Fish In the Afternoon

Butchfemme

January 8th, 2025

There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. – Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

There is no such thing as gender. There are genderings. To gender, as a verb. One genders by echoing a history, intending futures and expressing pasts in attending to the present. Genderings are performances of intending-attending-expressing suspended between past-present-future, the full significance of which is only found in the interconnection between them. One attends to the world as the gender they unfold, but this attending is incarnated from an en-habiting of a past-present-future relation. This en-habiting is en-worlding; every gendering reveals a world.

One is not a woman but womans. When I woman, I attend to myself and others by en-habiting a world that echoes a past of womanings and intends a future womaning. (Think of this as Trinitarian: creating-begetting-proceeding is perichoretic, her personhood only revealed in the indwelling relations of the three. This perichoresis is also kenotic, in that each self-empties into the others. The doings of the Trinity, her energeia, are en-homed actions, the whole of the doma unveiling creation as One-in-Many and Many-in-One. Such too is intending-attending-expressing and past-present-future. Intending-attending-expressing is perichoretically kenotic, each doing only signifying as its self through the interpenetration of the three, which empties each into the others. That is, it is not only that when one intends they also attend and express, but that what it means to intend is only sensible through what it means to attend and express simultaneously. Each is empty-of-self but full-of-others. Meaning is gifting. Likewise with past-present-future. The past is not only kenotically revealed through dwelling in the present while being oriented towards certain futures, but it also perichoretically unfolds from the present and future. The echoic history pasts by presenting and futuring.)

Lesbians lesbian in their womaning. Desiring emerges from intending-attending-expressing. One desires another and unveils their desiring intentions by attending to the desired-one and, in doing so, expressing the hoped-for future of one’s desires. Thus, sexual orientation: I lean in my desires to the desired-one. A sexual or romantic orientation is a meta-category of desirings that groups them according to a family resemblance. One is a lesbian because she desires those who woman (or unfold ways of en-habiting the world that emerge in relationship with womaning), and she unveils this desire by attending to those she desires and expressing a future with them, whether for hours, months, years, or forever. Likewise, one is heterosexual because they desire those who conventionally gender in ways opposite to them (where this opposition is highly culturally-bound), unveiling their desire by attending to those they desire and expressing a future with them. As with intending-attending-expressing and past-present-future more broadly, these desirings are perichoretic and kenotic: when one lesbians, she simultaneously intends, attends to, and expresses her lesbianing across a relationship of past-present-future.

However, these desirings are not reducible solely to those that are conventionally sexual or romantic in nature (however difficult it would be to determine that in the first place). These desirings are also genderings. One lesbians not solely by sexually or romantically desiring another, but through patterning these desires as a quilt woven from the lesbianing of others. How one lesbians is informed by how one genders and how one genders is informed by how one lesbians. This quilt is as detailed as the Uniques that compose it, each lesbianing in their uniquing and togethering, ultimately patterning into constellations of gender roles and gender expressions — that is, into a queer cosmos. Within this cosmos there are gardens of well-cultivated genders, two of which are butch and femme, togethering with one another as butchfemme. Butchfemme is a form-of-life that lesbian togethers form over time within their echoic history. This form-of-life generates a dance of intertwined patterns of activity, ways of gendering as femme and butch. This disco of unfolding souls unravels a shared lesbian placetime, where one’s genderings occur in echoic resonance with the genderings of others. Echoic resonance orients the togethering of these genderings towards the common heart of the community; in fact, it is this echoic resonance and the intertwining of Unique genderings in the together of butchfemme that marks it as a community. However, echoic resonance is not reducible to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. There is no set definition to femme or butch, because there are no gender definitions at all. What it is to be femme or butch is determined by one’s gendering and lesbianing within an echoic history. Butchfemme expresses an ocean of different resonant frequencies, each repeating and transforming one another in forming a lesbian pluricosmos, a Sapphic chorus.

Gender is not a thing but a doing, an en-habiting and en-worlding. When I woman, I playfully self-create, using the womanings of others as the echoic content of that play. Likewise, in womaning, I reveal a world and en-habit it, my womaning also a dwelling arising from the en-habited echoic resonance of the womanly forms-of-life that I sprout from. In then womaning as a lesbian, I intend, attend to, and express my desires, the ways my womaning is interwoven with those of who I desire and the communities of desiring that I echo in my activity. All our lives form a great orchestra and within this orchestra are an infinite range of improvisations, each emerging from a ground of harmonies that gift meaning to our play. In bouncing off of the patterned echoes of butchfemme life, I locate myself as a world, within a world, among other worlds — in a solar system of the ever-unfolding cosmos of genderings within which I dwell. From the history of queer life I creatively re-constitute myself again-and-again, a melody in the symphony of life.

