IDENTITY IN THE FACE OF MYTH

& An oblique reading of Hannah Baer’s TRANS GIRL SUICIDE MUSEUM, among other texts

Preface: This is very messy. I think I am going to let it stay messy because now, several paragraphs into part one and coming back to the beginning to mark this preface upon the page, I think it needs to stay messy at this point, or else I risk reducing the point to something more digestible, or maybe legible, and, maybe ironically, I think reducing the core of this post to a sort of legible thesis is actually at odds with itself? Anyway, this is not a cope, this is an intention.

. . .

Pt 1., Friday 7/19

I finished reading Hannah Baer’s Trans Girl Suicide Museum today, which has been this week’s treadmill book. I honestly can’t remember why I ended up with it, what lead me to it, but when I opening it up I (for some reason, probably because of the title?) was expecting some vestige of alt-lit transmuted into the trans culture economy of the 2020s, but instead what I got was a markedly insightful examination of how experience and the way social justice discourse occurs often never quite mesh in a way that feels anything other than conciliatory to “the middle.” 

I have never personally felt conflicted in how I experience my own gender, but I regularly experience a very distinct contrast between my sort of, well, inner self? in contrast to the way the world at large operates, from any given perspective (economic, cultural, etc.). There is, to me, a lot of overlap, so I honestly really enjoy reading work like this in a way that I don’t necessarily want to broadcast regularly because I’m extremely conscious of my position in the world in relation to trans discourse. For all practical intents my “identity” can be labeled as “gay,” but I am most often at odds with what gay culture (or lack of culture yuk yuk) tends to fixate on, both politically and aesthetically. This extends outwards from cis-gay culture into a current zeitgeist of what gets labeled as “queer” culture, which is something that Baer addresses in her book in a really interesting way (vis a vis a conversation about truscum which I had no familiarity with despite how much time I spend on the internet). I mean, the point here is that I understand the experience of feeling apart from the every day, and (without wanting to explicitly put words in her mouth) neither myself nor Baer seems to think this alienation is exclusively tied to marginality (but we also both recognize how significantly marginality plays into it!). 

. . .

Despite this preamble the point of this post is not to talk about how I inherently relate to trans-discourse for oblique reasons. The final essay/chapter/whatever of Baer’s book is brilliant, and hit me a bit heavier than the rest of the book as I neared the 50 minute mark on the treadmill today. But what she articulates that really struck me is the following, which I’ll just quote instead of trying to summarize:

But I don’t want to blame shrill SJW college queers for anything, because they’re doing the same thing Truscum are doing (and the same thing I’m doing in the museum) however distastefully, which is just trying to navigate a culture that tells us personal identity matters a lot, consumer identity matters a lot. A huge part of my experience of affluent white American culture, since my childhood, was being expected to define myself as an individual, through my dress and taste and academic performance and literally any other choice I made. Like making a character at the beginning of an RPG. Public symbols as everything, starter pack meme as everything. And I think this context of constructed self-hood in alienated consumerism is conducive to anxiety, and I think young people who are negotiating with queerness and transness sometimes want those variances—especially since they’re punishable with the painful consequences of homophobia or transphobia—to do a bunch of work for them. A lot of young people—and I struggled with this too— want queerness or transness to answer the existential question, “who am I,” when in fact the construction of that question in alienated consumer capitalism is basically unanswerable in a meaningful personal way.”\ (129, emphasis added by me)

And a few pages later: 

If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn’t be so confounding to people, and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive. Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of color get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything, and then monetize the ways that things move around on the map. (132)

I pair these two quotes because I like the tension they bring up in me: if I were to read the latter on its own, I would unequivocally agree with it, and it’s something that I have explicitly written in alignment with in other venues. The first quote brought me to one of those brutal moments where something so transparently true and relevant is put before you that you have no choice but to either fully ignore it or to reconcile with it. And that’s what I want to do here I think, I want to reconcile my response to it. 

Because I think she’s absolutely right. And of course I don’t think Baer herself would insist she is the one who first thought of these things, but the way in which she presents the ideas is what has sort of allowed me to really hear them for the first time (this is the thing about writing, this is something I talk about when teaching acrobatics: someone can hear you say the same thing 50 times and when they hear someone else say it differently a single time that’s the time they’re going to really hear it). 

. . . 

I have spent a lot of this year thinking about (and also reading/writing about) the sort of construction of an identity in relationship to fantasy and desire. This is explicitly important to me, as I think this creative potential of construction is very important. And, for me, it’s a construction that has to start with the self. 

