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#but also by my overflowing love for trans people and our bodies!
featheredadora · 1 year
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There is love in your body!!
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cajolions · 2 years
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Not to be incredibly Butlerian but
If we agree that our understandings of gender are constructions (made out of social agreements, appearances, language, symbols) then we also have to agree that our sexual orientations are also constructions— which they are.
I can call myself a lesbian, and this is an appropriate categorization because I find myself attracted exclusively to people who present what I recognize as womanhood. But what I recognize as womanhood is a complex combination of things which don’t overlap in all people— shared experiences of gender (imposed or chosen), interpersonal agreements on how to actualize gender in our environment, basic physical characteristics and relationship to one’s body. That’s why my attraction and love for trans women, or for nonbinary/transmasculine lesbians can all fall under the umbrella of my lesbianism, even if they will and should be materialized in completely different ways. 
While it is often relevant, the category of lesbianism is something only applied to these relationships later on, and which can blind us to the aspects of those relationships which cannot be captured by that category alone. To try and say that the love I have for these different people is equivalent and identical could be seen as validation of their womanhood, but is ultimately a disservice to the complexity of each person’s relationship to womanhood. In the end, I have a diversity of complex needs which are met differently by different people, and this is what makes for the beauty of the events of love when they overflow out of our categories!
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positivlyfocused · 4 years
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How to keep your heart from breaking
What is a broken heart? A broken heart is a mindset.
Society romanticizes broken hearts. Movies get made. Songs get sung. Getting hurt happens, right?
Not necessarily.
No one need ever experience a broken heart. Put your heart in the right place. It will never break again.
My recent relationship taught me that. 😂 ❤️👍🏾
Lauren and I got acquainted when she contacted me online.
Mutual affection grew fast, as we had a lot in common. She's trans. I'm Transamorous. We both shared art, love of music, philosophy, food and more.
But as intimacy grew, she got more nervous. The closer we got, the more uncomfortable she got.
I relish love. I relish love because I am love. Connected to my Inner Being, expressing unconditional love flows like breathing. So, naturally, I shared spontaneous appreciation for Lauren. I appreciated Lauren's existence, her talent, and her strengths, especially strengths she developed as she's accepted being trans.
For a while she appreciated all that.
Then it got too much for her.
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^^Relationships with other people get all the attention. The best relationship includes no one but you and you. Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash
Relationships are nice-to-haves
I know if I'm patient, the Universe will show me everything I want. It will also show me reasons why I may not want what I have.
As my Broader Perspective connection strengthens, I desire human affection less. Connection to Broader Perspective showers me with an incredible, unconditional love. A love so deep and satisfying, relationships with other people get put in their proper place: as nice-to-haves, not as must haves.
There's no forlornness when I'm not in a relationship because my Inner Being relationship dominates. It (my Inner Being) always floods me, its love so strong and overflowing and present, I never feel alone. I feel loved.
So I never feel yearning or that I'm missing out on love. My Broader Perspective's unconditional love for me is enough. When it pores through me I become that. Pure love.
So why seek relationships with people when I become that which people crave from relationships?
Good question.
Thoughts make reality
My perspectives on human relationships changed since discovering my Inner Being. I yearned for them before. I felt incomplete without one. But yearning creates problems. In yearning I sow seeds of loss. Here's how that works.
When I yearn for something, then get it, I fear I'm going to lose that for which I've yearned. Holding tight to what I've got for fear of losing it guarantees I will lose it. Holding something tight like that emphasizes its loss. Reality springs from thoughts.
Tightness in my body born of fear is reality. Physical sensations are real, right? So my thoughts about losing someone creates an incipient reality: a feeling. In this case "tightness".
In that reality, my behavior reflects my fear. I say things consistent with fear. I interpret what I see from that fear. I may even start checking out relationship options. I hedge my bets.
Meanwhile my partner knows what's up. They may not know it in their awareness, yet they still know. That's why a partner might check your phone or email. A hunch will push through into their awareness. There are no secrets. We're all one.
Unchecked my fear creates even more real, realities. This is called momentum. My partner may find my bet hedging, then get insecure. Before long tension grows. Fights happen. Mistrust grows. They might start bet-hedging. Then the breakup comes.
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^^Reality springs from Inner Reality. It starts with thoughts, which draw themselves to perceivers "tuned in" to those thought frequencies. The rest happens automatically so long as perceivers stay tuned in. So reality perpetuates, thus creating eternity.
Thoughts come from somewhere
Inner reality is real. Where do you think thoughts come from? Thought is a physical reality.
Thoughts drive perception. Perception is reality too. Perception then drives behaviors. Behaviors are reality. Behaviors influence others and their behavior. Others cooperate with me helping create my reality. They act consistent with my thoughts.
So behaviors always match Inner Reality. Since reality springs from behavior, and behavior springs from perception, and perception springs from thoughts and thoughts come from Inner Reality, then my Inner Reality must become one’s physical reality starting with my thoughts.
That's how it works.
I know how to create realities I want. My emotions guide me. The better I feel, the more I know my becoming reality includes my fulfilled desires. That’s because positive thoughts must become positive realities.
Strong connection with my Inner Being short circuits yearning, fear and insecurity, replacing them with appreciation and love. My job: staying there as best I can. I don’t always. But doing that consistent enough creates realities consistent with appreciation and love.
So if a partner chooses something other than a relationship with me, I see the former relationship in its proper perspective: a nice-to-have. Not so significant that I create realities consistent with painful loss. Were I to do that, I would experience a broken heart. For a broken heart is a physical reality (an emotion) triggered by thoughts consistent with "broken heart realities".
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^^Even when you're alone, you're not. Love literally surrounds and moves through and in and out of you. (Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash)
Love happens best when alone
Human love can't match Inner Being unconditional love. Moreover, another person can't match all that my Inner Being gives me in its love for me. It literally gives me everything I want in wonderful, surprising ways and in perfect timing. I write about these in this blog.
Human relationships always come up short compared to that. That doesn’t make human relationships bad. They are what they are.
Love doesn’t come from another person. Love happens when, while with a person, I tune into thoughts that connect me with my Inner Being. It’s my Inner Being connection that triggers love. Not being in relationship. Which means, I can feel love outside relationship.
This puts relationships in a less triggering perspective. I conjure love at will. So if a relationship ends, it's not the end of my love, or my world. And my heart breaks no more.
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^^You'll find no more broken hearts when you re-discover your relationship with you.
So when Lauren called distraught and in crisis about our relationship, I took it in stride. Despite all we had in common, despite being with someone who loved her, she focused on things she thought we didn't share. Real things for her. Perception is reality. Her perception saw broken hearts in our future. That scared her.
She said long distance relationships were something she didn't do. Yet, she was doing one.
She said I put too many expectations on her. I put no expectations on her. I only wanted to love her.
She said me telling her I loved her filled her with anxiety.
She said our relationship would fail.
I found it strange that the more I showered her with love the less she enjoyed us. I found it strange until she told me how people in her past said they loved her, but their behavior said otherwise. She doesn’t know that thoughts create reality. She doesn’t know other people act out what you’re thinking. They do that so your thoughts are “made real” for your examination. They’re made real so you can do something about them.
For me our relationship already succeeded and had no other choice but to succeed going forward. Where she saw "red flags", I saw adventure and opportunity.
As I said, when one gets connected to one's Inner Being, it will show that person why they may not want what they have. In her objections, Lauren showed me why Lauren may not be something I want. She wasn't consistent with my "love vibration". So she took herself out of my reality, leaving me free to love and be loved.
For me, relationship success looks like a relationship through which two parties are better off because of it. That means two find greater harmony with their Inner Beings by experiencing life with one another.
That's what happened for me with Lauren. And so where is the case for failure, or a broken heart?
It's easy to never have a broken heart again. It starts with prioritizing the one relationship that will never end, the one relationship through which I get everything I want, no matter what that is, and then some. That's the relationship between me and me.
Standing there, I never lose love. Or anything else. It's all gain. And my heart remains whole.
Title picture: by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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transamorousnetwork · 4 years
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How to keep your heart from breaking
What is a broken heart? A broken heart is a mindset.
Society romanticizes broken hearts. Movies get made. Songs get sung. Getting hurt happens, right?
Not necessarily.
No one need ever experience a broken heart. Put your heart in the right place. It will never break again.
My recent relationship taught me that. 😂 ❤️👍🏾
Lauren and I got acquainted when she contacted me online.
Mutual affection grew fast, as we had a lot in common. She’s trans. I’m Transamorous. We both shared art, love of music, philosophy, food and more.
But as intimacy grew, she got more nervous. The closer we got, the more uncomfortable she got.
I relish love. I relish love because I am love. Connected to my Inner Being, expressing unconditional love flows like breathing. So, naturally, I shared spontaneous appreciation for Lauren. I appreciated Lauren’s existence, her talent, and her strengths, especially strengths she developed as she’s accepted being trans.
For a while she appreciated all that.
Then it got too much for her.
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Relationships are nice-to-haves
I know if I’m patient, the Universe will show me everything I want. It will also show me reasons why I may not want what I have.
As my Broader Perspective connection strengthens, I desire human affection less. Connection to Broader Perspective showers me with an incredible, unconditional love. A love so deep and satisfying, relationships with other people get put in their proper place: as nice-to-haves, not as must haves.
There’s no forlornness when I’m not in a relationship because my Inner Being relationship dominates. It (my Inner Being) always floods me, its love so strong and overflowing and present, I never feel alone. I feel loved.
So I never feel yearning or that I’m missing out on love. My Broader Perspective’s unconditional love for me is enough. When it pores through me I become that. Pure love.
So why seek relationships with people when I become that which people crave from relationships?
Good question.
Thoughts make reality
My perspectives on human relationships changed since discovering my Inner Being. I yearned for them before. I felt incomplete without one. But yearning creates problems. In yearning I sow seeds of loss. Here’s how that works.
When I yearn for something, then get it, I fear I’m going to lose that for which I’ve yearned. Holding tight to what I’ve got for fear of losing it guarantees I will lose it. Holding something tight like that emphasizes its loss. Reality springs from thoughts.
Tightness in my body born of fear is reality. Physical sensations are real, right? So my thoughts about losing someone creates an incipient reality: a feeling. In this case “tightness”.
In that reality, my behavior reflects my fear. I say things consistent with fear. I interpret what I see from that fear. I may even start checking out relationship options. I hedge my bets.
Meanwhile my partner knows what’s up. They may not know it in their awareness, yet they still know. That’s why a partner might check your phone or email. A hunch will push through into their awareness. There are no secrets. We’re all one.
Unchecked my fear creates even more real, realities. This is called momentum. My partner may find my bet hedging, then get insecure. Before long tension grows. Fights happen. Mistrust grows. They might start bet-hedging. Then the breakup comes.
Tumblr media
^^Reality springs from Inner Reality. It starts with thoughts, which draw themselves to perceivers “tuned in” to those thought frequencies. The rest happens automatically so long as perceivers stay tuned in. So reality perpetuates, thus creating eternity.
Thoughts come from somewhere
Inner reality is real. Where do you think thoughts come from? Thought is a physical reality.
