Without Organs
on plagiarism, abjection, and fiction
tw: blood, sutures.
“The organs are not the enemy. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called organism.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, from “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?”
“Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other’s differences and are willing to fight their enemy together.” Leslie Feinberg, from Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come.
This is a story told in summer. Three different years stretching across the same span of hot months, each one growing a bit hotter in succession. It begins in May 2020 with a viral lockdown, skitters along the early August heat of 2023 as I read a novel, and ends here. Days after the Al Nuseirat massacre, in which occupation forces disguised themselves as aid workers, killing hundreds. Amidst a June marked by terror and violence and smothering warmth and cop cars wrapped in rainbow flags. Ahead of a week targeting Maersk and Citibank, both of which are profiting from the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I pour over this work again and again, looking for cracks in its facade. It is imperfect. It can only speak to my experiences.
Last year, I read a book and recognized something within it. That is, by itself, an unremarkable moment. The hope of so many novel writers is to produce moments of recognition, moments which elucidate and speak to specific subjectivities. Moments which, for the reader, can define something about a community, moment, or person that they have might share little to nothing in common with.
On the pages of Jenny Fran Davis’ debut novel Dykette, published on May 16th, 2023, the story opens on an established dyke relationship, beginning to falter. The protagonist Sasha is suspicious of her partner Jesse’s actions. Jesse vents to his therapist about Sasha’s control issues. Lou, a Black transmasc who seems to own the kind of boutique tchotchke shop that drives rent up in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, is dating Darcy – a cosmetically-enhanced coke fiend bisexual, one of the many who currently haunt Manhattan’s Lower East Side. An older psychotherapist named Miranda is hurtling toward a sexless marriage with Jules, who is Rachel Maddow by another name. (As an aside, I appreciate the recent description of Jules’ real life counterpart by Professor Steven W. Thrasher as the “perfect example of the liberal "upright sodomite" imperial lesbian.”)
Importantly, as Drew Burnett Gregory’s exacting review of Dykette notes, Sasha is not Davis. “Sasha was playful, engaging with persona, being funny,” says the book. There might be some overt similarities; Sasha the author of a viral essay that shares the exact same name as a viral essay by Davis, Sasha the fashion obsessive, Sasha the participant in a certain queer New York milieu. But she is a fictional character. An exaggeration. Text on a page. Someone who feels herself to be “verging on some manic performance, a delirious whim that forced her to embody a hyperbolic persona with lots of attitude and gesticulation.” Melodrama, pasted over irl parallels.
The real does exist, in brief flashes. Cultural objects which age into shared history. Ubiquitous signifiers of a buzzy, carefree millennial lesbianism: Stone Butch Blues, dairy alternatives, the film Boys Don’t Cry. But reality, which this work revels in appropriating, is a mirage. To borrow a dead dyke’s dated aphorism, “There is no there, there.” Every time the novel moves towards a moment of culture, what might have been a definitional outline evaporates. The material stakes of queerness, the danger or precarity of marginalized life, happens off camera.
Leslie Feinberg’s specter is used, both in the aforementioned viral essay and throughout the novel, to demonstrate a certain form of gendered lesbian desire, not to model a revolutionary queer subjectivity. If Dykette is an Instagram post, it is a group photo littered with tagged accounts that no longer exist. Butch means a penchant for crafting. Femme means consumerism. Histories of struggle, the kind of histories which Feinberg insistently explored and named, have been scrubbed clean of texture. They are blank profiles, belonging to since-changed usernames.
My copy of this book is borrowed from my friend Zefyr. She gave me the book when she came to visit me at the end of July in 2023. It was the first time we met in person. When we chatted about my decision to self publish this, she let me know that “full disclosure, i passed [the book] on because i was interested in your thoughts but also wanted to free up luggage space for the flight back. i had no clue what i had unearthed.”
In August of 2023, I undergo breast augmentation. Sore and exhausted, I begin the book while I recover. Zefyr tells me that she knows the people who the characters are based off of. Hers is knowledge gleaned from first hand experience and gossip. The page is both a novel and a series of known blind items. I only understand these scandalous contexts through her. Save for one.
