What if? We were?
Simple shrouds Data Clouds Matter in Lakes Biological Cyborgs Simply Selling Self. I desire designer jeans. And echoed. It is sound. Acting as Amplitutde. Atmospheric Art. Spatial Dis-Orientation. ----dream. So music is method. A way to move through the madness that is movement and life. And writing and math and code. In the moment of music, we are swayed and moved towards the moment. Here we design and dream together. So here are some starting with most recent jams. I want to link my Spotify, but I am having so many issues with logging into emails it is not even funny. (Or is it? Dark Comedy - bleh) IntroductionAs we set sail - I embark upon a journey to delve into metonymic possibilities bestowed upon us by crip theory and neo-material feminism. These two ethereal theoretical approaches shatter the shackles of normative and oppressive structures, unfurling before us a realm where embodiment and identity interweave with sexuality, gender, race, class, and nation. It is within this tapestry of difference that we discover the power of figurative language, a realm where metonymy and metaphor unite to birth new connections and ignite the flames of solidarity and resistance in marginalized souls. Metonymy, a poetic device that breathes life into words, allowing one to stand in for another, beckons us to explore its depths. Stacy Alaimo, a luminary scholar, and activist, wields crip theory and neo-material feminism as her guiding beacons, illuminating the intricate relationship between embodiment, identity, and the environment throughout history's tapestry. Like an alchemist of words, Alaimo coined the term "trans-corporeality" to articulate the movement that traverses bodies and nature, exposing the interconnectedness between human corporeality and the nonhuman world (Alaimo 2008).
Water, a vessel of life and embodiment, becomes Alaimo's metonymic and metaphorical prism, reflecting myriad facets of our corporeal existence—nourishment and contamination, memory and forgetting, freedom and constraint (Alaimo 2002). In this poetic odyssey, I shall employ the lens of crip theory and neo-material feminism, bestowed upon us by Stacy Alaimo, to unravel the mysteries within two remarkable texts that illuminate embodiment and identity in distinct ways: Kate Chopin's timeless masterpiece, The Awakening (1899), and Susanne Antonetta's poignant memoir, Body Toxic (2002). The contention unfurls, for I argue that the conclusion of The Awakening transcends the realms of metaphorical suicide or failure; instead, it stands as a metonym for a trans-corporeal reading—a gateway to uncharted possibilities of embodiment and identity. Furthermore, I shall juxtapose and interweave the divergent manifestations of water within these texts, deciphering the unique modes and experiences of embodiment and identity they unveil. This paper weaves a poetic tapestry where the echoes of centuries past resound harmoniously as the novels speak to one another through metonymic relationships, entwining water and woman within their lyrical embrace. The enigmatic figure of the mad mother emerges not as mere figuration but as an act of writing itself—a dance upon bodies that transcends the boundaries of our understanding. Thus, we embark upon this metamorphosis, traversing diverse registers and embracing the figurations of madness and motherhood as we venture into the realm of queer-crip ecological thought. Together, we cultivate a body of critique, tenderly nourishing it through the interplay of words and the care that breathes life into the writing of the mad mother's body. Within the pages of these texts, invigorated by the theoretical lens of crip theory and neo-material feminism, we discover the essence of critical inquiry—questioning the very fabric of cultural archetypes, unbound by the constraints of time or genre. Our exploration expands the horizons of our understanding, as we perceive writing and reading as an empathetic embrace—an embodiment of the collective that revels in its undecidability. It is within this boundless expanse that the body, in all its splendor, shall find its voice. A. Overview of the paper's focus In the realm of literature, metonyms dance upon the stage, conjuring connections between disparate realms and summoning forth deeper layers of meaning and resonance. These poetic bonds hold particular significance within the domain of feminist writings, for they have the power to illuminate and challenge the traditional roles and expectations imposed upon women. It is within this tapestry of metonymic connections that the figure of the "mad mother" emerges—a symbol of rebellion against societal norms and the confines of conventional gender roles. This paper embarks upon a profound exploration, unearthing how the "mad mother" disrupts teleological notions of form and defies representational critique through her parallelisms with the natural world. In doing so, she challenges the very separation between the observed and the observer, unraveling the foundational assumptions that underpin representational critique. Representational or figurative frameworks that seek to divorce the body from its ideas overinvest in a semblance of universality, a futile pursuit that unravels the intricate fabric of existence itself. The "mad mother" casts her enigmatic shadow upon literature, bodies, and culture, disturbing the equilibrium with her presence. She beckons us to question the boundaries and limitations imposed upon the mother figure, an ambiguous entity that encompasses a multitude of experiences—expectant, bereaved, adoptive, birthing, and beyond. Should a mother who leaves her child at home cease to be a mother? Motherhood, often relegated to a singular event, transcends the confines of temporal boundaries. In the realm of neoliberal feminism, motherhood is often regarded as a choice to be evaded. Yet, perhaps motherhood is a monstrous entity we should embrace—an integral part of the eternal cycles of existence. The mad mother, akin to the ebb and flow of water, dissipates or drowns beneath the weight of the world. She stands on the precipice of the water's edge, embodying the ever-changing nature of the corporeal vessel—the womb. The ownership of placenta, the definitions of fetal life, the birth's oscillation between pain and pleasure, the dichotomy of sacred duty and burdensome weight in child-rearing—within this liminal space, the mad mother emerges as the epitome of the mother we dream of and yearn for. C. Introduction to the primary texts: Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' and Susan Antonetta's 'Body Toxic' As we traverse the expanse of literary landscapes, our gaze falls upon two remarkable texts that hold the power to illuminate and transform—the timeless masterpiece of Kate Chopin's The Awakening and the poignant memoir penned by Susan Antonetta, Body Toxic. These literary offerings, separated by time's unyielding veil, beckon us to journey into their depths, where water and woman converge in a dance of metonymic interplay. Within the pages of The Awakening, Chopin weaves a tale that resounds across the ages—a symphony of self-discovery and liberation unfurling in the sultry embrace of late nineteenth-century Louisiana. Our protagonist, Edna Pontellier, embarks upon a profound voyage of awakening, casting aside the shackles of societal expectations to chart her own path. It is here that the conclusion of The Awakening stands as a metonymic gateway, beckoning us to transcend the bounds of metaphorical suicide or failure. Through trans-corporeal readings, we unveil new vistas of embodiment and identity, inviting us to envision possibilities yet untold. Antonetta's Body Toxic, a memoir that echoes with the cadence of personal and environmental history, invites us to journey through the author's corporeal tapestry. Through the delicate interplay of memory and flesh, Antonetta unveils the myriad facets of embodiment and identity. As we delve into the interplay of water within these texts, we unravel the distinct modalities and experiences they unveil—a poetic exploration that sheds light on the interconnection between water and woman. In the enigmatic realm of Kate Chopin's narrative, water emerges as a metaphorical current that runs through the veins of the text, carrying with it the essence of Edna's journey. It is a force both liberating and treacherous, embodying the ebb and flow of her awakening. Water becomes a metonym, a vessel that encapsulates the nuances of Edna's embodiment and identity. It nourishes her spirit, whispering tales of freedom and possibility, yet it also contaminates, carrying the weight of societal expectations and constraints. Through the metonymic power of water, Chopin beckons us to ponder the depths of our own fluid existence, the complexities of our desires, and the transformative potential that lies within. In Susan Antonetta's Body Toxic, water becomes the conduit through which the author unravels the intricate tapestry of her own corporeal history. She delves into the contamination of her body and the environment, tracing the echoes of toxicity that reverberate within her being. Water, in its metonymic resonance, mirrors the interplay of flesh and fluid, unveiling the entanglement between personal and ecological realms. Antonetta's memoir invites us to witness the profound interconnectedness of our bodies with the world that surrounds us, reminding us of our shared vulnerability and the urgent need for environmental stewardship. Through her lyrical prose, she immerses us in a poetic symphony of metonymy, where water becomes a vessel of personal and collective transformation. As we navigate the currents of these texts, steeped in the theoretical wisdom of crip theory and neo-material feminism, we uncover the profound implications of their metonymic tapestry. The figure of the mad mother lingers within these pages, defying conventional representations and demanding our attention. She intertwines with the fluidity of water, challenging our preconceived notions of motherhood and birthing new possibilities of understanding. Through the metonymic dance of water and woman, these texts beckon us to embrace the undecidability of existence, to question and transcend the limitations imposed upon us. The figure of the mad mother, entangled with the fluidity of water, beckons us to he mad mother as a cultural figure in writing "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement" (p. 875). This quotation is from Cixous's influential essay on feminist writing and politics. It uses metonymy to link writing and bodies as two domains where women have been oppressed and silenced by patriarchal culture. challenge and transcend societal norms, embracing the ever-changing nature of our existence. Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Susan Antonetta's Body Toxic stand as testament to the transformative power of literature, inviting us to embark on a poetic journey that explores the depths of our shared humanity. It is through the metonymic dance of words and ideas that we find solace and resistance, breathing life into the narratives of the mad mothers in the deep. II. Theoretical Framework B. Crip Theory, Mad Studies, and Neo-Material Feminism ”I propose that we dwell on the possibilities for a metonymic slide, a chain of material significations in which “environmental illness” extends the body outward into a trans-corporeal space. Such a body (or mind) cannot be distinguished from that which surrounds it, since various substances may provoke pain, illness, disability, confusion, and fatigue.” (Alaimo p. 115 Bodily Natures) David Mitchell suggest that suggests that within neoliberalism, disability operates in two distinct domains: (1) disability actively references the United States' claims to global exceptionalism – the inclusive adoption of policies toward disabled people as a sign of the nation's embrace of diversity in neoliberalism; and (2) antinormative novels of embodiment employ disability's radical potential to unseat traditional understandings of normalcy as subject integrity, cognitive coherency, and typical functionality. The first mode involves disability as a sign of neoliberalism's tolerance of difference (i.e., a rhetoric of inclusionism realized by claims to American exceptionalism); the second mode unveils the capacities of incapacity that disability embodies as a key strategy in the antinormative novel of embodiment's neomaterialist revelation of imperfection as a creative, biological force (Mitchell, p. 470). So we will work towards the latter, how does disability, environs and bodies co-mingle to the works of anti-normative discourses. In the imperfect texts and the imperfect ways we have of reading a text, particularly one that is not of our time or place, I attempt to draw out the ways that metaphors themselves are also unstable. As are interpretations, and they are also partial. In reading into Chopin visa vie qualities of the text. I want to find a way to make reading, open itself into