Thoughts drive perception. Perception is reality too. Perception then drives behaviors. Behaviors are reality. Behaviors influence others and their behavior. Others cooperate with me helping create my reality. They act consistent with my thoughts.
So behaviors always match Inner Reality. Since reality springs from behavior, and behavior springs from perception, and perception springs from thoughts and thoughts come from Inner Reality, then my Inner Reality must become one’s physical reality starting with my thoughts.
That’s how it works.
I know how to create realities I want. My emotions guide me. The better I feel, the more I know my becoming reality includes my fulfilled desires. That’s because positive thoughts must become positive realities.
Strong connection with my Inner Being short circuits yearning, fear and insecurity, replacing them with appreciation and love. My job: staying there as best I can. I don’t always. But doing that consistent enough creates realities consistent with appreciation and love.
So if a partner chooses something other than a relationship with me, I see the former relationship in its proper perspective: a nice-to-have. Not so significant that I create realities consistent with painful loss. Were I to do that, I would experience a broken heart. For a broken heart is a physical reality (an emotion) triggered by thoughts consistent with “broken heart realities”.
Tumblr media
^^Even when you’re alone, you’re not. Love literally surrounds and moves through and in and out of you. (Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash)
Love happens best when alone
Human love can’t match Inner Being unconditional love. Moreover, another person can’t match all that my Inner Being gives me in its love for me. It literally gives me everything I want in wonderful, surprising ways and in perfect timing. I write about these in this blog.
Human relationships always come up short compared to that. That doesn’t make human relationships bad. They are what they are.
Love doesn’t come from another person. Love happens when, while with a person, I tune into thoughts that connect me with my Inner Being. It’s my Inner Being connection that triggers love. Not being in relationship. Which means, I can feel love outside relationship.
This puts relationships in a less triggering perspective. I conjure love at will. So if a relationship ends, it’s not the end of my love, or my world. And my heart breaks no more.
Tumblr media
^^You’ll find no more broken hearts when you re-discover your relationship with you.
So when Lauren called distraught and in crisis about our relationship, I took it in stride. Despite all we had in common, despite being with someone who loved her, she focused on things she thought we didn’t share. Real things for her. Perception is reality. Her perception saw broken hearts in our future. That scared her.
She said long distance relationships were something she didn’t do. Yet, she was doing one.
She said I put too many expectations on her. I put no expectations on her. I only wanted to love her.
She said me telling her I loved her filled her with anxiety.
She said our relationship would fail.
I found it strange that the more I showered her with love the less she enjoyed us. I found it strange until she told me how people in her past said they loved her, but their behavior said otherwise. She doesn’t know that thoughts create reality. She doesn’t know other people act out what you’re thinking. They do that so your thoughts are “made real” for your examination. They’re made real so you can do something about them.
For me our relationship already succeeded and had no other choice but to succeed going forward. Where she saw “red flags”, I saw adventure and opportunity.
As I said, when one gets connected to one’s Inner Being, it will show that person why they may not want what they have. In her objections, Lauren showed me why Lauren may not be something I want. She wasn’t consistent with my “love vibration”. So she took herself out of my reality, leaving me free to love and be loved.
For me, relationship success looks like a relationship through which two parties are better off because of it. That means two find greater harmony with their Inner Beings by experiencing life with one another.
That’s what happened for me with Lauren. And so where is the case for failure, or a broken heart?
It’s easy to never have a broken heart again. It starts with prioritizing the one relationship that will never end, the one relationship through which I get everything I want, no matter what that is, and then some. That’s the relationship between me and me.
Standing there, I never lose love. Or anything else. It’s all gain. And my heart remains whole.
Title picture: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
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mrakyvkafi · 4 years
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Imagine being a 21st century woman with internet connection and thinking period blood is somehow ‘bad’ or ‘dead’ blood. Love yourself.
I know this is pointless as you didn’t really write to have a discussion, but:
1) I’ve never said it’s bad. I definitely don’t enjoy menstruating and being in quite a lot of pain, but I’ve been doing it for about 16 years now so I’m pretty at peace with it, knowing it usually means I’m healthy and children-free. I also don’t have a thing against period sex, be it vaginal or oral, you do you. It just doesn’t make sense to me the context of Dracula (2020).
2) It is dead. It’s done its purpose (to cushion your uterus for embryo, which is not there so it’s not needed) and now it’s being expelled. Your body is literally sending it away to rot, just as it does with water and food. The reason why you can‘t keep menstrual cup or tampon in there forever (apart from overflowing) is that it’s literally rotting in there and creates health hazard.
3) I know there’s this new idea that feminism means worshiping absolutely everything about your body including pee, poop and menstrual blood, but you really don’t have to to still accept and love yourself. Trust me, I know, I love myself plenty. It honestly blows my mind how some so called feminists can worship dead waste but can’t accept living, breathing trans women. (Not saying it’s you, but had to highlight this discrepancy.)
I’m so sorry this society that teaches us to be ashamed of our bodies and bodily functions pushed you into overdrive guarding your safe space and you’ve found yourself on the other side of the spectrum, but I’ll trust you’ll find your own way to love your body without uselessly idolizing it soon enough.
I’m posting this on my own blog, because I’m not in the business of anonymously patronizing people I know shit about. I’ll patronize you under my own handle. :)
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carolynpetit · 6 years
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Vicarious Visions: Butterfly Soup and My Teenage Heart
Before reading this piece, I encourage you to play the extraordinary visual novel Butterfly Soup, which I discuss in detail below. It’s available here on itch.io for free/pay what you want, takes three or four hours, and is wonderfully sweet, heartwarming, and hilarious.
Sometimes games get caught inside me, entangled so deeply in my own past or present that the only way I can get them out of me is to write about them. Butterfly Soup is that kind of game. What I’m about to write isn’t intellectual or analytical. It’s confessional. It’s the writing I need to do to get this game out of me. To turn my time with it into a kind of prayer.
Today in a piece on Louis CK, Woody Allen, art, creeps, and criticism, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “One fallacy about criticism is that it can be practiced objectively, as if we could see and write about movies from some sort of out-of-body experience. As if it were possible for me to watch a movie in which women are abused for no apparent reason — without even a pretense of narrative rationale — and view this exploitation as simply another formal attribute, like the cinematography, soundtrack or superb camerawork.”
Art cannot be critiqued objectively, and it cannot be experienced objectively. Consciously or not, we bring our life experience to our experience of art. Sometimes, as with me and Butterfly Soup, we bring our lack of experience to our experience of art, too. 
I often recall this quote when I consider why films, games, novels and television are so important in my life:
I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. – Andrei Tarkovsky
This is one of the big reasons. Time and experience that illuminates and expands my own. Most of all, perhaps, time “not yet had.” Time I’ll never have. Things I’ll never experience for myself. Things I’ve missed out on. Some queer women may play games like Butterfly Soup and be reminded of who they were at that age. For me they are a way of living a life I never got to live, one I’m still hoping to have someday, even now, at 41, because in some ways my yearning, inexperienced heart is still 16, waiting for the teen experiences it never had. Experiences like Butterfly Soup help me speculate about who I might have been if I’d gotten to live the life I yearned for so intensely. And they help me explore who I might be, how I might love, what I might have to give, if I ever do get the chance.  
Books and films and games that vicariously give me this aren’t painless. They hit hard. They cut deep. Kafka said that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” That’s what such works are to me, and Butterfly Soup is the latest.
That may make Butterfly Soup sound devastating. It’s not at all. It overflows with warmth. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that this game is a flame that melts the frozen sea inside me. It is not painless, but it is good for me. It thaws me out. It reminds me that I am still really alive despite a pronounced lack of life in my life, and that there are things I still yearn for.
Butterfly Soup is accurately billed as “a visual novel about gay asian girls playing baseball and falling in love.” There are four Asian girls prominently featured in the story, and they’re all fantastic. But here, I want to talk about two of them in particular, Diya and Min. I see myself in both of them.
I see myself in Diya’s social anxiety. The way she fears that people laughing are laughing at her. The way she doesn’t understand how people around her just talk to each other in ways that seem so automatic and effortless.
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 It’s gotten better since I transitioned, but in the midst of my gender dysphoria, when I couldn’t help but dissociate, I couldn’t comprehend how people could just talk about seemingly anything, lawn furniture or whatever. How could people have thoughts and feelings about lawn furniture? Maybe partially by not being in excruciating pain all the time, I guess.
I also see myself in the pain and anger Min experiences at being forced into a role that she knows just doesn’t fit her.
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I see myself in her devotion to Diya, and her desire to make Diya happy… 
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…and in the way she always wants to be closer.
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Some people love, or say they love, or pretend to love everyone. Min is not this way, and neither am I. I have a general love for humankind, a hope that we can view each other and treat each other with compassion. I have a desire to see local and global politics shaped by love and not by greed. But the truth is that there are very few people that I love, and so I see myself in the way that Min sets Diya apart. The way Min sees the signs, even if she has to bend over backwards to find them. Even though it takes a mispronunciation of Diya’s name, Min is excited to notice that their names, put together, can make Diya-Min, which isn’t that far off from “diamond,” as in a baseball diamond. 
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I see the signs too, sometimes. And even though I guess I don’t believe that they’re “real,” they still make me feel something, and I believe that, if we see each other with love, then we can take the stuff of cosmic coincidence and make it real.
I see myself in the way Diya wants to go slow, the way she wants time, the way she wants emotional intimacy, gentleness, cuddling and hand-holding. 
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I need that, too. The world has taught me to be very guarded. The path to bringing my walls down requires a lot of patience.
I see myself in the way Min keeps the faith, keeping Diya in her heart even while the two of them are separated for years.
Before:
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After:
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I know I love like this too, or would, if I were ever given the chance.
I see my own heart in the way the connection between Diya and Min has fun and play in it. My teenage heart doesn’t understand a love without these things.
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Love has to come out of friendship. It has to involve fun. Interest, stimulation, fascination, admiration, the desire to truly know a person, these are all a kind of fun. If someone is just “fun” in a superficial way, with no depth whatsoever, that won’t work. I need someone I can be 16 with and be 41 with. The sort of person I can be with anywhere–even the lights aisle at Home Depot–and think, there’s nowhere I’d rather be right now.
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The awareness that, at my age, I still have so much in common with these teenagers is confusing. On one hand, it makes perfect sense. I’m as inexperienced as they are. I’m still waiting for my first real experience of mutual connection, interest, fun, yearning, love. And I don’t think that still being able to love that way is a bad thing. But on the other hand, I worry sometimes that it’s too late. That if that part of your life hasn’t started by now, then you’ve missed the boat, because nobody knows what to do with someone like you. There’s a message that appears onscreen toward the end of the game. It says “I really miss high school.” Well, I don���t. I didn’t have this in high school. Not really. I’m still waiting for it:
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And like I said, that hurts. It always hurts, but games like Butterfly Soup activate the wound a little bit. So, then, if it’s not painless, if it cuts, why do I love it? Because by overflowing with warmth, this game welcomes me into that warmth. It doesn’t exclude me, or say that I don’t deserve these things in my life, too. I can’t connect with a person who isn’t sincere, and Butterfly Soup is one of the most sincere games I’ve ever played. Like a sincere person, this game’s sincerity opened up my heart. It doesn’t care that I’m trans, or that I’m a 16-year-old trapped in a 41-year-old’s body. Its warmth is for me, too. It lets me be Diya and Min and Akarsha and Noelle for a little while. It says you belong here. It says:
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And so I do. In a world that hates me, it’s easy to forget that sometimes. It’s good to be reminded, in a bittersweet sort of way.
