Thursday, September 6, 2012

Sex is Changing


Summer has begun its ebb. Do you feel it? Not quite perceptible, the start of autumn is like smelling a change in temperature. It's still hot and humid, yet we register a difference at the overlapping edge of our senses. Perhaps change usually has this character because it resides just beyond the human scale of things, like the climate or evolution. We cannot see the mountainside erode, but somehow we sense it nonetheless.
Change seems constantly on my mind: political change, climate change. And tucked away, sex change. It's my experience, after all.
Like a storm's energy before its bright beaks of lightning and fisted thunder, sex's transformation starts imperceptibly. In general, we pretend sex is obvious, some reductive algebra of chromosomes and physiology, but as we've slowly come to realize, sex is many processes that include X and Y chromosomes, hormones, gonads, internal sex structures and external genitalia, as well as history, culture, environment and other variables still to be named.
Excitingly for some, unnervingly for many and boringly for others, sex remains unfinished indefinitely. So, what does changing sex mean when sex is continually changing?
First and most important, it's a misunderstanding that changing sex is about crossing—as the prefix "trans" in "transsexual" supposes—from one sex to another. Of course it can be, but more often the starting point is subtler. For example, a man assigned at birth as female never felt female for emotional, situational, chemical or even biological reasons, and he grew up disidentifying with his assigned sex.
He has always felt un-female and un-woman. Here, female-to-male is somewhat of a misnomer because he is not necessarily crossing sex. Rather he is undergoing something closer to transsexual-to-male, or indeterminacy becoming more indeterminate.
But as Canadian filmmaker Chase Joint describes in his piece "Post-Transition: Who We Might Be," this man can share his experience only by simplifying his experience to his family and health care providers, even to sympathetic friends and allies.
Or worse, he has to convince detractors with unwavering confidence that he is happily a man and better for it. Every movement of his body, from posture to sneezes, is self-considered because he is keenly aware that people habitually sex these things. Can you imagine the fatigue of becoming more of yourself, attending to the ongoing changes of yourself, while having to shore up a narrative that doesn't belong to you and flattens your experience?
Like the change from summer to autumn, changing sex is more than a conscious choice or an act of will. It may be that change comes on a scalpel of desire or along a hormonal riptide, such that the body is legibly sexed, but this describes only a fraction of what is at play.
Hormones, for instance, have ranging impacts. Taking estrogen can cause fat deposits to uproot and travel to new sights of colonization so that hips widen, breasts grow and lactate, and musculature softens. Estrogen can also alter the eye's structure, affecting vision. It can modify the body's heating and cooling and olfactory systems. I remember sitting on a subway train, feeling so disoriented by smelling layers of place, saturated funk and perfume that I got off the train and walked six blocks to my stop.
Estrogen has health consequences. Annual mammograms and regular breast exams are recommended for transsexual women. If, like me, you started hormone therapy with Premarin (complemented with progesterone), derived (wickedly) from horse urine, how much of that early transition was about becoming horse-like? And later still, with soy- and yam-based estrogens, vegetal? Hormones are a complicated business, and they're just one plot line in the relentless narrative of sex.
Transsexuality not only is more nuanced than it is typically described, it breaches the defended territories of sexual reproduction. Thomas Beatie became a national sensation as "the first married man to give birth." Although other men gave birth before Beatie, he was able to capitalize on curiosity and voyeurism, an irresistible tipple, and start a public conversation about the limits of sex: "How can a man have a baby?"
And now, with the first successful uterine transplant, in Turkey, and Britain and Sweden following suit, it's only a matter of time before other wombless bodies have wombs. But surgical interventions are not alone in transforming our assumptions about sex. Infants are being breast-fed by all kinds of lactating men and women. And last week, a friend sent me a photo of her "false pregnancy," in which the endocrine system produces hormones that physically express as pregnancy. She is a woman "with a transsexual past," as she would say, and still her body is compelled to reach beyond her history. Sex changes; remarkably and unavoidably. Sex is an unending process, not yet finished with any of us.
Sex is changing, and so is transsexuality. Many men and women with trans histories occupy restricted areas of sex. Others are questioning the past tense of "transitioned"—what Chase Joint calls "post-transition." Moving toward your self through your body is less about a horizon in which change stops than about how to embrace the endless process of change.
It is hardly easy; change requires openness to uncertainty and a willingness to tell the story differently. For all of us—trans or otherwise—sex is reinventing itself just as we reinvent it. So the question is how do we—all of us—take to heart the unchartered dimensions of change? We can practice, as summer becomes fall. Trees begin to turn as photosynthesis slows down. Earth tilts toward itself, finding equanimity with the sun by late September. In doing so, the Earth transfers force and energy through its complex systems, unleashing seasonal potentials in already changing processes. Then, soon, winter ...
This article appeared in print with the headline "Changing attitudes about changing sex."

