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 “juridico-natural” 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