with anxiety and pleasure
december 2016
i understand this piece on situated knowledges to be Haraway’s petition, or call to action, for feminists who have destroyed the masculine, western empirical concepts of objectivity, knowledge production, and science so completely as to have left them with little tools for a grounded analysis. and if we believe that we are invested in good and important work, we must find someway to recover/ excavate these concepts from their masculinist and colonial histories. some of the things we see and know must be knowable. the first step to objectivity, then, in feminist praxis is knowing our physical and embodied limitations or “situations.” Haraway talks about our primate eyes. i think of my cats, and how she can see ultraviolet light. and i think the most radical and queered spaces for theorizing come from this ecofeminist perspective of trying to find more commonalities between humans and non-human animals the recognition and mutual acknowledgement of seeing, being, splitting, from our grounded selves which begin in our bodies & minds, what we carry with us, how we move through this world, bipedal or otherwise…
[[the search for such a “full” and total position is the search for the fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history, sometimes appearing in feminist theory as the essentialized third world woman]] me: Haraway explains that we are not immediately present to ourselves; we can’t assume or extract a vague, disembodied theory from the nebulous positionalities and we can’t speak for “all” of one kind of thing. imagine me speaking for all women, or all gay women, or all women-demarcated genderqueer bisexuals.
how do we interpret the visual field?
“those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished�
>scents are thick today in bodies >i feel our vulnerability >we are all trembling together >life has taken on the quality of magical realism >i feel this slippage; i grasp into the fracture >adrenaline is draining from my body >i wish for someone, to lay in my bed w/me reading Oppen >and we forget the world exists
CRYSTALLIZATION AND COALESCENCE do i look like a deadly signifier? no rebirth/death/life just a quick replacement. bait-and-switch i get hard and the soft and then softer. i remember what i said and feel bashful
I WORRY THAT YOU DON’T WORK WELL WITH OTHERS. I WORRY THAT I DON’T WORK WELL W/OTHERS.
you won’t let me touch you because _________________i think you are afraid it will break us both i like to eat. this is the most important thing about me so much gets redacted, my body in spring
you have no colonial gifts for me a promise that you leech from
tell me i’m a good boy
part I: sex/gender cause it’s not a revolution, unless it’s really gonna cost him i am smoking a cigarette + texting my friend and we are talking about the future of poetry in the current political climate. they have no more patience for static pictures, passivity, metaphor; they abhor “showing” would rather the poem direct/command. i’m reading this in various ways, which might be all wrong. i think we (women, femmes, gays) have been cackling and smoking and crawling around discotheques, kitchens, alleys, the much-venerated houses of our employers, sharing knowing looks, reading short and vague poems with almost no affect, afraid to be hysterical, thinking from within our mutual vulnerability. i am confused; these are good things to me. i don’t think this frenetic writing poems in a certain Way is purer or more politically salient than any other (way of writing poems.) i tried to tell my friend this thinking is kind of “masculine” though, in broad strokes, i agree: guerrilla warfare, molotov cocktails, blockades. writing poems which are objective and effective, that move us together towards the desired res/rev/oution. but other poems do other work. they make us feel less alone; they put us in conversation with other people. poems are like fred moten’s concept of study. the reading of books, sure, but also two nurses on a cigarette break. we need to blast it open, the whole category, so it can include the acts of persuasion, subversion, and defeat. i don’t think there is one way to split apart this being, being alive. i want love and i want poems that are life-affirming. i’m still reeling from ghost ship fire in oakland, which comes too soon after the wells of fear, sadness, horror of pulse nightclub. i cried for days, then. i tried to write about it but it was too fresh and anyways i don’t have anything to say. i prayed for my friends and lovers who live in ambiguity and loneliness. i want queer and trans lives to stop being so precious as in, so fragile and able to be lost, to slip away, to evade life entirely. i think of the deceased: 22 year-old cash askew, trans woman who played in a synth pop band. feral pines, 29 year-old trans woman and musician. ara christina jo. these are women, poc and queers who just want(ed) to live in their way, through music and art and furtive coalitions. frank o’hara writes, of his friends who passed, “but was the earth as full as life was full, of them?” he means: is the earth as full of bodies, as their bodies were full of the vigor of being alive. think of that grounded heaviness. saying that gender is a performance that we negotiate daily, this doesn’t make its ramifications less material. i think judith butler is careful to emphasize that there are repercussions for a trans person performing their gender the wrong places. there’s a tacit agreement in the western world that we will all perform various public, gendered functions and be very good about it. even our idea of gender deviant is like a slight ad-lib off the script that culture has written for us, the scene that we entire into with minor bodily deviations.
i look at my face as it arranges itself in a look and i keep looking. i look at my own face. i look at my face as it’s reflected in the mirror, though you tell me not to do this. i’m still looking at my face as you tell me to stop looking at my own face and i say but i hardly know what it is i am seeing and you say there will never be a time for this. you say, i will tell you what your face looks like. you say, the time has come to give up all your possessions. i pour milk on myself rub dirt in my hair and leave the house.
where we are and are,