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant ‘existing things’ does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like ‘woman,’ ‘butch,’ ‘lesbian,’ or ‘transsexual’ are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism. – Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex

Image: Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne by Marie Laurencin (1913)
Ithaca

January 6th, 2025

Sweetest of the sunflowers, yeah, you’re the sun to me. – Zach Bryan

There is no one else in the world but us.

You appeared after the tornado, newly-breathing the rush of time in a lightly-held cafe. I saw you; you saw me. You asked me: do you prefer handsome or pretty? And when you called me pretty I felt my heart echo back: her. Our knees nestled, my motions careful, timid — do you mean it? Do you see me? Do you hear me? I felt your breath threaded like cashmere in the candlelight, and our lips hovered in the aching-potential of the summer air. You held out your hand and I asked if I could kiss you. No one had ever offered their hand to me; no one had ever asked you for a kiss. There was no one else in the world but us.

Intertwined in the ever-wyrded ellipsis of Ozarkia, we traveled north. Don’t worry, the armadillo is fine. Barely-moving, trying not to wake you, I saw you. I saw you and knew I’d share my life with you. And time crawled to a still as the sun rose, the stained glass of God’s architecture shimmering the new morning. And I held you; and you held me. The next morning, we traveled by ambulance and I met your parents. For a few moments, I was only a corpse, possibility frozen in place as my teeth chattered fear. Bonewhite knuckles sweating over a 911 call and an earth-soul walking me through. You first saw me cry in the ER, forehead to forehead solid-as-stone. Everything’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay. There’s no one else in the world but us.

We woke up the next day to a rabbit’s paw. June joyed and June wept, and in the in-between we rhythmed a new life, coalescing into our happy home. No Brain July. And there it was that the future unveiled itself, a new beginning after many apocalypses; strawberry sugar and vanilla cake and honeysuckle atmosphering eternity as Teddy tossed to-and-fro in the grass of our backyard. My family: you and me and Luna and Teddy and Sable, voyaging uncertainty to find ourselves again in the hearth of one another. I now had someone (someones) to miss; I now had someone (someones) to live for. I now had us. And even in the steel of Empire, the fact remained: there is no one else in the world but us.

I don’t know if I’ve ever conveyed what you mean to me. Before I met you, my mouth was dry and my bones ached. A mountain collapsing into itself, I avalanched into the void, only to be caught again by an angel. For years, my skin stung and my breath shortened, heartaches and heartattacks constricting subjectivity into fear. I took a saw to womanhood and clawed at the boundaries of my soul until it resembled jagged glass.But, under the maple, you freckled my heart with threads of light, giggling rebirth. You said to me I know you and held my hand as I transformed, resurrecting Penelope from the ashes. Through anxiety and death and mourning and uncertainty, we wove ourselves into the bark of one another, a single oak tree emerging from two. And to that oak I return (again-and-again), to our Ithaca of primrose and thyme. To you, my Odysseus. And I know, our souls tethered together in the morninglight of coming-spring, that I always have a home there. There, swaying gently in the breeze on our back porch. There, building Lego and inhaling incense in the evening calm. There, tracing symbols on the backs of our hands, holding each other through ember and frost. There, where there is no one else in the world but us.

And every time I ask: would you fall in love with me again? And you answer back with every breath: I will. And there we remain, and there we return, and there we journey again and again – to Ithaca, to Rogers, to home. To where there is no one else in the world but us.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. – James Joyce, Ulysses Ch. 18: Penelope

Image: Country Garden with Sunflowers by Gustav Klimt (1905-1906)
Transitions #8

December 30th, 2024
In trans women’s eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognised as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
In a trans woman’s eyes, I see someone who understands that, in a culture that’s seemingly fuelled on male homophobic hysteria, choosing to be female and openly expressing one’s femininity is not a sign of frivolousness, weakness or passivity, it is a fucking badge of courage. – Julia Serano, Whipping Girl

This is a common transmisogynistic pattern of thought:
```
P1: Women’s bodies are inherently sexual. That is: to be a woman is to be a sex object.
P2: Men only dress and act like women as part of a sex act - because they desire to be a sex object.
P3: Trans women are men who dress and act like women.
C: Trans women are engaging in a public sex act, the content of which is to present herself as a sex object.
```
P1 is generally unspoken, while P2-3 may be explicitly affirmed in defending C. This pattern leads to a wide range of injustices, including public bathroom laws, three articles laws, bans on drag performances, bans on gender affirming care, and the “trans panic defense” as a justification for murder. Since we (trans women) are, according to this line of thought, engaging in a public sex act, we can be regulated and punished. Using a public restroom becomes sexual harassment, wearing women’s clothing become public indecency, drag performances become sex work, gender affirming care for minors becomes grooming, and murder is justified because trans sexuality is a form of coercive trickery. There is a clear line from trans women being sex objects, to the everyday activity of trans women being a sex act, to violence and oppression and deprivation.