uncertain possibility. In reading the uncertainty of a work of fiction ‘out of time’ in relationality to another work and in relationality to myself embraces an attempt to try and find ways that we can see hope in difference. We can propose alternative readings, such as examining Chopin's The Awakening and her protagonist's madness, not to diagnose her or claim it is merely a social construction, but to argue that in the uncertainty of the sea and the meta-ellipse ending, we see peripheral embodiments, albeit only through care. Antonetta's work more clearly fits this role as a self-theory, but at the edges of Chopin's authorial presence, the author bleeds into the text as a mother and an unknown writer who wrote with children running around. We can ask how we attend to the care of the unknowable possibility of what a past author meant - and how do we treat the undecidable openings? “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes overlong historical periods, so too does their mode of perception” - Walter Benjamin p. 23- The work of art Incorporating this perspective with the ideas of Karen Barad and intra-action, as well as Alaimo's material memoir, we can begin to envision a crip-body-care approach. I am wantign to make clear that I am not really looking at what the narratives represent, I am applying the method of diffraction from Barad, ““Diffraction can serve as a useful counterpoint to reflection: both are optical phenomena, but whereas the metaphor of reflection reflects the themes of mirroring and sameness, diffraction is marked by patterns of difference.” (Barad 2007 p. 70). So instead of looking at text to find where it does what I expect, I am looking and realize my looking implicates me in the eye. And I am looking in relation between two texts, and I want to see if they can speak to each other and to the ways of water. Barad's intra-action framework emphasizes the interrelatedness and inseparability of matter and meaning, enabling us to consider the ways in which bodies and their environments are entangled. Meanwhile, Alaimo's concept of the material memoir encourages us to examine the interconnectedness of the self and the environment. By weaving these ideas together with McRuer’s decomposition studies and Mitchell's able-nationalism, we can better understand how crip-body-care becomes a possibility. A reading and writing practice that challenges the structures of writing. In the crip-body-care perspective, we can transcend conventional views of normalcy and concentrate on the intricate relationships among bodies, environments, and care. This viewpoint enables us to identify opportunities for creativity and self-determination in marginal embodiments, while also highlighting the significance of care for disabled individuals and the larger community. By reevaluating established beliefs about disability and impairment, neomaterialist approaches reinvigorate the materiality of various forms of unique embodiment, considering them as potential sources of proactive, agentive, and adaptable innovations for the species. Starting with Metonymy To embark on this analysis, it is crucial to establish a foundation by defining the figures that form the edges of the haunting mad mother. I approach the reading of these two novels through the lens of metonymy, seeking not to draw direct comparisons or metaphoric containers but to engage in a dialogue across dynamic movements. It is a journey that traverses the watery depths of uncertainty, where clarity eludes us. Metonymy, as a poetic device, allows us to forge new associations and infuse freshness into our thoughts. As Walt Whitman writes, "Agonies are one of my changes of garments. I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken." Metonymy breathes life into our discourse, creating new connections and expanding our understanding (Hart & Doughton, p. 146). Roman Jakobson's seminal work in 1956 unveils the two poles of metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor, belonging to the poetic realm, thrives on comparisons and substitutions, while metonymy thrives on contiguity. Of particular interest in this analysis is the contingent nature of metonymic relationships. Jakobson highlights the intimate ties of Realism with metonymy, often overshadowed by the prominence of metaphor. He argues that the bipolarity of these linguistic elements has been artificially reduced to an amputated unipolar scheme, coinciding with contiguity disorder, as observed in certain speech disorders (aphasia) (Jakobson, p. 1078). Literary and rhetorical analysis has to find hooks to hang itself on. If I want to draw a picture, I can use nodes. This is the science of language. Language and meaning mix in their contingent relations to others. Can there be a feminist crip techno-linguistic material rhetoric? This linguistic analysis reveals how authors manipulate these techniques, offering essential insights into human communication. Bringing this foundational theory, which has been instrumental in French structuralism and its deconstruction, into conversation with the emerging mad turn in crip theory (McRuer, 2012) opens new avenues for exploration. It allows us to navigate the fluid boundaries of language, where the contours of meaning constantly shift and slip between metaphor and metonymy. I want to focus on something small, bits and pieces, because to make it clear how we can transform the tiniest piece of chance into a leap, we might have to think about the poles of possibility. And make sure they don’t collapse into each other. I wonder about the problems of citing Jakobson who is speaking of metanoym and metaphor in realtion to diagnosis of speech disorders. But I am goign to make leaps here, and I want to embrace the disorder, to find a way to swim here. I am perhaps searching for the slippery terrain. I want to lose my voice in the face of the waves. Crip theory, in its multifaceted nature, extends beyond a singular disciplinary framework. It is both a verb and a chain of associations, embodying critical insights from disability studies. Crip theory, as articulated by McRuer, exposes compulsory able-bodiedness as the script that interpellates subjects. Crip theory sees identity as relatioinly defined, and dynamic, entangle din its relationship with the other, as a discipline itself it has a bit of a metonymic slide between queer and crip, they are not metaphors and they share a problematic relationship as well. This space though is the uncertain terrain between states of being-with in a community. While both terms represent outsider positions, they cannot replace one another. They share a contingent relationality—a refusal of the script of power imposed by dominant systems that seek to exclude. Crip theory also challenges notions of universality, recognizing that at any moment, one may experience disability or identify as crip. It acknowledges the relational nature of disability, encompassing a diverse range of experiences, from inherent conditions to acquired or temporary disabilities. Within crip theory, the disabled body remains central, while resisting essentialist limitations. Mad studies and crip studies intersect, with Margaret Price's work, "Mad at School," shedding light on non-visible disabilities and their significance within critical disability studies. Johnson introduces the term "feminist psychiatric disability studies," highlighting the need to address mental illness within queer and crip theory. She calls for queer theory to take mental illness seriously, expanding the discourse and acknowledging the materiality of emotions experienced by individuals with conditions such as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Johnson's exploration delves into the phenomenological aspects of BPD, moving beyond discursive analyses to examine the concrete sensations felt by those with the disorder, such as the pressure in the chest (Johnson, p. 636). Margaret Price argues for an ethics of care within feminist disability studies, which lays the foundation for what Johnson terms "crip-feminist empathy." This empathetic stance entails caring for, respecting, feeling for, and feeling with individuals experiencing psychically anomalous episodes, such as micro-psychotic breaks or other extreme states (Price, 2015; Johnson, p. 651). I approach the reading of these two novels through the lens of metonymy, seeking not to draw direct comparisons or metaphoric containers but to engage in a dialogue across dynamic movements. It is a journey that traverses the watery depths of uncertainty, where clarity eludes us. Metonymy, as a poetic device, allows us to forge new associations and infuse freshness into our thoughts. As Walt Whitman writes, "Agonies are one of my changes of garments. I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken." Metonymy breathes life into our discourse, creating new connections and expanding our understanding (Hart & Doughton, p. 146). Roman Jakobson's seminal work in 1956 unveils the two poles of metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor, belonging to the poetic realm, thrives on comparisons and substitutions, while metonymy thrives on contiguity. Of particular interest in this analysis is the contingent nature of metonymic relationships. Jakobson highlights the intimate ties of Realism with metonymy, often overshadowed by the prominence of metaphor. He argues that the bipolarity of these linguistic elements has been artificially reduced to an amputated unipolar scheme, coinciding with contiguity disorder, as observed in certain speech disorders (aphasia) (Jakobson, p. 1078). Literary and rhetorical analysis has to find hooks to hang itself on. If I want to draw a picture, I can use nodes. This is the science of language. Language and meaning mix in their contingent relations to others. Can there be a feminist crip techno-linguistic material rhetoric? This linguistic analysis reveals how authors manipulate these techniques, offering essential insights into human communication. Bringing this foundational theory, which has been instrumental in French structuralism and its deconstruction, into conversation with the emerging mad turn in crip theory (McRuer, 2012) opens new avenues for exploration. I want to focus on something small, bits and pieces, because to make it clear how we can transform the tiniest piece of chance into a leap, we might have to think about the poles of possibility. And make sure they don’t collapse into each other. I wonder about the problems of citing Jakobson who is speaking of metanoym and metaphor in realtion to diagnosis of speech disorders. But I am goign to make leaps here, and I want to embrace the disorder, to find a way to swim here. I am perhaps searching for the slippery terrain. I want to lose my voice in the face of the waves. D. Attention to metonymic possibility to articulate the impossibility of the figure of mother My analytical method embraces close reading, intertwining it with crip theory, neo-material feminism, and the insights of influential thinkers such as Barad, Haraway, and Alaimo. Close reading enables us to penetrate the depths of textual meaning, unveiling the ways in which bodies matter and worlds are created within the written word. It allows us to explore the trans-corporeal metonymic connections that bridge temporal distances and offer glimpses of empathy, care, and collective understanding. In this approach, the boundaries between the self and the text become porous, as we surrender ourselves to the transformative power of language. We become vulnerable, open to the possibilities of meaning-making and the embrace of hope. Through the act of reading, we are washed, evaporated, and transformed. The text enters and changes us, undoing and decomposing our preconceptions. We engage in a perpetual dance of embodiment, seeking to uncover and embrace the body that emerges—a figure that defies categorization and unveils the multiplicity within. Conclusion Within the interplay of metonymy and poetic exploration, a new understanding emerges—one that challenges conventions, disrupts normative structures, and emboldens us to reimagine embodiment and identity. The theoretical framework of crip theory, mad studies, and neo-material feminism provides a lens through which to navigate these complexities. It encourages us to forge empathetic connections, to care for the mad mother, and to embrace the contingent nature of our existence. As we embark on this journey of exploration, let us revel in the depths of these texts, where the boundaries between water and woman blur, where the metonymic tapestry weaves narratives of transformation and resilience. Through the power of close reading and theoretical engagement, we embrace the undecidability of meaning, unraveling the threads of the mad mother's story and finding within them the echoes of our shared humanity. III. Analysis of Texts A. Unveiling the Metonymic Dance With the theoretical framework in place, we begin our conversation with the primary texts at the heart of