. It’s a very strange feeling. But I’ve published all kinds of writing under that name. Alysha Wood is a very publishable-looking name. I won’t respond to it anymore, but that’s still me.

I.

To the Office of Alumnae Relations, I wonder if you have considered the students who have transitioned their gender during and after their time at your institution. Just think of all the envelopes you print with a “Ms.” in front of the name. Just think of who you’re leaving out.

I.

I saw Sean Dorsey's Uncovered: The Diary Project this past weekend. Dorsey choreographed pieces from his own diaries, as well as those of Lou Sullivan, a gay trans man, activist and scholar, who pioneered the beginnings of FTM community in San Francisco and worldwide.

I.

I first saw Sean Dorsey perform in Lost/Found in the fall of 2007, an excerpt of which was featured again in Uncovered. Dorsey’s movement vocabulary references several languages, including pedestrian gestures, ballet phrasing and partnering, layered and choreographed in conversation with a voice-over soundscape.

I.

The combination of text plus movement does not equal “theatrical” or “dancy” or “dancing to tell a story” in ways that can be very badly done. Instead, the energy of the choreography meets the text in a place where they can interweave. What is being said accents a gesture, while another movement punctuates the text, creating a seamless relationship. Though pedestrian gestures bleed into classical vocabulary, the body begins to express not just the literal words, but the energy behind the words. The body begins to give weight, to move beyond.

I.

Light captures bodies, opens and closes on them as they move. There is no sense of beginning or completion as such, but of continual negotiation, as the text offers “So...” and “...and then.”

I.

Partnering did not become spectacle, as in classical forms of dance where men’s bodies were expected to fulfill the purpose of “prop” to “show” women’s bodies. Partnering became hinges to express other sentences in the story. Men were partnering men--but even more than that. They engaged each other with trust, they expressed affection.

I.

“I Want To Look Like What I Am” was for me the most poignant. It began with the experience of looking into a mirror and not knowing who you are looking at. It talked about seeing other people who have found their own form of happiness in their bodies, and wondering if that happiness will ever come to me. These are things I have felt.

I.

From loss, to grief, to memory, to history. I was, as a writer and dancer, left with an unimaginable lack, as well as an extraordinary desire. I wanted to move like that. I wanted to feel like that. I wanted to cry.

I.

I have associated the I with stumbling, with being inarticulate and confused.
My body stumbles inarticulately, is confused.

I.

I am waiting to see if an old box of my diaries made its way from West Virginia to Kansas.

I.

I am not sure I have made it here, by saying “I.” It’s not that easy, but I tried.

Review of "All I asking for is my body" by Milton Murayama

In Milton Murayama’s All I asking for is my body (University of Hawai’i Press, 1988), two elder sons in a Japanese family working the plantation camps in Hawai’i in the 1930s fight to feel ownership of their bodies, in the face of filial piety and the obligatory slavery of working off the family debt. Since self-sacrifice is common practice, the body enters the story in many subtle, striking and surprising ways.

“If I start holding back, I play right into [father’s] hands,” begins Tosh, Kiyoshi’s older brother. “Hard work, patience, holding back, waiting your turn, all that crap, they all fit together to keep you down” (46). Boxing is Tosh’s way to dodge his parents’ verbal blows and tactfully engage his situation with an embodied agency. The new-found physicality of boxing allows him to release his emotions, to feel empowered in his decisions, to believe there is something outside the work camp, to believe in a future.

Even the act of feeling his body, of being aware of it, is an act of rebellion, because it states to others that he can access his own power--a gift that becomes a threat. Kiyoshi is wary of Tosh’s actions until he begins to feel the pressure of eldest son bearing down upon him--his emotions build up with nowhere to let them out. He begins to realize that “all this reserve and discipline and patience and self-sacrifice only wore you down and made you feel real low” (88).

Ironically, “face” is a denial of self, an act of illusion, one that requires both brothers to give up their bodies toward a pre-determined end. Murayama offers one of the most articulate definitions of face I have ever read, including, “Face was pretending to be perfect or there was nothing wrong, and either way the losing of face meant exposure and shame. You ended up pretending and hiding too much, you ended up with all kinds of skeletons...” (89-90).

Whether through desire, shame, or anger, Kiyoshi begins to find and feel within himself, begins to let himself be vulnerable. After the news of the bombing on Pearl Harbor, he says “It was like being KO’d. You woke up hot, the skin on your face and hands feeling thicker, callused and barely feeling, you could poke a needle into you and not jump. You’ve withdrawn inside where it was safer, and left your skin out there in enemy territory...” (78).

“Shit, all I asking for is my body. I doan wanna die on the plantation like these other dumb dodos” (48), resists Tosh. “All I asking for is my body” becomes Tosh’s constant refrain. Each time he says it, he uncovers his skeletons, he exposes a part of himself, he stays alive.

“Small But Heated Fictions”: An Imagined Intimacy in Wojnarowicz, Bauby and Cooper

Your body is a body the State does not recognize, so to the State you are invisible.
Your body is a body that is neglected and misunderstood, so you are unable to communicate.
Your body is a body that is paralyzed, so you are trapped inside of it.

How do you live inside your body, if you can only imagine it?


David Wojnarowicz in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration responds to violence enacted by the State during a socio-political climate in which those living with HIV/AIDS are disembodied and left to die. Homophobic State-sanctioned violence dictates how he is allowed to be intimate in both public and private spaces, so that his intimacy (defined as the ways he is embodied and “bodied” with others, as well as the ways he sees and is seen in his body) becomes imagined.


Echoing Diane DiPrima’s cry (“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination”), Wojnarowicz states, “I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination” (120). Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle who suffered from locked-in syndrome and dictated his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eye, wrote that all he had was memory and daydream, which became the intimacy he shared with others, whether in his dreams or through individual letters, which became words, which became sentences.


Wojnarowicz writes how his social landscape disintegrates with the deaths of intimate friends, as their bodies dissolve with the lack of government support. Dennis Cooper in Closer writes of life as a series of gradual dissolves (70) and how this disintegration comes to constitute vision. The distance between people, the impossibility of intimacy, the uncertain border between closeness and fragmentation, the confusion between reflection and reality. Cooper captures how utterly strange it is to have a body and the awkwardness of social interaction in adolescence. “No matter how I extend myself I don’t get closer to who I am” (36).


Like Bauby, Wojnarowicz also could not “escape the ropes of my own body” (33), which in 1990 was still taboo. His intimacy becomes fantasy; desire gathers strength and meat and movement. “I don’t want to witness the silencing of my own body” (230) so “I fill the gullies with small but heated fictions” (26) because it is the only way I can survive. Already unable to exist, he is a repository of the voices, memories and gestures of those who have died and his ritual is to continue to make these gestures, this art, these communications in the face of death, to continue to attempt. This is his weapon.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Two articles I wrote for the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center website:
Violence Against Transgender People of Color: A Response to the Deaths of Latiesha Green and Duanna Johnson
Reflections on the Transgender Day of Remembrance March

For more information: Transgender Day of Remembrance



See also the lastest public service announcement from the Banyan Tree Project (a national campaign to reduce HIV-related stigma in Asian & Pacific Islander communities) targeting the A&PI transgender community.

View the PSA on YouTube or below:

Sunny Drake

Sunny Drake: Gender-Juggler, Many-Tongued

Truth or dare, boy or girl. Australian genderqueer performer Sunny Drake explodes two-by-two construction by risking a multi-lingual architecture of voice, body, and identity. “My gender is something otherwise,” Drake declares, sitting on the topmost rung of a ladder in The Garage, a performance space on 975 Howard Street in San Francisco. Flashlight in hand, Drake illuminates his own face against the darkness of the voice he questions.

As a writer and performer I have taken interest in Drake’s performances, beginning in March at the Raw & Uncut Festival and again in June as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. As Drake gears up for another run in the SF Fringe Festival this September, I am reminded of the strengths that drew me to the work and that still ring loud--the mutable yet resilient presence of a genderqueer body on stage, and how that body radiates with precision, honesty, and an empowered exposure.

Critique of Drake’s performance belongs within a canon of drag theater and multi-lingual writing. I have come to think of Drake’s performances as poly-lingual texts enabled by multiple forms of media. Drake’s aesthetic is poly-vocal, utilizing the languages of video, projection, and audio to create multiple tracks that are always engaged in dialogue with Drake’s performing body and voice. In many instances Drake speaks with, disagrees with, or questions a voiceover of his voice, or a voiceover of his voice altered to become another voice. Drake code-switches between different forms of media, from sound to image to movement, while embodying the act of code-switching between genders that is common practice for many transgendered and genderqueer people.