Notably, there are some redundancies in the reasoning and it can consistently be presented as such:
```
P1: Women’s bodies are inherently sexual. That is: to be a woman is to be a sex object.
P2: Trans women are women.
C: Trans women are engaging in a public sex act, the content of which is to present herself as a sex object.
```
P2 and 3 in the original argument are sometimes presented as justifications for the connection between P1 and C. This is because the person who engages in this pattern of thought does not typically affirm that trans women are women, and so must explain why they still fit the sexual object role. Cross-dressing or similar actions or identities are therefore used as both a bridge and a smokescreen. However, this move is only at the surface. What drives the transmisogynistic argument is an internal affirmation that trans women are women without an external or public affirmation. Trans women are oppressed as women, but part of this oppression is to for our identity as women to be denied. However, the denial of our womanhood only works because we are women.

Many of the forms of oppression trans women face are variations on women’s oppression more broadly. If you are a woman, it is safer to use public restrooms in a group. If you are a woman, you must self-monitor your appearance to avoid dangerous interactions and a loss of social status. If you are a woman, anything you create will be interpreted according to your perceived sexual value. If you are a woman, changing or expressing or valuing your body is an impurity and invitation to unwanted sexual behavior. And, if you are a woman and you are assaulted or even murdered, it is justified because all women want it and all women are temptresses. In all of these cases, we, as both trans and cis women, are reduced to sex objects, are denied our autonomy, self-ownership, and safety, and are subject to the property(object)-owning authority of men.

Misogyny is the pervasive dehumanization of women, and it takes different shapes depending on how our womanhood is perceived. All women are criminals for the misogynist, but what the crime is may differ. The crime of the trans woman is to be assigned a different sex at birth and to transition, but it is only a crime because we are women. The denial of the transmisogynist is self-defeating, because their accusations only work with the presumption of affirmation. Transmisogyny is misogyny and the liberation of women generally and of trans women in particular is biconditional. To abolish transmisogyny we must abolish misogyny and to abolish misogyny we must abolish transmisogyny. Trans liberation is a necessary path in defeating patriarchy.
```
Let me listen to me and not to them
May I be very well and happy
May I be whichever they can thrive
Or just may they not.
They do not think not only only
But always with prefer
And therefore I like what is mine
For which not only willing but willingly
Because which it matters. They find it one in union.
In union there is strength.
- Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation
```
Image: Man and Woman I by Edvard Munch (1905)
Askesis

December 18th, 2024
Life is a classroom, darlin’. – Katie

Thoughts are patterned motions. We drift ever-worldly into new futures, ripples of intended attention oceaning the mental fabric of the Unique. We are not calculators, but dwellers, being-here, being-now, and being-together. In intending, we set out together into the sea of time; in attending, we hold each other in our here-and-nows; in meaning, we say: “I know you.” λογισμός. To reason, to think, to decide. I decide and decide-again each and every day: to measure time by our togethering, to nest forever in our doma. I know you. I earth with you.

Virtue is the art of wisely earthing-together. Art: to make, to create, to play. κινοῦν. That which forms. Wisdom: to nurture, to heal, to do rightly. τέλος. That which is formed. Earthing: to gather, to till, to plant. ὕλη. That which we form from. Together: to dance, to sing, to live. εἶδος. The pattern of en-forming. The virtue of each Unique is its playful self-creation and the flourishing of the together it forms in its Uniquing. The virtue of Penelope is to self-create as Penelope and to attend to my dwelling with you. We art in loving one another; we wisdom in holding each other; we earth in tending to our home; We together in becoming a family.

Entering as equals, we en-place our souls in the forest of other-worlds, dancing the cycle of birth and decay. Planting and harvesting, reaping and sowing, tending and growing. Praying our future in every step, we psalm our every season, our songs floating time like a lily in strawberry wine. My Katie, whose dreams melody morning from twilight, beaming the coming dawn. My Katie, whose life smiles tomorrow, moments-together growing in warm-oak streams of belonging. My Katie, whose breath traces our unfolding, drifting mindful into the silk of nature. My Katie — my every day, my always — freckles gardening the here-and-now of our common-being, souling our honeylovely togethering. My Katie. In every world, we find each other; in every world we make a home together; in every world we wrap ourselves in the warm amber of our common-soul. In every world we say: I know you, I love you, I’m here. My Katie. My Sunshine. My home.
```
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
You make me happy
When skies are gray
You'll never know, dear
How much I love you

- The Pine Ridge Boys, probably
```
Image: The Valley of Sasso, Sunshine by Claude Monet (1884)
Transitions #7

December 5th, 2024

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. – Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