You know, stories about queer girls so often end in tragedy. Butterfly Soup doesn’t. It’s a game that really, really believes in love. In fact, the way this game ends makes you think that maybe, just maybe, Min was right all those years ago when she said:
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There’s gotta be someone somewhere out there for me, right?  I won’t give up if you don’t give up.
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queernuck · 6 years
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There are a lot of things I’m dealing with right now and honestly, I’ve kind of lost control of them, I think. Boxing day is as good of a day as any to let that all come to the surface, the sort of strange deterritorialization put in place by the end of the year, the space where everyone is scrambling to score for their New Year’s Eve parties and we’re coming up on all of the really good playoff football but aren’t quite there yet and it’s still interesting and fun but you’re like okay we can be done now we are able to call this finished, more or less, I believe
I have a way of relating to people through sexuality and sex as functions of a gendered body were I almost in a way have an inverse structuring of the usual one around sex, it seems? I’m a very affectionate and open person and part of that does include sex, that’s something that comes kind of openly and easily to me in concept but not at all in practice, just because...I don’t really HAVE much practice with it, I have far more experience with lack of experience than I do with any particular means of being sexual it seems? This is also just very true in relationships, friendships, so on, it always seems as if there is some kind of new ground being broken and I am so rarely comfortable with who I am as a person
As a result of this the sort of recursion that realizing that I’m kind of left at a point where I’m unlikely to have sex anytime soon is part of a larger realization about the way that I’ve been living, the isolation I face, which is incredibly difficult to put into words without making it into something petty, something I genuinely do not want to be a part of, something that I feel is vastly different from me, from who I am and who I want to be.
This is the exact kind of turn that creates the worst of what trans women have done to other trans women, the way in which our own suffering becomes the very abuse we put onto others, the kind of repetition of concepts of our sexual body as part of how we experience attraction to others, the sort of desperation and suffering and eventual realization of a kind of violent fetishization, the way that trans women are only given a vocabulary for reaching other trans women that is sexualized, that can only reach out through the sexual. I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to be a part of repeating that, I don’t want to but I just hate how bisexuality, being as a trans woman, the ways that I want to reach out, have become so intertwined with my own sexuality and the ways in which I am allowed to realize myself in both spaces, how it determines as well that which I can see for myself. 
If anything, the way that sexuality has overcoded upon my own self is so indeterminable, is such an inexorable process that I need to do what I can to prevent myself from repeating violent tendencies, of forming genuine connection along lines of affinity that are structurally identical to lesbian connection, of course, but not necessarily sexual, the ways in which community among trans women is not founded merely upon our sexuality. It can certainly be expressed through it, and that expression can be wonderful, is so often very wonderful, in the way that trans lesbians find one another and indeed are often finding one another in a fashion that is sexual, but preventing the kind of overcoding that makes it solely sexual.
Sexuality, relationships, these precarities are such a part of effectively all life when living within the prohibited space, the life of taboo, marked by homosexuality, and dealing with that is itself incredibly difficult. It makes us vulnerable, it creates the kinds of vulnerability that lead to grooming, and of course, while the person in question is not a trans woman, their own sexuality and relationship to gender is one that I had at one time felt a lot of affinity for and I am terrified by how he wielded it against us. The way that my girlfriend’s ex, someone who is an ex of my own, who I never quite had a relationship with but who I certainly in some way was in a relationship with, part of a process of consummating this relationship with, and how this was part of a process of grooming that has been awful and traumatic and just so fucking hard. 
The result of my girlfriend suffering from the culmination of a process of grooming is fucking horrifying, and in seeing it, seeing how dramatically it has imparted a certain sort of structure of continual retraumatization, is something that in turn hurts me. I do not want to make myself out to be the primary victim, or as if I am claiming some greater affinity or something. Rather, as someone who came to know him through her, who was persuaded in the same ways, who opened herself up to him, who thought of him in a way that was hopeful and looking to a future that simply cannot be, that was never meant to be beyond his own fucking horrid fantasies, his own little world of Oedipal desire, I feel fucking horrid, I am terrified of men, of being with them, of what actually fostering a new relationship with a man might mean for myself. It is something I fear more generally as well, but the specific aspects of it are just...fuck.
And on top of that, the way in which having to navigate understanding that trauma with supporting that the way in which emotions and flows of desire have manifested the same events in different ways for her and I, figuring out how to approach our shared experience through the difference of us as people, the way in which that difference is realized, is something I am obviously working toward but something that is not at all easy.
Most generally, I feel as if I am just full of so much, there is so much overflowing from me, that all of it is just pushing me past what I can handle, that I am at a point of breaking and will eventually be forced past breaking, whether it be by the actions of another (such as my family!) or by taking it on myself. I feel as if I am in an unsustainable situation, as if I cannot and moreover will not be able to handle another year of circumstances like this.
My brother has a girlfriend, he’s going out to Wisconsin to see her after he goes back to DC for a few days. My sister got dumped but has a relationship in waiting anyway. They’re at home, they’ve been home barely a week, and they already talk about not wanting to “sit around all day” on a day where I’ve got a short shift of work, one late in the day, and it feels so...strange. They’re complaining about wanting to not sit around all day when this is the environment I live in, this is where I am whenever I’m not at work. They’re dealing with the same abusive parents as me, sure, but they’re also better equipped for it, they get less of it and get to react with far more violence than I do, they effectively have a vastly different territory that they live in than the one I live in, and attempting to deal with that is incredibly difficult.
There are a lot of parts of it that are all very difficult to deal with, and Christmas eve, seeing family and family friends drinking a whole bunch and being able to say no (in no small part because alcohol by itself is a shitty experience and im not a fan of it lmaooooo) was an achievement of sorts but the way that a specific and structured sobriety has been the basis for this year, the way it has structured my experience as a whole, the way that a habit of sobriety has itself been just that, a habit I maintain out of habit, not out of any reason except the fear of the reprisal of my parents and the lack of opportunity to break it, is part of a sort of proxy for a lack of interaction, feeling starved of any genuine contact with anyone in person, the way that I am just...alone.
I have someone I love, but I’m so far away from them that I feel alone. There are so many lovely people around me, so many beautiful and wonderful people, but I am so scared of hurting them. I am terrified of it. I feel so strange. Dysphoric.
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flakandforay · 6 years
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171129 // 10.21AM KST edited: 3.56PM KST
[Starcast] my success is already golden~BTS x steve aoki x desiigner’s ‘MIC Drop’ MV shooting site!
the strong hip hop vibes in the poses of bts at the bts, steve aoki, desiigner ‘MIC Drop’ remix version music video shooting site.
bts is overflowing with swag in this hip hop song, at this music video site, what kind of episodes will there be? mic drop~mic drop~let’s go!
EP. complete MIC Drop up till the completed choreography
they are familiar with this choreography. it can be expected how much they can express our coolness in the music video.
because of the strong big movements in the choreography, to not get hurt, they need to stretch our bodies. ( strong jhope...forever doing it...★ )
this is how they unfold each other’s big muscles.
to get a perfect shooting, they continue to practice.
meticulous monitoring.
!power!modern!hiphop!sexy! this was how it was born.
if put together, these 2 sayings will be the strength of the helmet can be defended by force. ( given failure at the site )
members who are in the middle are outside of the angle, with most of the flow of the members nimbly finding their places. this is how they breathe.
jhope nimbly entering. and again they wait.
suga nimbly entering!
hoseoks’ mates
while catching their breaths, they follow, dance and practice the choreography even when their bodies are against the wall. ( where is jimin, i have no clue! )
too many hurried movements, need caution and guidelines
newsflash newsflash! in the middle of jhope’s rap part, it’s jin and RM’s collab choreography shooting. ( heart beat heart beat )
both of them were so nervous but it was a complete successful mission! dance team leader, how was it?
jhope: it’s oh so good jhope who had a soft dad smile while cheering on both members
throughout the shooting, it exploded with coolness
EP. suga hyung with the dongsaengs who are too cute
in the middle of suga’s rap part
jungkook was monitoring closely couldn’t help to hold in suga’s cute appearance without the soaring of the acrobats who are main ones. ( upon seeing it is cool, the scene was right )
either way, does jimin feel the same way ?! jimin: suga hyung is too cute
( even at a secluded place, he is working hard practicing for the shoot ) suga hyung is too cute
in our eyes, he is the best, the best, cool
while for suga’s part of the shoot, there’s wires being mobilized.
surprisingly, all the members who had the experience of shooting with the wires was a cool success! ( BGM: bts-butterfly )
of course, the dangling wire shooting was the best. ( its not bad )
jungkook was feeling great when the wire shooting was a success, as a momento, he became like jhope.
who is jhope, we’ll never know !
EP. music video viewing outside of the screen
while taking a short break during the group dance meeting, the time was filled with their noises. just watching the dead leaves fall is fun...
In his own free time, V made a new way of greeting. ( this is a teaser of the greeting )
MIC Drop’s flower! and the light! salt! highlight! suga doing the micdrop scene
holly’s dad is cool, a success ( -ㅅ- )◜
while in the middle of doing the cool shooting, the youngest was teaching self-defense martial art. this is definitely not a joke
hahahahahahahahahahahaha this is a really lame excuse
Q. who among here are the people who needs self defense martial art suga: jungkook, you’re the one who can suppress, you can’t jungkook: yes, cannot ha
in the middle of RM’s personal shooting, there’s no price for the admiration of his height model fit, true story
RM is not fairy...
the strongest hip hop behind the scenes
since it was cold, he used the bonnet as a heater
~sope’s kont~ suga: ah hope ah, say it’s an investigation, i don’t know what’s at the front jhope: look here, min hyung investigator, the criminal has already ran away jin: lets go to the reporters at Oryudong
the puppy at the shooting site has grabbed everyone’s attention and love jhope was one of those people truthfully it was cute, the puppy’s personality is the same as jhope’s
EP. music video supplement music video
today, jungkook is in charge of the music selection
jimin started danced while feeling the selection of music...
the producer of the music video was impressed with the charming dance of the Team Dance Leader
...
the camera has heard that the director say that is there anything jungkook cannot do.
jimin’s solo music video is highly anticipate at the shooting site.
and also, the selcas cannot be excluded from the music video shooting site. ( an honest hyung tae selca )
let’s both do Vs Vv
( •ɛ •  )  ( •ө•  )v
EP. excuse me? what? an explosion?
even before shooting, members received the expectations.
there’s a car explosion that will straight away give a taste of the music video.
there’s only one chance. they didn’t want to make an obvious mistake in the choreography by being surprised at the big explosion. ( a cautious trap )
of course, bts who is the center of world business, the explosion couldn’t stop their passion. can’t stop.
lastly, their back appearances were a complete success. ‘you’re rushing to run away’ *the explosion scene was filmed safely.
for the fans who like our music and our performances, bts worked hard and had fun filming each scene from all the small to large ones!
we ask for you to give the newly developed MIC Drop remix much love ♥️
Words/Picture= bighit entertainment *the content, production company, source
Credits: Naver © DO NOT REPOST
trans by: maxine ☕️ do give credit if you’re using my translations 🌊
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slaaneshfic · 5 years
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“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif (conference notes)
This is my text/notes for my presentation at the "beyond the console" conference at London South Bank university / v&a the other week. I've not edited this into a proper essay format because it's already going to be re-edited into part of a thesis chapter in the next month.
