The Wound that Recreates Itself
In 2015, with his hands in my mouth, a man told me “you have very unfortunate teeth”. That man was a dentist, so in this scenario, he had an authority over my body I did not. He said it in a way that was meant to be funny, but true. And I’ve thought about it every single day since he said it. It’s become an inside joke with myself. An inner monologue meme. I’ve had other dentists say outlandish things to me since then (“you’re on your way to immortality”; another dentist sends me a monthly newsletter swarming with typos). I keep track and have been saying for ages that one day I’ll do a standup routine about it. It is the thought my mind falls on when there’s nothing left to think about.
Two days ago, I returned home from spending a month in Berlin at a studio program. On the penultimate day of the program, a student filed Title IX against the professor and he was asked to leave immediately, never to contact us again. As soon as I got to the program, I knew it was not going to go well. The professor was rude, arrogant, disturbing. His energy was infantilizing and sexual all at once: a combination that made me feel sick and brought me to tears. All of this I felt, but had no words for. The social dynamic amongst the students was cold, distant, tense. And nobody was openly being critical of the professor or the terrible structure of the program he designed for us. Alone, I felt guilty for not enjoying it or wanting to engage. It felt like my fault for not having fun. I never said anything.
Halfway through the program, I suddenly had a toothache unlike any other. The pain was a kind I’d never had before. It kept me holed up in my room crying until early hours of the morning. On my way to a hastily made appointment with a German dentist an hour and a half away from where I was staying, I realized my dentist jokes weren’t funny. They were hurting me.
This is about the pain we carry in our mouths: language. How the ways we think and express ourselves can reflect the wounds created by patriarchy even when we do not intend for them to. Their harm penetrates us in ways we cannot immediately recognize. In her essay Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway puts it perfectly:
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
When we are raised on misogyny, racism, classism, homophobia, these things seep into our unconscious thoughts, whether or not we consciously believe in them. They seep into our ways of storytelling, of thinking thoughts, tying knots, describing descriptions, and keeping history. And who created the processes, systems, standards of literacy we uphold? What powers do we abide by without realizing? Born into this capitalist, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal state, we continue to breed what bred us. This issue with language is an issue with the benchmarks made, standards set for holding a world in place. This is about the world we build we with the words we know.
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When I visited the Berlin Biennale, I had a tour guide who, before beginning the tour, wanted to preface the show by saying it was in their [the curators] every intention to redefine things. They actively set themselves apart from using the word “unlearning” in their discussion of the show, and instead practiced saying “unteaching”. This distinction, they felt, stressed the hierarchy apparent in the word unlearning. Unlearning implies a more superior structure, chain of command, an omniscient system. With unteaching, the unteacher carves out their own autonomy of knowledge. When everyone is trying to “unlearn” those things that have harmed them, that have kept them from knowing themselves, from understanding the world, to then use a word that continues to uphold those same structures of information, understanding, and being is counterintuitive. To practice actively rerouting the tongue is to recognize the power each of us has carried in our bodies, in our minds. Creating new language builds a new world. And the ever-dominant and oppressive tower crumbles just a little bit more.
When we carry patriarchy’s language, systems, stories, thought processes in us, their power recreates itself. I call this phantom penetration. When our bodies are used to keep their authority strong, their force alive, ourselves compliant, unknowing. When we cannot talk about the wound without the wound reproducing itself. When we carry the structures within us. The patriarchy finds ways of infiltrating, making delusions of itself, encrypting into our ways of being. And, it has historically claimed linear scientific knowing to be superior over feminine intuitive knowing. That which is intangible, lacking observable proof, product, is invalidated, disprovable, weak.