medusa movements






medusa

1

half
light
further
down
dark
dark


2   a   drift    a    float    a   clear   wet   bowl              
                                                  
                                                     3   pulse    and    flounce    then    flow   then    flair         


Ctenophores




(pen/ink, watercolors 2012 -- made when Nina Fonoroff visited me during a round of chemo)  

Monday, September 3, 2012

Sounding out


Cripple and the Starfish



...o00O00o...

How Queer a Sound?


 The Independent  Weekly, July 6 2011
I was sitting close enough to Justin Vivian Bond, performing at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro last month, to look into her mouth and marvel at its unbolted reveal, its size, its fearless ability to stretch open. Her throat curled around the cries, rasps, whispers and stops of "22nd Century," a Nina Simone song she covers on her new album, Dendrophile. Working the larynx with teeth, tongue, diaphragm and lungs to shape air, she sang, "Gods and goblins walk this land ... when the soul is gone and there are no more babies being born ... when there is no one and everyone." The lyrics evoke a future full of catastrophe and possibility, but I was struck by something deeper than her words.

ey/ecotone


Laura Marks: Haptic Visuality

      Haptic visuality: In Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks defines, among other kinds of hapticity, 1) haptic, which is associated with the tactile, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic senses; 2) haptic visuality, an expressive mode in which “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch”(not actual touching) resting on the surface of images “rather than plunging into depth” (2, my emphasis, 8); 3) haptic cinema, often do to a lack of distinction in the image, “do not invite identification with a figure [secondary cinematic identification] so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between viewer and image [dynamic intersubjectivity produced through the senses]” (3); and, 4) haptic criticism, a methodology of interpreting images that is “mimetic . . . presses up to the object” creating a robust movement between “sensuous closeness and symbolic distance” (xiii).
         In general, Marks recognizes a problem in writing about visual culture—which she refers to as an act of translation. Too often, she notes, critics use preconceived theories to address film and video rather than letting the visual arts generate theory particular to its own constraints. Turning to Walter Benjamin’s concerns about the “basic error of the translator,” she writes, “We critics cherish our ideas and forget that they become hard tools that chip at, or merely glance off without ever touching, the surface of the other. But if we measure with more delicate tools, fashioned for the occasion, our critical activity becomes less a hacking away and more a sort of precision massage” (xv). She develops the interpretive model of haptic criticism, the corollary of haptic visuality, to offer a more embodied form of film analysis. Haptic criticism (like haptic visuality) offers a method of sensory analysis that does not depend on the presence of literal touch, smell, taste or hearing, but the affective solicitation of these senses. Marks derives her haptic criticism from a reading of the haptic in Deleuze and Guattari. For Deleuze and Guattari, the haptic defines “smooth space,” a spatial zone that “must be moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment . . . . Close-range spaces navigated not through reference to the abstractions of maps or compasses, but by haptic perception, which attends to their particularity, their specificity” (xii). Deleuze and Guattari distinguish smooth space from striated space: They write, “It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space. The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space – although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity” (xii). While these two spaces differ fundamentally in nature, they in fact exist constitutively. Smooth space is occupied by intensities and events; that is to say, a vectorial space rather than a metrical one inhabited by packs and nomads. Striation seems to be, at least in part, the effects of technological mediation resulting in quantities as opposed to qualities. In striated space, one closes off a surface and "allocates" it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one "distributes" oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one's crossings.  These two functions, allocation and distribution, serve as the organizational principles of smooth and striated space. Following this analytic, Marks writes, “The haptic critic, rather than place herself within the ‘striated space’ of predetermined critical frameworks, navigates a smooth space engaging immediately with objects and ideas and teasing out the connections immanent to them” (xiii). Haptic criticism is defined by the distributed quality of gliding along the surface of the object of inquiry—what Mark’s at other times calls “unfolding” so as to “increase the surface area of experience” (xi)—rather than attempting to “penetrate or ‘interpret’ it” as is common in classical film theory. If criticism is observing something in order to form an opinion of it, haptic criticism observes in close contact with its object. This closeness or proximity is not an erasure of the distance of representation, but to slide between the registers of critical remove (symbolic) and nearness or nearby-ness (sensuousness). Haptic criticism is opposed to the notion that analysis merely bridges a chasm between thing and representation, rather it is a continuum between the two, with the possibility of “getting close enough to the other thing to become it” (xiii). “Haptic criticism is so sensitive to its object that it takes on a form of subtle complexity, building toward its object, brushing into its pores and touching varied textures” (xv). Criticism is the process of attempting to translate events, conceived in the broadest possible way, into verbal expression. The critic’s success is only asymptotic—at some point the interpretations necessarily lift off the surface of the object or event and begin to do the things that words do best. Whether or not criticism is “haptic,” is in touch with its object and bound in “connective materialism,” is a matter of the point at which the words lift off. Haptic criticism keeps its surface rich, textured, and sensitive to the particularity or “strangeness” of things and environments, so it can interact with them in unexpected ways. It has to be fungible, willing to alter itself according to what it is in contact with. All our senses rush up to the surface to interact with another surface; this isn’t a loss of difference, not a totalizing becoming (becoming with rather than becoming), but as Marks say using Deleuze and Guattari, a “plane of immanence” (x). When this happens there is a concomitant loss of depth—the critic becomes fractal-like, changing as the surface against which she slides changes. She cannot help but be altered in the process of interaction, giving up the notion that meaning is formed after the fact, and attribute power to create meaning to the interaction itself, a kind of differential becoming (becoming with).
         I would extend Mark’s analysis with an ardent attention to materiality, the technological interface as part of one’s sensuous reach. Even the reproductions that you the reader are looking at are stratums of digitization, ink, publishing, and uploaded and downloaded filing. Moreover, and of central concern in this book, the refracting and diffracting principles of light in and through water are gathered up in this luminous interchange. Substantial elements spread across ecosystems of technology, people, knowledge production, copyright, and modes of production. So too are the legacies of perspective, beauty, captivity, and spectacle folded into this image. 