My struggle here is wanting to understand whether this inherent autonomy (or, dare I say it, sovereignty) that is such a persistent part of my way of navigating the world is merely a reaction to the way that capitalism pushes us to define ourselves as a target audience for something consumable (whether it be product, service, or even hegemonic political alignment). My capacity to develop and shape my own selfhood has been extremely important to escape depression and the sort of banality that I think the endless cycle of consumer culture wants us to devolve into: a place where there is no solution to my problems that can not be purchased or subscribed to. I have always held onto the idea that what I am after is something outside, and this is the basis of all of my own work. 

(There is a level here, in this space of the page where I just deleted two paragraphs, where I want to comment upon the fact that so many of the places that I find can best articulate this issue of a sort of social push towards the construction of a consumable identity end up finding a solution in the idea of community. Because I have never felt truly part of a community in a way that was deeply satisfying to the issues that I struggle with, I hold on a resistance.)

. . . 

So I said what I wanted to do here was to reconcile this sort of paradoxical positioning of agreeing with the ideas presented in Baer’s quote but also understanding that my ostensible buying into what they reject is what has made this agreement possible. What does this mean?

Pt. 2, Sunday 7/21

I burnt out on Friday b/c I was trying to write my way into something instead of out of it, and I wasn’t sure where I was going. I thought I was going to return Saturday, but instead I ended up hanging out with my best friend visiting from LA, and ended up beer-drunk with my partner. I enjoyed the socializing, but I’d be lying if I said I felt fully good about the decisions I made otherwise.

We did, however, go to the SF Art Book Fare and I managed to pick up a couple issues of Manifest Reader that I didn’t have, including an issue with one of Rick/Dane Leather’s “Leather in the 90s” series which, despite the sort of banal name, is this sort of post-Parusha deeply religious in an Acephale sense construction of basically a leathersex secret society that suggests an actual answer to a lot of what my constructed identity struggles with on a daily basis, but also has, in the past few months, served as a sort of push towards suggestions of what to think about. The article that I ended up reading today, while slightly hungover at lunch after having to wake up a little earlier than I would have otherwise preferred to do part one of my day-job (which I love but I am struggling a lot with lately both because I feel like my body is just falling apart AND because this summer has been a STRUGGLE financially because apparently everyone is just traveling constantly so my attendance numbers [I get paid by the student at the primary studio I teach at] have been absolutely abysmal), was about archetypes, and Leathers is a good writer and points out that these should function more as myth rather than as literal individuals-as-signs that exist in the world, and they should be inspiration instead of impossible-to-live-up-to points of reference, and I realized that, well, shit, I guess that’s the thing.

This all makes way too much sense to me because I’ve also finally been finishing the Atlas Press edition of translations of all extant texts related to Bataille’s Acephale secret society. And Acephale was attempting to create new myths, and from what I can tell based on the new-to-me-documents this failed to come to pass mostly because I think all members kinda his the same impasse as I do when the question is posed: how in the fuck do you found a new myth? There was potentially a failed idea of human sacrifice, but a failure of action. But I think this isn’t important, because I think, ultimately, Acephale lead Bataille to his essay “The Practice of Joy Before Death” and also an elaboration of his actual method of meditation (dramatization) that opened towards the Somme Atheologique which, if you’ve read literally anything else on this Sub Stack you are probably away is basically the singular body of work that I am incapable of shutting up about. 

But, I was trying to justify something else, right? I want to figure out how I can put faith in this idea of the construction of identity (especially vis a vis fantasy) as a route towards sovereignty instead of just shaping something consumable under the capitalism imperative. And what’s crazy is that this cash-cow John Embry magazine from the late-80s and early 90s by a writer obsessed with a basically homomasculine leathersex re-reading of Robert Bly’s IRON JOHN (which I’m afraid to read because the description sounds like proto reactionary-gay “Androphilia” bullshit without the explicit trappings of whatever the fuck is wrong with Jack Donovan!

But this is an idea, this is a sort of more organic way that myth develops, right? A subculture latches onto archetypes that get defined within the community and the hive-mind ends up creating a sort of space where these figures become signs that can be pointed to as expressing an urge. And the construction of identity, here, should look to these archetypes for guidance but not a literal shape: the thrust must always be becoming rather than having become. Present tense, always. 

Because if we are always in the process of becoming we never cement into a singular impulse or idea; our identity becomes fixed and a fixed identity can become a consumable identity; something legible that it’s easier to target marketing towards. An identity that is forever impermeable cannot be fixed in time or space, it is harder to pinpoint, the thinktank market research fails to hit its mark because the mark never stops moving. 

This feels coherent to me: if my interest in the construction of an identity is to open up the space where I can push towards sovereign experience, I can accept that this is never a static identity. It is a trajectory: how many times can I insist upon pointing to Bataille’s statement that “the animal is in the world like water in water” ? The self is not defined by the edges but by the constancy of change.