this inquiry—Kate Chopin's lauded feminist peice, The Awakening (1899), and Susan Antonetta's memoir, Body Toxic (2001). Within the pages of these works, the metonymic dance between water and woman unfolds, inviting us to explore the depths of embodiment and identity. In The Awakening, water emerges as a powerful metaphorical current, surging through the narrative and carrying with it the essence of Edna's journey. It becomes a metonym, a vessel that encapsulates the complexities of her embodiment and the shifting tides of her identity. Water nourishes her spirit, whispering tales of freedom and possibility, inviting her to dive into the depths of self-discovery. Yet, it also carries the weight of societal expectations and constraints, contaminating her path with the pressures of conformity. And it takes other forms, gas like, it promises and exceeds the corporeal limits in tears and in its process also draws towards the depths. Through the metonymic rhythms of water, Chopin invites us to reflect on the fluidity of our own existence, to navigate the intricate currents of desire, and to challenge the limitations imposed upon us by societal norms. Antonetta's Body Toxic, a memoir woven with personal and environmental history, offers a different scale of the metonymic score. Here, water becomes the conduit through which the author unravels the interplay between her body and the world around her. She delves into the contamination that infiltrates her being, tracing the echoes of toxicity that rewrites the processes of body and mind, and it also restores. In Antonetta's narrative, water acts as a metonym, mirroring the entanglement of personal and ecological realms. Through her lyrical prose, she immerses us in the sensory experience of her body, unveiling the profound interconnectedness between self and environment. As we traverse the fluid landscapes of her memoir, we come to recognize the shared vulnerability of our corporeal existence and the urgency of environmental stewardship. B. Queer Eco & Crip Perspectives Rooted in the theoretical foundations of queer eco and crip theory, our analysis of these texts transcends traditional boundaries. Through this lens, we embrace the multiplicity of bodies and identities, blurring the lines between the normative and the marginalized. Crip theory reminds us of the script of compulsory able-bodiedness that society imposes upon us, while queer eco perspectives disrupt the binaries and hierarchies that confine us. Together, they offer a space where intersectionality thrives, where the voices of those on the margins find resonance, and where empathy and care become guiding principles. Within the metonymic interplay of water and woman, we witness the transformative potential of embodiment. The narratives of Edna in The Awakening and Antonetta in Body Toxic defy simplistic categorizations, challenging the limitations imposed upon them. They invite us to question the prevailing notions of motherhood, societal expectations, and the very fabric of identity itself. The mad mother emerges not as a fixed archetype, but as a fluid and multifaceted figure—an embodiment that defies conventional representation. C. Embracing Empathy and Collective Understanding As we delve deeper into the interplay of these texts, our analysis becomes an act of embracing empathy—a willingness to immerse ourselves in the narratives of the mad mother and to recognize the shared vulnerabilities and aspirations of humanity. Through close reading and engagement with the theoretical framework, we navigate the liminal spaces where meaning-making occurs. We become attuned to the nuances of trans-corporeal metonymic connections, where the boundaries between self and other blur and collective understanding thrives. In this exploration, the body itself becomes a figure—a site of transformation, resilience, and untold stories. By embracing the undecidability of meaning and acknowledging the multiplicity of identities and experiences, we cultivate a sense of hope—a hope that jams up temporal boundaries and propels us towards a future where empathy and care are the guiding forces. Through the lens of queer eco and crip theory, we begin to see the potential for a new figuration of bodies—a figuration that disrupts normative structures and celebrates the complexity and diversity of existence. The mad mother, in her defiance of societal expectations, becomes a symbol of resistance and resilience. She embodies the fluidity of water, constantly shifting and transforming, refusing to be confined by rigid definitions. The figure of the mad mother is a failure. I want to make that clear. She will not emerge as figuration, she is not theoretical. She is not engaged in a libidinal economy of jouissance. She will not stand against The Child. Because she is in definition and materiality not one, she is defined as possibly-with-child. Their is a fundamental disconne t between the passages of metonym when we start to see the figures we are making, that we must invest in them a new way of spacing, that spacing must be in fact destroyed. Here and now. I tis a call to arms. Just kidding, it is a call of the armless. It is a seduction, and yes she has a vagina and is leaking breast milk and crying. We as in the western normative culture can’t tip toe out of the story that is written, we might hate her, we might dream to be her, but she is not alone omnipresent - and she is part of you, literally, materially. Can we makes sense with such bodies. Can we think through the bodily callings of cripped suspended lost and emerging pregnancies? Will they be of and with the world, or should theory continue to make itself on her back. This is to be said alongside everything else, but if your theory demands that she must return to the Crypt. She isn’t there. She is everywhere. Uncanninly she is of you and you of her, and language should not artificially dance amongst her. We live in the midst, of so many possibilities. But can you cry? We must think through what it is that emerges as a powerful symbol, transcending temporal and genre limitations, beckoning us to challenge and transcend normative structures. Through empathy, care, and collective understanding, we navigate the depths of these narratives, embracing the transformative power of literature. . C. Chloroform, birth, and the mad mother In Chopin's passages, the metonym of chloroform represents the way childbirth masks the embodied experience. It is used to numb the physical pain and emotional turmoil of giving birth. Similarly, the metonyms "voice of the sea" and "touch of the sea" seduce and envelop Edna in a comforting yet potentially dangerous embrace. These metonyms depict the intricate relationship between humans and their environments, showcasing the material world's capacity to both protect and harm. D. The undecidable ending and its impact on readers The conclusion of "The Awakening" with Edna's suicide at sea deliberately avoids neat resolution, instead inviting readers into a state of undecidability. It beckons readers to enter into a relationality with Edna, the author, and the water. By creating this space of undecidability, the text evokes memories of Edna's children's voices as she swims beyond the point of return, leaving the reader to finish the story themselves. This invitation establishes a metaleptic relationship between the author and the reader that cannot be IV. Analysis of 'Body Toxic' A. Overview of the memoir and its significance Body Toxic is written in a matter that attends to the concept of trans-corporeality introduced by Stacey Alaimo. The book fits into the literary category Alaimo coins, ‘material memoir’. Alaimo examines Antonetta’s work stating it is a form of “counter-memory” in the ways that she investigates the toxic truths of Pine Barrens, New Jersey where she grew up. Where the government lied to the public, she doesn’t accept the discourse as given. She writes a story of her life woven together with scientific and environmental truths that Through its style and content the book opens the reader to how environment and self are entangled. Through transforming the autobiography into a poetic wandering that disidentifies from linear narrative to help us see self through mania, memory, experience, body and environment. Antoinette writes, “Memory is a form of lying. Autobiography is a literary form devoted to the ceremonial lie. A taxidermy. A pretense that the form of what’s dead can be preserved, made to lash and snarl still.” (Body Toxic p. 185). Alaimo’s analysis focuses on the ways in which Antonetta’s memoir points out the different bodily effects including, “I choked facts but they choked me back; they stuck, like Legos—clingy but hard to build into anything real. I can know what hung in the water, nested in the soft tissues of the fish. I can’t look into the novel of my body and go to the end, where it tells what happened. I have or have had one spectacular multiple pregnancy, a miscarriage, a radiation-induced tumor, a double uterus, asthma, endometriosis, growths on the liver, other medical conditions like allergies.” (Alaimo p. 99, citing Antonetta’s p. 27-28) Alaimo more extenensively cites the passage which goes on to list numerous ways that environmental factors can invluence bodies. Alaimo’s analysis makes clear the matter of writing one’s self as as a strategic mattering of form. If I find the mixed form which consistently eludes easy interpretation or pinning down of trees, family trees, locations, to generate a way of thinking about writing materially or writing as a trans-corporeal activity that infuses page with person. A space I found compelling throughout the text was the womb’s intergenerational articulations. “I’m sure it’s these narratives that stay wrapped in a palpable silence that become something else. I don’t speak in metaphor. I mean I think what the mouth doesn’t void for the mind moves into the blood-stream and the nucleotides. It runs for the DNA as any other form of language.” (p. 88) She states, I don’t speak in metaphor, and this quote comes soon after her telling us she thinks her mother is writing the text in a cellular manner at times. Helene Cixous writes that writing is a ladder and one must descend it (three steps on the ladder of writing). This is always simeloutanously a death and a birth. Antonetta writes, “The only secret to be unlocked is why this dream should have jumped in my head…the suppressed, female presence of the reader, another one who lives through the story without a voice.” (p. 87) Can we find the voice in the spaces of resistance where the metaphor resists the dark. If it were to be light. Must it be resistance, ti is in the binding hat we find our way sometimes, a back bend into the pain. To give birth is to give into the inevitably. Disability theory must attend to the ways in which we must give into our pain, our madness, our bodies. To give in - I mean to give. To give pain, a space. This is hospitiality. Derrida writes, “Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into apact) or even their names” (Derrida 2000, p. 25). So the author, who reveals much or little is a host of sorts. The text has become body. We are touching on limits here. And the body-with-birth is host, of possibility. Invited or not. There we are. Unhappy hostess. And who wants to find oneself in the home of an unhappy hostess. But in a party and a game we are not stuck there. But this is not a game. And the toxins that Antonetta hosts are unwelcome guests. But they bring things, that one might not simply wish away, or perhaps is even needed. Living-with and writing-with madness, in the materiality of language written towards an unknown audience. Not a letter without destination. But book. Arrives at your door. You must choose, to take up the task, can you allow the text into your home. Or will you refuse to let one sit, will you have many excuses, as to why you can’t just put aside self - in relation to the book, this moment, right here. What are we wearing and holding that can’t be dropped. The weight of toxic love. And that is where we again become lost in the waves of me writing myself, and then I am too creative. What is writing is only auto-erotic. And that I am only playing a game with myself. Well I would not send it away. But when you don’t hear me I realize I made it too personal. I have risked too much. It is not just the structures of risk, which are indeed what structure the economy of choice. But it is the other ex-tensions, that we are written into. To write can be such a risk, as Baitalle says in Literature and Evil, it is of necessity that we see the danger of literature. The interesting, writer must be at risk. So how much must I put on the line. To play these games. I stop now. I have said too much, withdrawing back into something I will try to order these lines. My materiality is mad. And it might muster confusion. That is the point. That is what is wanting to write itself. And writing of auto-ex-scription is writing-with the body, if I can