Conscious of transforming space and engaging the audience as active participants, Drake creates a landscape for the self’s multiplicity and juggles multiple forms of media with a presentation that is “carnivalesque magician.” Gender performs its catalogs in and through the medium of the body and becomes an act that is conjured, that is always continually coming into being.


SF Fringe Festival & The Garage present
Sunny Drake
Other-wise: a gender-euphoric multi-media one-person show
8:30pm (no late seating)
Sept 13 and 14
975 Howard St, SF, between 5th and 6th near Powell BART
$9 (NOTA)

Tinfish 18: The Long Poem Issue

"Sawn: how to peel in seven lessons" is a long poem from my MFA creative manuscript, "Llao," selected for publication in TINFISH 18: The Long Poem Issue. "Sawn" engages fruit, hunger, translation, transmigration, and immigrant inheritance.

Tinfish 18 airs it out, offering an issue devoted to the Long Poem. Contributors include Mani Rao, Alysha Wood, Lynn Xu, David Perry, Stephen Collis, Endi Bogue Hartigan, and Norman Fischer, engaging issues of translation, form (including collage, the sonnet sequence, and the elegy), contemporary politics, and more.

Tinfish's journal is known for its eclectic, eccentric designs and for the use of recycled materials for its covers. In this case, all covers are made out of real estate advertising brochures. Covers by Alan Konishi, Interior Art by Sara Hertenstein, centerfold by Gaye Chan. Design by Chae Ho Lee.

Order here.

Longitudes of Longing: Michelle Naka Pierce’s “Beloved Integer”

(Bootstrap Press/PUB LUSH, 2007)

Uncertain of where we are in the matrix of desire, we become unstable points, unexplained phenomena. In “Beloved Integer,” Michelle Naka Pierce calculates intimacy in numbers and names the beloved, beginning with ‘one.’


“You emerge from inertia, and our desires change” (73). “Beloved Integer” diagrams a physics of the physical, where space is durational and time, spatial. Bodies and boundaries are in flux, traveling along points of contact and con/text.


On this grid the specific splices through the general—daily activities cut through theory—raisin bran and Stanislavsky. As Pierce attempts to graph intersections recalled in memory, the tension between time and space peels apart, and the location of any landmark, whether city or body, becomes variable.


“Absence can only exist as a consequence. Can only exist as a consequence of this. Only exist as a consequence of this other” (48). Pierce’s vocabulary and placement are meticulously measured. The numeric cuts through word, writing through distance toward and until.


Tone and rhythm fluctuate, become less incremental, as she moves from the beloved to the landscape of Obaachan, Japan, her father (19). Always lurking is the death within stillness, the peril of becoming fixed.


By inscribing figures Pierce reveals writing as intimate, as an intimation, to write being to intimate or discern. This writing is a “long engagement” (58), a longitude of longing. Each block of text is a quadrant, each quadrant in transit, while figures traverse by train, bus, and plane, roadmap and road (62).


Navigating with GPS in hand, Pierce finds clarity in what is next to, in what is relational. We measure what’s around us to determine where we are.


These measurements are distances.


It is through distance that we arrive.





See M. Perel's interview with Michelle in Tarpaulin Sky

Marginal Bodies

I attended “Marginal Bodies: Illness, Disability, and the Queer Community,” an event curated by Brent Armendinger as part of the National Queer Arts Festival, Sunday June 15, 2008 at the SomArts Gallery in San Francisco. I was already becoming more aware of the intersections and potential dialogue between transgender and disability studies, and this panel/performance event opened up more spaces for me to think about the connections between embodying decay, transgender embodiment, and other forms of marginal embodiment.

Gregory Tomso, professor of American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of West Florida, spoke about disability, illness, HIV/AIDS, and transgender embodiment as chronic conditions that are stable yet unstable, that change but stay the same. Toni Mirosevich, professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, spoke of living with illness as containing many rebirths and the necessity of letting go of the body, of letting it shift and transform as we live on with this, as we embody decay.

What became apparent to me was the need to both make the body visible, yet not let disability define it--to do this work both on and off the body. With sharp presence, performer seeley quest’s body and spoken text struck up against years of trying to keep their disability in the closet. Audio documentarist Briana O’Higgins brings the body into an aural, rather than visual, realm, and Artistic Director of SINS Invalid, Patricia Berne, chose to create a video without the image of their wheelchair. Mirosevich read from a work in which the writing was dictated by the energy of the body, in which both body and poem were “shattered.”

I thought about disability and my work with artist M. Perel, specifically our recent workshop at the Movement Research Festival in New York City. In that workshop we used a score involving a series of authentic movement cycles, focusing on sites of decay, disintegration or vulnerability in the body. We discovered that these sites were transformative, that decay in the body actually looked more like continuation, extension, lengthening. I thought about how the body grows around the metal in Perel’s hip, how my body energetically shifts as I embody gender, of our friendship and artistic connection. I thought of how SymbioticA grafts live tissue into sculpture, of Anna Halprin completely covering herself in mud and earth and being reborn. We continue to re-imagine the body and what can be possible, we illuminate more options for “modes of assemblage” as Armendinger phrased it, we embody decay and live with it. I understand why authentic movement has become a powerful form for discovery and healing, why our lives and work have become intertwined.

The Rice Kings

thericekings.blogspot.com

Trans March 2008

I performed at the TRANS MARCH!
Friday June 27
Dolores Park
3 - 10p

National Queer Arts Festival

the National Queer Arts Festival & AIRspace presents

Sunny Drake (Australia) with 2 solo pieces:
Gender-queer Seeking… and Other-wise

& an exhibition by Woo of "The Spiderboi Files"
(a choose your own gender adventure graphic novel)

Wed June 18th and Thurs June 19, 8.00 PM
@ The Garage, 975 Howard St (@ 5th), San Francisco (near Powell St BART station)

Cost: pay what you can (suggested: $10 – 20)
Reservations: 415 885 4006
Or online at: brownpapertickets.com
** the June 18th show will be ASL interpreted


SUNNY’S PIECES

Other-wise

Children, can you say gender-queer? Can you say this morning on my way to school I lost my homework and the dog ate my gender? Lkdjfaowiute sldjkiuewt ;kdsghjhrdl asjf ckjhiuwer askdfjo;wiuetrlsajf. Confused? Welcome! Gender adventurer Sunny Drake takes up the challenge to try to articulate their/ his/hir gender journey, to arrive at this brief moment in time: gender = carnivalesque magician. By the time you see this performance, the moment will probably have passed. A hide-and-seek peekaboo at misogyny-and-tokenism-in-childhood, invisibility, class and white privilege and getting comfortable with ambiguity. Other-wise includes a performative documentation of the process of coming out to Sunny’s family (picture Sunny sweating and fretting a little at this point in anticipation of this terrifying process). Video & visuals by Dana Aleshire.

Gender-queer Seeking…

Have you ever wondered if what you think you want is what you really want? Or just what you’ve been taught to want? In this one-person-show, in collaboration with visual and video artists Dana Aleshire & Alana Heiner-Smith, Australian performer Sunny Drake explores love, heartbreak, and the manufacturing of emotions. An embarrassing, vulnerable and exposing look at Sunny’s internal world of fantasies, run-ins with the polyamory police, green monsters, and how internalised capitalism and relationship scripts play out in the narratives of radical communities.


ABOUT SUNNY

Australian performer Sunny Drake is a human critter who weaves story-telling, theatre and creative movement with layers of sound and visuals. Sunny embeds intimate and exposing autobiographical stories in broader political contexts, creating performance that is socially relevant and resonates with many different people’s experiences. Explorations include body image, gender, sexuality, concrete, sexual assault, identity, confessions, fear and professionalism. Sunny has performed in many places around Australia, the USA and Canada including in theatres, festivals, living-rooms, backyards, forests, streets, basements, work places, conferences and deserts. Sunny’s solo works include Gender-queer Seeking…, Umbilical, I Should Have Turned the Mattress Over too and The Pencil Test. Sunny is currently doing a residency at The Garage theatre in San Francisco, and working towards shows in the National Queer Arts Festival and the San Francisco Fringe Festival. Sunny was born on stolen Indigenous land in Australia (Jaggera-Turrabul land, Brisbane) and comes from English and Irish ancestry. Contact sunnydragonflight@yahoo.com for more information.


