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.
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