I remember throwing spa days for my teddy bears, and scrubbing their imaginary genitals like Lady Macbeth. And later, I remember being told to scrub my own genitals – to remove all scent from my own vagina. And later, keeping wet wipes in my school bag, and scrubbing, fearing I would be clocked. And later, learning that the vagina cleans itself. And lastly, meeting men with vaginas, feeling human again.
The two of us once volunteered to vacuum the entire church estate. The main hall had a silver saucer of a window above the alter, that sterilised all in its purview – but under the pretense of vacuuming, we broke away from the clergy into abandoned rooms. Rooms where mould abounded; rooms whose lights gawked at us. Rooms short of breath, with shuddering piles of paraphernalia. These were true homes of prayer and philosophy. Rooms for drama, for hyperbole, confession.
The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See (2009) was a live open gallery performance. Zachary Drucker laid on a morgue table in open gallery, on their back, near naked. Composed in repose. Drucker’s recorded voice demanded each participant take a tweezer, and pluck every visible hair from the body before them. ‘Don’t be afraid, the bitch can take it’, Drucker chanted, rough unmusical sounds in the background: the ocean gagging. Whitewater.
‘Imagine this body is a receptacle of your guilt and shame and trauma, your feelings of inadequacy, of being unlovable and being diseased and being a failure in all areas of your life’.
As we vacuumed, she told me about a time years ago when she’d fallen from grace. It was late night shopping – she was taking out the late-night trash. She’d been back and forth between the dumpster and food court all night and right near the end of shift, a bag had broken – hundreds of bottles and cans hitting the floor at once. Families had watched, curious but cautious. Counting the silent seconds. She’d sat there, dabbing her sodden apron, symbiosising with the filth. No one came to comfort her. Some contemplated it. But decided it was too risky, that she might contaminate them too.
‘Then what happened?’
‘I carried on.’ She replied ‘Didn’t have time to clean myself up.’
I wanted her to keep talking. I knew she had grislier stories. I wanted to tell her my stories, to dig up my dirt.
But she quickly moved on to more immediate concerns. ‘Do we have another extension cord?’
As we wrapped up for the day, I spotted radioactive juice leaking from the basement ceiling.
‘Should we call a plumber?’
She shook her head, then vanished, and came back with her sleeves rolled up and a peg on her nose, a toolbox swinging by her side.
The word abject has Latin etymological origins. Abiectus is a literal sense is something cast aside, outcast.
I wished I could slough myself – the versions people preferred, where I conformed, presented as female, heterosexual. Hand those out, let them filmily talk and do and be, so that my real self, my truest, strange slip of a body could walk more peacefully, alone, but at ease.
Voice of The Fishes by Lars Horn
The term ‘abjection’, however, hails from Julia Kristen’s Powers of Horror. It defines the abject as having only ‘one quality of object and that is being opposed to I’. Under the umbrella of abject, she includes ‘substances that cross the body’s boundaries, for example tears, faeces, urine and menstrual fluids’. In Blood, Death and Fear, Philosophy and Art in Relation to the Myth of Womanhood, Marta Tuznik writes ‘Although is nothing closer or more familiar to the human being than his own body …’, when subject to abjection, ‘it can become estranged and unfamiliar’.
This definition – restricted to matter ejected from and exchanged between bodies – has been replaced in recent years by a definition with social and political relevance, abjection as the dehumanisation of all marginalised communities. ‘This term can be used to think of the instability of gendered and/or sexed bodies – especially those occupied by transgender individuals’, writes Robert Phillips. Transgender bodies ‘… defy the borders of systemic order by refusing to adhere to clear definitions of sex and gender’ and violating the boundaries ‘internal and external’. The challenge this presents to the social parameters of ‘the ‘normal,’ the ‘natural,’ the ‘scientifically justifiable,’ the ‘real’, has, on a global scale, inspired violent and regressive legislation, aimed at restoring social order.
Abjection is a hallmark of transgender poetics. Horn, for example, in their experimental lyric essay collection, Voice of The Fishes, writes that their gender exists ‘… unseen, unworded, unintelligible …’, that they can only ‘articulate the body as tension, contradiction’, as ‘vessel, as carrier’, ‘body a hot red thing of openings, convulsing with the world’. From a young age, Horn understood that to stray beyond gender was to stray beyond human.
‘I am grateful for my body … but I do experience it as distance, as transient shell that I will walk out of in the same way I walked in. I identify with the gazes put upon it. Their exteriority …’