ABOUT WOO & "THE SPIDERBOI FILES"

"The Spiderboi Files" is a story-time, choose your own gender adventure graphic novel that chronicles Spiderboi's commute from tidy femininity to embodied sexuality through pen and ink documents of passing. Recently performed at the Judson Memorial Church as part of the Movement Research Festival, one of the panels has been selected for Fresh Meat in the Gallery V: Riots and Revelations and will also be performed at the Trans March on June 27. For more information visit http://eucalyptusraven.blogspot.com/


Alysha Wood (Woo) is a graduate of Naropa University's M.F.A. Writing & Poetics program and holds an undergraduate degree from Hollins University. A writer, dancer, and performer, Woo's critical and creative work appears in "Across and Between the Void" (Achiote Press, 2008), In Dance, Galatea Resurrects, Feminist Review, Cliterature, Glimpse Abroad, and "Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices" (Johnson Books, 2007). Woo performs with The Rice Kings, a San Francisco bay area API drag king troupe.

somewhere out there: movement research spring festival 2008

thursday may 29
10am - 2pm
de(compose): duration, decay, and the unwinding unconscious
a workshop led by Melissa Buzzeo, Marissa Perel, and Alysha Wood

8pm
Skeined Tongues: the reification of language as mesomorphous substance
Experimental reading and performance by Melissa Buzzeo, HR Hegnauer, Danielle Vogel, Marissa Perel, Alysha Wood

Judson Memorial Church Gym
243 Thompson St off Washington Square South, New York City

movement research spring festival 2008

Fresh Meat in the Gallery V: Riots and Revelations

A segment of my choose your own genderadventure graphic novel, "THE SPIDERBOI FILES," will be exhibited!

FRESH MEAT IN THE GALLERY V: RIOTS AND REVELATIONS –
Opening reception June 7 / Exhibition June 7-July 12
Opening reception: Saturday June 7, 6pm-10pm
Location: SF LGBT Community Center, 3rd floor (1800 Market Street @ Octavia, SF)
Exhibition: June 7 – July 12
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri Noon-10pm; Sat 9am-10pm; Sun closed
Admission: Free
Info: http://www.freshmeatproductions.org/calendar.html

Fresh Meat in the Gallery is a groundbreaking annual exhibition of transgender and gender variant artists. The first and only exhibition of its kind in the nation, Fresh Meat in the Gallery celebrates its Fifth Anniversary this year!

This year's exhibition, Riots and Revelations, asks: How have riots and revelations been part of our histories and how they will shape the future? How do we find peace in a time of war on our bodies and communities? How are communities around the world rising up? What new ways of living are being revealed for the future? Transgender and gender variant artists from across the nation and around the world respond with innovative, startling, moving new work.

Featuring work by: Jillian Soto, Danyol, Eric Allen Carter, Maya Christina Gonzalez, Miss Day, Noelle Walker, Alex Smith, Aryn Zev, Gariel R. Felix, Henry Schneiderman, R. Sandler, Rae Strozzo, Sela Davis, Simon Croft, Stacey Wexler, Truc Thanh Nguyen, Valerie Amedee, Woo, Miles Conrad, Uman and Woolf Israel. Riots and Revelations is presented by Fresh Meat Productions, the Queer Cultural Center and the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, and is a featured part of the National Queer Arts Festival.

Ghost Decay: Decomposition as Transformation

The other day I realized that I could quite possibly be a ghost. I am in between even the betweens of in-between, a microscopic terrorist, so ambiguous that I must continually search for and be searched out. Expectations of culture and gender dissolve me into void, I exit and enter spheres of definition, included yet excluded. It is this ghost decay that allows me to pass into invisibility like a haunting, and to infiltrate visibility at my own choosing. Judith Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York University Press, 2005) speaks of the time and space of queer performance, the spatial dimensions of cultural productions that infiltrate and delay, documenting and cataloging the “transgender stages” of “temporal drag,” where past narratives of self haunt the body as martian anachronism.



Shadowing her first memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (Broadway Books, 2003), Jennifer Finney Boylan examines her encounters with death, suicide, and the paranormal in I’m Looking Through You: Growing up Haunted (Broadway Books, 2008). A concept extremely relevant to transgender and transsexual experience, which Boylan deftly delivers, is that of being a ghost because one is rendered dead (Boylan’s sister no longer acknowledges her existence), or invisible and impossible by popular media and the state apparatus. The complexity of this haunting dances throughout the stories Boylan tells, and in the final scenes Boylan uncovers the haunting of both her past and future selves.

Final scenes from the film Beautiful Boxer (Ekachai Uekrongtham, 2003) similarly document the “transgender stages” of Nong Toom’s transformation. At a bus stop, Nong Toom, at multiple stages of her life, is depicted waiting for a bus to pull in. Each “Nong Toom” marks a stage of her journey, all lined up. Throughout the film Nong Toom has visions of a young girl and then a woman with a flower in her hair who always vanishes—a “ghost.” While Nong Toom is haunted by the woman she will become, she is also haunted by the man she was, and in the final scene of the film the boxer Nong Toom visits Parinya in her dressing room mirror—just as the old woman Boylan frequently saw in the bathroom mirror of her childhood home was actually herself.

Haunted by past and future selves I walk the earth translucent, yearning for the substance and solidity others take for granted, trying to feed a “turbulent desire” (Halberstam) for meat and touch without teeth or skin. Rather than fright, this constant self-haunting causes sadness. Julia Serano in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press, 2007) defines this transgendered sadness as arising from a dissonance between what she terms subconscious sex (who you feel you are on the inside, or who you perceive yourself to be) and physical sex (the externalities of the body, or how others perceive you). Serano’s extremely helpful and articulate critical discussions and arguments offer alternatives to the destructive tendency to blame and reinforce (gender) binaries. Whether queer or straight, if you’ve never questioned this alignment within your own body, you might not understand a trans person who experiences such a dissonance, a dissonance that causes some trans people to feel disconnected from themselves and the queer communities they may have once belonged.

The myth of flexibility in regards to the transgendered person is haunted by the rigidity of borders, definitions, and access. Terre Thaemlitz questions the trans person and their “mobility between nations” in “Trans-Portation,” a piece originally created for Trans-Sister Radio and published in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, edited by Mattilda (Seal Press, 2006). Our bodies are so mobile that certain borders can no longer be crossed.

Sometimes I am too tired to keep writing my transition. I am frustrated by being texted, by being made up of words and words alone, words and not bone. The story of who I am keeps being crossed, and I have been looking for my body for so long that there can be only one conclusion: I’m a ghost. I’m a ghost decaying to make room for new organs, watching The X-Files in the dark, searching for an alien pornography that will make possible my body and its response.

“I have lost my origin”: A Meditation on the Moment

I’m going to have to resign myself to being “New Age.” I’m going to have to stop worrying about “The Origin,” about Authenticity and Appropriation, about who said what first and what belongs to whom. As queers, as products of colonization, we often grapple with a sense of being without history--whether that manifests as the absence of a birth certificate or other documents, the inability (to adopt) or choice not to have children, the dissolution of lineage, or the families that disown and reject us.

For me, transgendered-mixedness is about being homeless, in constant search for ground, redefining where home and tribe reside. We are poor and always hungry; we need to take what we can get. We are scavengers and thieves, full of quotations and borrowed ideas, we reuse and recycle, we collage.

The very de-centering of authority and power in which we function often works to disarm us. Our fragmentation is mocked by those that broke the frame. As we de/reconstruct hegemonic architectures, let us also de/reconstruct what those architectures have named cliché, the mud and bone they have stolen and re-packaged to sell without mythology.


I sit on the fourth floor of a building on Market Street meditating with a group of people on words the Buddha may or may have not spoken, on concepts re-interpreted and pieced together in an on-going extrapolation since B.C.E. Our understanding of metta includes Pink Floyd and Valentine’s Day; we let it hold our queerness. Our breath and our bodies still invoke entire landscapes; what we bring is our specificity, our ability to open and expand earth and fire to house ourselves.

Our task is to find context and continuity--whether that is within a circle of close friends in which we are invigorated, or in the art we create. Our task is to continually arise of the moment, in the moment, with all--history, lineage, origin--and nothing.

Divided, photograph by A Wood

"Across and Between the Void" from Achiote Press

"Across and Between the Void" by Padcha Tuntha-obas and Alysha Wood from Achiote Press features my critical thesis published as an essay with new poetry by Tuntha-obas. Unfortunately the short print run has sold out.

Review of "Not in the Picture," presented by Christine Germain and Dancers

Review of Not in the Picture, presented by Christine Germain and Dancers
Friday and Saturday, September 14 and 15, 8 pm, CounterPULSE
San Francisco, California
by Alysha Wood


Driven by a passion for cultural anthropology and what tourism leaves out, Christine Germain presented her first professional production, Not in the Picture, with Christine Germain and Dancers on September 14th and 15th at CounterPULSE. As the show began, audience members were given the opportunity to stand, sit or move around the marley floor while dancers Mimi Cave, Jesse Hewit, Slater Penney, Natasha Warder and Germain performed and observed from the risers, cleared of chairs.