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“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif’
[introduce self and position as artists, researcher and phd candidate in art practice, working primarily with post-structuralist feminism, horror, and play.]
This paper is built on a structure which I hope reflects and supplements the material it is concerned with.
[Note that it is brutally chopped out from a thesis chapter primarily about Cixous, whos work shadows the whole text but who only appears briefly as a sort of cameo towards the end. As such there is a large section about her relation to queerness, her use of the category “woman” as a post-structural rather than essentialist term, and the relation of these of these to my own identity as genderqueer. I just want to state at the start, to reassure against the obvious horror of a masc presenting person on stage lecturing on such a huge figure of feminist art that I approach this with the utmost love and care for her work.]
First I need to establish the position from which I am writing it, which is that the video game I am about is address is a work of art. There are many other ways to approach video games; as products, as recreational activities, as social of historical objects. However approaching it as a work of art not only only feels most comfortable for me as an artist and researcher of art practice, but it both reflects the increased art context in which the maker’s work is presented and also allows for a ways of looking at the work which is particular to art.
In a 2001 journal chapter entitled “The Aesthetics of Affect, Thinking art beyond representation” the artist and lecturer Simon O’Sullivan calls for a way of thinking about and reading art works which centre’s their aesthetic and affective qualities, that which grants them an “apartness” from other objects (O’Sullivan, 2001). O’Sullivan draws initially from the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the journal chapter begins with a quote from the later which ends with the following statement :
“But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production” (Lyotard, 1991).
    This images of “rapture” and “excess” will return throughout my writing here, particularly in regards the feminists and queer philosophers I will be primarily drawing from, and again because such things are in my view central to the game I am going to talk about. However before all of this I wish to make clear my position which echoes O’Sullivan’s call for “Art history as a kind of creative writing” (O’Sullivan, 2001). I will attempt to avoid where possible a hermeneutic analysis of the game where it becomes only a expression of social production to be reduced to an ‘explanation’, instead I want to place this “bundle of affects” (O’Sullivan, 2001) alongside concepts and ideas, with different intents and aims, and see what happens in between. Paraphrasing writer AB Silvera in “Radical Transfeminism Zine”, “Multiplicity of strats guys, you cant carry every team with a Hanzo, sometimes you gotta use D.vas Ult to break a choke point” (Silvera, 2017).
The work of art can now be introduced by its name, which is “No World Dreamers. Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode 2: Aperitif” (Aperitif), the second in a series of collaborative works by coders, artists, musicians, writers Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Rook (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). in the words of one of its makers Aperitif “combines top-down RPG, Shmup, visual novel and medical sim” (Hayes, 2018). In playing the game, the player alternately takes control of and interacts with four principal characters. These characters include “Ever. The Loser”, and “Brava. The Leader” who are broadly humanoid with cat/fox/deeresque features including enlarged ears. There is also “Chalcedony. The Big Sister” and “Agate. The Little Sister” who are both “labor drones” who have been modified and “overclocked” almost beyond capacity in order to have some kind of consciousness. All four of these characters are employed by a large company called “Innocent” to recover salvage from a contaminated and overgrown former city referred to by the characters as “Swamp-Dot-Com”. The area’s contamination is connected to the presence of a mysterious object only referred to by this point in the series narative as “The artefact”. Another character that we see, and occasionally have control over is called “The Therapist” who is presented as a human size, anthropomorphic moth-like person. Finally, we also hear from an interact with “MOM”, the Innocent A.I., and possibly (though not via intelligible words) from the Artefact itself.
The episode prior to Aperitif was titled “No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode one: Hyperslime” (Hyperslime) and primarily serves to introduce the setting and characters, principally through the eyes of Ever, detailing her mental health and particularly anxiety (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). Episode one was concerned with our characters getting to work, passing various obstacles to achieve this including panic attacks and mandatory drug tests.
Picking up where Hyperslime ended, Aperitif is concerned with our characters beginning the job they are assigned, and their discussing the material and social relations within that environment, as well as portraying material effects these provoke. I would like to consider this through philosopher Eugene Thacker’s definition of the horror genre as “the space between”, and “passages between”, “I cannot see what I believe”, and “I cannot believe what I see” (Thacker, 2015). For our character’s, this field of uncertainty crops up frequently and extends at times out to include us the player. Early in the narrative, text from an unspecified character or voice sets this tone:
“Jeez how much blood do you have?
The Inside becomes the outside.
    The world grasps hungrily at the swamp gate. Two voracious circuitries at war. the fever of skin grafts.
    Four salvagers set out in search for debris” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).
The context for this statement is not revealed until the end of the game, and the “who” that is speaking all of it remains ambiguous even then. Our player character proxies recount their memories and feelings about Swamp-Dot-Com in fragments as you explore it with them in turn.
It is important at this point to note that it is implied to degrees that some or all of Aperitif’s “four scavengers” are not cisgendered. This was first implied in Hyperslime, but I will stress that this is my interpretation of the game. It is never stated within the game’s text that any characters are trans, cis, non-binary, or what if any concept of gender exists in its setting. However in the sequel Aperitif, the characters gender identity contrasting to that one assigned to them by a social power is implied more strongly. This contrast is also expanded as their non-cis status is not just in relation to gender but in terms of crossing further boundaries to arrive at their identity.
Accessible in the game’s folder from the start, and later triggered by an on screen event is a pdf manual for Agate, the younger robot sister. The pdf presents as an official service manual for the original robot model which Agate belongs to, which has been subsequently annotated and edited by Agate herself and her sister after they are both upgraded to consciousness. Agate is implied to be transgender because her manual originally labels her a “[redacted] labor drone” and she herself has altered this to instead assign her the name “Agate, cool girl” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).
The overlapping of transgender identity discourse and sentience of nonhuman or modified humans is not without precedent. In the article “Making and Getting Made: Towards a Cyborg Transfeminism” in Salvage, writer Solvi Goard argues that the “1995 anime version of Ghost In The Shell [offers] both the dream and the nightmare of trans politics”. Goard makes the case that “Cyborgs [...] are undoubtedly transgender [because] they choose and change their bodies based on what relationship they desire from that body” (Goard, 2017). In Ghost In The Shell, the cyborg cop protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi begins to express doubts about her own existence through the course of the narrative which centres on hyper augmented bodies and brains and the limits of existence and identity (Oshii, 1995). Goard identifies this doubt, “the visceral confusion that comes about from knowing how you feel and experience your body, but having that experience jar so powerfully with what meaning other people and society give to it” as “one many trans people will recognise” (Goard, 2017).
The doubts and confusions over self expressed by the characters in Aperitif are different to those of Major Kusanagi. Chalcedony expresses fear and regret that like her, she sister Agate was “overclocked” and modified to have sentience and that “she would pay for it with every moment of her life” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). For Chalcedony, much of her anxiety is around her and her sister being unable to be safe, to rest, to have energy, to have “a room to hide in” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). While Agate seems exhausted by the demands of her body run beyond its intended capacity, and at the newness of the world after their escape which is both exciting and terrifying in turns. (The pdf robot manual states that the overclocking can lead to violent failure of the unit’s heart, and that these are advised to be bought in bulk. This whole section in the manual has been all but obliterated by Chalcedony with a note to tell her younger sister not to read it [this should be a footnote, but i dont have the ability to insert footnotes on the tablet I’m using]).
Both the robots experiences undoubtably jar with “what meaning other people and society give” them (Goard, 2017) as they are literally on the run from that authority, but this is joined by the jarring of the body itself not functioning as they need it too. The culmination of this will be the medical sim section of the game where we play as Chalcedony attempting to repair her sister’s overworked organs, potentially watching Agate repeatedly die in the process. What seems to most concern Chalcedony at least is this perpetual state of exhausted, unstable, borderline survival. She asks herself “what if it was forever. What if nothing changed, and we kept as we were. Unable to perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This same anxiety about not escaping is echoed shortly after by Ever when she states that she “and Brava always said we’d be the ones to make it out. We wouldn’t be the losers stuck in this nowhere shithole” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Constructing improvised temporary solutions to keep going through trauma and awareness of their imminent potential failure is common to most of the characters in Aperitif, if not the entire universe they inhabit.
Characters within the game might lament the possibility of their being caught in limbo, but our encounter with the work of art called Aperitif is one of approaching something always in flux and always pointing to incomplete or decaying possibilities. Video games broadly of the sort Aperitif belongs to often present the player with avenues which may be explored or ignored. In this instance, there might be dialogue options we do not choose, or we might miss sections of the map, and not trigger every piece of narrative description text. This is one potential way in which we experience this game as never fully resolving, as an altering space. Knowing that you could have told Agate “We are sisters and our fate is bound together” but instead you told her “I’m doing for you what no one did for me” when asked why you as Chalcedony keep looking after her means the game does not quite resolve into a fixed form (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). You might speculate on what would have happened in game if you took the other path, and your emotional response to the game might have been different also. This however could be said of most games of this broad type, and that all but the completist who must replay every possibile forked path experiences such a game as fluid in this way. However there is another instance of alterability in the experience of encountering Aperitif which melds with the former This instance is less common, and I would argue makes Aperitif a richer and more complex experience for its lack of solidifying resolution.
When playing Aperitif we are never given full, authoritative, and non conflicting information on anything we encounter. We experience much of the game as a mediation of a visual landscape which we interact with, and our proxy character’s interior monologues on this landscape, its history, its impacts. Each character has a different response to this space and the first half of the game consists of exploring the same map, with the same triggers for these monologues with each character offering a different association. A clearing with a pool triggers the text for Ever “this is where I hide”, for Brava the description is “I think this is where Ever goes to whack off”, and for Chalcedony it is simply “small water” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Across these multiple descriptions is presented a world that resists one single interpretation, but beyond this, the specific writing that the game employs is frequently one which is open, personal, multiple and incomplete. We experience the game therefor as a series of fragments, and these fragments feel less like they were crafted to convey one meaning than as they were pulled together and placed somewhere for them to form new associations with whatever text came before them and whatever the audience had already in mind. In a published interview, the writer Kathy Acker who practice involved cut ups and often plagiarized re-edits was asked about control in their work and gave the following response.
    “When you write are you controlling a text? When you’re really writing you’re not, you’re fucking with it” (Acker & Lotringer, 1991).