I am a world, in a world, among other worlds. In my unfolding, I dwell in the placetime that grows in the commons, neither mine nor theirs. This placetime appears to me already value-laden, matterings layering on the architecture of my dwelling so that each part appears as-something and for-something. This is a chair and it is for sitting. This is a fork and it is for eating. This is a man… no, wait, a woman… no, wait… That… thing… is disjoint: out-of-place, catawampus, crooked, flawed, failed, an object of suspicion and irritation and intervention. Matterings are not solely a projection of myself onto the world, but the projections of others onto me. Matterings co-constitute the world we inhabit, creating the grammar by which we make sense of ourselves and our activity. We appear to ourselves as a mattering that is both self-created and projected by others, and which may then appear as either a site of liberation or a prison. I am a woman, they see me as a man; I am both self-creating and disjoint, both an artwork and a failure.

Dysphoria. Dys-pherein. To-carry-suffering, to-bear-affliction, to-dwell-in-pain. Dysphoria is the experience that one’s own body is the origin and vessel of suffering, an ontological harm borne from ontological injustice. Ontological harm: suffering located in things-in-themselves, the elements that are constitutive of the world or a part of the world. I experience my body not only as a site of harm, but as the harm itself: my body is the pain that I endure, and this pain seems constitutive of what it means for me to inhabit my body in the first place. Importantly, this rests on a mistake: ‘the body’ does not exist, much less is it inherently valenced. Our being-enfleshed is not an original sin. Instead, ontological injustice generates ontological harm. Ontological injustice: when the intersubjective co-constitution of the world itself produces unjust relationships and harm that seem inherent to things-in-themselves.

The experience of my body as ontologically harmful is generated from the ways that my experience of my body has been co-constituted by the system of matterings I dwell in, matterings that are themselves racialized, classed, gendered, and which project a parochial world-picture onto the cosmos as a whole. Why do I experience my body this way? Because through this world-picture, (1) my internal mapping of my body is disjoint from the map provided for me as a male-assigned person, (2) this internal map seems to be generated from the body-itself (the call is coming from inside the house!) such that not only is my map disjoint but so is my body, (3) such disjoint gender-experiences are not neutral in the external map but are negatively-valenced and associated with abjectivity and monstrousness, so that (4) I experience my body as abject and monstrous and my desires as a pathological or alien corruption, an infection rooted in the thing-in-itself. Kristeva here is illustrative: abjection emerges from the exclusion of those that lie outside the norms and rituals of the social order, and is experienced as a trauma, as a schism or separation from the world that marks one off as monstrous.

This is one reason even cis people experience gender dysphoria. The gender-forms that we aim at are not real patterns of embodiment, but a projection onto those patterns. The world-picture we receive pictures women and men not as they appear in the world but as they are expected to appear, creating a negative valence in any appearance or experience of the body that is disjoint from the specter we aim at. The ontological injustice of the world-picture aims at trans people because we operate outside the cis dyad that beats at the heart of the picture. However, trans oppression is one manifestation of the Leviathanic system that regiments gender and embodiment in general. We are the monsters, but every person sees a monster in themselves whenever they do not fit the picture: being disjoint becomes experienced as an alienating infection that separates each of us from who we’re supposed to be. Except that no one has ever met those standards. No one’s body fully accords with the forms imaged in the world-picture. Everyone has some monster in them.

The promise of trans liberation is not only that we will be freed from our oppression and be able to live and flourish as we are and as we desire to be. It is that, and that is what must be centered in our struggle. But — trans liberation also means breaking-apart the world-picture that ensnares everyone in gender oppression. It means uprooting the system of ontological injustice that alienates us from our bodies. It means the systematic abolition of dysphoria. That is why trans liberation must also be for the abolition of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of ableism, of fatphobia, of capitalism, and of imperialism. Each of these forms of oppression intertwine in the world-picture of what our bodies should look like, what they should do, and what we should do with them. Abolishing the world-picture won’t set the world right, but it will set on fire the system of ontological injustice that causes us to locate harm in ourselves, in our bodies and minds and the world itself. The world-picture of Leviathan is one that spiders out to being-itself, and in order to free ourselves from injustice we must also smash that picture. Liberation is iconoclasm.

I didn’t regret the decision to take hormones. I
wouldn’t have survived much longer without passing. And the surgery was a gift to myself, a coming home to my body. But I wanted more than to just barely exist, a stranger always trying not to get involved. I wanted to find out who I was, to define myself. Whoever I was, I wanted to deal with it, I wanted to live it again. I wanted to be able to explain my life, how the world looked from behind my eyes. – Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Image: Nocturnal Voyage by Ivan Aivazovsky (19th c.)

Butchfemme

Ithaca

Transitions #8

Askesis

Transitions #7