Quantum physics shows that thoughts and feelings have quantum energy, affecting the physical world because they are a part of the physical world. The energies we produce are real and powerful, giving shape to our bodies, to the world. The concept of quantum feminism wonders how feminist are we, when we engage in discourse that erases and pathologizes? Continuing to reinforce the violence of patriarchal structures, these thought systems (dismissing and blaming ourselves, our feelings, our instincts, hating our bodies, honoring productivity, empirical knowledge, success above all else) manifest the wound again and again. It becomes cyclical. And men will continue to abuse their power, reminding me of other men I’ve seen abuse their power, reminding me of men, reminding me of men, of men, ad nauseum. What about the self, knowledge, history as process? How much do we experience that we don’t have language for? What if we hadn’t developed into a society that operates based on linearity, proof, product, solution, capitalism, power, singular definitions of history and reality?
In their book Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History, Jac Pryor discusses the way people perceive and experience time, history, trauma, memory. Moments in which past, present, and future coincide, moments that challenge American narratives of racial and sexual citizenship. They describe straight time as linear and teleological, in a way that “negates a trauma survivor’s lived experience of past events, reproduces the logic of capitalism: the system, that is, that creates the conditions under which racial, gender, sexual, and economic violence gets enacted in the first place”. Conversely, the concept of queer time “describes those ‘unscripted’ modes of life that defy the logic of capitalist accumulation, as well as the presumed naturalness of a sense of time that is governed by an imperative to own property, produce offspring, establish stability, accumulate wealth, and ensure inheritance.” They explain the construction of these temporal norms:
When straight time is naturalized, the logic of capitalism is produced as inevitable and the kinds of state and psychic violence required to uphold it seem justified if not unavoidable costs of a presumably well-functioning system. Any digression from these temporal norms is produced as aberrant, delinquent, criminal, and queer.
These digressions become specters, existing outside of the historical canon, image of reality. Pryor gives a name to this: the titular Time Slips. Time slips “reveal a previously unseen aspect of either the past, present, or future (while complicating the presumably linear relationship among and between each)-with an eye toward hidden histories, buried traumas, unclaimed experiences, invisible structures, and previously unimaginable futures.” Pryor’s time slips embody that which exists outside of the patriarchy’s proof & process, linearity & standard. In the collection of essays Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality, Frieda J. Foreman writes about the marginalizing patriarchal institutionalization of history similarly, almost three decades before Pryor:
One cannot think intelligently about time within patriarchal history, with man-centered epistemologies. If indeed mankind is engaged in a continuous linear or even dialectical process of making history- a process understood only by philosophers and therefore qualifying as more real than reality- somewhere a line must be drawn. Where this line is to be drawn, by whom, its erasures, amendments, breaks, recapitulations; its lies and secrets, its crippled language, its ethical unconcern, its empty elegance; where it is to be drawn is precisely the lie of male supremacy and the truth of masculine inadequacy. History tumbles outside of drawn lines and selective dialect. [...] Knowledge of these is knowledge of abstract time, time out of mind, not experienced time, not species time, not common time. Men have used the mind for the sorts of understanding of reality embedded in the history of the conquest of time, men’s history.
Read side by side, these disparately timed writings on time show us that that it is cyclical: we have always been slipping through the cracks of a manmade history. And history repeats. What Pryor and Friedman write about the constructed, enforced, normalized concepts of a straight and manmade time leaves all outside those lines marginalized and unrecorded, therefore unreal, pushed into spaces of liminality, criminality, invisibility, mutation. Feminist poet H.D. called this keeping of chronological time “the father’s signature”, a space and system which excluded her from history. The response to this patriarchal temporality is timelessness, myth. Time slips are simultaneously created by the wound and outside of the wound, lingering, shaping, mutating. We can only catch glimpses of these other worlds, in peripheries, as apparitions, ghosts. We haunt the thing which haunts us. Pryor’s Time Slips and notions of quantum feminism, read together overturn understanding of the reality we are sold. These ghosts have energy; they only need language.