counter-memory, I must stop muttering around. Wallow. of metaphor and metonym after reading Alaimo and thinking why metaphors as a literary term that helps us see two like things, yet when we are always looking at how we are the same as another instead of how we are all possibly moving in paths that intersect, or how our intra-actions are colliding, we get lost in our subtractions or difference. So, when we see how one thing becomes another, how it infuses and leaves and transforms and transfers, we have more generative potential. Alaimo writes -----“….I propose that we dwell on the possibilities for a metonymic slide, a chain of material significations in which “environmental illness” extends the body outward into a trans-corporeal space. Such a body (or mind) cannot be distinguished from that which surrounds it, since various substances may provoke pain, illness, disability, confusion, and fatigue.” (Alaimo p. 115 Bodily Natures) “It’s that moment, like with paper, when it shivers between receiving you and holds out the signs – the emptiness, the receptiveness and resistance – of another life, another story. What was to have been she made again Of course like all loves this one is based on illusion, the illusion of quiet, of nothing-there. Though once we exist, nothing’s empty; we can add but we can’t subtract.” (Antonetta Body Toxic p. 89) And here we see the ex-scription of body, well really I think we mean soul. And the body’s soul shifts between water and wine. Purity and Toxicity. But these are merely metonymic poles, waiting for a new definition. A new perspective. Perhaps in universality of undecidability we can escape the pull back. The pull towards the new fascism. Where right goes left and left goes right and we find ourselves one day away from the end. And now I am a fear-monger? I didn’t intend to find myself here. B. Close reading of groundwater toxins and their metonymic relationships Groundwater toxins and their interplay in descriptions of her writing and womb work as a metonymic relationship that forms metalepsis of madness and motherhood that become inextricably linked. The cultural figure of Mad Mother is worked through in writing itself. Writing becomes a way of healing, without an aim for cure, but of empathy for self and a call out towards the figuration of a cultural model that overshadows literature and culture. Like a monster, she emerges from the depths, time and again, but her shadow is not a shadow, it is not a figuration of a non-real idea. The mad mother frightens and captures because there is as of yet, no way to escape reproduction outside of motherhood. As the sole link between the unknown and materiality, the mother speaks to the ghostly and the monstrous. The spiritual and the material or the body and the body. In Body Toxic, Susanne Antonetta discusses the hazardous effects of groundwater toxins on human health and the environment, creating metonymic relationships between the toxins and their consequences. For instance, Antonetta refers to the "taste of metal" in water as a metonym for the presence of toxins such as lead, mercury, and arsenic. This sensory detail connects the reader to the experience of drinking contaminated water, while also symbolizing the broader issue of environmental pollution. Another metonymic relationship Antonetta explores is the connection between the toxins in the environment and their effects on human health. She writes about the "chemical fingerprint" left by pesticides and other pollutants, which stand as metonyms for the various health issues she and her family have experienced, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, and mental illnesses. By using the term "chemical fingerprint," Antonetta emphasizes the indelible impact of these toxins on the human body. Through the use of metonyms, Antonetta invites the reader to consider the interconnectedness between the environment and human health. By focusing on the intimate details of her own experiences, she underscores the idea that we are all affected by the toxins that permeate our surroundings. C. Womb Focusing on a critique of Representationalism, itself, the representation of narrative as holding a determined truth is in line with critiques of representatlisionsim that are rooted in Platonic theory, considers language and ideas as always representing a true object. The subjective turn, influenced by Neo-Platonists, views language as reflecting an image, separating it from its source and recognizing it as illusory. The mirror stage in psychoanalysis represents individuation from one's mother by seeing oneself as separate from others. The slippery slide from the separation and the abject, leads to affectual isolation, as Johnson writes. The anti-social anti-future turn in queer and crip theory has left a feeling of dread for those who carry the weight of embodied experience. There is something wrong reliance on figures that don’t touch bodies. I want to conjure a figure that is body, in all sense of the word. Bodily horror, all too mortal, is part of the messiness of wombs and water. Antonetta does not shy away from the complexities of language and body. Alaimo’s analysis of material memories steps into the mud of messy womb spaces - “The pregnant female body is an ideologically hazardous terrain due to the centuries-old articulations of woman/body/nature as passive matter, a resource for active human minds and cultures. An entire constellation of pernicious practices and assumptions emanate from the melding of woman as nature, nature as woman…Despite the ideological risks of calcifying the female body as a reproductive body and of eroding reproductive choice by focusing on fetal health, it is impossible to deny the devastating consequences that environmental toxins have on developing fetuses and on infants who are ingesting human milk, which is…simultaneously the best food for infants and terribly toxic. Feminism, even gender-minimizing feminisms, cannot turn away from matters of reproductive health and bodily politics.” (p. 104-105). Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures (pp. 104-105). Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition. V. Evaporation and care in the Transmutation of contingent relationships - relationality of reader and author and text in 'The Awakening' and 'Body Toxic' A. The Limits of Body and Text I started this and forgot about myself. As I touched the two texts, I moved through back and forth between them. I read them again in order then out, and I am now a bit lost in my swimming. Another text was mixed in, there were so many. I wanted to tell you everything. But we aren’t supposed to say things like that. Seduction requires concealment, this is the way of the sorcerer. And do we speak? I certainly should delta this paragraph if I am to be not haunted by the drawings of the figurations of failure that encompass my literary goggles. And to say, what have we touched on? The limits of self? The expansiveness of self. I think I may have forgot that I am trying to find a way to stay alive when life comes to crash down, and perhaps I am like the bird flying in ciricles, or I wish I could swim to the sea. But I have no water. I reject the purity of a clean water. I am only washing in the depths of blood and poison. What is this voice, can a mother speak like this? Is this fiction? No its fucking not. You don’t need to know my citations. This is my mad feminism. I am mad. It’s anti-relational as seduction. I’m queer when I want to be queer with who I want to be. And I can be as Mad as I want. I can be as Mom as I want. I also can fail at every step of the sliding. And then I can be drowning. And I can know myself at so many nodes that the self is melting into memory. And I sometimes can’t controlt he overflow. I don’t want to be naked in words. But I am always undressing, what brings me here? Why can’t I find a way out of this auto-erotic confessional. It is so hard to get anyone to think through the mess. I am trying so hard to not write this way. But this comes so much easier. I can come when I think of the ways that my body touches the text and the words can carry me across times, I can be someone else and I can be lost in the voice. And the voices can intermingle. And this isn’t touching madness. This is material madness. This is the fucking pain of birth. And its better than sex. I am ready to reclaim the material bodily horror of placentas. The after birth. You want to feel relations? Why is there no feminism of the sexual pleasure of pulling my breast out in front of the whole world and sticking an engorged tit in the face of a beautiful child. The oxytocin is pulsing thorugh my body, the other nipple is driping, I never wore a cover, why would I cover my chance. I will breastfeed in a church, at a funeral, in a bed, while watching porn. Whenever the fuck I want. But then I kind of won’t. So I sound so mean. I mean could I be masculine mom, I am bothered deeply by the flat out ways in which childless students, queer parents have told me that my research is a form of violence. Well like only 2 people. Violence, because you don’t know me, and I am saying my name. My name Mother. Mom. That is also a name in your lexicon, but is it better to keep it at home, out of this world of Ivory? This isn’t everyone, clearly. Or foggy. But to even tell you the number of former students and former profs who warned me about being open about having children and letting department know about it as I started grad school speaks to the absolute discongrouity between academia and motherhood. I am either too late, I am promiscuous fucking myself by having had kids before my PhD or whatever in between two phds. So yeah I quite one because my world fell apart or fell together, in teh puzzling ways worlds come together. And I know this is dumb, but the academic might not realize - that I was working harder for less money. Or also that I know how to play with things, like money I am older and never had the protection of job security. Ever. So I found ways to make things. I made compromises, I am not a Marxist. I am a materialist. A body. I use money because it is an energy that feeds me and gives me power. I am not going to lie. Do I want to support capitalism no. But I am certainly not aligned with everyones destory capitalism crying when they continue to take promotions with institutional security. Now I really can’t share this anymore. . Would that be more pleasing to the reader? If I am masculine female that only shows my tits to fight capital. I will only show my tits to make you very uncomfortable. Or if you buy me dinner. Am I prostitute or a mashocitst? I can take on that role. In the room. But I would rather not. I love you that do, I want you too. I want it all. I am hungry and tired and always in search for more. I am eating myself and the world in my insatiable hunger for fuck. But I just wish you would let me say the things I want in my time. Will they? I can say this and maybe if you realized that I am saying this, is what Kate Chopin did. Her quite tame affair and tears in the bedroom. And she smoked. Thank god. No one fucking smokes anymore. I want to be able to bring back a base neo-materialism. A Baitallian religous fervor for the natural. And this whole thing of like writing liek this, this is how I could always be But only in words. Well and body. But not in figure. So figure is fucked. I can’t be that figure. Maybe I am part of a figure of a mother or nature or child or whatever. But I don’t really care that much. Until you do. Until you treat me like that. Not you, now I figuratively made you a You. And then I’m losing where I wanted to go. Must I be totally nude until you realize that I have something to say. We (who is We, if we is always me-you, this conversation is simply an example of the failure of figures because the point of all this is that words are always material. That neurons are always electric, we didn’t need electric sheep, we needed mattering) cannot demand a flanking of self, it is one thing to speak from experience as a way to access power. Or to speak when you want. But to feel compelled ot confess. I have to meet with the school social worker again. And then my confidence is falling, and I am failing. I am alone and a keyboard in a room. I went out once this semester and I cried. I am so fucking old. And I am falling and a failure. But thats the words or the ways? This is a journal entry. What do you want to do with it? I don’t fucking know. But what else can I do. How does emotino exit the body if I don’t write it. I am not sure, I am like a fucked up machine. I am the fastest typer and reader in my school, or I was as a child. I was TAG. Talented and Gifted Child. So maye I was the CHILD. And now I am MoM. Monster of Monster. Mess. Mad. Mistake. Memory. Material. Mmm I am shifting sands and I don’t want to get dragged down under. What would happen if I could let go of these words. I would have no more words and I would be losing light. And sometimes I realize I am closing