This flip in the location of “stage” and “audience” was influenced by Edward M. Bruner’s Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, excerpts of which Germain gave the dancers to read. Bruner’s work analyzes the observer’s expectations and assumptions concerning culture, an objectification that may be translated through either camera lens or stage. During a phone interview, Germain revealed her fascination with the oblivious traveler whose picture-taking of locals, often without their permission, becomes a violent act. In imitation of such travelers Germain quipped, “We just want to take good pictures. We don’t want to know what’s not in the picture”--what slips from the edges of the viewfinder.

Bruner’s practice of taking pictures of tourists inspired Germain and dancers to travel to a tourist area of San Francisco to do the same. In an email correspondence Germain remarked, “[We took] pictures of the tourists, of ourselves, of attraction, but also taking pictures of things that tourists never take picture of...what is usually not in the picture.” This ambiguity between the categories of observer and observed creates a fluctuating border within which the practices of tourism and the practices of performance collide. Exploring such excluded realities as coal mining and sweatshop labor, Not in the Picture includes an interlude in which a woman behind a window, lit by red light, suggests sex trafficking and sex tourism, while dancer Sunny Nordmarken, seemingly sunbathing in a hammock, struggles with the netting, caught--against a backdrop of blissful beach music.


In creating the piece Germain developed several exercises for the dancers. One such exercise involved having the dancers choose an image, and the cliché within that image, from photographs and brochures of travel or their own memory. The dancers then reproduced these images with their bodies until sequences of images were created. This process of recording images and memory with the body echoes Germain’s artistic statement; “the choreographic work becomes a travel journal,” in which bodies mark the space and leave their own traces.

Under Germain’s direction as artistic director and choreographer, Not in the Picture maintains a specific movement vocabulary that incorporates the dancers’ own physical language, a collaborative and improvisational translation that is both abstract and pedestrian. Bodies are acutely examined for their use as surfaces and the dancers crawl, push and pull against each other in an effort to reach their own trajectories. They carry bags of coal, wear headlamps to creatively light the space as they move and don sub-zero expedition gear, creating platforms and pathways with their bodies as they climb, spill, curl and intertwine.

Taking advantage of every inch of the CounterPULSE performance space, dancers move on and underneath the risers (where audience members normally sit), using the kitchen window and hanging a hammock. People work at sewing machines on the storage space up near the rafters and at one moment dancer Jesse Hewit hangs from the pipes. This spatial awareness folds into both the choreography and improvisation, magnified by John Willhoite’s varied and layered sound design.

At one point in the piece the dancers break into the space, taking pictures of the audience members, posing and directing them. So viewed, the audience is no longer passive and the discomfort of “performing” is abruptly placed onto them. Incorporating an element of audience interaction in her work for the first time, this further demonstrates Germain’s belief in dance as a conversation. Where the performance of a people’s culture is often “staged” for tourists, Germain hopes to reveal that tourism itself, whether well-rehearsed or improvised, is also a staged production.

Review of Costa and Matzner's "Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth"

When it’s safer to camouflage a tranny’s story in fiction, fashion, or faux pas, LeeRay M. Costa and Andrew J. Matzner lift away mask, makeup, and make-believe in “Male Bodies, Women’s Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand’s Transgendered Youth” (The Haworth Press, 2007). While living in Thailand, Costa and Matzner invited several Chiang Mai University students who identified as sao braphet song, or “a second type of woman,” to write narratives about their lives.

Costa and Matzner bring an incredible transparency and thoroughness to this project by contextualizing their research within the Thai sex/gender system and other research on gender crossing and Thai sexualities, consequently providing points of entry and analysis into the voices and lives of sao braphet song themselves. They review the presence of kathoey in creation stories, early traveler’s tales, religious ritual (as shamans or mediums in northern Thai culture), mass media, and western academic research, all in an attempt to highlight the need for sao braphet song’s own voices. Their work moves away from perpetuating totalizing identities for those considered “third sex” and instead uncovers the heterogeneity, situatedness, individuality, and agency within gender transgression.

Costa and Matzner clarify the similarities and differences between the terms sao braphet song and the more popularly used kathoey, which are often used interchangeably yet carry a variety of meanings dependent on context. They debunk the ever popular notion of Thai society’s “tolerance” of gender variance and complicate the Thai gender/sex system. Costa and Matzner’s fluency in both written and spoken Thai adds to the decentering of authority that grounds their process and methodology. The question of power and their position is frequently discussed in terms of translation and ethnography itself and surfaces in their refusal to present a “conclusion” for their work, instead choosing to center marginal experiences in order to humanize them.

What makes “Male Bodies, Women’s Souls” an important work is its focus on a textual approach, using the personal narrative within an ethnographic construct. Costa and Matzner present the voices of Thai transgendered people themselves, without exporting or superimposing western categories or interpretations. Since sao braphet song “have often served as symbols,” the personal narratives “allow readers to engage with them as individuals rather than as a homogeneous group” (2). Capturing an “identity in flux,” the narrative allows sao braphet song to come into focus without becoming fossils, and to “imagine themselves anew” (43). As a re-imagining, the act of writing or telling one’s own story transforms both the self and the world.

Many people in the U.S. have approached me about the broad acceptance of queerness in Thai society, romanticizing it as Costa and Matzner suggest (29). From my own experience of gender in Thailand I’ve always said yeah, but only if you don’t make a big deal about it. Only if you act proper and don’t draw attention to yourself. Only if you still conform to what a true puu chai or puu ying is supposed to be. It’s a conditional acceptance. Costa and Matzner write, “...Thai attitudes toward kathoey are ambivalent and often dependent on context....Students indicated that they generally felt positively toward kathoey who ‘behaved themselves’ in public by dressing and acting as modest and appropriate ‘women.’” (30)

While in western discourse it’s now pretty much given that same-sex desire and trans identity behaviors are distinct, “Sexual orientation is tightly bound up with gender identity in Thai discourse in that same-sex attraction is assumed by many Thai people to be intrinsic to cross-gender identity and behavior” (17). So in short, everything you learned in Anthropology 101 about sex (nature) and gender (culture) being of opposing camps is lost on a Thai dee who’s asking you, “so, do you like girls who look like girls or girls who look like boys?”

My experience of Thai tom/dee or lesbian culture was that you were either super-femme or a chain-smoking, Johnny-Walker-drinking butch, that “sexual desire is organized around gender difference” (136). Costa and Matzner write, “In other words, as long as a couple’s gender presentation appears ‘heterosexual’...then Thai people are more willing and able to understand such an arrangement” (29). Sexual practice and gender expression in Thailand fall into one big category called homosexuality, while the fight to include or distinguish the T from the GLB continues in the states.

Each sao braphet song characterized their condition as either fixed at birth, due to karma or hormonal imbalance, or a product of social factors, like family dynamics, making them “become” or “change” to kathoey. In reading the students narratives, nearly every one mentioned the fear of bringing sorrow to their parents, an emotion I feel is particular to being Thai. Also, many silently accept isolation as part of the deal, understanding that there can be no true love between sao braphet song and real men, that love will always be one-sided. The profundity behind Lara’s statement, “We meet each other in order to leave” (63) echoes.

Many sao braphet song communicated the drastic divide between studying hard and being true to one’s self, that to chose other than school was to be selfish. Seeing this duality of a public or family identity and a core identity mirrored in these young Thai students struck me as something I had also known, that to keep who you really are separate from the self you don for “public consumption” was just part of daily practice (140-1).

What really resonated with me was the fact that many of their families stopped punishing or abusing them when they realized their child couldn’t be changed, that it was their karma to live out--not because they unconditionally accepted the child for who they were. Thai Silk writes of her parents, “I think they knew who I really was, but didn’t say anything mean to me about it” (96). The “linking together of transgenderism and karma (kam)” means that it is “neither appropriate for people such as parents to interfere with it, nor is it appropriate for sao braphet song to attempt to change it themselves” (143).

I see myself in the voices of these sao braphet song, yet the effect Costa and Matzner’s project continues to have on me is unexpected. It is through the Thai MTF transgender experience that I finally understand how femininity is socialized in Thai society, how I was socialized as a daughter by my Thai mother, that “...morality in the Thai context is intimately bound up with appearance and conformity” (153). Being riabroi or ‘proper’ is a gendered feminine attribute, which explains the strange synesthesia of ‘Thainess’ with ‘womanness’ with ‘propriety,’ and conversely queerness with Americanness with impropriety. What is culturally appropriate behavior for your sex is enforced, and there are “types of femininity and morality [to] embod[y] and perfor[m]” (138, 147).

When Costa and Matzner quote Van Esterik, who notes “the importance of understanding surfaces, appearance, face, masks and disguise as important cultural strategies of interaction” (142), many kinks in dissecting my own socialization and sexuality clicked. Karma, mask, duality. When we cannot interfere we put up a mask, we perform another disguise. What lies beneath then can never be known, can never be shown. You perform, I perform, you won’t interfere. You are ambivalent, I am ambivalent, you don’t care, I don’t know, it depends. I keep that hidden.