Text in Aperitif feels extremely fucked with, and invites the player to fuck with it further. The ruined signposts which litter Swamp-dot-com contain easy to cite examples of such fucked with text. Approaching these signs with a controlled character triggers an onscreen text. Some sign-triggered-text describes its context in the manner of “The sign says, Feeling depressed? This is the only thing it says” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Other sign-triggered-text such as “watch out for stuff” lack the initial contextual statement leaving available the possibility that this is something else other than what the sign reads (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). What could be read simply as inconsistency of form becomes yet another way in which the experience of this work of art invites us to embrace uncertainty. The narrative content of these signs re-enforces this. As a player there is real joy to be found in uncertain fragmented warnings and questions, which leave us plugging in whatever context we have to hand to try and make sense of. The fucked with text triggered by bringing a character near to one of these signs (or not, if you happen to miss them) sits very much within that definition of the horror genre from Thacker, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s broad definition of “Queer” as existing in “lapses and excesses of meaning” (Sedgwick, 2004). They elicit both the disbelief that what we read is correct and the absence of that which would fully qualify and resolve them.  
It would incorrect to suggest that there isn’t an overall linear narrative to Aperitif, but that narrative is not responsible for the only, or dominant experience of encountering it. That encounter, is one of being hit with a splattering of different affects, each eliciting thoughts and associations and creative possibilities for us as collaborator rather than mere musculature for that narrative skelton. O’Sullivan describes the affective encounter with art as “self overcoming”, to be immersed in our encounter to the point where our self, that certainly of the “I” becomes lost. The splattering of affects in Aperitif as we jump from witnessing character struggle to articulate their trauma and love, to the game on various levels presenting us with an incomplete or decaying experience of an incomplete or decaying world strongly provokes such self overcoming. This isn’t the unrelenting insistence that we forget our human body and commit to the protagonist of a narrative, supporting their every decision and telegraphed emotions backed up with orchestral swells, rather instead the game seduces us into active collaboration with never claims to be certain, and to be fine with this.
Philosopher and writer Helene Cixous in her text “The Laugh of The Medusa” called for women to write “Ecriture Feminine”  (Cixous, 1976). Such “women’s writing” presents an alternative of art, language, and being, distinct from the phalogocentric order which supports its power through reason. I believe that Aperitif embodies much of what Cixous called for, through its “intoxicating, unappeasable search for love” (Cixous, 1976).
Of relevance to a game series that began with a character “getting high and whacking off”, the Ectriture Feminine in “The Laugh of The Medusa” is frequently described in terms of masturbation. [Note about queerness and concept of “Woman” in Cixous] Principally this association is about the creation nof desire, of something that is erogenous at different territories and speeds. This is not the monomyth of phallocentricity, the seminal work where writing is built like a tower, but a multiplicity of queer desires that are not just the one dull drive to completion. Cixous elaborates on this with the following;
“Heterogeneous, yes, for her joyous benefit she is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous; airborn swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, delirious and capable of others of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him of you” (Cixous, 1976).
This is writing that self overcomes. The uncertainty of horror is now joyous delirium, yet the circumstances have not changed only our ethical position to them. Our encounter with Aperitif mirrors the loss of self, overwhelming affects, and improvised collaboration with an unstable world which its characters experience. However for us at least, this is not crashing trauma, but what O’Sullivan identifies in art as an exploration of the “possibilities  of being, of becoming in the world” (O’Sullivan, 2001).
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oselatra · 5 years
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Looking for a hot and a cot in Little Rock
Winter weather in Central Arkansas means people experiencing homelessness have even fewer options for shelter.
As temperatures drop and Arkansas slinks toward winter weather, shelter options for the homeless in Little Rock are scarce. With the October closing of 40 emergency beds at Union Rescue Mission's Nehemiah House, many homeless people in Central Arkansas are left with two choices: staying at Little Rock Compassion Center or sleeping outside.
Choices are especially limited for single men. The Salvation Army once gave men a bed for the night but changed that practice in July 2016. Its beds are now restricted to women and children; men can stay only if they're part of a family unit. The cities of Little Rock and North Little Rock support a day center, but not beds for overnight stays for either men or women. Abba House is for women and children only; St. Francis House houses veterans only. Lucie's Place has a shelter with eight beds for LGBT young people. Our House provides housing to single men, but does not have enough beds to meet demand. The shelter also requires all residents to find a full-time job shortly after arriving and maintain it throughout their stay.  
The faith-based Compassion Center, at 3618 W. Roosevelt Road, has 150 beds. With the closing of the beds at Nehemiah House, however, Compassion is bedding up to 200 men and women a night, some of them sleeping on mats for lack of mattresses, pastor and CEO William Holloway said. The women sleep separately at Compassion's shelter at 4210 Asher Ave.
The Compassion Center is a "hot and a cot" shelter, offering a hot meal at night and breakfast in the morning. It also operates a 12-step program for people with drug and alcohol addictions and hosts worship services on Wednesdays and Sundays and daily prayer every morning and night.
The religious tenor of the Compassion Center has prompted allegations — denied by Holloway — that LGBT individuals are denied shelter there and those who are allowed to stay are subject to intense proselytization. There have also been complaints about overcrowding and a lack of hygiene products for those housed there.
Mandy Davis, director of Jericho Way Resource Center, the city's day center, says the Compassion Center provides an important service to Little Rock by allowing the homeless long-term stays, which makes it possible for Jericho's social workers to keep in touch. "I need stabilized people in order for social workers to be as effective as they can be here at Jericho Way," Davis said. "So I might have the professionals on staff; but, if we as a city don't have emergency shelter beds for people living on the streets, then how do you work those cases if they're living outside and struggling to meet their basic needs? Or freezing to death, or having to have limbs amputated? This gets complicated."
In addition to case management, Jericho Way, at 3000 Springer Blvd., provides access to computers, internet and local phone service, showers and restrooms, laundry services, housing referrals and access to job counseling and training. Open from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., it serves breakfast and lunch and provides transportation to and from the day center. Jericho Way, which is run by the Catholic nonprofit DePaul USA, is jointly funded by the cities of Little Rock and North Little Rock.
Those who will suffer the most from the lack of beds are individuals who are not able-bodied, Davis said. The Compassion Center, which is not handicapped-accessible, plans to install a chair lift, but probably not before the weather gets more severe.
Pinning down how many people in Central Arkansas are homeless is difficult. The nonprofit Central Arkansas Team Care for the Homeless (CATCH) tallied 369 unsheltered men and 139 unsheltered women over a period of 24 hours in 2017. But Sandra Wilson, president of the Arkansas Homeless Coalition, said the count excludes many homeless people. It is tailored to those individuals targeted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development's specific homeless programs and is intended only to represent the number of people eligible for those programs.
Little Rock's 2018 annual operating budget lists $375,000 for Homelessness Outreach, up $25,000 from 2017 and 2016's annual budgets. The city of Little Rock also employs a homeless services advocate, Chris Porter, a former case manager at Jericho Way.
Despite the fact that the Compassion Center says it's so crowded it has people sleeping on mats rather than in beds, Porter said he isn't worried about the Compassion Center exceeding its bed capacity. He said Holloway has told him that the Compassion Center has an additional floor it could open up for more shelter.
"I've yet to see when the Compassion Center said it was overfull," Porter said. "There are beds available. People just don't choose to go to the beds. When I hear the Compassion Center say, 'We are overflowed and we don't have a bed,' then I'll say, we've got a big problem."
And until then?
"Until then, I live in the here and the now," Porter said. "I just have the confidence that right now, people don't have to be outside if they don't want to be," he said.
As for plans to expand available shelter options, Porter said the city "is not in the business of shelter. They rely primarily on people who have shelters. ... That's my understanding, because shelters are in the business of sheltering."
***
While Porter may be confident the Compassion Center can handle the need for beds in Little Rock this winter, other service providers are not so sure.
Roger Mauldin, who volunteers at The Van, an organization that brings supplies such as food, water, clothing and hygiene products to homeless folks where they're living, lived on the streets for about four years. He said he never stayed at the Compassion Center, even when his choice was between sleeping there or sleeping in the cold. He said his brother tried to stay there but was denied entry for carrying too many possessions with him.
Penelope Poppers, who founded Lucie's Place, said she's heard that those who run the Compassion Center "famously don't love LGBT people, and they openly deny housing to LGBT people." But Holloway said there's no policy to deny shelter to gay or lesbian or trans people. "I don't discriminate against anybody," he said.
Service providers told the Times that the Compassion Center's evangelical mission drives most of the complaints they hear.
If a resident rejects the Christian message, Holloway said, "I let them make up their own mind what they want to do. That's their answer to that problem, not mine. That don't stop me from housing them, that don't stop me from feeding them, and it don't stop me from preaching to them. And sooner or later, they will listen.
"That's what we do, that's what we were founded on. We based this whole center around Christ, so it's all spiritual, right? But also at the same time we don't turn people away because they don't believe like I do. I still go ahead and feed them. When Jesus fed the 5,000 on the mount, I don't think he went around and said, 'Do you believe in me? Do you trust me?' He just fed them all, and that's what I believe in."
***
Antonio, a full-time volunteer at Jericho Way, was staying at the Compassion Center when a reporter interviewed him. He asked the Arkansas Times not to include his last name in this story because some of his family doesn't know that he's homeless. Antonio, who says he left Pine Bluff on foot to escape the city's high crime rate, said he's glad the Center exists, and he understands the rules it has in place.
"It's been different than having your own place, your own house," he said. "I'm not gonna say they have a bunch of rules, because the rules they've got are for people's safety. They actually try to help people all they can. ... I mean, all and all, I'm grateful that the place is there. If it wasn't there, I'd be sleeping on the street, which I've never tried, and I don't want to, either."
Asked about the complaint that the Compassion Center doesn't provide enough hygiene products for the people staying there, Antonio said churches and other organizations often give out hygiene products on the weekends, so people have access to them for free. And anything the Compassion Center gets, he said, it'll put out for shelter residents to use.
Antonio also said that anything he collects he has to carry around with him, so he often chooses to donate the deodorant or toothpaste he picks up from those churches to others in need. "Even though you're in this position, you can still help somebody. ... It kinda builds you up a little bit, lets you know that you ain't just all the way down and out. You still have the ability to help somebody."
Antonio said he gets up around 3:30 every morning — early to rise at the Compassion Center means one might have the bathroom to himself — and takes three different buses to arrive at Jericho Way and mop up before it opens.
"I look at homelessness as, I've found trials and tribulations, and the Bible says we're going to have those, but they'll pass," he said. "It's not like nobody is going to pull up on the road and say, 'Here's a house and a car, I put you some money in the bank.' You've got to work for it, you've got to get out and do what you've got to do."
***
The Compassion Center's men's shelter and thrift store is housed in a former Salvation Army building. Its entrance is manned by staff members who speak to new arrivals from behind a Plexiglas wall. Holloway showed a reporter around the facility and introduced many of the organization's success stories, calling over some of the individuals working at the shelter with variations of "Hey, brother! How long have you been with us?"
When people arrive at the shelter, they're given a clean set of clothes and a voucher to pick out items they need from the Compassion Center's thrift store, which raises funds for the shelter.
Jimmy Townsend, head of housekeeping at the Compassion Center, has been at the center for three years. Originally from California, he and Holloway said the homeless often abandon suitcases and belongings when they become too heavy to continue carrying.