my world in. I am not really. But i am making limits. And what if I were to just run. But then in between all the bravado, which is really pretty pathetic. IT is like a small dog barking aggressively. I am nothing. But I have nothing to protect me so I have very tall walls - of - toxic - energy? If that exists. I let people in too close and it might get real. Particularly now. It seems to be falling into each other more and more. And I am afraid because if I get too creative it gets more dangerous, I can’t break with reality. But if I don’t do the creative. I fall apart and I am non-moving. I want to reduce my commitments, smaller make world. Aphorsia. See its happening! I am losing words. I am always lost with words. I don’t know if anyone will ever read one fucking word I write or get it. Tehy will see me as the debase, psycho, whatever. It doesn’t matter. They should learn to read. I hate that insult. Don’t ever say that to anyone, its not something one learns to do, it is soemthing you feel. Reading isnt the text to the eyeball. Its more and less. It is the way of becoming a child in the face of the text. To let it wrap you up in its arms. To let mommy read you a story. That is the embrace of the reading process. Hear it - read it- touch it. Don’t be afraid, of the erotic nature of the text. It is seductive, and if you appraoch it like an asshole. You won’t get much but the sun coming out of my eyes. The roles are reveresed now and I am the the woman with the moon in my cunt. I am more. And if only they knew this might happen. The reversal. Narcisim. Where is Lyotards jerk-off. And again how do i get here? I don’t want to make more mistakes in my direction. figures such as Edelman The Child in his critique of reproductive futurism - are invested with political meaning and operationalized rhetorically by actors for gains. ⁃ He posed sinthomosexual as the schynecode which challenge it ⁃ Mad Mother adds a verb to mother which then I argue transmigrates figuration itself. If figures must be born even theoretical ones, mad has many metaphoric slippages that overidentify mother another invested term which in a patrocharal linguistic an cultural system come to be opposed to masculinity, mad mother is a doubling and alliteration MMM this double m Evaporation is the process of transformation from liquid to vapor, and reminds us of the scales of temporality and their fragile nature. We are not forever nor are we even always ourselves. What one calls pain and another pleasure can evoke watery responses, the body leaks as it releases towards the all. This is the brief ecstacy of being with eternity, wrapped in a tear, orgasmic relase, the draw of the water pulls us back towards the cycles. Pleasure and Pain are also in a dance of opposition as they exist in the divide of either ors. Pleasure invites pain, in a gesture of hospitality, and pain seeks out pleasure in the night and they are speaking scales of skin. B. The chiasmic possibility of a trans-corporeal reading and writing practice This sense of water as healing, tears releasing, kisses enlivening and the ocean calling is further explored through bringing Edna and Antonetta in dialogue, through another body - this writing. In Body Toxic, Antonetta writes a memoir of bodies, the way that one's body is entangled in other bodies. The writing of self becomes excess, and the difference between water as healing or that which madness escapes back to the infinite, is altered. . The water outside her hometown was contaminated with radiation and toxic waste. My analysis will focus on the form of the memoir as an eco-poetic material memoir. Alaimo writes about material memoirs in Material Feminisms; this genre makes real the nature of trans-corporeality in the complexity and beauty of its form, which cannot be separated from the author or the interwoven worlds surrounding the author. Kate Chopin’s novel (1869) The Awakening once banned and now acclaimed as a critical modern feminist text has been analyzed by numerous scholars since its revival in the post DeBeavour and Gloria Steinman era. The book’s embrace of sexual desire, breaking social norms of the era and prose all have been delved over. But I want to say something a bit different. Through reading Chopin’s novel empathetically in relation to another current text, Body Toxic, in combination, with my own reading and perspective, their forms a chiasmic possibility of the texts opening towards a trans-corporeal reading and writing practice that decomposes the body of itself and highlights the authors own body and its own evaporation towards the future. The analysis will close read the relationship between water as a narrative player via metanoymic relationships to desire and voice throughout the text. The conclusion with the infamous suicide of Edna at the sea, does not conclude neatly and tie up the narrative. Rather the text opens undecidably inviting the reader into relationality with Edna and the author and with the water. Through creating a space of undecidability the text calls forward and backwards in her memory of her children's voices as she is swimming past the point of return and as the text suddenly ends. The reader must enter, they must finish the story themselves. This invitation is a relationship between author and writer that forms a metalepsis that cannot be resolved. The reader is haunted, and is given a chance to invite the ghost which emerges, The Mad Mother figure. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. P. 310 ““Such is the world of bodies: it has in itself this disarticulation, this unarticulating of the corpus. A statement of the whole extension of sense. An unarticulating statement: no longer signification, but a “speaking” body that doesn’t make “sense,” a “speech”-body that isn’t organized. Finally, the material sense—meaning, in effect, a madness, the onset of an intolerable convulsion of thought. We can think of nothing less: it’s either this, or it’s nothing. But thinking this, it’s still nothing. (Which might be: laughing. Above all, not to ironize, not to mock, but to laugh, the body shaken with no way thought.)”(Excerpt From Corpus Jean-Luc Nancy & Richard A. Rand ) ““the techn is one of a sharing of bodies, or of their compearance: the various ways to make room for the tracings of areality along which we are exposed together, in other words, neither presupposed in some other Subject, nor post-posed in some particular and/or universal end. But exposed, body to body, edge to edge, touched and spaced, near in no longer having a common assumption, but having only the between-us of our tracings partes extra partes.” ( Excerpt From Corpus Jean-Luc Nancy & Richard A. Rand ) C. Floating Care & Time If crip theory has illuminated the power of material, yet not-biologically determined collectives, a way of aligning in relation with others for the collective. In the literary realm, I apply this to the contingent relationship between water and body. This is not the water of purity and re-birth and Mother Earth Goddess energy (not that it isn’t also a bit of that). This is polluted water, that both cleans, restores, and can hurt too. The radical undecidability of the sea, draws us to the seductive power of its allure. And this is not radical in and of itself. It is radical in that Chopin holds out the end. She makes you wait for it. She does not provide you an image, but rather a scene in which the reader must write the end. The ending offers very little in terms of a life line for Edna. And I do not want to argue that she does not die within the narrative. But rather that that opening, is the glimmer, that opens itself towards conversation. And in fact that is what reading does, it does not merely deposit information, it is entangled in a matrix of one’s own experiences, encoded and accidental associations between authora nd reader. Writing at Kate Chopins time with her children running around the home, this is dirty writing. Recent queer and race critiques of her work are entirely valid in terms of the representations of the time period she depicts. I am less sure though of how we can read with care to the past. Is she giving us a picture of the time. As a portrait of the time, the novel encapsulates things that were happening at the time. Her resistance is more subtle. She writes in glimmers. She wants to see something else. A world where feeling isThe impact of the mad mother figure on readers and society demonstrate the potential for crip-care in liminality of language. Her writing provides a space for readers to empathize and understand her journey, allowing for a reimagining of the relationship between the author and reader. VI. Conclusion A. B. The body is written, materially in its births in its differences in its weights; the body is inaccessible in itself, except in touching from the exterior, and a sense of interiority can be touched. An empathy of motion, emotions that can be written, must be not a figuration of a disembodied body but of an embodied writing. It is in fact, not what was written, but it is in the writing that care appears, in the use of I which was only an I as it touches you, and you are an intruder to the body of this text. Pregnant with possibilities, the reading and writing of bodies is a Mother, and this is Madness. In the madness of literary figurations, we will leave the body politic, itself a disembodied mass of bodies, and perhaps open ourselves to a body beyond the spaces of place – a body is more a time than a place, it is in motion and in its movements of community commotion we work towards the dissolution of I. The dissolution happened already, in the impossibilities of true differentiation, that already happened in birth. And we continue. Bodies corporeal and intracorporal, the trans-corporeal river flows through the text. And I am not a nice ending, I am an invitation awaiting the touch of your thought. A call towards the future. A call to the past. And this is yet to be written. I want to step a bit, I am drinking toxic water. If chloroform polluted body - the body chose sea. With lover away, the lamp not lit, the need for experience was a return of the raw. And Antonetta - writes with it. Chopin is yearning for Antonetta, this is nearly love. And I am the menageua-tea. The third. I am going to sort of go sideways here. A slippery slide - to something keeps invoking a feeling in me. That what we might need, is a base neo-materialism. Baitaille, prefigures in many ways the move towards the contingent nature of identity in an event. And so what we are seeing or remembering in Baitallie, is the pollution of ideal and that which is excluded. Crip pollutes queer as crip pollutes queer. And I poison the reader as I am poisoned, we do not consume each other but rather extend out - and there we again find ourselves sort of in the same realm. Of this trans-corporeal, crip, counter-narrative, affirming via multiplication, fresh toxic tangles. To be with child. Is one thing. To be drugged is another. But they speak back and forth. And I can’t tell whats where. I know that there is something slipping away. It is the bodies. And the big body, every wall and step away, from experience, ecstacy desire - I think in some ways its ok be bad and mad. I’m sorry for those that will find me terribly offensive. And I mean that, truly I do. But care for some is like this. It is just raw. And maybe your words hurt me raw. Maybe I was hiding, and I ran to it. And I am running still. Can you let me lick my wounds on your knife? I will be here too? This is not a call to violence, but a romp in the mud. B. The invitation for readers to engage with the text C. The call for a future understanding of the mad mother figure My drive to incarnate the figure of "monster mother" and the interplay of madness and motherhood reveal the deeply intricate and diverse nature of the maternal experience. Motherhood, in its multifaceted dimensions, may indeed offer a framework for embodied care that unites us through our differences, never settled, always in our decay, a base collapse of time/space. As we move forward in a world where universals have been criticized and challenged, it is essential that we strive to build a body politic that acknowledges and respects the roots of our existence - our shared experience of birth and motherhood. A fragile vulnerable universal that is born again and again, through love at moments, shared, for uncertain futures. In the face of climate change, , perhaps a return to the body that all have came from can help us think through how to honor the body we all are part of, Mother Earth’s body politic. By doing so, we can foster a sense of care for the collective that bridges the gaps between us and unites us in our common shared present, shattered as each vision may be, a kaliodsocope can become a collective, a stained glass reflection built together. Can we build a universal that is based in place? In the body? New Woman movement culture and literary side of first wave fem, Chopin doesn’t fit as neatly. - themes of marriage, motherhood women’s desire for separate identity and bodily autonomy. At the time women did not have right to body or refuse sex for child, Sea is site of sensual fulfilmment and elemntal force driving woman towads slef-destruciton - (Heilmann p. 335. ) The ending can be read as a return ot the sea, the ocean maternal spac eof the sea which she describes as “homecomign” a return to childhood. But I want to say that perhaps it is not a return but a transformation, a call out towards the future. Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of exscription relates to the idea that meaning is not something pre-existing or inherent in an object, text, or artwork, but rather emerges through a process of externalization and interaction with the viewer or reader. Theco-productive nature of meaning interactions, as well as the role of optical metaphors and the significance of ecstatic experiences in connecting to the universe. Applying these theories to the process of writing, we can understand that the meanings produced by a text are not fixed or solely dependent on the author's intentions. Instead, they are generated through the complex interactions between the text, its context, and the reader. This co-productive process is shaped by historical, cultural, and psychological factors that influence the ways in which the text is read, understood, and experienced. I tried so hard to write a map. An outline. A guide. And follow it. But I kept writing other stuff. And then being pulled to read more, this is the process of writing, but how do we make limits? That allow us to have space and produce. I am actually wanting to birth here. I have a freight train - a build up of backed up nonsense and body that I want to drip into the text. This is my material empathy. It doesn’t come out right. My writing is not right. It is a flawed copy. And it is a weaver, not ashamed, but not proud. It sounds brave, but the words are weak. And I shorten. Them. To try and avoid, complete unravel. And the direction got fuzzy, the world fell into itself. And I may need some guidance. So any help here now (Robert like seriously how should I conclude this and how do I incorporate my own experience or my preferred style of writing in a way that will be more legible to publications and readers, and how do you write? Do you just write it first, slowly, organized. I think you are less of a mess. Well I’m feeling sure of it a bit. But maybe thats a projection. Of my own reflection. Shattered mirror. Writing something. Sorry if this comes off, the door is a bit unhinged.) Megan Jean Harlow Abstract: The placenta nurtures in darkness, pulsing with the rhythm of becoming. Yet under glaring hospital lights, this sustained lifeforce is bagged as biohazard waste—its vital materiality rendered invisible. In this presentation, I tread delicate lines between being and non-being to reconstitute the placenta’s significance. Drawing on Deleuzian perspectives of affect and assemblage, I explore the placenta's spiraling transformations: from sacred in ritual to abject matter in the medical gaze. But binary thinking falters here. The placenta defies categories, overflowing boundaries in its emergence. This vibrant, relational tissue pulses with cosmic creativity—and untapped potential. My analysis interweaves feminist and indigenous insights about relationality and interdependence with crip/queer refusals of “normal.” Binary life/waste, purified/polluted collapse as the placenta trails amniotic threads across categories. I discuss artistic projects that re-stage the placenta as catalyst—unleashing its generative forces. In honoring what has been discarded, separation gives way to renewed connection. Out of absence, presence coheres in a feminist birthing of possibility. I seek not to constrain meanings, but invite imaginative openings that the placenta’s becoming births within us. This presentation explores the placenta’s potent material-discursiveness to transform what medicine excludes into radical new heuristics of value. How many
Times will you not answer I love you To hear nothing back Silence in hallways that curve through A heart that shared Our children’s breathe Grew children in womb Penetrated by your love I’m toxic maybe You say But you won’t why Why won’t you tell me the path To get back to where we once were Or somewhere new Fresh sheets and states Underwear and winks Anything I will be anyone A new name A fresh Jon New meal plan Nothing You want nothing from me You say there is no one You’ve destroyed my name To our Yes please hear Our, and yours, family Why? I wanted the truth and to protect Those that are ours The children that are innocent Or were Before you drug them into a storm Perhaps the storm brewed and it was loud and I had my hands covering ears And you had already built shelters But I was naked with child Waiting for you And I didn’t see you We’re not alone If it’s someone or no one It’s all the same The with if you The trust of you The warmth of you The you You Are gone. I’m crying and you tell me To stop My eyes are but weaving The worlds you are drowning And I’m falling into couches And alone Afraid if your words are real You lie And you lie about lies So I turn into a Fly On a wall I’m not even real I heard a whisper once of me A girl with a lot to offer A woman you said was worthy And you left her And then I was a fly I am in a web stuck in your story I wish I saw truth when it wasn’t so near My stomach is tense and I shiver As you turn towards me Your words shatter Everything That was once the woman I was I don’t know her anymore I dream of escape or the final embrace When you destroy me so totally That I can’t feel again But I fear For them Your madness is thick And heavy And it can’t No more and I can’t Breathe Breathe please I will exist I will a future Hold me once more And I’ll pretend I’m not dinner I cannot calculate.
But I did conjure the moment. I decided to do this. I was asked to do this. An invitation of the response. The response can never Return a letter To the sender Communication is scary. It is at the edges of response, of expectation. I hesitate so many times my automatic writing is full of hesitation. I am speaking on the edges of things. I am afraid to fail. To fall. Is this the door? That I should go down. The path ahead is one step and goes no further. Then the next step unveils the next door, the next path. A labyrinth which may just break apart the entirety of the moment. I want to travel and move. To travel through time and return to time. I don’t want to return, I want to move forward through the future. I-65 - the music is my cue, a form I am responding to now. Can we turn down the road and begin the new spaces? The feelings of love are uncaptured. We feel sorrow when we think of those lives lost. If one has lost love then one might begin to think of love. We don’t want the return of the same - except at the moment of the break. To be thrown into another timeline is the space of rupture. To run towards it is to emerge. To pretend to deny the psychic spaces that illuminate our relationships, to see that they are shared. You know it is empty and I do not know if you hear me. I can see you when I close my eyes. I can feel you when you speak but you know not of my watching. My eyes are an audience and are not all - feminine - discourse a love letter. I remember when we first met. The impossibility of it is exactly what I remember when I hear a certain song. Sometimes I try to close my eyes and remember the sun shining on your face. I felt a true opening emerge. I knew you and did not know you. I was running towards you but standing still. A future emerged in the moment. The encounter was ongoing and I was chasing you. But did you know I was. I felt the future unfolding in that moment. And you say I should not focus on the memory of it as an image my mind makes of an image. I know that you knew me too. I don’t know if you can say it. And now you are gone. And I left and I ran away from Hazard and then I found you again. And we ran together. We broke ourselves through the excitement of the moment we knew. We spoke of times before and times ahead were too sure. They were too much. They exceeded. I ran with you and it made no sense. I then was thrown back to the timeline and your variations fade with time. But sometimes I am right there. Love is like that. And now I have a new love. It is emerging and it is exceeding the pages of the time that exceeds the space. The space is virtual and we cannot tell where things will be. I am afraid to say the wrong thing, lest I not be heard. But I have to speak. I have to. I am pushed into this by something beyond myself. In a dream I see you. I think you are something new. I think you are emerging. A love letter to the danger of this. The danger of truly opening up a possibility that may forever erase myself erase myself as such. We are becoming. But is there an order? I search for the formality proper to such an exchange. Is all exchange playing with the hazard of a ghost. I was ghosted and I am haunting. Do I haunt the spaces of our exchange. It is not so easy. To see the ghost and the spaces of love. I want to know the future, and to not repeat. I want to jump into the space I think I hear yourself in. I can feel that I am opening to something new. This is the hazard here. Bergson’s theories of memory rely on a visual space of the dream, where action is not present. This is continued unquestioned by our movement to virtual space. But what of the lucid dream? When one can take action within a dream. To become aware of a game? Is that no chance itself? The true move between watching a dream and being part of a dream. Very few lucid dreamers can truly create and control the outcomes, but to play within one's own consciousness seems to elude some further connection between past present and future. We can in fact in the space of memory. If that is within a dream. Be a dream. If we open up our voices our minds our bodies to the infinite. We have to. In fact we are only open in regards to that infinite. We must begin to wonder. Can love ever be with you. Am I only in love with myself? Love should be easy? Or should it be impossible. I cannot tell if I love or hate you. You are representing something but if we are to reach beyond our representation of each other we create something new, an emerging love that is hazardous. And love is always a chance, or it is not love. The love of a mother is hazardous. We do not know the trajectory of the child, yet we hold the space for this becoming. Together we give all of our physical and mental spaces to the child. Psychic borderlands. And we must let you go and you wander outside the body and we try to guide our psychic strands so they are not broken so easily. And so is the love that wanders the world. Is there such a thing as a soul and if there is, does it have a mate? Or mates. Every instant provides the opportunity to be with hazard. Chance how I love you. Chance how I hesitate at your movement. I hold myself back as you walk into a room. I am afraid to breathe, I am all body and I tremble at your hands. You have not reached me, but I imagine you do. I want to jump. I am in the space of hesitation. Can I ever send such a letter to you. If chance is to be imagined it is to be loved. Because love is that which is between me and you. And there is no chance if there is not something to be chanced. The holding of the dice of life and the unrolling and unfolding of our story. It is possible. I may hesitate, you may hesitate. There may be nothing left between me and you. Because There never was. But I hold the space for you right now, before I dare to throw out the dice. It is in here the holding of chance, that I am reaching for you. I am not thrown, but I am holding. No one can throw me into the future without my opening. I am waiting for you. And now I am no longer holding. To wait is to expect to project in the future. I know very little about how to write such a thing. Is there a similarity to speak of, I don’t know how to remember this. I don’t know how to tell you. If I told you then you are not a chance anymore. The chance of a future is the possibility of freedom and of the subject as itself. The impossibility of being is so beautiful. Chance, you illuminate our very sense of possibility. To be of hazard. You are dangerous, you are mysterious and you are lucky. You are representing the possibility of me and you. Will you be a lady, will you be a moment. Will you share the moment with me? Will you Dare? Danger. Danger excites me. The danger of chance. If I jump. I might fall. And I can’t predict this. I can predict other things, but I can’t predict this. I want to be with you right now. You are so dangerous to who I think I am. Me and you would be dangerous together. To break down the world with our dance. The probability of such collisions is beyond the macro. I want to begin again. I want to try again. I desire a chance in the darkness. Turn the lights on, I