A reader lacking a sense of contemporary dyke vernacular won’t be able to perceive just how referential Davis’ character work is. The fussy older butch seems to be an archetype of anachronistic gender expression, not a reference to a national cable news host. If the audience didn’t see a piece published on The Cut in 2019, which covered the book launch slash drug fueled party thrown for the debut of Rachel Rabbit White’s poetry collection Porn Carnival, how could they have possibly known who Davis was implicitly referring to or basing Darcy’s composite off of? Ambiguity breeds distortion. Characters ride the blurry line between the real and the fictional.
*
If White’s book launch was not on your radar, then certainly a semi-pornographic, collaborative performance piece organized by four sex workers, held over Zoom on May 19th, 2020, would not have made a blip. It centered around a reading of the chapter “How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?” from Deleuze and Guattari’s 1,000 Plateaus – the performance done as an attempt to activate the text.
Three of the sex workers were dominatrices. The fourth, and only transsexual member of the quartet, largely worked in online porn at the time. Accompanying that fourth participant was a surgeon, who never appears fully on camera. The only visual record of the surgeon during the performance are her disembodied hands and the jarring bodily interventions which she makes with them.
When I ask friends to read early drafts of this essay, I try to define the Body without Organs, or “BwO”, without sending a lengthy pdf. It’s easy to acknowledge the human body’s homeostasis, or self-regulation, the kind of accepted information which exists across disciplines. For Deleuze and Guattari, that regulation is a literal and symbolic manifestation of how oppressive structures, like language and capital, limit life’s possible expressions. The BwO is an accessing of the unrestricted body’s potential by disrupting, superseding, or foregoing organization. Possible methods to achieve this include drug use, sadomasochism, and schizophrenia – forces which dysregulate the body to such a degree as to resignify its meaning completely.
“Transgression’s insatiable appetite for intensified stimulation can produce paroxysms that override homeostatic controls, thus contesting the ego’s sovereignty.” From Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou.
It’s hard to tell when the sovereignty of the ego slips into the sovereignty of the state. Leftist psychoanalysis frequently plays with scale; objects of desire function as both individual choices and internalized social scripts writ large. Stakes distort. I wait for the moment when Deleuze or Guattari or Saketopoulou speak about escalating transgression as a force which can disrupt the closed, homeostatic loop of empire. I get tired of waiting. I write a fictionalized version of myself that would behave in ways I never would. I take another slap in the face. I shatter my ego.
On May 19th, 2020, the performance starts. The fourth worker, clad in pink leather gloves, appears on camera chained to a St.Andrew’s Cross. An additional set of eyes have been painted onto her high cheekbones, destabilizing where a viewer is meant to look. Voices begin to intone. Each participant spends a few minutes reading from the dense psychoanalytic text.
After one complete cycle of readings, it comes time for the fourth worker to read again. As she does, the hands from offscreen begin to sew her mouth shut, until a fleshy pucker remains where her lips once were. She whimpers in between words. The reading continues with her body and without her voice. She is removed from the cross and placed onto a thick carpet. The off-camera hands insert a butt plug, before sewing the flesh of her ass cheeks together. “There are, in fact, several ways of botching the Body without Organs,” one sex worker reads. Pressing on the sutures which knit her skin, the surgeon’s hands torture her flesh, prodding the angry surface until it dots with blood.
The form on the ground can no longer hear the words. She has long since ceased reading. Sweat coats her lip, dripping down into the new orifices which ring her mouth. It is one of the few times since starting hormones that she feels her womanhood slip away – her body has been stripped down to its most bare components. She is neutralized flesh. Her meaning is undone. No longer femme or anything approaching it. The reading continues. “It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed.” Riding the line between traumatic shock and horrible presence of mind, groans are heard from just off camera. Noise shudders out of all the newly constructed holes in this Body without Organs.
Detail shot of the performance, May 19th, 2020.
Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis (2023), pg. 223
Darcy’s performance in Dykette largely copies the one above. For 16 pages, from 219 to 235, Sasha and Jules clutch at each other as they witness this appropriated vision of life play out. The audience for Darcy’s performance is far larger than the trim attendance for the irl performance on Zoom, and it is implied to be full of fictional scene-y aesthete Brooklyn art gays.