                                                                      ...oo00O00oo...

Seawater, seewater

Water? Shimmering, undulating, rinsing depth, how does one transmute water, that deep element, into language? Italo Calvino has said of its surface, “To describe a wave analytically, to translate its every movement into words, one would have to invent a new vocabulary. . . .” (1983: 17).[1] No doubt a grammar of liquescence would start by turning all nouns into verbs, an anthemeric language. You would need, constantly, the irrigating verb to make fluid. Liquefy, deliquesce, and liquate: from the first dissolve water seems to evade us. The various enunciations that we cup it with—poetics, symbolism, and empiricism—over-flow at contact.


                              [1] Calvino continues, “ . . . and perhaps also a new grammar and a new syntax, or else employ a 
                           system of notation like a musical score or algebraic formulas with derivatives and integers”  
                            (17).

Tentacular, Spectacular

Octo-ontological choreographies 



Anem-amies
Cuttlefish Envy

                      
Ruby Tanjarin

I am writing this day after day; it takes, it sets: the cuttlefish produces its ink: I tie up my image-system (in order to protest myself and at the same time to offer myself).

How will I know that the book is finished? In other words, as always, it is a matter of elaborating a language. Now, in every language the signs return, and by dint of returning they end by saturating the lexicon—the work. Having uttered the substance of these fragments for some months, what happens to me subsequently is arranged quite spontaneously (without forcing) under the utterances that have already been made: the structure is gradually woven, and in creating itself, it increasingly magnetizes: thus it constructs for itself, without any plan on my part, a repertoire which is both finite and perpetual, like that of language. At a certain moment, no further transformation is possible but the one which occurred to the ship Argo: I could keep the book a very long time, by gradually changing each of its fragments.
                                                                   —Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes.

                               ...oo00O00oo...
Octopoeisis


Gelata


Ciliations




My essay, Cilated Sense. Written for "Party Writing" for Donna Haraway.