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A perfume chemist in Paris once explained to me that 1+1=3 because two individual things, once combined, became a third, entirely new entity. I was in this perfume shop so I could make my own scent. Well, recreate one. I brought in a sample of perfume sprayed onto a small 5x7" card of paper. In Paris for a month, I was staying in the apartment of an older woman I had fallen in love with. Some nights, I would sleep in her bed because there was another visitor using the guest room and some mornings, I would wake up with her already having left for the day. I’d put on her perfume so I could still have the experience of smelling her, of our pheromones mixing. So she could still be with me in some way. I took this sample of her perfume to the chemist to recreate whatever fancy perfume it was (I never photographed or wrote it down), but through the interpretation of my senses and memory, rather than its actual note makeup. We spent hours carefully smelling every single base and top note we could, taking them each in. When the chemist said 1+1=3, I knew exactly what she meant. I wanted to recreate the woman I loved so she could still be present for me in her own absence. I was reperforming her for myself, stretching who she was her past her skin. Her image, her energy, our exchanges, I carried with me, but it wasn't her. I fell in love with something I created, something I became.
This was an instance of myself, mutated. Remembering, perpetually. Remembering, until I became the memory. Haunting the thing that haunted me, I existed in a liminal space: a form of escape, an infinity mirror of becoming. Similar images of queer, transformative twinning are seen in the Wachowski’s 1996 film Bound. Corky and Violet meet exchanging long glances in an elevator, drawn to each other because instantly they recognize they are one in the same. Time skips forward, offering flashes of future moments. I imagined you inside of me, like a part of me Violet repeats. When they’re together, visually there is little difference between them; they both don black leather jackets and similar-but-not-quite-same haircuts. Both have been imprisoned for the last five years; Corky, recently from released jail for crimes of theft, and Violet in her relationship with mafioso boyfriend Cesar. Living on other sides of the same wall, they are two reflections bouncing off of one mirror. Their love affair is fast and works on spawning itself even while the woman are apart from each other with little communication. Violet sees herself as a parallel version of Corky, telling her “we’re not that different”.
They live in a liminal space, both seen and unseen by the world around them; Corky, alone in the apartment she repairs, hears all that goes on around her but is seen by nobody other than Violet. Violet’s presence in her home and in her relationship with Cesar, is merely to act as a prop for him. Cesar and his associates objectify and use her, and she complies as a means of survival. Around these dangerous men, she functions on auto-pilot, her body performing the actions needed to stay alive. This is a clear juxtaposition to her interactions with Corky, where she freely expresses herself. This newfound freedom inspires her to make a break for it and get out before it’s too late. The two become incomprehensibly enmeshed, plotting a crime that renders them codependent and requires deep trust.
Together, along with their plan, they become a single entity. Both existing in realms governed by patriarchs (Violet’s endlessly hierarchied mafia of Cesar, Jonnie, Gino, Mickey, ad nauseum, and Corky’s unseen authority Bianchini), they are desperate to break free. This escape is driven by their affair; this criminality pinned to their queerness. While every character in the film is a criminal in some respect, Violet and Corky’s delinquency is stressed; their conspiracy situates them as deviants. Slipping in and out of Violet and Cesar’s apartment and back into the one she repairs, Corky slips in and out of the violent patriarchal space, into her own of invisibility and liminality; their plan is dependent on Corky’s knowledge of her own body, manipulation of space. She is undetected, clever, apparitional. When Violet seduces Corky, she is seemingly seducing herself; something near narcissism and incestuousness, they find the missing parts in each other required to claim agency over their lives. Frames imply multiplicities of self. Uncanny duplications. Two halves of an unfinished whole, they act as fragments of a self almost free. Their teamwork makes a mutation, a joining of split selves; in loving another that is indistinguishable from the self, they form something whole and something otherworldly. In Corky’s truck, going over their plan, only their backlit silhouette’s show. They look identical. This is the space where they are most comfortable, authentic, authoritative over their bodies: it is their own. The sound of their leather jackets fill the truck as they shift in their seats. Street lights glow in the distance. Corky says the plan can only work if “I know [you] like I know myself”.