The disembodied hands which operate on Darcy use a green ribbon instead of surgical string for the sutures. Those off-camera appendages belong to Sasha’s partner Jesse, who is not a medical professional. In the novel, the hands seem to fuck Darcy more than they torture her. At the end of the performance, Darcy pokes an acrylic finger nail through one of the holes which rings her mouth.
These minor altered details aside, it is a set of choreographed actions which Davis herself did not invent. There is no bibliography or footnotes which cite the aforementioned Zoom performance. At the beginning of the book is the standard disclaimer of fiction. It states that all events to come “are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” This legal disclaimer is flimsy and frustrating. Davis did not imagine the performance. Hers is not an ekphrastic response to a piece of art – it’s a copy and paste command.
Fictitiousness implies the imaginary or fabricated. Swapping out pale blue surgical string for the overburdened image of the green ribbon is no more a fantasy than photoshopping one’s face over the Mona Lisa is an effective claim of origination. It’s reappropriation at best, lacking a citation. Fictitiousness defends an author’s right to use reality if they lie about it to such an extent as to make a libel suit impossible. But the lies Davis tells in Dykette are not complicated, or interesting, or even fun. The lie is that Darcy suffered, that she made herself abject and strange.
She did not.
I did.
What exists on Dykette’s pages are an outline of my life with the contents half discarded. My actions are trimmed of meaning, my body is made into a stranger’s metaphor. Last summer, I went on a date to a Michelin starred restaurant with a client. I’m served an appetizer: a hefty dollop of caviar, nestled beneath loquat foam and shavings of cured egg yolk, all inside an empty oyster shell. A container of life, shucked and refilled with something more expensive, more palatable, bearing little resemblance to the original flesh.
When I read the novel, I see the gaps in her body of work where I once was. They are punched out, seamed together via slim fictional invention.
*
Reading the section of Dykette which describe this performance piece – I float out of my body. I am once again made strange to myself. It is August 2023 when I first read it, May 2020 during the performance, and the cold, unfamiliar cabin where Dykette takes place all at once. I lay alone in bed in Oakland. I’m sweating, lying on the floor of a hot room in Richmond, California as distant, husky voices whisper out of a laptop. No one can verify this intrusion into my reality. I fire off a frantic text to Zefyr. She is on East Coast time, asleep and blissfully unaware.
The BwO is a fuzzy concept. It does not have a fixed meaning. The definitions are both context and condition dependent. This does not mean that a fuzzy concept is meaningless; close readings of a situation are necessary in order to determine how the term is being used. When I read the text describing Darcy’s performance, my eyes cross, trying to make out the doubling that’s occurring. She is enduring extreme pain. Her suffering is made meaningful via Sasha’s interpretation, who watches it on Instagram Live. Two contexts coexist on the page.
My history is made ambiguous, fictional. The past actions of my body are painted onto Darcy. I hardly spent time identifying with or sympathizing for her when I first read the work. She is an infamous micro-celebrity, a cis woman, someone described as having the “proportions and the gait of a charmingly clumsy Borzoi”. Sasha loathes her for every reason and no reason. “What I hate is her beauty, her appeal”, Sasha texts her friend Sylvie, with the kind of incensed rage that defines an entitled cis woman made to feel inadequate for even a moment.
Sprinkled between seething lines about Darcy’s body and its beauty compared to Sasha’s, there is the minutiae of my life. It extends down to the specific sense memory of my hand, exhausted from clenching the carpet in pain, trying desperately to get a grip on the lube-slick buttplug inside of me.
In Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” from 1919, the psychoanalyst explores feeling unsettled. The title and term would later be translated as “uncanny” in English. Yet unheimlich possesses a deeper meaning than a generalized strangeness. It describes an object, event, or person which possesses an “un-home-like” quality. It is not something new or unknown. In fact, it is “familiar and old – established in the mind” and this quality of familiarity ensures its psychic disturbance. It is made strange because this known thing is not quite what we expect it to be.