Response to Jamison Green's "Becoming a Visible Man"

For Jamison Green, “Becoming a Visible Man” (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) requires negotiating the desire to live a ‘normal’ life, to pass and “transition into invisibility” (73) with the need to create a collective network of resources and history for other FTM transsexual people. In order to fight for our own rights, we must connect with other queer communities in legal and political struggle; we must keep ‘coming out’ despite that painful territory. We must become visible to ourselves and then to others, so that we can all move out of isolation and become who we are.

In a recent conversation with some friends, I said I would be needing to look for a new living situation soon. Someone inquired as to whether I had any requirements, and I shrugged and said I’d like to be close to public transit. Not having any other prerequisites besides cost, I cautiously added, “...to live with other queers.” As soon as it came out of my mouth, I realized that “queer” and “queer community” no longer held the meaning they once did.

During my undergraduate years at Hollins University, a women’s liberal arts college in Roanoke, Virginia, I came to a strong identification with my body through dance; I came to know that body as queer, and as female, within a queer, women-centered, creative and communal campus environment. For those four years I exercised my creative agency to its fullest extent, I was fed artistically and intellectually, I constructed an innate sense of self; it was my home. Upon graduating and moving to Colorado to pursue an MFA at a co-ed institution, I grappled with my resistance to create (from scratch) an identification of self outside the Hollins sphere. I mourned a self I had already lost, to which I could never return.

In the midst of my frustration at not being reflected, I was handed the ‘person of color’ label (news to me) and clung to it and its prescribed zone. I defiantly waved the old ‘queer’ flag, even as my relationship to queerness, and to my own body, began to change. My relationship to ‘being brown,’ however, was not built around white bashing, and my sense of queerness was not built around sex or sexuality per se. Being mixed in primarily POC spheres brought its own uneasiness, as I began (unconsciously) to unhook my sense of queerness from a completely female sphere. I tried to convince myself that all I had to do was show up to POC and LGBTQQIA meetings, listen, be loyal; I thought constantly holding up signs and abbreviations would be enough. Yet I couldn’t find wholeness--I gradually understood that these identity clubs could no longer hold me.


“Identity has often been a powerful organizing tool, but it should not be mistaken for the ideal model of community. Identity is not a rigid, monolithic psychosocial box into which we can each place ourselves, where we will permanently remain” (81).


Due to the stigmatized racial and class climate in Colorado, my queer and colored brothers and sisters seemed stuck, constantly on defense. Efforts to act always suffocated and drowned. I was ready at all times to flee--Colorado was a very small closet into which I had been stuffed, screaming, far away from the community I had known, from the identification that I thought would hold me forever. There was no place I could safely reveal myself.


“For me, community exists when I don’t have to be afraid to let others around me know who I am” (87).


I criticized people of color who wouldn’t come to POC meetings. I criticized women who looked queer but had boyfriends, women I knew as queer who later married men, transpeople who passed in heterosexual relationships--I played the “you aren’t queer enough” game. But I was socialized within a queer feminist sphere, and my critiques came from a failure to language or accept my own attraction to men and masculinity, my own fascination with heterosexuality, a hatred of (my own) whiteness, and a converse fetishistic desire for (my own) otherness--to be as other as possible.

As gender peels itself apart from my body, I desire to know it once more, to let others know who I am, without shame. I desire to become visible, to myself.

Review of Max Wolf Valerio's "The Testosterone Files" and Dhillon Khosla's "Both Sides Now"

Side by side, Max Wolf Valerio’s The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male (Seal Press, 2006) and Dhillon Khosla’s Both Sides Now: One Man’s Journey Through Womanhood (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) serve as complimentary documents in a catalog of heterosexual transsexual male experiences. While Valerio focuses on his first five years on T, Khosla unfolds his journey through his surgeries and the subsequent emotional and spiritual transformations of his body. Both explore their relationships with heterosexual or bisexual women and their departure from an ill-fitting lesbian community as they reclaim a vast and activated sense of self.

At first I was surprised to see how strongly both Valerio and Khosla promoted the gender binary--reinforcing its need and highlighting the differences between masculine and feminine behaviors as fundamental to an understanding of their world. My first reaction was, “Come on, boy/girl sex turns you on? That’s so stereotypical. So normal." Both described how their perceptions of self and other (women) changed through transition, and how the clear opposition and separation between the sexes became an erotic boundary. Given that both live and pass fully as heterosexual men, a loyalty to the binary makes sense.

Although I strongly oppose the gender binary, or essentialized notions of male/female, as a departure point for critical theorizations of gender, after reading these two works I understand more of the nature side of the nature/nurture debate. Valerio helped me understand how being on my period, in addition to the emotional cloudedness of PMS, is a lot like taking a shot of estrogen, and how an intense substance like T re-figures the body on a chemical and cellular level. I identified with the substance, solidity, and anchoredness Khosla found in being affirmed as male, and all the protective layers he had to pull off in order for his true identity to emerge. “…until I was able to expose my true self, there was always a sense that the love that came my way was not truly meant for me. It remained stuck on this hardened outer shell, unable to penetrate through to my heart" (22).

Yet arguing biology has always made me nervous. I cringe at gender being the result of some horrific “trapped in the wrong body” scenario, or a monstrous medical condition that must be ‘fixed.’ The notion of being ‘born’ stupid, dirty, primitive, or uneducated is a common imperialist attack upon many folks of color. Binary thinking offers only fixed definitions (“that’s just the way you are”), a reaffirmation of established stereotypes, and no mode of agency for those who don’t fit inside its proscribed categories.

I thought transitioning would enhance the mutability of gender rather than fix it. While Valerio and Khosla’s stories show the importance of distinguishing between a transsexual versus a transgender identification of self, I think it’s a disservice to maintain these groups as mutually exclusive--making it appear that only those who transition and pass completely as one gender or the other are more ‘whole’ or deserving. I was bothered when Khosla described his perceptions of dykes, gay men, and other non-passing trans people as unhappy and confused, and his perception of “butch” as only a bad imitation of masculinity. But since he couldn’t feel happy or at home in his own body until he was completely male, I understood where he might be coming from.

Valerio made a reference to the current visibility of genderqueerness as a matter of there being more ‘choices’ now. While I refuse to attribute the ‘rise’ of a gender variant / gender ambiguous community to some kind of ‘trend,’ I do believe that current dynamics in global economics, border policing, and surveillance have contributed to the quality of betweenness that permeates many aspects of culture, art-making, theory, and criticism today.

Those who can’t ‘pass’ are still labeled freaks.


I’m looking for others who grasp at a continually shifting, non-fixed, non-locatable, uncertain, undefined, and constantly constructed shape of their bodies and their selves.

Review of "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon" by Tom Spanbauer

I initially fell in love with The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon (1991, HarperCollins) because Tom Spanbauer crafted such a vulnerable language of re-imagining. Through the eyes and mouth of a young boy without a name, a youth called "Shed," a half-Indian berdache, or two-spirit, searching for his mother and the meaning of his given name, "[t]he half I liked to call the me part of not me" (7).

Shed grows up in a brothel in the small town of Excellent, Idaho during the 1880s, during the rush of gold and Mormons. His mother dead, his father unknown--questions mark the story he tells. I identified with Shed being of mixed race and mixed gender, yet praying to the Indian gods of his mother's people using tybo, or white words. Uncertain if his mother is Bannock or Shoshone, he learns to speak the tybo language with his self-proclaimed family, who spell out new words and provide their own definitions, "[m]y language being some words I still can remember" (3). Sex becomes a language of relating, a mode of communication, opening up a relationship to the body and therefore the visceral mortality of experience. A net in which the search for self transverses multiple directions at once, and the impossible possibility of knowing.

Yet what I discovered during the course of the book collided with a recent realization of my own. The killdeer game. Looking for what I don't know I'm looking for. "The trick, the broken-wing trick: out there. Me looking for me out there" (21). Who I think I am is really not who I think I am. The ropes of identity I thought I needed to grasp and pull and desperately hang onto. The realization that I can actually let go.

"All the years, me yearning big for I didn't know what--the mystery, the secret--that part of myself that had always been missing--isn't anymore" (351).

"Keep your heart open in hell," Shed learns to tell himself. Telling stories--your story--is all that remains.

Feminist Review

I have two reviews at Feminist Review for the month of August.
The Queens of K-town by Angela Mi Young Hur, 8/27/07
Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl by Marusya Bociurkiw, 8/31/07

Galatea Resurrects #7

Galatea Resurrects #7, a poetry engagement, edited by Eileen Tabios, has published two reviews of mine.
a(A)ugust by Akilah Oliver and Brenda Iijima (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs)
trespasses by Padcha Tuntha-obas, the Thai writer on which I wrote my MFA critical thesis.

Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices

"stoplights read RED ORANGE YELLOW," a spoken word piece written for the downfall of Naropa University's BFA in Performance program and people of color everywhere in the immigrant-bashing and terrorist united states, was performed at the 4/27/06 "We Will Rise" Tendrel (Naropa Diversity Journal) event at the Laughing Goat Coffeehouse in downtown Boulder. I helped to organize and coordinate this event, which celebrated the release of Tendrel's 2006 FIRE issue, which I edited, and which was a benefit for the N a Sonje Foundation.

"stoplights" will be published in Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices, an anthology edited by Matt Kailey, due out in September 2007. If you really want a copy, I can get one for you at half price.

Trans/lations: from half to mixed to genderqueer

When I begin to respond to Logan Gutierrez-Mock’s essay "F2Mestizo" in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, edited by Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Seal Press, 2006), to the multiple intersections involved in being mixed race and trans, in an analytical rather than creative written form, every thought or memory or idea opens up several more thoughts, memories, and ideas, so that I don't know how to start writing a coherent sentence that synthesizes all of them.

It's difficult to be concise, but there are several things I want to say. I identified with Gutierrez-Mock's articulations, that being in between races prepared him for being in between genders--the borderlands. My mother is a Thai immigrant, and since I was first generation and first born, she wanted me to assimilate--to be a doctor with a doctor's salary--for our security. I grew up thinking I was white, with very little of my Thai heritage revealed to me. Still, there came a point when I knew I couldn't pass into middle-class suburban bliss.

When I traveled to Thailand for the first time to study abroad and visit family, I loathed my white skin. I wanted to be the color of mud, dark like the sun. I wanted to pass as a Thai woman. Thais would either tell me, "You look like Thai people," or they'd snicker, and I'd think, over and over, I am not a tourist. I am not American. I am not white. I tried to cover up.

But "passing as a Thai woman" involves silence, the silence as cultural inheritance that I have unwittingly perpetuated. The parts I was unaware of hiding when I was in Thailand. The parts I hide when I'm around Thai people in the U.S. The parts I hide when I'm around my white family. I've often spoke about being queer as canceling out my color, as denying me access to that proper Thai daughter I could have been.

I perform the multiple ways of being queer like it's my job, but for me being Thai is only one thing. It's the prodigal daughter, it's kha. It doesn't include my queer body, which is loud and American and disruptive. I play around with the idea of using khap, the male particle, when speaking Thai in the U.S., but whenever the opportunity arises my social anxiety, and my insecurity about my command of the Thai language, always defaults to kha. I guess I don't have the balls yet.

When I attended students of color groups on campus in my graduate years, the sudden rushes of collective anger and sadness and rage only made me feel distant from my queer body. Even more, the whiteness we thrashed against was also inside me. I couldn't find all of myself within that community.

Now I have come to understand being mixed through being trans. When I explore my relationship to gender I understand how to be mixed, and I re-learn the meaning of "homeless," of being "between." Gutierrez-Mock speaks about being trans and mixed within the same sentence, so that they merge and spill, each identity speaking the other. Like Gutierrez-Mock, I'm also learning that in being trans I have to claim my mixedness. It was a kind of revelation when I realized, I'm not actually trying to be a misogynistic white dude! The masculinity I'm trying to claim is hillbilly thug mixed with glitter, and keeps changing and shifting every day.

In communities of color I long for my queerness. If in queer community I long for my Asianness, what is it exactly that I long for? Not the silencing of my daughter body, but humidity, brownness, nam plaa, speaking another language. I understand how to be mixed, which means I create my own country. But how can I be trans within the Thai culture? How do I voice my trans identity in the Thai language?

I spent 6 months in Thailand speaking the Thai part of me. Now I need 6 months to speak the trans part of me.

I've always wanted to see the Pacific Ocean.

Glimpse Abroad

"Caught Between" 5/10/07, with two photographs. A piece revisiting vignettes from my time in Thailand.

"A Day in Three Seasons" 8/14/06, with two photographs. I revisit my experiences in Chiangmai through the cool, hot, and rainy seasons.

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Review of "Drowning in Fire" by Craig S. Womack

Reading Craig S. Womack’s novel Drowning in Fire (University of Arizona Press, 2001) was a complete surprise. It is through the story of Josh Henneha that both his queerness and his Indianness burn into one forbidden desire, which wraps itself into the old ways, the cadence of the Creek language, in which it finds a way to be spoken. Womack, who is Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee, beautifully renders a Muskogee gay coming-of-age, complicating interracial relations with the tensions between full-blood and mixed-blood, Christian and native, Indian Baptist and indigenous.

Unearth stories and histories that reflect who we are. Dig for language that speaks what can't be spoken.

Cliterature

Cliterature Journal's new issue, Sisterhood, just went up and includes me and some other great Naropa women.

Review of Mutamassik's Definitive Works and M.I.A.'s Galang

dj Mutamassik and M.I.A. : the post-colonial re-colonized by tourist terrorisms : helicopter fan blades mixed with automatic rifle fire mixed with missiles : gunshots and break beats : the wall : electric fences : permits and checkpoints : curfew and police state : a tongue sliced by government sanctions and free speak : the mouth of guerrilla resistance distorting the dominant languages with physical graffiti : dis/rupture and access :

SMUGGLE THIS!

SMUGGLE THIS!
BETWEEN GENDERS AND OTHER BORDERS
TENDREL DIVERSITY JOURNAL SPRING 2007

On April 21st Tendrel and Naropa University's GLBTQIA hosted an evening of drag, readings, and performances to celebrate the release of the new issue. As editor and co-coordinator for the event, my vision was the create a space that complicated the notion of drag as a form of entertainment bound by two strict caricatures of gender--"king" and "queen." I wanted to create a space in which people could perform the space in between gender(s) that includes other borders and identities, and allow the audience to participate critically in the evening, alternating "traditional" lip-sync drag pieces with readings and performances of writers' written work.

An excerpt from my editor's note:
This is for those of us who've lived between, who are between. Between genders, between cultures, between languages, on whose bodies borders cris-cross and transverse. Instead of checking all that apply, we create our own gestures, our own names. We will not and cannot "pass." Our resistance to the "new gay capitalism" is an act of terrorism, and we risk deportation by stepping across the dotted line. By trespassing we forfeit loyalties to either side--we belong to neither while smuggling the cargo of both.

Fuck the binary. Fuck the origin and the destination. Fuck "other." This is us making shift. This is us moving. These are the parts we are holding hostage. These are the parts we hide and will never let go.

The journal features the work of Bhanu Kapil, Andrew Wille, Akilah Oliver, and many other Naropa students, and circulates freely throughout the Naropa campuses.

kari edwards memorial reading

I performed at the kari edwards memorial reading on Saturday, March 10 at Denver's EDGE Gallery. kari was a trans and gender activist, writer, and Naropa alum. The gallery features kari's visual art work ("Transcendence") through the end of March. In light of recent hate violence in Boulder, it's important to speak out and continue to do our work.

Review of "Tripticks" by Ann Quin

“Today the vagina, tomorrow the world” (175)

Tripticks: a novel by Ann Quin (2002, Dalkey Archive Press, originally published in 1972 by Calder & Boyers Ltd, Great Britain) stitches an erotic cross continental mechanical misogynist monologue, excavated through an archaic architectural typewriter into a smoky B-movie detective’s car chase dream, cast in a extramarital peepshow bestial porn film, stalking the fantasy of spiritual enlightenment and lesbian existentialism in a graphic novel comic strip tease, featuring divorce, marriage, miscarriage, orgy, objectification, turn-ons & blueprints.

“His solemnity was a species of burlesque” (166)

The Library of Congress catalogs it as:
1. Consumption (Economics) – Fiction. 2. Women dog owners – Fiction. 3. Divorced people – Fiction. 4. Poodles – Fiction.

“...made cruel sport of by a band of incredible lesbians” (23)

Bizarre, with illustrations by Carol Annand. You might try performing it with a group of friends in a large unfurnished living room.

“Instead of a battlefield, the arena became a dance floor, which did not in any way alleviate or moderate the risks involved” (24)

José Esteban Muñoz, "affect," and Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People

I attended a lecture by José Esteban Muñoz at the CU (University of Colorado, Boulder) Museum of Natural History on February 9, 2007. Muñoz is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), a text that has given me the vocabulary to articulate my own performance aesthetics as a queer person of color. His lecture concerned a new project of his, in exploring “affect,” and “performing affectively.”

Muñoz defines “affect” in opposition to “feeling.” While he describes “feeling” as an individual, personal notion, “affect” is more of a social projection, creating “projective identification,” empathy, longing, and “communal belonging” rather than sympathy.