In a final moment of defiance, Violet regains autonomy when she kills Cesar. Cesar not only thinks she won’t shoot, but tells her she won’t, because he knows her. Her choices are not hers, this says. Her body, with him, has never been hers. Subverting his expectations of her as docile and subservient, she pushes past mere survival tactics to reject what kept her oppressed, absent, powerless. Corky and Violet meet again in the truck, this time in one brand new and improved, presumably purchased with their stolen mafia money. Mirroring each other, with their reflections rebounding off the windshield, Corky asks “Do you know what the difference is between us?” “No”, Violet says. “Me either”.
Corky and Violet’s dynamic is perfectly illustrative of a queer kinship. Of the curious space that surrounds the uncertainty of the desire to be or to fuck. Of the power, self discovery, revelations that occur when it’s both. Of the liminality of queer women in a male dominated world, of the anything-but-ambivalence. Of the varieties of survival that manifest and the collectivism that can create change. In a world authored, documented, controlled by men, to live a life apart from male desire and attention is to live on the periphery, outside of the canon, in spite of them, seen as defiant, threatening. Entire histories slip through time. Lives go unnoticed. Love stories untold. Desires communicated invisibly. And, something about their affair, their merging, their teamwork rings of the desire to see is the manifestation of the desire to be seen.
In loving that woman, wearing her perfume, becoming something of myself and of her, I was mutating, doubling myself, doubling her, creating an entirely new entity. An unknown body, looping back, lingering, slipping. Even before the perfume, she would call me “a younger version of herself”, and I, she an older version of me. But I wasn’t her past body, and she wasn’t my future. We felt like a glitch. I am curious about this kind of queer kinship, of loving another indistinguishable from the self, of becoming and performing back the mirrored image. The hunger to find an image of the self seems to breed love born from familiarity, an inherent and unspoken knowledge of culture and history. Our inability to produce offspring causes a reproduction of self in images, escaping a sense of mortality for infinite gestures of becoming. Allowing desire to spawn itself, and spawn the self, into multiple bodies, entities, as a means of cheating invisibility and liminality, like a silent shout echoing. We are everywhere.
Where Bound reflects the invisibility and liminality of queer women, Alex Garland’s 2018 film Annihilation reveals visibilities of trauma manifesting in the body, where mutations and rebellions again are abound. Lena, a cellular biologist and former soldier, volunteers to go on a research expedition with four other women: Josie, Anya, Cassie, and Dr. Ventress; all either scientists, psychologists, or paramedics. They venture into Area X on special government operation known as a suicide mission. Nobody who has gone in has ever returned. Area X, overtaken by an iridescent electromagnetic field called The Shimmer, is menacing and ethereal. The Shimmer alienates and distorts knowledge, concepts of reality, time, and the body. Lena and the other volunteers find themselves facing their inner demons. They discover that The Shimmer is acting on organisms in the same way that a prism refracts light. They themselves are slowly distorting and changing, mentally unraveling. Each of their wounds manifests in The Shimmer in the shape of something The Shimmer has created.
Lena’s journey through Area X is a journey through uncovering trauma, locating its origins. Everything that enters Area X is a part of a larger wound. All things echo. Disappear. Return in new forms. The wound must be faced, defeated, removed, otherwise it will continue to haunt, replicate, mutate. In an earthly space, this is a realm where alternate realities split off, multiply. These mutations reflect reality, a warped and foreign likeness. As the women journey deeper into Area X, their bodies become further integrated into The Shimmer, and The Shimmer into them. In The Shimmer, trauma is carried in the body, and everything is a possible body. Carrying pain (or anything) in the body fashions for a reshaping of it, a haunting, a mutation: an entirely new entity, apart from the self that one is/becoming. Annihilation makes this visible with images of the volunteers’ insides moving, organs shifting, forming new bodies. When Cassie is attacked and killed by a monstrous bear mutated by The Shimmer, her cries become its cries; Cassie’s pain is absorbed and repurposed into language, her screams slipping into the mouth of the monster that took her. The Shimmer takes the body’s traumas and absorbs them, redistributing them to manifest elsewhere, again and again. Dr. Ventress seeks the ultimate kind of annihilation, when she reaches the lighthouse, directly entering the pulsating origin of The Shimmer, mutating into disintegration in order to “encompass everything”, releasing herself to regenerate.