He writes about doppelgangers. How it is a confrontation with a body that is both ours and no longer under our control which disturbs us. I see myself in the text. It is not me. Darcy’s body, the body on the page, has become a home I can no longer live in. Context doubles. The past gets quoted, twisted, occupied by someone who is not me. Sasha, while taking a selfie, admits to “having trouble capturing her whole body because of angles.” Important details are cropped out.
In the Fall of 2023, I reach out to Davis after finishing Dykette, to ask if my suspicions are correct. She tells me that she saw the 2020 performance and was “super inspired by it 💓💓”. In another message, she expresses her hope that I like the reference. She tells me that she’s “so curious to know how it felt to read a fictionalized account of it!!” It has been three years since I spent any time thinking about that brutal afternoon.
I have not kept up with the three sex workers I collaborated with on the performance. Seemingly, it’s no one’s fault. Covid, professional obligations, worsening disabilities, graduate school, breakups, cross-country moves; forces in life which push people apart.
But as I write this essay, I run it by the people who appear in the work, each of them taking turns to read it. What a friend calls “the basic due diligence of life writing”. A courtesy neither I, nor my artistic collaborators, received during the writing of this novel. It feels uncanny to contact the dominatrices I collaborated with. I expect the hazy outline of a certain professional friendship to appear, for things to function how they once did.
After a few pained hours of waiting, B, the dominatrix in the trio who I was once closest to, texts me back. She offers a lengthy, thoughtful response. To her, the wholesale appropriation of our work in Dykette relies on the fact that the four of us are “just whores.” We are not, like Rachel Rabbit White, sex workers who have attempted to legitimize ourselves as creatives by putting our collective pasts behind us. She continues, writing that the four of us have had our labor invisibilized and our work cannibalized. Forcibly made into artistic references. Erased after the fact. Unpaid and uncredited muses.
Jesse, Sasha’s beau and Darcy’s performance partner, is not a sex worker. The one explicit reference to sex work in the novel that I could find is a moment after the performance, in which an enraged Sasha refers to Jesse and Darcy’s “whorish need for attention.” Aside from this insult, which is either gouache in its winking acknowledgement of our appropriated labor, or just unaware and insensitive, sex work does not appear to factor into Dykette at all. Nor does it appear in “High Femme Camp Antics”, despite the copious references to our work and to Feinberg’s writing in Stone Butch Blues, a novel which names again and again the historic interconnections between butch manual laborers and “pros”.
In Dykette, Sasha swooningly gushes over the major arguments in her own essay. Throughout the novel, she performs half-baked gender theory somersault after somersault. Sasha thinks fondly of the moment between Angie and Jess in Stone Butch Blues to explain her own sexuality. “This is an act of sweet imagination,” says the femme in Stone Butch Blues who teaches the butch protagonist how to use a dildo.” But the femme is not just a femme. She’s been paraphrased. Portrayed at an imperfect angle. Angie is a sex worker, someone who Jess first refers to as “turning tricks all night”.
The act of imagination which transpires between them is not simply about portraying a historical form of lesbian sex. It is a moment of reprieve between two people who experience intense police brutality at the hands of the state, who face horizontal violence from the other marginalized people they live alongside, and who are desperate to maintain their capacity for connection and hope. It is the reality of working class gender and sex deviance. Not Rachel Maddow’s cabin in the woods.
In Sasha’s essay, she tells the reader that she thinks about being femme as a politics of exposure. A methodology found in the moment one insists upon their own nakedness, “to bare the ways in which you were totally destructible, and ultimately powerless.” Feinberg, writing in Stone Butch Blues, has a different take. Describing the weeks of recovery after Jess and her friend Ed, a Black butch, experience a violent police attack, “[t]he pain in my rib cage reminded me with every breath how vulnerable I really was.” There is an echo between the texts here, the similarity of the language misrepresenting how different the sentiments truly are. For Feinberg, the vulnerability of the human condition does not terminate in an aestheticized, consumable powerlessness. It is always a reminder for deeper collective action.