"Dragging that suitcase behind you gets heavy," Townsend said. "Especially when it's raining, with nowhere to go. Just throw it down."
Holloway pointed out their nurse's station, where he said a nurse volunteers six or seven times a month. The nurses provide basic medical services such as checking blood pressure and body temperature. Holloway said the Compassion Center was in the beginning stages of renovating the nurse's station, classrooms and meeting rooms in the facility when Nehemiah House's 40 emergency beds closed.  
Most of those who come to the Compassion Center "are happy to be in out of the weather," Holloway said. "If you're out there sleeping under a tree and it's raining on you all night long, this is a dry, safe place. We have security here, and we have a full-time night watchman here, and a residential manager."
That takes money. With extra people sheltering there, the Compassion Center is focused on housing and feeding all who walk through their doors. The recent increase in residents has put a particular strain on food supplies. According to Antonio, residents have been eating a lot of beans and rice.
The kitchen staff includes folks participating in the drug and alcohol recovery programs and some performing community service. Diana Warden, who's been at the facility for five months and works in the kitchen, said she came there "to get my life together so the Lord could help me better myself. My life was unmanageable, I was on drugs for 30 years, and it really has helped my life. I'm so grateful for this program. ... I want to spend the rest of my days sober, the rest of my life on this earth is going to be sober. I take my sobriety very seriously. ... That's the good part about the program, it helps you change your life. The 12-step program is close to my heart, and I'm very grateful to the pastor and his wife for starting the program. I am."
Kitchen worker Larry Thomas came to the center in 2008 while struggling with drug and alcohol abuse. "I came to find Jesus. I knew where he was, but I just couldn't get there the way I was going," Thomas said. Thomas completed the eight-month 12-step program and was then offered a job in the kitchen. He's now married. "He was planning on leaving, so I had to go out and find him a wife," Holloway said. Thomas added, "The pastor's been holding me here under lock and key for the last 10 years and 10 months."  
Past the kitchen, a large warehouse divided into metal cages is filled with donations, including a large walk-in freezer the center was given and a veritable wall of bags containing donated clothes. Most of the clothes are donated through blue Compassion Center donation boxes located around town, according to Holloway. The clothes are sorted into three categories: clothes used by the center for new arrivals, clothes designated to sell in the thrift store, and clothes that are bundled and sent to a recycling center in Houston, a transaction for which the center is paid.
As the CEO of the center, Holloway said he relies heavily on the center's donor base for funding; a recent gift from a donor allowed them to order a stack of new beds. Despite the strain the emergency bed scarcity is putting on their resources, Holloway said he and his staff make it work.
"We know most of the homeless people who come through, or we learn to know them," he said. "We try to help them out as much as we possibly can, but the only ones we can't help out are the ones who are violent. If you've got a bad temper or anger and are wanting to fight all the time, you can't do much for that person."
Holloway said some of the policies in place — like requiring that new arrivals check-in their cell phones overnight before they're given back in the morning — are to combat issues they've had with residents fighting. "We keep them from doing any drug dealing or prostitution or anything like that for safeguard," he said. People in the drug and alcohol programs aren't allowed to have their phones for the first two months of the program. "They're here for a reason, they're trying to get their life together. ... We're trying to build up strength to say no and get them back to thinking again," he said.
***
Even with the message of the Gospel attached to the services the Compassion Center provides, it's still the only shelter in Little Rock with emergency beds available without stipulation, like having to pass a drug test or joining a long-term program. Aaron Reddin, the founder of The Van and a longtime homeless advocate in Little Rock, said the key problem for those serving homeless folks is this skewed ratio of people to services.
"There's more people than there are services available," he said. "We see [this] every year this time of year. We're a rural state. This is what we can't seem to get through to anyone that should be looking at the big picture of it all ... . There's an influx every year, about this time when the temps drop, from folks in rural Arkansas who come here thinking they're going to get some help, they're going to get inside. And then everyone here ends up overloaded."
Reddin said the navigation of bureaucratic red tape, like zoning issues and time delays, by those who have the authority to work through them, would be crucial in opening more emergency shelters for the winter months and in creating long-term solutions after that. Reddin said he's encoutered problems with city code enforcement kicking people out of camps in the woods but offering no alternative place to stay, aside from shelters located miles away.
So what would Reddin call for from those in positions of power to create change? "Acknowledge that you have screwed your own citizens and apologize for it, for one," he said. "That would be a really great first step. You're the leaders of this city, and I know you have to have codes, and all of these things. I understand that. But when you have a public health crisis, such as hundreds of people sleeping in this crap on your streets and in any patch of woods you can find, then you have to pull your big person britches up."
Davis said remedying the recent loss of those 40 beds would be the first step to stabilization. "I think that one solution would be partners, including the city partnering with a nonprofit or a church, and opening 40 beds," she said. "We lost 40 at the [Union Rescue] Mission, so start there, because we can't implement new interventions to reduce the number of people living on the streets if we can't hold the interventions that we have. So, we need to pivot at this point and not try to do more. Instead, we need to back up and say, we've lost these beds, how can we fill them?"
Holloway believes the most pressing need for people experiencing homelessness in Little Rock is Jesus. "Christ in the life is what's most needed, and the rest will kind of take place. I know you can't print that."
He also said he's working to develop a crisis center or hotline for people experiencing homelessness to call to help figure out their next steps. Teaching home economics, shop and mechanics classes in high school again would be an important step for teaching people trades early on in their careers.
Asked what the city is doing to improve conditions for the homeless, Porter referenced the recent efforts of city-funded Jericho Way to create more affordable housing for people exiting homelessness, as well as their case management services, but said that help is available there only for those that want it.
"If you've been over there [at Jericho Way], you know that there are some people who don't want it," he said. He noted that Jesus had been homeless and had told his disciples, " 'Well, I'm getting ready to leave you guys, but the poor are going to be with you always.'
"And so it is. Not that we should be all right with that, but we should have compassion for that. They're gonna be with us. We need to always try to help them. Always be concerned about them but, at the same time, respect that that is a truth that won't change."
Looking for a hot and a cot in Little Rock
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TO TURN THE PAGES of Spill is to watch the invisible become flesh from the language of humming, longing, living, and dying. Drawing from the deep aquifers of the work of Hortense Spillers, American literary critic and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s poetry is an overflow and offering of Black voice. It is a voice mostly for Black women that illuminates a world critically and lovingly restored with dimension and structure by the work of Hortense Spillers. Characterized by intermittent rhyming, a perspective that is at once fluid yet rooted in the language of the body and the usage of space and citations, Gumbs weaves narratives of hope, desperation, and knowing into one sharp longing. It is a “poetilitical praxis,” an unflinching look at what pain has wrought and what fruit might yet be born.
A queer Black troublemaker, a Black feminist love evangelist, and a prayer poet priestess, Alexis Pauline Gumbs holds a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Her scholarship spans the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University. Alexis is a public intellectual and essayist on topics from the abolition of marriage to the power of dreams to the genius of enslaved African ancestors.
  Alexis is the visiting Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota. Her conversation about Spill can be found at Left of Black, and more about her work can be found at alexispauline.com. The second book in the series, M Archive: After the End of the World, comes out in a few weeks.
Alexis makes time for me right after a dentist appointment, so that’s where we begin.
¤
JOY KMT: How are you?
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS: Doing well. I didn’t engage in full-scale battle against the dentist and dental assistant, which I used to do when I was a kid. I guess meditation works. Because of how I don’t really get numb from anesthesia and how I am in the throes of grieving my father, I have been thinking a lot about Lucille Clifton’s poem “water sign woman.” I have a Cancer rising sign. She talks about the “feels everything woman.” That’s me.
 
I am sorry to hear of your father’s passing. I have a moon in Pisces, so I understand the “feels everything woman.”
Yeah. I miss him so much. He was actually one of the first people to read Spill.
What was his reaction?
My dad was a big cheerleader for me, so of course he was like, “It’s groundbreaking, it’s stunning, it’s going to take the world by storm.” But that’s what he said about everything I did so …
It’s true, though.
My dad would say, “Just because I’m biased doesn’t mean I’m not right.”
How would you say general reactions have been to Spill?
The reactions have been really humbling. People have written beautiful letters and emails about how the work is impacting their healing, their relationships, their creativity, and their lives. And it’s been a wide range of people from other scholars and poets, people in my neighborhood, and dance classes. I wanted it to be a space for all my communities of accountability to be together, and it seems like it’s working.
Over and over again people have told me that the scenes are out of their own lives and the lives of the people they love. And when I share the book, I use it as an oracle. I ask people to think of a question and then a number and I read them a page and it seems like the book is able to speak to their lives and get all into their business. Long story short, a lot of people are looking at me like I’m a witch. And they aren’t really wrong.
I’m really struck by the tenderness with which you were able to render scenes, even when they were scenes of deep antipathy — “she loved the soft blue ocean of wishing he would die,” for instance. Why and how did you frame those very devastating scenes like you did?
The one thing that was present for me every moment of writing the book and that I hope is present in every moment of the book is love for Black women as Black women above everything, despite everything. So in a moment like that scene where this woman is trying to use all the gentleness and servility she has been taught to destroy, the person she sees as her oppressor, abuser, exploiter, love is still there. Her love for herself is there. Even if it can only be expressed in her desire to be free from the situation.
I think that no matter what we are going through, and even if we are not in a so-called “empowered” or “positive” space, mood, or situation, love is there. My study of Black women as a Black woman has taught me that. Love is always there. Always. Even when it seems completely impossible that it would be.
You start the book and each chapter with the definition and synonyms of spill — the title of your book. It seems both an homage to Spillers and a declaration of defiance. What is the container that you intend to overflow in this book?
Yes, I definitely think of this book as a celebration of the fact that Black women have not been contained, even though our blood has been spilled over and over again (including internal bleeding). I also think of the book as a libation to honor our ancestors and begin a ceremony that doesn’t end in the book. You have to use it every day. So I think the container has many names. Heteropatriarchal capitalism? Colonialism? The Western idea of the individual life?
 In the next book (coming out in March!), I write about the Black Feminist Pragmatic Intergenerational Sphere, which is just of way of referencing what Audre Lorde said in “My Words Will Be There,” which is that who we are is beyond the limits (or container) of one lifetime. But most explicitly what I designed the book to defy was the oppressive interlocking set of narratives that entrap Black women every day.
What kind of ceremony do you see springing to life from this work?
For me it is the opening part, the libation, of a three-part work. A triptych. This is the part that opens the way for ancestral honoring and healing. The second part, “M Archive: After the End of the World,” is about long visioning about what the material evidence will be of this apocalypse we are going through. And then the third part is actually what I am writing right now. It’s called “DUB: Finding Ceremony.” Which is another way of saying yes, this is an oracle. And what’s cool is that it still functions as an oracle for me, even though I’ve read it more than a hundred times.
 And the other thing I love is that other people are using it as an oracle. A few weeks ago a healer was doing tarot readings paired with pages from Spill on Facebook. I was like, “Wow! Draw one for me!” And it was right on point! So the primary ceremony I think Spill calls for is for Black women, all of us by the way, cis and trans, to recognize ourselves, each other, our ancestors and what we’ve been through. And to recognize the love and life-making that has also been there the whole time and is still there. And the secondary ceremony is for everyone who doesn’t identify as a Black woman to also understand that their healing is bound up with ours too.
