weaponised abjection & queer identity / visibility / experience

written for an exhibition at RM gallery entitled ‘a bone, a flesh, a daddy’s nest’ featuring sorawit songsataya and bronte perry. this text was written to accompany bronte’s work and was re-exhibited at the christchurch pride art show 2017.

In 2015 Sociology course, my lecturer began to express a non-normative gender presentation and attended lectures in lipstick and heels. While the class attendees themselves had very little obvious reaction to this, she talked about the response of some colleagues and, more importantly, passers-by. While she restricted this presentation to the university campus – due to safety concerns – she nevertheless experienced people doing double-takes at her as they passed by. She mentioned this explicitly in a lecture and related it to normative assumptions being challenged. As she was wearing clothes typically deemed those of a woman but did not otherwise fit the societal standard of “a woman”, this perceived dissonance meant people had to challenge their initial assumptions of her and her gender.

This is a phenomenon most, if not all, trans people experience, and on the scale of public reactions, a double take is significantly mild. Most experience harassment, slurs, and in the case of trans women of colour more than any, physical violence. It is a result of the normative confronting the othered, experiencing the abject as a physical reality.

While being visibly queer can be a threat to ourselves, it is also a threat to the normative. To those for whom the abject, the other – queerness – is part of another world, one that does not involve them; to those who believe queer and trans people are not a part of their lives, not people they would ever encounter, being visibly queer is a challenge. Forcing people to recognise our abjectness, our queerness, challenges their stable, normative world. For those for whom events such as the attack in Pulse nightclub is an attack on “all of us” or “every American,” for those who “just don’t know” if it was motivated by queerphobia, active, vocal, and visible queerness is a political and personal challenge.

In a world where, for many of our most vulnerable, being visibly queer and trans is a death threat, the responsibility to embody this challenge may fall to the more privileged. There is a responsibility in the queer community not to succumb to respectability politics, to conform ourselves to heteronormative society. The gay marriage movement fell to this conformity, simply expanding marriage instead of providing the rights and privilege that accompany marriage to those who are unmarried, unable, or unwilling to marry. Hate crime legislation also fell to this conformity, expanding the carceral state and filling prisons with more black and brown bodies instead of taking steps to dismantle it. So, too, was the push for inclusion in the military flawed, similarly expanding imperial forces that put millions of innocent lives at risk. Respectability politics are inherently humanist; an ideology that centres the ‘human’ and the normative. Abjection is post/trans/inhuman, and destroys that privileged centralisation. If humanism threatens us while forgetting us, erasing our histories, experiences, and bodies, then abjection forcibly and violently centres us, staring with a billion unblinking eyes and screaming with a chorus of voices:

W E A R E H E R E

If being abject is distant, is other, is not something normative society wishes to face, then weaponising that abjection, emphasising it and making it impossible to ignore, is a radical act. We wear the abject like an armour, refusing respectability politics and the normalising process. In this work, the abject becomes personal and weaponised. We are brought from the ‘other’ world where normative society relegates us, and into the world they occupy, in a physical and confronting manner. The abject is here, it is in your face, all around you, and it has a body. The space it occupies is one which disturbs identity, system, and order. It does not respect borders, positions, or rules. Parts of the artist’s body normally ruled as disgusting line the walls, creating discomfort, unease, and repulsion. But this piece is as much about your body as it is about the artist’s. It is impossible to distance yourself from the reality of the body; this is a body labelled as other, different, abject, though it may share many characteristics with yours. Let it challenge you and question you, and avoid the urge to distance yourself.

This is an abject realm the artist, myself, and many others occupy; it is not yours, but ours. It is a space where, as Tame Iti said: “No one can tell you that you are not important and your experience does not matter and if they do, I challenge them to say it to your face where they can see your eyes and feel your breath.” Not everyone is meant to understand or relate to it, and it is not intended to make trans narratives and experiences easier for a cisgender and heterosexual audience to consume. It is intended to repel, and if it does, you must question why you feel repulsed.

Antonyms suggested by dictionaries for ‘abject’ may highlight this repulsion: the non-abject is apparently commendable, noble, excellent, exalted, magnificent, and most of all worthy and proud. These are things normative society does not want us to be, at least not without conforming to their standards. This is especially notable in times of turmoil and conflict; during the AIDs crisis, the ‘good’ queers were those who were healthy, ‘clean’, and in long-term, monogamous relationships. Recently a man was arrested on route to LA Pride with a backpack full of weaponry and explosives. People regularly ask “why is there no straight pride parade?” while police forces attend our own parades, arresting queer sex workers and protesters and other abject undesirables. Trans women get told “wow! I wouldn’t even have known you weren’t a girl if you hadn’t said anything!” as if congratulating them. Trans people get refused healthcare unless they conform to heteropatriarchy and its standards – trans women must be feminine and fucking cis dudes if they wish to begin HRT. Trans men must be hypermasculine in every meaning of the word – including the toxic elements that cause violence to so many of us. Humanist respectability politics cause violence to and within our community.

Abjection is a weapon of resistance. I am queer, trans, and crazy. I am abject, but I, too, am divine; I, too, am exalted and magnificent and worthy and proud.