Speaking at the Al-Fatiha international retreat in Washington DC in the spring of 2002, Feinberg insistently championed connection. She opens the talk by commenting on what an honor it is “to stand with you here at this critical moment in our shared histories, our interwoven struggles for liberation.” She speaks about reaching across perceived difference. “I do not believe that our sexuality, gender expression and bodies can be liberated without making a ferocious mobilization against imperialist war and racism an integral part of our struggle.” She ends by chanting “Free, free Palestine!” It is a call I have heard echoed, again and again, for the last 9 months.
The embodied history I was taught by Feinberg’s Jess, and by each of the three sex workers in the brief times I knew them for – of labor, of power, of what you risk when your ego is shattered, and of how “risk can solicit the future” – is enormous. There is no way to capture that on a page or in an action. The fictionalized account of that performance which Dykette portrays is both too close to the real situation and changed in a thousand microscopic ways as to be wholly unrecognizable, even to friends of mine who have both read Davis’ book and who were present on the Zoom call that day.
Beyond these material changes made to the kind of eroticized labor being performed on the page, Darcy’s cis-ness disallows a life like mine from existing. Trans life in Dykette, like in most cultural work which lays claim to dyke identity, tends to easily incorporate trans masculinity. However, there is only brief lip service paid to trans womanhood – a Bryn Kelly tweet as epigraph and a barely there side character named Sylvie, one of Sasha’s friends who she occasionally vents to, and who often functions as a mouthpiece, validating Sasha’s most unhinged behaviors.
In a scene after Darcy’s performance, the phallic shape of a cigar inside a vagina is described with – at best – insensitive prose. To read the scene in a more cutting way, there is an un-critiqued transmisogyny which infects the moment. The characters of Dykette find the idea of a woman’s body with a penis to be disgusting.
Our 2020 performance intended to capitalize on similar feelings of disgust. Four people, all with various degrees of investment in economies of abjection, wanting to explore exactly what escalating transgression far beyond any socially-accepted fantasies could yield.
*
I reread Dykette ahead of writing this. I find myself rapt with the way that Sasha’s disgust towards Darcy is written. I know that the woman on the page, arguably the antagonist of the novel, is not me. But I cannot help myself. I contextualize. Bend the light. Find my angle. I take it personally.
Sasha spends pages of the novel stalking Darcy’s Instagram. It is a normal and normalized behavior – one that my friends and I often do in order to size up queer people online. Who do we want to fuck, who do we find funny, who do we want to feel justified in hating? Sasha interprets Darcy’s posts, scrying them for meaning. “In the picture, Darcy is taking a mirror selfie, and she’s pursing her lips in a way that’s supposed to look self-awarely seductive, like she’s making fun of herself for trying to look “sexy” but also insisting that she does look sexy”. I project my experience of posting a selfie onto the passage. I catch myself committing a reading. Feelings of awareness, irony, and the desire to be desired all colliding.
Even before Darcy and her trans-masc boyfriend Lou arrive at Dykette’s claustrophobic cabin, we are treated to a description of Sasha’s distaste for her. “This was what she found most repulsive about Darcy – how Darcy made her, Sasha, feel misunderstood.” It would not be the first time that a cis lesbian has felt threatened by my existence due to their inability to see me as anything more than an image. Instead of personhood, I symbolize some heady concept; plasticity, violence, beauty. This reading affords the cis lesbian a chance to ignore her own imperfect gender and its performance, an obliviousness she cultivates to ensure the psychic coherence of her own life. I realize again how easy it is to equate my experiences with Darcy’s. Darcy isn’t me is a mantra I must repeat over and over in order to believe it. Without it, I find myself in every scene.
Darcy isn’t me. And there is no way for Darcy, or her life spent trapped within Dykette’s words, to experience my version of the performance. A permanent, puckered dot lies just below the right corner of my lip. It is where the sutures punctured me. It is the material stakes of having a vulnerable body. Darcy can disappear into the ether after the plot is done. Her performance is finished. There is no dot.
When I message Davis back, I tell her that reading the section brought up some “interesting feelings” for me. “I think I need to sit with them for a bit so I can uncover what’s past my gut level, but I might write something about it (cliché of course but what else is there to do)”.