How would you describe Spill in terms of genre and intent?
I think of the pieces on each page as scenes. I think of the book as a whole as a poem (#epic) and I think of every scene as poetic. And I think of it as an index and an oracle and a meditation. My intention is for the technologies of Black women poets, fiction writers, hip-hop artists, priestesses, singers, mamas, fugitives, stylists, and literary theorists to converge in the same space. Sylvia Wynter says, “After humanism — the ceremony must be found,” and I wanted to find a ceremony where we could be together, and where I could be with the revolutionary work of Hortense Spillers and with everyone else I love at the same time. Finding ceremony is a poetic act. So it is poetry.
I think you’ve partially answered this, but as a multidisciplinary artist and Black feminist scholar, what was the impetus for this book at this point in your career and life?
Right, I thought about what my intellectual writing would look like. And I thought about the people whose work has impacted me the most. I thought about Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux, and Barbara Smith and how none of them wrote “novels,” even though the novel was the most marketable form of writing available to them. My dissertation is about the poetics of survival and mothering in the work of those four geniuses and I think about them at all time. I thought about other academic theorists I cite the most: Hortense Spillers, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Sylvia Wynter, and how, to date, none of them have published a traditional scholarly monograph. They have all these essays collected (or in the case of Wynter uncollected) that change everything.
And so with that in mind I decided that building on the work that I have done to create spaces for my communities of accountability to be with the Black feminist creative and movement writers that I love, I also wanted to have creative space to be with my communities in the worlds created by the Black feminist theorists I love. Also though, it wasn’t a decision like how capitalism and individualism and Western education teach us to think about decisions.
When I decided to do the daily writing process that resulted in Spill, I didn’t really have thoughts about who would publish it, or if it would be published at all. I just knew it was what I should do. 
And I’m actually still doing it. First thing every single day. And I am as surprised as anyone by what it looks like. But what I’m not surprised about is that it is infused with love for Black women in every moment. Because that’s the one decision I keep making by continuing to be alive. To love Black women (myself included) with everything I have, every day. That’s what my life is.
At the end of Spill you seem to shift to a longer and broader timeline, moving from individual intimacies to a more collective oracular vehicle, sort of in the vein of Ayi Kwei Armah. Also, throughout the text, rhyme, space, and sound tend to shift the movement of the text at will. What was your decision-making process like behind the movement of the text or what guided the movement?
What a generous comparison! Yes, that’s true. The end of the book is more explicitly collective and intergenerational. The way the scenes appear in the book isn’t the order I wrote them in. It was a conscious decision I made when I was ordering the manuscript to move from the intimacy of the first scenes to the collectivity of the last scenes. And maybe because that’s how my day goes. I wake up very early in the morning to be with myself. And then my partner and I intentionally come together, and then it’s later in the day usually that I’m actually in community. And the way that rhyme and rhythm work in the text … to me it’s a poetics of fugitivity. The sound of being on the run, compelled, but sometimes being able to stop and be with people, stop and be with self, stop and reflect, but then you are on the run again. 
Can you speak more to the poetics of fugitivity and fugitivity discourse?
Sure, so Harriet Tubman and Phillis Wheatley get explicit shout-outs in Spill. And they were both enslaved women who in completely different ways spilled out of and upset the container of gendered and racialized slavery.
Fugitivity for me, for us now living in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery,” means that we are still entrapped by the gendering and racializing traps that made slavery possible. But we exceed it. We stay in love with our own freedom. We make refuge for each other. How do we do it? With our movement, with our braveness, with our leaving, with our words, almost always with food involved. So the scenes in Spill are scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity because for me they all feature a desire to be free and the urgent impossible-to-ignore presence of the ongoing obstacles to our freedom. It’s making me think of my teacher, my cherished intellectual mother Farah Jasmine Griffin’s book on Billie Holiday, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery. Our navigation of freedom requires so much creativity, and the work of saying it while also hiding it. That’s a fugitive poetics.
I wanted to ask you personally, why did you include a thank you to me in the book?
Oh girl! Because you completely inspire me in general! But also specifically because when I was writing that scene after Spillers’s words “a question that we cannot politely ask,” I immediately thought of your work and the confrontational, epistemic liberating questioning you do in your poetry. And also your refusal to be limited by the “polite.” How you say, “they say we are strong but they really mean silent.” It’s exactly what I am talking about in Spill. Reading your work while I wrote Spill had a crucial impact on me and I had to acknowledge that.
Reading Spill was deeply nourishing for me. It took me back to my secret life. I think the unwavering radical love that you offer in this book helped peel back my shame. So thank you so much for the opportunity to read and the opportunity to explore with you.
Wow, I am so grateful for that. That’s the ceremony of Spill, I think, to give us space to acknowledge all of it.
How is the eclipse treating you?
The eclipse is amazing! We put candles all over the house and were drumming and dancing.
Yeah? My house is a mess, so I was playing Alice Coltrane and cleaning and went outside to watch the eclipse.
Super powerful and profound energy. Yeah, change is coming; you can feel it.
It’s a potent time to be talking. I appreciate you taking time out your day.
[Laughs.] I appreciate you. They’ll speak about it in legend — “On the day of the eclipse, the Nat Turner eclipse, Joy KMT and Alexis Pauline Gumbs spoke about the healing qualities of literature.”— When we’re really old, they’ll speak about it like this. [Laughs.]
What have you been thinking about Spill?
I just did this reading with an amazing poet named Cynthia Dewi Oka, and Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, who is an amazing poet, student of Audre Lorde, mother of Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest and Afro-Trinidadian genius, author of many books of poetry, and another person, Raquel Salas Rivera. It was really interesting because a lot of the poems in Cheryl’s newest book of poems, Arrival, are thinking about her family and ritual, and a lot if it is in Trinidadian English, and Raquel’s poems are all in Spanish, and she translates some of them into English; Raquel is a Puerto Rican poet. So I was thinking about, “What is the vernacular of Spill?”
When Black women talk to me about feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I feel like you wrote this just for me,” what makes it feel that way to other people? What’s recognizable? I think some of the vernaculars of Spill have to do with food and cleaning and domestic rituals and domestic work, hair braiding and grooming. I think there’s a lot of tactile language. Language of touch.
I realize that I’m always thinking about Black women and I love Black women, and obviously I was engaging with a Black feminist theorist the whole time I was writing it. But I think what makes it effective, intimate, ritual space for me and for other Black women does have to do with familiar forms of care that are in the book. Even if it’s for a slaver, which it sometimes is, or if it’s considered to be surplus labor, that work that we do to keep other Black people alive, that is not sanctioned by the state.
You asked me, before the interview, about the relationship between Fred Moten’s work and mine. Well, Fred was on my dissertation committee. But before I even met Fred, Fred Moten’s work, In the Break in particular, had me thinking about how powerful Black maternity is. And how scary it is, you know, to everyone in the world who is threatened by that power. And yet, how revolutionary it is to honor it for what it is. That’s actually one of the things that I love about your work. What happens if we understand everything in the world, all of the systems of oppression that target and seek to harm Black women and Black mothers especially. What if we see all of that as proof of and as a response to the amazing power that is Black mothering and that is the Dark Feminine? What does it mean if we acknowledge that? I would say that that’s the primary connection between the work that I’m doing in Spill and the work Moten is doing there. And it’s not a coincidence that that would be the connection because they both come through Spillers.
That’s the thing about Spillers’s work, that has me coming back to it forever and ever and ever ever. It’s the basis for how he develops that theory of Black maternity, also.
Well, I know we jumped right back into the interview, but I wanted to ask you, how have you been?
I’ve been good. I know last time we talked, I had just come back from the dentist and was talking about my dad. I still think about him every day. I was just thinking this morning about the fact that my dad was an amazing friend to me. I never thought about that until literally this morning. About the fact that, “Ah, I was actually friends with this person.” And I feel really grateful for that. That was a really powerful definition of our relationship. And what if I never realized that? I feel like the reason it took me so long to realize that is patriarchy. My dad did not play the patriarchal role, but there is something about the Black longing for patriarchy that’s deep. It’s something that I think is super toxic, hateful, and ridiculous and illogical.
Hortense Spillers writes about this as well in her essay, “‘The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight’: In the Time of Daughters and the Fathers.” There’s no such thing. There’s no Black patriarchy, there’s not gon’ be no patriarchy, there’s really no such thing as fathers and daughters in relationship to what Black life has meant. The essay looks at a short story by Alice Walker and the strange incest story that the guy in Invisible Man tells. It talks about these stories as examples of how ownership, the way a father owns a daughter in patriarchy, is not Black relationality and is sick and disgusting to begin with. And that these stories basically offer how absurd that is but also how harmful the desire for that is. And as usual — this is what I love about Hortense Spillers so much — in conclusion, Black people are inventing a whole different type of life. Basically we’re doing a whole other thing that makes all these other things possible. At least for me, that’s the queerness with which I read Spillers’s work. It’s like okay, if there’s no such thing as Black fathers and daughters, then what are Black relationships built on? Black social life and Black community? If we know we cannot own anything, even our bodies and even our loved ones, then what is our relationality made of? It’s not made out of property, but we’ve been made into property.
What does she say relationships are made out of?
Let me go ahead and open the book. So I don’t misquote, but basically she talks about our relationships being built on choice, our relationships being built on shared ritual practice, our relationships being built on creativity, creativity that can’t be necessarily owned. So that’s a general paraphrasing. Of course the way she says it is going to be beautiful and incredible and impossible to paraphrase, but …
Would you say that interpretation of Spillers’s work is the foundation for how you approach Spill? And also, it’s funny that we started on this path of conversation, because one of my questions is: What do you see as the relationship between Black masculinity and Black femininity in Spill?
That’s a good question. And yeah, it’s very much framed by those questions. And you know, that essay is not an essay that I cite in Spill, but I got back into that essay — it has always been one of my favorite essays of hers — trying to process my grief around my father and not wanting my grieving process to be shaped by patriarchy. So I actually ended up writing some other scenes that are not in Spill, that have a similar process based on quotations from that essay, and some scenes that are based on Sylvia Wynter’s work, which is what the third book is.
Is that M or the next work?
It’s the next work, called Dub, Finding Ceremony. But this piece in feminist formations is me processing around my father and it cites this essay and it cites ethno and socio poetics, by Sylvia Wynter. I think it’s coming out soon because they just paid me for it today. I think it’s coming out today. Who knows? Sorry, I have you on speaker phone and I’m climbing my book shelves looking for this book.
It’s okay.