can’t find you and I Know you are in the dark now. Chance is perhaps an uninvited guest. I did not ask you to be here. I found you quite simply. By chance. Your dangerous nature is making me turn my world inside out. I can step towards you and then it may lead me away. That is the third attention that one may follow. It implies such a risk. You ask me to reach into the fold. A fold I do not know. And I want it to unfold. I want to be beyond the fold. I want to be inside the fold. I can conjure you in the dark. I can speak to a space I can feel into you. This is becoming unnatural. Can nature explain the chances of its own creation. Can we find through formalizing the language of our chances the spaces of a philosophy of uncertainty? Uncertain we begin. Uncertain we continue. We know something though. The time is going. If you could tell me what you needed I would join you. I want to move towards you - and I hesitate. I want to waste your time. I want you to stop and look to feel into me. To feel you, to lie with you, chance. Your danger is enticing. I want to be your danger. I want to break it down. I don’t know if we can love. I can’t find you. Where did the time go? I can’t find you. Leave the light on. And we break into a formalization of the spaces between us. OR was it time? Was it a gambit? I am throwing the dice right now. The dice The flower The fear The gestation The arrow The hesitation The gaze You Can we find each other in the dark of the void? It is only where we can. In the midst of a dream that is without time, the experience of time as a dream in the dream can we wake up together? Can we break out of our lives to be together in time? You are making me into a danger. An image of danger. Seduction. Does chance seduce us? Does the hazardous elude us? Does my language miss the subtlety of this pause, this is something I want to show you. I want to show you the feelings of embrace. Is the great chance, their birth, or their nurturance. A mother who made matter inside her matter, who held the possibility of their child’s becoming within her, who went through birth with the genius to give the child the light of day. Then to survive. To be fed, to be loved, to be nurtured. This is a chance... a mother’s love. The chance of one who has given more than one can imagine, to create teh nurturing. When we think of the mother, we can begin to make the one fuzzy. It is not God on high, but mother in her pajamas, in near tears, and her milk that nurtured the child. And what of the lost children? Children without mothers. Without love. The child without love is of many. And the chances of a child to be an orphan? 10,000 children become orphans every day. Childhood is a time of freedom, within the safety of the confines of the family, an estimated 10 million children around the world don't have that chance. These are the children left out of our calculations - they are the children of slaery. It only cost $37 to buy a child. Not all children in slavery are orphans, but all are certainly orphans of society. If society is a mother, she has lost sight of her sheep. If chance is a tale of the victors, why does it insist on producing exiles? The lucky can count their stars in favor of a world that has remembered them. A timeline, a genealogy that culminates in their bright star on top of the Christmas Tree. Where are the lost children in this? Where do we find a theory of chance that can mean something….Something that can help those left out. What if Mozart was a child slave? What if a counterfactual examination of history where the genius was the orphan, sold to child slavery. Where would the music be? The Day The Music Died. And the widow, the black widow. They rip out the reproductive organs, so you don’t have menstrual periods or wombs. They are searching for the red room. The young girl plays with dolls. She yearns to be with mom. During the precious moment of childhood mom is the one who has the moment. But as time marches on, those moments lessen. The universal stories bleed in. Push in. The higher truth comes back adn we hear more about the plight of women. This is not unique to women, but can apply to all others - those outside white, male, wealthy, western hetero priveleged position. Not to focus on a system of privilege, but to note the intersectionality of privilege. Let us say that woman is a bar on the cage of Marilyn Frye's birdcage. Not the entirety of the enclosure, but a bar upon which points of the birds escape, make points. Chance for men is not a game within a game, barely a warrior's path. Chance is always feminine. It requires endurance. To wear down the possibilities of one's life. To live out all options, to imagine all possibilities. To train to deal with movements. To become the UberMensch. To be SuperMan. We do not want to be that SuperMan. What turns a good man into a villain? It is a choice. Or the imagination of a lack of a choice. There is something about rolling the die often that helps one imagine chance, if one has loved many, then perhaps one can be loved. This seems acceptable for some, but is the woman of many lovers, is she free? We must not speak of her journey. The women born in cages, gave birth to women born in cages, and the caged woman has continued a repetition. The song alters, but the cage continues. Essentially that is superman. For Nietzsche the eternal return allows a song of the victorious. But is not the woman the last in line here. As man wins, woman haunts? Widows. The true victors of history. Those whose captors were left. Woman must write herself, claims Cixous. Cyborg Manifesto. Techno-futures imagined by a woman. Ada Lovelace, is the one who wrote the essay which outlines the true language of Charles Babbages’ fame. It is in the haunted images of woman that we find truth remain. Then there were 2. They switched faces - if one has no preparation for the binding, one has no plan for escape. The caged raised their daughters, more aware, more finessing of the spaces of hidden places. Then the cracks continue. Is man as such? Or is the cage enclosing him? Variants affirming their possibility by their design. Their urge to continue. There is a secret perhaps, that there is a chance that they may get a voice. And feminist imagined a future, where woman is free to play within chances. This is something essential to a further elucidation of chance in any sense of the word. There needs to be an understanding of its formal limitation. And those may be more or less non - formal. If I can’t have the time, to take the time, to train, to properly prepare, to dress appropriately. Then where is the time for a mediation on chance? In fact it is not truly a gift, but a necessity. To affirm oneself, in the limitation fo the spaces there is. For in limited spaces, or times of uncertainty to truly exclaim your ability to have a chance to exceed the knowledge of the past. There have been times in and out of history where chance had no home. The slave ships to america where women killed their own children lest they be prey to the dangers of fate surrounding them. Chance was not part of the thought of those in the Holocaust. Hiroshima, chance was brought to zero. What may make one look back and give such a certain interest to chance, includes the outliers of chance. To even think of those whose chance left behind - calls for a secondary look back. Can chance give us a way to think of ethics - ethics in chance? “ There is a chance within the encounter itself to leave I - and to enter an entangled state. In fact that would be the indeterminacy now determined by modern quantum physics post Einstein's E=Mc2, furthered by Heisenburg and Bohrs continuing fractions on the spaces of such scientific interludes. Ethics is a reach forward, a responsibility backwards. Its not just ME who takes a chance for the sake of me, but what of taking a chance for another. To another. Is this not what one thinks of in regards to the real memory (if there can be one, we know maybe not?). One remembers taking a chance on love, and then losing and gaining. To have loved is to have lost. If you have never lost, then you don’t treasure love itself. The death of a loved one brings enormous grief and pain. This is clearly felt as the counterpoint to love. If one has not lost someone, if one has not experienced life as sorrow, how can they know the joy of true love and life lived. This is where it gets dicey. So where is the I - in the dice game. If we can imagine ourselves as the gambler, as the thrower of the dice, not just now, but in its entirety - perhaps we can understand more the stateliness of chance. His chance is not my chance! His chance involves a series, a history of throwing and playing and casinos and conversations and feelings, of course we do not know all the ways in which the world works or what would science and philosophy even do? The gambler exists to place a - gambit because it is their path that they choose to unfold. And what of ethics? One must be aware of one's own relationship to becoming to the world, to materialit and performativty - one must walk a sort of warrior's path with chance if we can have a hope of understanding or effecting any sort of ethical responsibility for ourselves in the world. It is not a world of random probabilities. But the existence of possibilities demands we take responsibility for our actions. The dice throw is with the knowledge of all our previous actions, dice related or not. I lost my father before I gained my daughter. The space between was not alone but with a child growing within me. I felt the gift of life, as I drove to the hospital passing the ambulance - I felt something. Someone touched my stomach, I knew he was dead and she would live. Like that. I knew. We hate to speak of such truths. But as a woman wrote herself, in the past, now a woman must write herself in feeling, in memory and in the mixed modes of being a woman in the future of woman. I want to look back at the futures created. A world within a world. Title: Chimeric Crip Doulaing: Werewolves, Crip Childhood, and Dancing Deviant Mothers. Abstract: This paper engages crip doulaing as a method and mode of care. Through reading the hybrid, genre-defying film Good Manners (2017), the author reflects on crip care, mothering and embodied writing. The critique emerges as a powerful sensual place in which crip children and crip families, as well as crip caretakers, begin to imagine the bubbling future. Crip kinship leads us towards a new imagining of crip love and crip children and crip creators and crip doulas: in the hybrid figure, we see something mixed and mingled. Otherworldly child-werewolf Joel is born into an otherworldly aesthetic. The child transforms and structures the possibility of merging toward the future, which is the return of a past love that has always lived. Werewolf children and their crip-doulas open doors to reimagining mothering and children within a crip framework that challenges traditional norms of kinship and ableism. This is a radical embrace of the rhythms of time and care work. Drawing on the power of contingent unity through difference, this reading furthers current conversations surrounding crip temporality and care work through an ethos of care. The non-self same chimera hybrid film as horror and fantasy, the chimera's pregnant body as Ana and fetus Joel, the chimera child werewolf-boy, and the chimera caretaker as a lover. These are becoming chimeras within the film, challenging us to think about bodies of crip time that bridge past/future/present, eternally splitting into more ways of joining others in difference. This attempts to temporalize the non-self in and outside of time, to find swerves in the road to everywhere. Writing is a web in which the writer weaves a world. The net I spin becomes the time and space I am stuck on this paper. I risk losing myself on this web or perhaps even revealing myself. Arriving at this paper, I entwine a film, Good Manners (2017), my life as a mother and as a child, and thinking theories culled together to create something new. I come with a desire to speak to the joy of crip chimeric childhood and mothering. The essence of crip time is in its moments of joy. The past, present, and future come together, leading us to the unknown dance of stories to be lived, written, and pursued. Reflecting on childhood and mothering, I will interweave both into the three-bodied chimera. We are birthing; in the past, we were born, and in the future, we will birth. The emphasis is on we. We are a chimeric and crip identifier. You meet I in us. This is the flux. We are written in the bodies of the bio-chimera-maternal-laboratory. Director Juliana Roja explores crip themes through the story of a young woman named Clara who becomes the nanny for the unborn child (Joel) of a wealthy, pregnant woman named Ana. Clara discovers the hidden secret beneath the plot; Ana is pregnant with a werewolf. As the film progresses, Clara and Ana's relationship intensifies, with plenty of sultry pausing and