What I write to her is half true. I am confused. But I also know what some of my emotions are; they cycle between disbelief, grief, and rage. Each time I speak about the passage with a friend, a chill of unreality ripples through my body. It is the same feeling I had when first reading the work in 2023. Incredulous shock dawns on me whenever I think about the willingness to take this performance, insert a detail or two, and call it fiction. Beneath all of this is a second layer of indignity.
The piece itself was brutal. It is the most extreme and acute pain I have ever come up against. My body went into shock during it. Each time the suture needle punctured me, I felt as if I might faint. For her to erase the details which define my body, the body that was singularly capable of enduring the pain of that moment, is insulting.
But my grievances at our artistic labor being erased are impolite. They are emotions which would be considered an extreme reaction, something easily punishable with the techniques of social disposal. A punitive force all too familiar to marginalized people and a coercive tool used to constrain expression. They are feelings which do not get me invited to publishing lunches or networking events or help me make professional connections. I once felt desperate to foster that success. To get a book deal. To have my work recognized. I bite my tongue. It is a vain, careerist impulse.
In May, a reading series in New York hosts its first event, named after the title of an Amiri Baraka poem. “Against Bourgeois Art”. A different reading series, this one in Los Angeles and entitled “Revolutionary Letters”, features a burning cop car on the flier. I pitch this essay to a dozen magazines and get rejected by all of them. Editors “admire” the writing, or find it “compelling”. Some think it is worthy of a “higher-profile publication”, an accolade which would be useful if not for the ways in which high profile publications have spent nine months manufacturing consent for genocide. The coffee shop near my house, the one with Palestinian flags adorning the menu, always has a box of free produce outside for people in the neighborhood to select from. So I offer this essay for free. At least then, it can’t be stolen.
Back in 2023, just a few weeks after I read Dykette, my work is appropriated again.
*
My most popular Tiktok to date, posted on September 20th, 2023, is Troye Sivan. It is not inspired by, commenting on, or interpreting Troye Sivan. It is a screen recording I took of his music video, “Got Me Started”. He dances forward with an exaggerated hip thrust, gyrating snakelike towards the camera. Text overlaid on the video, text which I wrote, reads “my gay sleep paralysis demon dancing toward me at 4 am”.
On the November 10th, 2023 episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Timothée Chalamet, a sketch begins with a woman, played by Sarah Squirm, suffering from insomnia. Bowen Yang is a nurse technician. He tells her that a new machine will show her what this sleep paralysis figure is. This technology allows her to stay awake, in order to confront this horror. Chalamet appears as Sivan in the “Got Me Started Video”. He dances near her bed-bound form. He is her gay sleep paralysis demon.
My signature is erased from the joke. I hate how petty I feel I need to be in response to these moments. A toddler, an aggrieved homeowner, a dog with food scarcity – indignant that something I think of as my possession might be under threat. My roommate jokingly suggests that I should feel grateful. My humor is sharp enough to be stolen by a venerated New York cultural institution. I bite my tongue. I write. I read about Tina Fey teling Bowen Yang that “authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” But the cost only matters if a career built on staying silent is one worth having.
I do not get paid in exposure. I hear the audience laugh at the Sivan sketch while I gnaw on my cheek. My body and my work are in separate rooms. How many more times am I asked to rationalize this discomfort with the hope of eventual recognition?
It seems my art is most palatable when it is taken out of my mouth. Or, my art is most marketable and capable of being broadcast when the woman attached to the username disappears. When my transsexual body, my sex working body, my body which labors for a liberated future – those uncomfortable asterisks serving as an insistence on difference – is left out of the conversation.
Plagiarism comes from a Greek root meaning kidnapping. I see my ideas sliced up and repurposed. Letters from magazines, glued together to make a ransom note. I am not the first trans woman whose cultural contributions are successful only when I cease to be involved. I would love to ignore the emotions I attach to what I have created.
