Clarice Lispector + Susan Stryker
Talking Monsters.
No. 02
A conversation with Clarice Lispector via Agua Viva and Susan Stryker…with a touch of Mckenzie Wark.
I don’t like gender. It doesn’t feel exploratory. To be “read as ___” is boring, and falsely assumptive to me. It negates the work of learning and knowing another, it negates the necessity of curiosity. It assumes too much and does too much work that then inevitably is undone. Or if it is not it flattens and mimics. Maybe my mind will change. Most thoughts do. Or they mutate to be premised in meaninglessness. But i also need you to not need or expect me to change my mind. This is important.
Reading Stryker I wondered out loud whether monster was useful for us to identify with the Other as liberatory practice. Wark said of course. For some reason this made me angry. Stryker said it is like reclaiming whore or slut or gay. No it’s not. It’s not. Maybe it’s still useful to Be Monster, but it’s not the same. To be gay whore slut is only bad or wrong if the thing it describes is assumed bad or wrong. The terms themselves are not indicative of a description of “badness” itself. Monster - is. Monster reflects the subjective speaker. It does the work of communicating that which is harmful, ugly, and feared. It does not generate or prescribe specific actions or traits as whore slut gay do. Monster does the work of being flexible, to be specifically and exclusively defined by those who use it. Monster is the judgement itself, not the identity or practice that is judged.
I did not say any of this to her. Why would I when I wouldnt be heard. And Wark did not explain or change my mind. I was disappointed by this. I learned nothing. I changed my mind later. I changed my mind when I embraced the monster for myself because i didnt want the human described as human by those who use Monster. Which is almost exactly what Stryker said. id rather be the creature they feared. i would rather be the thing feared than the boundaried saltless human they want. To them, I am a monster and she is a monster. But, to me, so are you. And so the speaker of Monster is Monster. They just don’t know it yet. Which really means we are all human again too. It all is the same metaphor for the same creature. Mary tried to tell us.
Monster isn’t a slur to be reclaimed, it is diagnostic of the speaker, diagnostic of their prescription of “human.” But as with gender and race and most things, human and monster equally drift, shift, blur, glitch, slide, drip.
Boundarilessness is wordlessness.
Sometimes it’s hard to speak words when words mean everything and never nothing.
How can I speak when not all can hear and how can I gesture when not all can see and how can I touch when not all can feel and how can I whisper when you are so far and how can I shout when the wind snatches thought and how can i write when youre not there. And how can i share when i cannot feel. What is left to be said, communciated, shared when it is all and all everything and you already know anyway?
Like photoshop attempting to distinguish one pixel from the next to form an edge, a selection. How often it gets those pixels wrong. A corner of a nose blends with the skin of another’s stomach. Even when we tell it which pixels to look for a shirt rubs off on the moon. How can I gender when it’s boundariless and how can i race when it fictious except for how we live it in body against body atom against atom and so we speak in poems and riddles and metaphors and analogies and monsters and words. And so words become genders become races become types become categories become All of us monsters, but not all of us Narccissus. That is the secret. We are all monsters. But speaking to no one. But us.