Annihilation provides images of operating in a space within reality that feels separate, in which your body does not feel like yours, where time functions differently, and the history in that space is only recorded through the recounting of those who experienced it. When Lena is interrogated by hazmatted government agents aiming to obtain clear accounts of her time in The Shimmer, there is no tangible proof other than memory and the ethereal glow that moves within her. While the film may not have been explicitly about queerness (although roughly two characters identified as queer), Annihilation’s imaginations of Area X are inherently so. Area X is existing outside of the father’s signature, outside of the wound, while still being shaped by the wound, watching the wound manifest within the body and echo in the world surrounding. It is the site for time slips, for that which gets lost in history, goes unrecorded, suffocated and pushed to the margins by white capitalist heteropatriarchal structures.
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A month before going to the dentist in Berlin, I wrote a poem whose ending read: to reject this wound would take / the body rejecting itself / swishing salt water constantly / creating new language / I am almost my own / singing to the pain like it is a baby. Having been offered nothing for the pain or suggestions for how to care for my teeth from the German dentist, I went home and Googled homeopathic fixes for the situation I was in. Thus, I began to actually swish salt water daily, in efforts to remove the bacteria from my mouth. I was panicked, afraid I would lose a tooth or two. And then I remembered Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto:
For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.
I wanted the tooth removed. I wanted to locate the origins of the pain and expel them from my body completely. I wanted to stop carrying it within me. To regenerate.
While actively practicing this gesture of removal, I was existing in an entirely toxic environment. The professor of the Berlin studio program was predatory, harmful gaslighting his students. I knew this was something I did not want festering into a wound, something I would carry in my body. I began the only performance I made at this program: every other day, I went to the (program provided) gym, spending an hour in a sauna collecting my sweat. Another gesture of removal, I was bottling the toxins that came out of my body, making visible the stress, harm, pollution my body had collected. I was purging the wound, emptying myself of the pain, not allowing it to take space in my body. The collected jar of sweat became physical, tangible proof of an invisible act, one that usually denotes labour, effort, or force. And it was disgusting. This was abjection in the truest sense, spotlighting the subject that is unworthy of being a subject: the unreal, illegible, unrecognizable. The performance of rejection and collection was ongoing, public, and ephemeral, documented solely through evidence that it occurred, rather than images of it occurring. This collection of sweat, Phantom Penetration, and the daily swishing of saltwater, was the removal and cleansing of a wound: a process necessary for reinstating authority and power over my body, in order to stop carrying it around, allowing it to manifest again and again. In the middle of a town an hour north of Berlin, Germany, in a small, wooden sauna at a local gym, I was unseen, undetected, unquestioned; moving through the space, “to encompass everything” I was sweating to disintegrate, releasing myself to regenerate.
This is where the body becomes itself: through regeneration. In removing the wound. It’s hard to know what that looks like. How can we regenerate ourselves within the quotidian? Where are the images of unteaching? What does it look and sound like to escape, refuse, and create something new? Save The Wachowskis’ direction and writing of Bound, the aforementioned films were made and produced by men. And while narratives of regeneration within them can be legible, the subject of feminist agency is one altogether inaccessible and restricted territory for men to explore. They cannot fathom what our freedom and future looks like, when they have dictated it for all of history. When they have profited off inconsequential images of freedom being sold back to us as conventionally attractive cis white women playing gay for pay. When they have put the words in our mouths, the fears in our heads, the dangers to our bodies.
What does a queer/feminist future world look like? How do we get there without continuing to perpetuate patriarchal systems? For the poet H.D., the final phase is “agency: assuming responsibility to work for social change, [uniting] history and metaphysics”. The work is understanding what we’ve been taught, what we’ve accepted as norm, what we unknowingly participate in, down to the quantum level. It is removing and reconditioning our language, our thought processes, our ways of being that continue to perpetuate a world not made for us.
2019