Before I finish writing this version of the essay, an earlier portion of it is read at a performance I do in November of 2023. It is my first piece of performance art since the sutures, over three years earlier. It is entitled “Cut The Ribbon”. In it, three friends encircle me; one reads from Deleuze and Guattari, another from Dykette, and a third from this work. As they do, a length of pink ribbon is passed from me and through each of their hands. When we reach the end of the spool of ribbon, a fourth friend surgically attaches it to my body with hypodermic needles. The piece is not just responding to Davis. It is trying to materialize how any writing I have a relationship with, even my own, cannot fully reflect my life. Myself, and everyone I know, are ensnared by narratives which are outside of our control. In a single flourish at the end of the piece, the ribbon is removed. The surgeon, whose hands activated something similar a few years prior, watches it happen from the audience. Afterwards, once the blood has been wiped away, I chat about it with her.
At one of McKenzie Wark’s “Writing on Raving” events which she attended, the surgeon hears a piece read about her, one which painted a less than kind portrait. She shared with me that she felt a similar estrangement to the one I had while reading Dykette – her body and her actions had ceased to be her own. They had become images puppeteered by another person. This story is not remarkable. For many, life has become indistinguishable from content. It is cat person, it is a video essay, it is the addendum at the end of Stone Butch Blues which insists that “the reader hear Jess Goldberg’s own words”, words which, while fictional and written by Feinberg, portray an insistently real world.
I confront the gap between my body as subject and Darcy’s as object. I stare down the violence on the page while recalling the violence done to me. The events of the performance are imbued with meaning by Sasha, whose main character narcissism interprets the performance as some referendum on her own desirability. I interpret Dykette as some referendum on the kind of art I’ve chosen to make – often uncomfortable and abject.
I fix my makeup. I work. I send the money I earn to Palestine. I do it again. I look at pictures of myself from a year ago, and feel frustrated with her priorities. It’s uncanny, seeing someone who looks exactly like me behave so differently.
*
In Davis’ last messages to me, she tells me that she’s glad that I’m going to write about my experience. That it is necessary for me to “complete the cliché gay writer loop 🍭”. Instead of a Porn Carnival-esque ketamine fantasia for a book launch, Davis opted for hot pink merchandise with Dykette airbrushed on to them, to be handed out to friends and influencers. She offers to give me some. I consider it. Who else can say they own a trucker hat which involves such oblique self-reference? A commodity fetish to sell a commodity fetish which contains my extracted work, worn on my commodified body. It’s perverse. I want to know how many more layers of alienation I can wrap myself in.
In a scene after Darcy’s performance, Sasha and Jesse lie in bed. They are frustrated with one another: Sasha because she feels that Jesse has betrayed her by fucking Darcy in the performance, Jesse because he saw the sex act as a part of the performance. They bicker like schoolchildren. The two attempt to define what the emotional landscape would be if Sasha had been the hands. Jesse says that he wouldn’t be upset. “I’d understand that it was art. Like your writing–it’s not real.”
The real at the end of Jesse’s sentence is italicized in the novel. It drives home the point to the reader in the most didactic way. Sometimes a thing can be both real and fictional. Calling a strap-on a cock. Saying that my body has a pussy. Labeling all fictional events imaginary. That lies are never true.
“Everything We Write Will be Used Against Us” in LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism. vol.1, 2012.
As my MFA thesis advisor, the writer Trisha Low, tells me when we discuss my autofiction, the unreality on the page is just as important as the reality which it bookends. There are consequences for your life outside of the text. Responsibility beyond the body of the work. Scars which remind you that the past is real. She has seen friendships fractured by the fictionalization of reality. Life writing demands acute care, because your life is never just your own. Our lives are shaped by and accountable to everyone involved in them, even through the most flimsy and parasocial of connections. She tells me these stakes are important “because life writing is built on relationality”.
I am as fictional as Darcy. I joke about having lore. I focus on certain events in my life and they create a cohesive narrative trajectory. The ones which don’t are forgotten or ignored. I am a composite of reference points, lumps of projection, and a nice helping of transsexual sociality, all huddled inside of a trench coat.
None of the words used to describe Darcy fully encapsulate her body or what it undergoes. Despite the ease of plagiarizing a source text, the novel cannot capture my experience. Rarely, if ever, is prose able to hold the body in all of its complicated entirety. The angles are imperfect. The ego shatters. Some pieces are named, while the rest are left on the ground. No matter how kaleidoscopic the perspective, slivers of life always go missing.