last week day one: monsters!
• Stryker’s “My Words”
– a performance piece (!)
– harnessing rage that comes from being queer/trans
for political purposes
– seizing on connections between surgically altered
embodiment and Frankenstein’s monsters’s
embodiment
– fueled by monstrous emotion, affect
• deeply connected (obviously!) to Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
key concept #1 for today: “affect”
• Lawrence Grossberg: “a place of effects, a matter
of actualization, … a prepersonal intensity
corresponding to the passage from one
experiential state of the body to another”
• For Grossberg, affect usurps intentional
subjectivity, for “it circumscribes the entire set of
relations that are referred to with such terms as
‘volition,’ ‘will,’ … [and] ‘commitment’”.
• William James: “we feel sorry because we cry,
angry because we strike, afraid because we
tremble”.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• set in 17__, published in 1818, revised/re-issued 1831
• written in epistolary form
• story of Victor Frankenstein’s discovery of how to bestow
“animation upon lifeless matter” after long dreams of how
his act of creation would produce a group of beings that
would fawn over him like a father.
• Victor flees scene of animation, encounters “monster”
years later, monster pleas for a female monster, Victor
initially agrees
• Victor ends up nixing that plan for fears of a “race of
demons”
• murder and revenge fuel the novel (which begins near its
chronological finish, a revenge-fueled pursuit across ice
floes in the far north).
key term for today #2: diffraction
• For Donna Haraway, diffraction is “an optical
metaphor for the effort to make a difference
in the world,” “diffraction is a mapping of
interference, not of replication, reflection, or
reproduction”.
• Karen Barad: diffraction patterns are
produced by waves under the right conditions
picturing diffraction
on monsters
• historically, heralded danger, change (Paré,
Stryker)
• inspired disgust, disrupted settled boundaries
(nature, man, woman, etc.)
• Foucault: shift in mid-18th c from “juridiconatural” to “juridico-moral” monstrosity
• Jeffrey Cohen: monsters embody “ontological
liminality,” reveal “the potential for the system
to differ from its own difference.”
key nodes of diffraction between
Shelly’s Frank & Stryker’s “words”
• kinship
• becoming-monstrous
• the space of reading
Frankenstein’s monster on kinship
• he comes to understand kinship through
watching the DeLaceys, whose “gentle
manners,” “love and respect for each other,”
kindness, all move him.
• he finds language important because it
communicates emotions; among the first
words he learns are those of kinship and
affect: “father,” “sister,” “dearest,” “unhappy,”
etc.
Frankenstein’s monster’s desires/
innately queer kinship
• asks V. Frank. to create a female for him “with
whom [he] can live in the interchange of
sympathies necessary for [his] being.”
• this is a queer kind of kinship, based on the
“interchange of sympathies,” not semen.
• note the monster’s own “birth,” not by the
‘usual’ heterosexual way. (although yes
patriarchal)
Stryker’s kinship: kind, queer, and
something else
• writes of her “little tribe,” queer, anarchist,
illegible to the hospital staff.
• her family: non-normative, non-self-evident,
brought together through bonds of love,
affection, and the birth of Denali
• unlike the monster’s vision, anti-patriarchal to
boot (dyke, poly, queer, …)
Frankenstein’s monster’s becoming
monstrous
• per Stryker, he fails as a “specular subject;”
glimpses self in a pool and, in comparison with
the “perfect forms” of the DeLaceys, recoils in
seeing the monster he is.
• traffic in language between the “monster” and
Victor: they use the same words – “wretched,”
“miserable,” “hellish,” “fiend”– in their
descriptions.
monstrous affect
• “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
• He begins his tale to Victor: “I shall relate events, that
impressed me with feelings which, from what I had
been, have made me what I am”.
• After a disastrous overture to DeLaceys, during which
the monster is attacked by the son “in a transport of
fury,” the monster experiences rage: “for the first time
feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I
did not strive to control them; but allowing myself to
be bourne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards
injury and death.” “Like the archfiend,” the monster is,
at this point in the novel, carried by a “hell within
[him]”.
key concept #3:
Karen Barad’s “intra-action”
• articulates how knower and object, self and
other, come into being through encounters rather
than prior to them
• For Barad, the space of encounter (between
subject and object, “self” and “other”) marks the
“cut” through which “self” and “other”, “subject”
and “object,” become such, demarcated as
separate; these encounters are “intra-actions.”
• Changes how agency works: agency is “a matter
of intra-acting, … an enactment, not something
someone or something has” (7).
affective “intra-actions”/becoming
monstrous
• F’s monster becomes monstrous, doesn’t start
out that way (“I was benevolent and good;
misery made me a fiend”)
• Fear-laced encounters with others are
affective intra-actions
• Shaped by monstrous emotions, by
encounters with humans who flee and/or
attack him, the monster becomes monstrous.
Stryker’s monstrous affect
• is shaped by “intra-actions;” her “queer fury”
stems from encounters with a world that treats
her as “less than fully human due to the means of
[her] embodiment” (245)
• She notes:
Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions,
the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in
through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it
becomes the blood that courses through my beating
heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in
external circumstances that work against my survival.
(249)
anarchic womb of rage
• Stryker: Rage/ gives me back my body/ as its own
fluid medium //… Rage constitutes me in my
primal form. / It throws my head back/ pulls my
lips back over my teeth/ opens up my throat/ and
rears me up to howl …// In birthing my rage, /my
rage has rebirthed me (252)
• Like the monster’s, Stryker’s rage moves and
shapes her. Unlike the monster’s, it transforms
her flesh into a medium: it transmogrifies her.
Stryker’s rage alters the encounter
between bodies and language
• While Stryker rages that “Phallogocentric language … is
the scalpel that defines our flesh,” (253) her “queer
fury” counters this blade: it makes of her flesh “a fluid
medium” (252).
• Stryker’s flesh-as-fluid-medium eludes the violent
grasp of Phallogocentric language.
• Further, her transformation by transgender fury makes
language itself a medium:
– I defy [Phallogocentric language] in my refusal to abide by
its original decree of my gender. Though I cannot escape
its power, I can move through its medium. Perhaps if I
move furiously enough, I can deform it in my passing to
leave a trace of my rage (253).
similar spaces of reading
• both require the reader to piece together meaning
– Stryker sutures poetry with prose with theory
– Shelley confuses chronology, “whodunnit” element,
structurally confusing
• both novel and “words” use second-person address
(“Hearken unto me fellow creatures” 247)
• both divide sight and sound
– Stryker through performance then writing
– Shelley through monster we are told is hideous but whose
eloquence far outweighs that of all other characters in the
novel
Sympathy
• per O.E.D.: sympathy for another is “the quality
or state of being thus affected by the suffering or
sorrow of another; a feeling of compassion or
commiseration.”
• per O.E.D.: sympathy with another is “the quality
or state of being affected by the condition of
another with a feeling similar to or corresponding
to that of the other; … sharing the feelings of
another…; fellow-feeling.”
Stryker’s “monstrous benediction”
“If this is your path, as it is mine, … May you
discover the enlivening power of darkness
within yourself. May it nourish your rage. May
your rage transform your actions, and your
actions transform you as you struggle to
transform your world.”
diffraction round … ?
• Stryker “diffracts” the novel’s space of
reading, asking that we also transform
through feeling
• Her space of reading “intra-acts” with us,
pushing us to become her queer kin in kind by
asking that we
– also feel differently
– also craft different worlds
– also engender new and transfigured languages