An example he gave was José Feliciano’s rendition of the national anthem at a Detroit baseball game in 1968, which caused a stir among the crowd and angry phone calls ordering him to stop singing. While today it is very popular to sing stylized versions of the anthem, Feliciano’s blues anthem and blind body “sang America brown.” His performance was “double-voiced”--the lyrics provided a narrative track, but the way in which he sang overlayed an affective track that transmitted a completely alternate tone and meaning. Listen to the anthem on his website, under Jose's Music.

Muñoz’s ideas of “transmitting affect” and the “performing of (a brown) utterance” have given me the vocabulary to discuss Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People’s performance of Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies (2005). Created by Gutierrez in collaboration with Anna Azrieli, Michelle Boulé and Abby Crain, a December 2, 2005 performance at Dance Theater Workshop, NYC was recorded for DVD by Character Generators. The pieces were created in part during a residency at Hollins University during the spring of 2005 in the last semester of my undergraduate studies.

I would like to focus on a section of Gutierrez’s solo movement in Retrospective Exhibitionist in which Gutierrez performs in a state of urgency and quickness movements juxtaposed against one another, creating an “affective track” that is dense with discord. Each movement is read as a different "style," from classical to jazz to modern to pop music video, but the ways in which they are interlaced affects dissonance--Gutierrez’s body becomes discordant, riddled with anxiety, strife and confusion, bursting and screaming. His body “sounds” difference, “transmitting affect” through his voice and the visual script of his movement. His use of a delay pedal in both pieces is a continuation of this concept, in which the voice transforms into a discordant and dissonant sound body.

Difficult Bodies involves a movement script inspired by embellished, baroque aesthetics. The "affect" of three women, facing forward, moving in unison in a line, re-tracing their movements and repeating phrases, is one of palimpsest, of erasure and re-writing, in which the movement is traced and fades into the neutral black background from which their forms emerge. The bodies “pass” visually, but also through sound, as all three women stand down stage and lip-sync to Destiny Child’s “Survivor,” with smiling, “affected” faces.

Muñoz referred to the “national affective protocols” that determine how bodies should be and how they should function, as well as what they should represent, especially how bodies of color, or queer bodies, should “perform” in our society. Through our creative practices, however, we are “reigniting our political imagination,” offering new ways to affect our bodies that resists hegemony, plastic surgery, magazine covers, and silence.

Review of "What Keeps Me Here" by Rebecca Brown

What Keeps Me Here: Stories by Rebecca Brown (1996, HarperCollins)

In a similar vein to The Terrible Girls, this series of stories is bound together by the texture of meticulous obsession, and compulsion held in constraint. The language accumulates, gathers detail, keeps ordering and re-ordering. The language stalks and silently watches its own characters unravel, exhausts patterns and routines of repetition and delays the promise of a break, of an escape. Brown observes and captures every move to the point of stillness, to immobility, to find out what keeps these characters tied to their roles and positions within relationships. Again, her stories are permeated by the physicality of the body and the absence of it, shells of bodies that can’t be touched, but are flooded with the desire to. I am drawn to Bread, The Enchantment, and The Mark.

Re-imagining Gender: Responses to Pauline Park, drag, and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'

I was excited to read this wonderful post of Pauline Park's at the Big Queer Blog and applaud Park's critical review of culture, language, and gender. Park made visible the fact that cultures that have gender-neutral pronouns within their languages are not necessarily gender-neutral cultures. In fact, Park notes the hierarchical and gender-normative properties of these cultures. The same is true for Thai.

Thai also has a gender-neutral pronoun for he and/or she, kow, but the particles used at the end of sentences are gendered--khrap for men and kha for women. The "I" for men is pom while for women it is chun. From my experience, many toms (butch lesbians) use khrap instead of kha. This use of language is still to some extent trapped in the gender binary, especially since there seems to be a lot of pressure to identify as either a tom or a dee (femme) within the Thai lesbian community. Thailand also has a similar history of gender hierarchy, which is folded into the Theravada Buddhist tradition of only men being able to attain englightment.

My question is: What are the ways to transform our cultures/our genders on the level of language?

I would say that using such gender-neutral pronouns is merely one way of transforming how our culture interacts with gender, and I support all people who use gender-neutral pronouns and feel empowered by them.

I personally try not to use pronouns at all in written situations when referring to trans-identified people (or in instances in which I do not know how the individual would refer to themselves), using their name instead. When that fails to work on the level of syntax, it becomes a creative/resistive act to find alternative pathways and dodge the conventional uses of pronouns and the conventional manifestations of the gender binary, which have been so ingrained in american culture. Look at how feminist movements have worked to de-bunk the pervasive use of the omniscient “he” and “man.”

The spoken level of language is no different. How do we speak of ourselves and the people we love--how do we voice our genders?

What are the ways we can transgress the gender binary in language? What are the ways to re-imagine the workings of gender?

"A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon?" (Le Guin, 213)

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Ace; Reissue edition 2002), the individuals of the culture that the narrator encounters are described as being androgynous, both male and female. All individuals go through what is called kemmer. In the process of vowing kemmer to each other, the partner who will become pregnant and bear children is not known until the phase matures, so that each partner has the ability to come into either gender. Even applying “male” and “female” to the genders is somewhat false--an imposed reading that is accessible and understandable for those not familiar with the culture. Is the one who bears the children “female”? Is the one who does not “male”? Even androgyny is caught up in andro and gyny. When not in kemmer, the individual is celibate, remains gender neutral, and does not have sexual desire for another. Also, an individual in their lifetime may both bear children and “father” them.

Look how I just wrote “their.” A single subject with a plural antecedent. How fitting, for we have many genders. Le Guin writes of a culture in which genders are always shifting and are never fixed, are at times even unknown.

How does this change how we could see each other?

Another instance of gender transgression that sometimes still gets caught up in the gender binary is drag. Conventional notions of drag queen and drag king invoke gender polarities, and also power at the opposite ends of the gender spectrum. Extremely pink, and extremely blue. Yet, drag for me is a performance of many genders--means negotiating between and among them within one performance--means packing but not binding and singing with both feminine and masculine mouths--means wearing black boots and a short skirt as a way to express butch strength and eroticism--means performing the submissiveness and radicalness of my color while disidentifying from it, for once just being a hot white guy who gets all the chicks.

I feel that the trans liberation movement--of which Leslie Feinberg writes, speaks, and embodies--understands and includes all the complexities within drag, within being ourselves. It feels amazing to claim trans/gender after being queer for so long. From being to begin. I translate and transverse many genders. I am always in motion. I am always acting. The things we make and create transform our world, transform our language. After all, we are the ones writing, the ones speaking this new tongue.

Review of "We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this?" by Achy Obejas

We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this? Stories by Achy Obejas (Cleis Press, 1994)

Out of this collection of stories of immigrant and queer survival, I would like to focus on the final and title story of this collection, “We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this?” The story is told from the point of view of a daughter of a Cuban family who has just emigrated from Havana to Miami, and begins with the image of a boat, their mode of transmigration, literally shattering in transit. This irreversible destruction rings against the question of their return (to Cuba) or their inevitable stay (in the U.S.), which forms the crux of the story’s passion.

The story takes place, simultaneously, in flash-forward memory vignettes and in an INS office in 1963. When the daughter’s father points to her and says, “We came for her, so she could have a future” (114), I am chilled by the family’s vulnerability, and by the reality of many other immigrant families, like my own, who sacrifice so much in a journey to america, in order to seek better lives for their children. Growing up a queer second-generation daughter is weighted with the pressure to succeed, to fulfill my mother’s dream, to not fail her and in so doing discredit her sacrifices. In the face of tradition, queerness is already a failure, already falls below expectation.

Obejas’ daughter clings to her green “sweater, which at this point still smells of salt and Cuban dirt and my grandmother’s house” (114-5). When the daughter speaks with a Colombian woman in the center, and notes that, “[s]he says everything will change for me in the United States, as it did for her” (116), the tone is one of irreversible finality, as giving up her sweater, her home, is the first price.

In the INS center her parents are her landmarks, and throughout the story both her mother and father imagine her new life among their own dreams. Obejas explores the supermarket and hotel as rituals of citizenship, and the conflict between anti-communism and Cuban nationalism when distance is a reality and patriotism is at stake. Each vignette teases, stops short when I begin to wonder, to be transported. The scope of the story and its subject matter seems too short for a short story, so each scene seems clipped, or a flash of dream.

The bulky immensity of both TV set and LA-Z-BOY become markers of permanence, as the dream of returning to Cuba fades into desire. When the daughter asks for her Cuban passport, it is kept from her until after her father’s death, and I am reminded of the ways we seek citizenship and the ways in which we try to forget. A turning point comes when the daughter questions why her parents came to the U.S., which is one of the most difficult scenes to read. I know, too, how it feels to want to go back, to return to the land of my heritage, and my mother, like the mother in Obejas’ story, saying, Go back? “What for? There’s nothing there for you, we’ll tell you whatever you need to know...” (125) and knowing that her only answer will forever be silence.

