Ashley Johnson. “Turning the Beat Around Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes”
Though Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir is certainly not a novel about sadomasochism, Elizabeth Freeman’s article “Turn the Beat around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History” provides a valuable theoretical avenue into analyzing Kai Cheng Thom’s use of allegory and quasi-fantasy genre. By blurring these boundaries between fantasy and reality, Thom crafts what Freeman terms an “alternative historiography” of the violent reality transgender women face. Inserting fantastical elements into the memoir becomes a vehicle for discussing traumatic experiences without explicitly naming or portraying them.
This paper seeks to examine the ways in which transgender individuals (in this case a transgender woman of color) examine and redifine space. While she discusses and constructs her theory accordingly with sadomasochism, Freeman’s theories of queer temporality and “slow time” and the rehabilitative crafting of an alternative historiography is imperative to my reading of Thom’s novel. The fantastical allegory of Thom’s memoir-but-not-memoir achieves a similar effect by rewriting history, whose linearity may be called into question, while still acknowledging its existence. Rather than achieve temporal asynchrony through tools like the mirror or the video camera, Thom achieves it by writing a novel-memoir which asks the reader to ask where truth and fiction collapse and diverge.
Ultimately, Thom’s narrator exerts control over her past experiences and trauma through allegory and self-conscious revision of, most notably, sexual violence. Rather than simply adhere to the standard trans girl narrative in which the narrator is violently and explicitly victimized, the book permits her the agency to rewrite her trauma not as sexual violence but as an attack by a swarm of bees. The novel and its allegory is a space for rehabilitation, allowing Thom and her narrator to control what would have been, in the moment, uncontrollable.
Andrew William Lee. “Thee Process is Thee Product”: Liminality, Creativity, and the Altered State of Pandrogeny”
The project of Pandrogeny—as conducted by contemporary artists Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge—is popularly remembered for its gender-transforming body modification practices intent on having the two artists resemble one another and operating as a unified being. Although their altered bodies are a crucial aspect of Pandrogeny, the project was more deeply concerned with change itself. The artists spent years concentrating their efforts in seriously considering the ethical value of change and deliberate alteration. Embracing process as a conceptually and spiritually generative space made them willful participants in enacting and instigating change, which, they hoped, would allow them to intuit a next phase of social, and biological, evolution. But, as adaptation is a strong condition for evolution, Pandrogeny too was forced to venture down new avenues in the experience of profound loss. For example, Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, just under five years after the cosmetic surgeries rendered their bodies “angelic” and increasingly alike. Genesis continued to operate in “this” world, whereas Lady Jaye operated in the immaterial world, at least up until March 2020 when Genesis also experienced a corporeal death.
Using the family resemblance of Latin words denoting change (alter/mutare) as an entry point for interpreting the variegated Pandrogynic methodologies of altering the self, I will examine the project’s challenge to the highly charged creative space of liminality as theorized by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. In addition, process philosophy will help in construing the altered state of Pandrogeny as one of becoming. In turn, we will find that Pandrogeny is responding to modern conditions of flux and, in an idiosyncratic manner, continuously pushes against the stability offered by the status quo.
Megan Mau. “Gilded Cage: How the Patriarchy has Created and Condemned the Madwoman”
For centuries, patriarchal society has designated specific spaces on the basis of sex. The boundaries of this spatial defining is clearer looking back in history and literature of those periods, but the consequences still leave marks today. Men were given a sphere that allows them mobility and power over women. The space women are given to occupy, keeps them in the home which in turn keeps them subservient and dependent on the men. In an effort to disguise this suppression the patriarchy creates an artificial valuation system that makes it appear that women being only in the home as wife and mother is critical to the survival of the society, that only women can manage the home. The patriarchy deploys these crumbs to placate women from rising up and pushing back against patriarchal control. Preventing them from claiming their power and their rightful, equal place in society. This societal structure is reflected and often illustrated in literature; in female characters, but the female writers as well. Being confined to the home leaves little mobility for women, and that is maddening. Focusing on 19th-century female writers, the effects of patriarchal control are clear. These women were writing in a patriarchy, and oftentimes their female characters exist in patriarchal societies as well. The way these writers craft female characters reveals an inner awareness from repressed women. In many works, female writers include a madwoman character in opposition to their heroines. The madwoman character illustrates how the rigidity of power structures in our society actually lead to utter madness. In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the madwomen characters are made out to be villianous. However, these women are actually maddened by the ‘failure’ to be a patriarchal-approved wife and mother. Patriarchal society designates space that empowers one half of its people, and spirals the other half into madness.