Yeah, but the relationship between masculinity and femininity, I mean I think one of the things I was present to, especially in the section, “what he was thinking” was just the violence of masculinity. A lot of the violence that the feminine figures in the book are fugitives from is masculinist energy, but it’s also the predictable result of the imposition of masculinity. I felt like those were scenes that made it visible in a particular way, and there is a scene in there where I’m very much thinking about Invisible Man, that scene where a young man is seeing his mother being disrespected over and over again by a paternal figure. The imposition of masculinity, especially in terms of Black social life, has been profoundly destructive. And Black femininity has been in fugitivity from that in a particular way. I think that might be one way that it shows up in Spill. But then, I think that there’s a lot of different possibilities. Some of the scenes around Black masculinity and femininity in conflict, I’m definitely drawing on Alice Walker’s work, I’m definitely drawing on Zora Neale Hurston’s work, I’m definitely drawing on — I think about Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I think about masculinity in Jamie’s life as something that comes through the scenes in Spill. I think about “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, and the ending of the book is definitely an offering in reverence to that story.
So yeah, I would say that the relationship between masculinity and femininity and the work in Spill is a relationship that is also — the masculinity and the femininity of the people in the book are fugitive from patriarchy. It’s also fugitive from binary. It really is trying to escape that. So part of what Spill is about is how sometimes you don’t escape something until it’s impossible to ignore how violent it is. And at the same time, whatever the revelation is within that violence is what is making it possible for something else to happen beyond that binary. Beyond what patriarchy has made masculinity and femininity. So you know I think about that in the way that Toni Cade Bambara talks about in “On the Issue of Roles,” which is definitely another influence on Spill. But I think actually the relationship between masculinity and femininity in Spill is as complicated as the relationship between the relationship between masculinity and femininity in Black women’s writing. As we know, at the very outset of what literary historiographers call Black women’s writing renaissance, when Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker and Toni Morrison had these widely deep texts that were centered on the experiences of Black women, that were probably the most widely acceptable that texts about Black women that had ever been, by Black women, immediately the pushback was around the portrayal of Black men. That it was unfair to show the forms of violence that Black women experience. It hasn’t stopped, as we know. That’s the archive that I am soaked in, that spilled out in Spill. And at the same time, like how June Jordan writes about Zora Neale Hurston’s work in contrast to Richard Wright’s work, saying whereas Black masculinist impulse in protest literature is like, “ F you white man!” and this is why we need to destroy this terrible racist society — which June Jordan definitely agreed with — but if you look at Zora Neale Hurston as your model for what Black literature is, you see the relationship between Black people invested in within the work of Black women. I wouldn’t make a gender binary around that either. But what she’s saying is if you look at Zora Neale Hurston as our model, that’s what we are going to have again and again. We’re going to see that the revelations, the complexity and the nuance is really in relationships between Black people, and what about that as an argument for the world that we want to create. Not only relationships between Black people and white people. So I would say Spill is that too, saying that there is something to be learned in the gendered relations of Black people that is key, core, really primary. And it’s learned. And if healed, would absolutely change everything. Who is considered family? What Spillers is saying is that, Black family is based on who preserved life and the calling for life. Who creates kinship? It’s not going to be based on patriarchal traceability and lineage. Because people have been sold away and are being dispersed over and over again and displaced. Revolutionary mothering is the way that I think about it. Who is participating in the preservation of life? That’s the vernacular of Spill. If you go back to what I said in the beginning, that’s what’s happening. Cooking is happening. Cleaning is happening. Hair is being done. You know, all of that is happening. People are being warmed.
I’m such a baby trying to get into this Spillers. But I appreciate the challenge of her work.
It is complicated, what Spillers is saying, and it’s almost impossible to say. Given the language and structures and thought that we have all been trained into, how deeply her work unsettles those it’s almost impossible for her to say what she’s saying. And at the same time, it’s really simple but it only requires the small thing of forgetting everything you know. For me, that’s the poetic imperative. Every poet is saying things that’re unsettling and making possible ceremonies for something to be said, that couldn’t be said otherwise.
I wanna talk about craft with you a little bit. What, in your writing, signaled to you the evocation of ceremony? What are the components of language that create ceremony?
The first scene in Spill, the person tried every possible ceremony they knew about and it’s still as bad as it looks. They had candle, they had the food in the corners, all of it. The ceremonies that had been known up till then were not sufficient to the reality and in a certain way had to either be what offered that clarity or be left behind. And similarly, making the greens, that ceremony changes. The way that person makes the greens changes throughout that scene. There’s something important about that, that the ceremony that they started with and the ceremony that’s available is asking for something else to be created. So how does that happen? Writing can be like a wormhole, a nonlinear path to a space from where one started. That’s the fugitive technology.
For me, the repetition of rhyme is the fugitivity. The arrival at the urgency that’s asking for your own revelation. Fugitivity for me is like, okay, so we have this flight and we’re compelled and propelled and the momentum of the pieces of Spill is evoking that through the rhythm. What does that embodied experience give and demand? It demands ceremony in a particular way. Fugitivity demands many ceremonies. One of the things I talk about in the beginning note is, “we have to create the space now we gotta leave.” The rhythm shapes that movement.
The other thing I would say is listening. The major skill that I had to develop to be present for this work was to listen. Hearing different people read them, I can tell that it is what I heard when I hear people read the scenes at performances. That’s important because the words are there or the punctuation that we have access to, and you know I’m doing weird stuff with punctuation, it’s not a given that it would sound like what I heard when somebody brings their own voice to it, but I still hear the rhythm that I heard. It means that rhythm holds the possibility for that ceremony. The shifts in the rhythm signify the shifts in the ceremony. I think that’s how it shows up in the language. That’s the language that gets you to get into the rhythm that makes this possible.
It’s not to say that the language is a signifier or that you could substitute any word as long as it had the syllables, I’m not saying that at all, what the language references is also important, domestically ceremonial and creating and providing intimacy and access in really important ways. The actual content of the language is what has my neighbor be able to be like, “Oh, this makes me think about my mom and my aunt.” But at the same time there is something rhythmically happening, and it was transformative for me to be able to experience those rhythms in the process of making this work.
You said you were listening. What were you listening to?
I needed to hear the phrase. I had written down the phrases [from Spillers’s work] and I would open up the notebook that had the phrases outside of their context, and I would work with the one my eyes fell on. Then I would cross it out after I worked with it. I was distilling it in that way because I had to look at the phrase and not then go, well here’s what she meant by that. Here’s what I think about it. I had to not let my brain fill the space. I had to leave a space and listen to where the phrase took me. Who is this? What is the scene? Where? As I was hearing it and writing it and seeing it, the rhythms were very different. Sometimes there was a breathlessness at the end of writing it. Sometimes I would reread it and be like woo! Sometimes the experience was like um-hm. Sometimes it was a feeling of being transported and traveling back into my actual life. Who has the actual expertise to tell this actual story is who I had to listen to, and understand that I’m in relationship to who that is through my intimacy with Black women’s writing, and that legacy of listening. Listening to storytellers and also listening beyond, listening to the silence of a room, that those writers have been doing. And realizing that it was all there. Like if I had been a lot more quiet a lot earlier in life I would have heard this before. And it was these phrases of Hortense Spillers that could get me to have the level of stillness and listening to hear whatever it was. It was the technology for it.
I wanted to ask you about your next work, M. I got the sense from the description that it seems to build on Sylvia Wynter’s discourse on humanism. Can you talk a bit about M and the connection between Spill and M?
First of all, Sylvia Wynter is always there. I first heard about Sylvia Wynter from Brent Edwards. I went to this summer thing at Dartmouth and I had this one conversation with Brent Edwards who was a speaker. He mentioned ethno and socio poetics by Sylvia Wynter — and this is the deep generosity of Black scholars without which I could not participate in intellectual life in the way that I do — he mailed me a photocopy of this essay. That was very important because it was only published in the journal of this conference in 1979, so it wasn’t very accessible. The context of this essay is that the conference seemed like it was for anthropologists who were interested in poetics, like do certain poetics come from certain ethnicities, preserving indigenous language and poetics but in a super colonialist way, so I don’t even know why they invited Sylvia Wynter to this conference unless there was some subversive person that wanted them there. In this essay, Sylvia Wynter breaks down the entire invention of what you think a human is. She’s like, let me go through the medieval times, the sense of God, Robinson Crusoe, and basically she’s breaking down all of Western civilization to say that there is no ethnopoetics, there is no ethno — there is no us, because what you all have done is to create a them and then said that hat them has no language. So this entire project that you think you’re doing, you can’t. You’re not. But, there’s such a thing as Black poetry, and there’s such a thing as Indigenous poetry. It’s not along the lines of ethnicity that you are thinking about. It is the possibility of being able what is impossible to say. For me, that was a very important moment in my life because I was like, “That is what we’re doing!” Yes. Yes. It is the impossible daily work. Black artists and Indigenous artists in particular, we’re using these languages that are literally what makes it impossible to say what we gotta say, do what we gotta do, be with each other, be here. From then on I was like I have to read everything by Sylvia Wynter. She’s saying, none of this stuff is natural, none of this stuff is permanent, so we can think of some other stuff and do it and the sooner the better because this particular train of thought is destroying everything. So back to the question. M, the citations from that work come from M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing, so it’s a similar process that I did for Spill but a completely different set of essays that took me to totally different places and post-apocalyptic futures. One of the things about this future is that the perspective is from someone who is archiving the material evidence of the end of humans. But that does not mean that there are no beings, or no beings related to those of us who are the current humans or not humans based on anti-Blackness. But it does mean that that category has expired. And it may actually mean that we all die. There are multiple possibilities in the text, but it does imagine what is after the human, and Sylvia Wynter says that after the human the ceremony must be found. So what are the material components of that post-human ceremony? What are the memories, what are the practices, what are the rituals that constitute that? And how would someone describe it who could see it as history? And definitely, there’s nothing that I’ve written before I read Sylvia Wynter and definitely after I read Sylvia Wynter that’s not in conversation with Sylvia Wynter. Not a tweet. Everything is in conversation with Sylvia Wynter in some way.
So, final question: What’s your recollection of how we met?
From my perspective, it was like the hugest gift that you came to DC from Pittsburgh and were like, “Hello, I heard you were doing oracle readings, I’m here to open the oracle.” The way I got to DC, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival had a special thing they were doing about Black adornment called “The Will to Adorn,” inspired by how Zora Neale Hurston talks about Black adornment. They asked me to come, and I don’t know what they thought I was going to do but what I knew there was to do was to create this wearable oracle created on a daily basis out of Black feminist texts. I remember what was going on in your life but I don’t remember what your question was. I remember you talking about Oshun and the cinnamon and cleaning the new space you were in and the artist grant you had just gotten. I’m just really inspired by you and your life, and how you understand everything to be a part of your creative practice, like the ants and how you dealt with the ants by putting cinnamon down. And you know I’ve never stopped reading your work and I’ve never not been blown away by the brilliance, the honesty, and the rituals that you create in your community. I just feel like we have the same religion.
Yes, I feel similarly. I feel like much of my work is in conversation with your work. Did anybody ever tell you that talking to you is like talking to a nourishing whirlwind?
[Laughs.] No, but I like that though. I should put that in my bio. I like that! I identify with that. I know it’s a lot. I know I’m all over the place, but I’m glad it’s nourishing. I’m glad it’s clear that it is all love. That’s all it can be.
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Joy KMT is a healer, poet, and ritual artist. She is the founder of the Tabernacle of Immaculate Perception.
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