There is silence, and there is desire.
“I have no view of this scene from a distance, so I don’t know if the window frames tall pine trees or tropical bushes permeated with skittering gray lizards” (118).
Where are we? Where will we end up? Where will our dreams take us?

Will we be granted passage?

Review of "Transgender Warriors" by Leslie Feinberg

I spent yesterday’s New Moon cozying from the snow blizzard, reading all of Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Beacon Press, 1996). “Since I am writing this book as a contribution to the demand for transgender liberation, the language I’m using in this book is not aimed at defining but at defending the diverse communities that are coalescing” (ix).

As Feinberg mines history for the presences of those like us, I greatly appreciate the willingness to position the authorial voice--white, Jewish, working class—-and for not presuming to analyze trans presences in cultures outside of Europe and the U.S., but to contextualize them as doorways into the wide acceptance of trans expressions before patriarchy. (There are/have been ways of crossing gender that are not figured as “queer” like they may be in the U.S.)

Feinberg continues in the tradition of transgender people, queers, and Two-Spirits who were/are spiritual healers working in solidarity to end oppression on all fronts. This is evident in Feinberg's extensive activist work, with working class unions and Native nations, and brings to mind Gloria Anzaldua’s “mestiza consciousness” (Borderlands/La Frontera). The border peoples will be the ones to rise.

Why should sex and gender expression be aligned at all? Why should they exist neatly, side by side, sex hyphen gender, man slash woman?

I was intrigued by the historical associations of trans people with paganism, witchcraft, and peasantry, and the deep connections trans people had in religious practice and ritual in the early earth-based and goddess traditions. (The gallae of Cybele!) Both Samhain and Yule are holidays associated with trans; Halloween was the only day on which you could not be arrested for cross-dressing. (Cross-dressing, once a crime, is now a marketable fad.) Trans people were shamans and shape-shifters, and trans expressions were an integral part of ritual, and also theater. This is how residues of drag and trans expression remain in carnivals and freak shows, which now may popularize the “other” under the guise of spectacle.

Feinberg’s hugest claim is that it was not the gendered division of labor, but the division of class and the overthrow of the cooperative, communal matrilineal societies that instigated the creation of laws that regulated queer desire and sex inequality.

What excited me the most was the relationship uncovered between trans people and warriorship. In many documented rebellions, the peasantry was lead by groups of cross-dressing individuals.

Feinberg also states that queers and trans people are not just escaping oppression, but repositions the need or requirement of passing as one gender or the other as a product of oppression, and that we have a right to physical ambiguity and contradiction (103). “I am subjugated by the values attached to gender expression. But I am not oppressing other people by the way I express my gender when I wear a tie” (102). Why does the “T” sometimes get pushed aside in “GLBT”? The first three are markers of sexuality, while the fourth is a marker of gender-crossing.

Another coalition Feinberg pushes for is the joining of the women’s and trans liberation movements. While such a move has been met with resistance, Feinberg asserts that “creating safety in women’s space means we have to define unsafe behavior – like racist behavior by white women towards women of color, or dangerous insensitivity to disabilities” (117). Feinberg later says, “It’s not your lipstick that’s oppressing me, or your tie, or whether you change your sex, or how you express yourself. An economic system oppresses us in this society, and keeps us fighting each other, instead of looking at the real source of this subjugation” (118).

A wonderfully detailed historical text, Feinberg’s call for warriorship and trans liberation resounds. We are trans warriors. Let us rise.

Bangkok Pride and Loi Krathong

This year, Bangkok's pridefest, Bangkok Together 2006, and Loi Krathong, the Buddhist festival of lights, culminated on the November 5th full moon. What a lovely way to herald in the age of darkness--lotus flower lights floating downriver, tomboy fashion shows, and beautiful gathoeys.

Fridae: empowering gay asia, has a good article: bangkok pride: together and more local

'The L Word' and LGBT

I was completely disgusted when I watched episode 3X3 "Lobsters" of Showtime's The L Word in August. Although season 2 of the "lesbian soap opera" proved more than mildly addictive due to a) last year's Colorado winter, b) my friend's Netflix, and c) the sex, I initially, and continually, approach the show with distrust. The characters look like no real queer womyn I've ever known, and plus, they're all brutally rich residents of West Hollywood, where they precede to engage in massive amounts of drama, involving lust and petty power battles.

Rich girls in downward spirals. Attractive, isn't it?

No doubt the show attempts to deal with real issues in the queer community. Post-traumatic stress due to child abuse or sexual assault, drug addiction, growing up in foster care, coming out in the media, employment discrimination, anti-gay legislation, homophobia, and an interracial couple having a biracial child.

But my first reaction to the show was that all the characters were extremely femme. Long-hair, lip gloss, and Dos Equis. Let's face it. The 'l' word is, after all...lesbian.

After trans character Ivan's short stint in season 2, I was intrigued when The L Word introduced Moira in season 3, a character who is definitely not "lipstick-" anything. The discussion in the "Lobsters" episode, which occurred around a shamelessly expensive restaurant table, involved the blantant dis-validation of Moira's gender expression. WOW, we are not about to essentialize femininity, right now, in a television show about lesbians, are we? I realized that what made me most uncomfortable during this scene stemmed from social class. Moira orders the cheapest thing on the menu, a 15 dollar salad, which ends up being a few sticks of grass. I could feel how unwelcome she was in this group of friends, all the stares and silences. Being out is not a lifestyle--for some of us it is a matter of survival.

The New York Times published an article on 8/20/06 entitled, "The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack." Despite its awkward treatment of the story of an FTM individual, it did open with quotes taken from online message boards and the like--apparently some viewers of the show wished Moira would die.

What do we do with all this animosity, within our own community? As queers--those whose existence subverts norms of both sexuality and gender identity--can we all recognize the discrimination and hatred directed toward our peers, and be in solidarity with our struggles?

But the 'L' word isn't "Queer," and it's on Showtime, so I don't expect much more than magazine covers and marketing talk. But I was suprised in the season 3 finale, 'Last Dance', when it becomes known that Bette (who is mixed), wishes to have full custody of the child her partner bore through artificial insemination. The child is also mixed. Bette states her horror at seeing her daughter with her white ex-partner and her new white boyfriend, saying that only she can know what Angelica will face growing up mixed in America.

Lesbian sex? Bi-racial race relations? Resistance of 'woman' spaces to trans bodies?

Lipstick. Lip-gloss. Dos Equis.

Review of "Commons" by Myung Mi Kim

I opened Commons (Univ. of Calif. Press, 2002) and saw spores. Cross-pollination.

I opened Commons and saw seams. The layers of sediment are like the pages of a book, says Winterson in Weight. Document. Documenting. “Book as specimen. / Book as instruction” (107).

The “Pollen Fossil Record” at the book's base is a directory of remnants, an index of what’s been left behind, keys to interpretation and deciphering, a legend of transcription. It seems that here, Kim provides clues to possible theorizations of her work. Clues to be mined.


The difference between continuum and chronology.


Commons is a text that resists linear narrativization. Yet the bits we sew together as attempts of explanation and answer. Erased : shouted. The hidden, the disguised : that which endures.


War: Disease & Death of a Population & its Environment. Parasites. Infestation. Invasion of Foreign Species. The Persistence of Dissection & Infection. Distribution & Consumption of Food & Bodies. Mutation & Variegation. Currency & Time. Lack. Ration. Left. Seige & Seize. Cost & Debt. Becoming Part of the Soil. The Definition of Ruin.


Being left nothing. This is how we speak. We have nothing to say.


How to carve out an arena. How to infiltrate, interrupt a totalizing, coherent language of codification and commodification. To refuse that our speech become "illegible" (110). Our agency.


I am most intrigued by Kim’s explorations into the romanization of the Korean language. Concerning "conflating Korean and English texts....It is not the actual translation or even the state of translatability between the two texts that is intriguing but the possibilities for transcribing what occurs in the traversal between the two languages (and, by extension, between the two "nations," their mutually implicated histories of colonization, political conflicts, and so on)" (110).


"How physically (almost physiologically) impossible it is to pronounce or even imagine what Korean words are being depicted under the standard (standardized) romanization of Korean. The odd vowel blurs, the unclear consonant combinations" (110).


This makes me think about the transliterations of the Thai language. How what is commonly transliterated as 'k' is in fact a 'g' sound. 'Th' is in fact 't'. How does transliteration function in a work? How does script function? How does (mis)translating function? And how can they interact with each other?