suspenseful drama betwixt. This dark fairy tale ties together the chosen family: Clara, Joel, and Ana. Love can connect the past with the present. In the dark spaces of fantasy is a return—nostalgia as potential. The film has been read as a queer film that challenges Brazilian horror films and examines how race, class, and sexual orientation work in the ‘context of horror and the uncanny’ (Oliveria 32). Fantastical films provide fodder for the hungry critic's appetite. This essay will engage in the visually enticing aesthetic of Good Manner’s matte-painted backgrounds, dramatic color choices, and campy werewolf imagery. The moon dictates the night and the scene of the film. Captivated by the lunar, it becomes a maternal time. The film is incredibly lyrical, the eerie, otherworldly comforting lullabies throughout the film. The rhythms of music provide a sense of connection to another space, an innocent, childlike space. The theme allows the film to be more severe and more playful. The musical backgrounds shift to the effectual moods which rhythmically dictate the film. The movie playing with its own body, speaks to the rhythms of the monstrous cultural body made real in the biological body as the pregnant body grows; as the boy becomes a werewolf, these growths are accompanied by their internal rhythms, none of which can be fully clocked. But they can be felt. The film’s moodiness is as much sad as it is joyous. The film's length, at just over two hours, demands patience, an extended call to ponder on the fantastical times of extended becomings of time, motherhood, and childhood. Punctuating the life of werewolves is a lunar rhythm, as the human-animal is pulled by the moon, becoming a monster. Joel, the werewolf body, challenges us to see what love and care for another means. Even if the other may kill us. Eat you. In her role as Joel's mother, Clara is a mother not of biological reproduction but a mother of love with a child she must now protect. This is the joy of choosing the impossible. It was never a choice, but in the end, it does not matter; it is more the accepting of a call. Agape, or a mother’s love, runs throughout Brazilian culture and with it comes impossible mothers and impossible games, but perhaps somewhere in these games, agape emerges as refigured. Perhaps Clara, captivated by the same moon that shines towards you, embarks on an unknown future of crip doulas. Motherhood Manifesto and Crip Methods This body politics draws on recent articulations of kinship as more than bloodlines; reading through a crip lens can inform what Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman call kin-aesthetics. Kin aesthetics is a philosophical idea that can help us imagine how texts redefine our social relationships. Judith Butler postulates that in the fictional world, we can begin to imagine crip kinships beyond bloodlines. Sami Shalk states that ‘speculative fiction can defamiliarize (dis)ability, race, and gender in intellectually and politically productive ways. By shifting our taken-for-granted social norms, speculative fiction makes unconscious preconceptions about (dis)ability, race, and gender more readily apparent, challenging readers to think outside of the accepted definitions of these categories.’ (40) Within this film reading, I can imagine and reflect on the lived realities of caretaking in a world where we don’t exist with werewolves. Themes of care, mothering, queer, and crip kinship are seen in an imaginary space that dissolves the frameworks structuring our current straight hold on alternative imaginings. To make a home with pregnant bodies, crip doulas, crip-kin, and werewolf babies, the family we choose and who choose us, demands a crip-ship. We are building a ship that crips and crip kin can sail. My ship is this page, and the film is my first mate. I am not sailing to home; instead, the ship is our homing—an intertextual rhetorical imagining in the form of academic writing and speaking and thinking. The film’s fantastical family opens doors to those we know now and those we may have never known, inspired by the phenomenon of an echo. It is embodied writing. This is a risk, and indeed, I could write another way. And I likely will, at some point in the future, but I want to write like this, and I believe writing like this communicates something distinctive. I want to undress, the prison of the third person. This paper articulates a crip-doula as a mode of reading film, and composing criticism. ‘Crip doulaing, naming disability as a space to be born into worldmaking, a word marking the potential for collective action and radical reimagining’ (Kafer, 425). Crip doulaing is about more than the birth of those disabled at birth or of disabled mothers giving birth. It is that. But it also names ‘disability as a space we can be born into… again and again as we acquire new disabilities or discover words for things that have been there all along.’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 241). This is a radical embrace of the rhythms of time and care work, the socially identified and radically articulated ways in which we are born, again and again, with a difference. as a method draws on witnessing and assisting the birthing of writing and reading through an ethos of care. This aligns with a crip method that ‘might function as a body of thought, or as thought about bodies’ (McRuer, 76). Such a theory is a form of composition theory that engages the embodied author and the bodies without. Through weaving blood to ink, a crip composition situates itself, against the God Eye From Nowhere, as Donna Haraway has shown, we place a partial patch over the author’s I, and blink into the night. In the film, a magical tale, we comingle with monsters. The crip body emerging is a monster body; a werewolf film uniquely opens doors to such a reading. Sami Schalk analyzes speculative fiction and discusses how the fantastical defamiliarizes the reader or viewer, which encourages readers/viewers to question ‘(dis)ability, race, gender, and sexuality’ (161). In so doing, we open doors to this fantastical world. I was turning inside to break out. I want to escape the blood. In this, I call towards the past and its aborted dreams. Robert McRuer writes, ‘To adapt or crip the concept of worldmaking, ‘more people than can be identified are engaged in the critically disabled project of navigating the ableism upon which neoliberalism relies and remapping the ableist spaces neoliberalism has constructed’ (93). And to that end: I make some rough drafts. Pregnancy and Normative Biological Clock Checkers We are brought to a scene familiar to anyone who has ever been pregnant. A doctor’s examination where Ana is receiving an ultrasound. The filming is starkly white and sterile. Ana and Clara are passive in the biomedical gaze of the doctor and the fetal imaging ultrasound. Ana’s appointments at the doctor follow typical biomedical surveillance of fetal growth. In the exam, the doctor shows the ears, eyes, and nose and then asks if she wants to know the sex. Unsure, she decides why not; it is a boy. Her one question is, ‘is he normal’ the doctor says he is healthy. The fetus kicks, and Ana is frightened. The doctor assures her that this also is normal. Fetal imaging is part of what I call the biological Chronos of temporality. Its images secure a timeline that can predict due dates, despite the insufficient realities of such calculations. It clocks and maps the womb through sonic waves designed to find enemies in war and underwater. It sees only what it is trained to see, enemies in the unclear territory—attempting to make lines in waves. There are other temporal resonances in the pregnant body. At home Clara puts a fetal heart monitor over Ana’s belly; we hear the heartbeat and a different effect than the 2d image. Does the heartbeat, like a horse galloping, print a new vibration that verifies the non-unity of anything but the beat? Ana is in love with horses; she shows Clara a photo of a horse earlier in the film. She has a music box with a horse, whose lullaby occupies the sounds of fairytale and nostalgia that run throughout the film. The horse beating sound of a fetal monitor operates on the Doppler effect, discovered in 1842. The fetal doppler works on the same principle as the ultrasound machine; the frequency and variation of waves are much higher, meaning only a trained ultrasound technician can use the device. Clara and Ana efficiently operate an at-home fetal doppler machine and listen to the results. Something changes in such frequencies. The echolocation changes based on its reader and its time and space of use. They told me I would have a 13-pound baby. I was two weeks late, and the pressure was setting in, I went to the hospital to appease the family around me. How could I put the baby at risk? They scanned me and said go home, we will schedule you for Monday. I cried, my midwife said it was my decision. And I did everything, I saw a magical acupuncturist and I went into labor, I did not go back to the hospital. I had a 9-pound baby at home with my midwife, my partner and I felt rhythms of be-coming others that were unlike anything. The spacing of birthing is an intensity of becoming that unlocks the body, unlike any other pleasure. And it was the most powerful and strong and amazing energetic flux of my life. We don’t hear positive birth stories, because that’s not good for business. Luna’s Embodied Crip-Chimera Time Following the doctor's orders, Clara removes bloody bags of meat from the refrigerator and replaces them with large heads of lettuce. One night under a full moon, Clara finds Ana at the refrigerator. She is looking for meat, and Ana approaches Clara passionately; she violently kisses her and bites her tongue, drawing blood. The following day Ana has no memory of the encounter. Clara begins to drop her own blood into the food she prepares for Ana. Ana is not aware of the blood flavoring but eagerly eats her food. As the sexual relationship between Ana and Clare develops in the film, Ana’s pregnancy develops, and Clara’s caretaking enters more mysterious realms. Clara is doing her own type of clocking of Ana’s growing pregnancy. Using a lunar calendar to note Ana’s weight and vitals, she notices the link between the full moon and her behaviors. Clara and Ana’s sex is tender and powerful. The love between the spaces we find ourselves in. Ana has run out of money, so Clara helps her pull diamonds off her boots to sell. Or both. Following Ana, one full moon begins to sleepwalk, and Clara follows her into the streets, where in an abandoned parking lot, she picks up a cat and kills it drinking its blood. The nighttime sleepwalking horror contrasts sharply with the two's more brightly lit tender daytime encounters. In all the film's approach to these scenes, there is a doubling of perspective; we see Clara watching Ana; Clara is behind Ana and her gaze fixated on her as she sleepwalks, as she workouts during the day, as she is at her OBGYN appointments. In the light of the full moon and the scenes of lunar marking, we enter the world of maternal lunar linkages. Like the lunar body, the pregnant body is based on rhythms of nature; these rhythms are embodied in other bodies. The moon pulls the ocean in and out, and the moon is pulled in by the pull of the Earth's body. Lunar time is circular, but it is not a return of the same. It is not a circle that can always be predicted and interpreted equally. The lunar pull is a rhythm that symbiotically interacts with bodies that are themselves changing. Pregnancy itself cannot fall into an image of eternal maternal time in Freeman’s thinking; the pregnant body, the lived pregnant body, is not ever a repetition of the same body. It is uniquely embodied intra-acting with its spaces, times, and fetal kicks. The pregnant body queers the future and the past, confounding the self in its growing all ways. Flattening the image of pregnancy into chronology, line, or a sonogram depends on an outcome; that futural view of pregnancy depends on a particular image of a child born, a certain future. There is another futural view that extends itself and folds into everything. As Clara prepares a meal for Ana after realizing her need for meat, despite the doctor's orders and wanting to avoid her killing cats, she cuts herself while preparing Ana’s lunch. Clara’s blood drips into the food, digesting and tending to the needs of Ana; together, they are forming love with the tender gauze of sensuality. Dripping, tenderly, rewriting the wounds. Unless I forget, that can happen as well. Clara embraces an embodied knowing of how to care for Ana, the thirst for blood must be quenched. In this way, the embodied temporality of our childhood and our mythologies and pasts haunts us, the weight of embodied time can feel like a prison, or it can be a structure through which we engage creative risk. A love story emerges. Ana was dancing as Clara watched. Her pregnant body moved with the music; they danced together on Ana's 30th birthday. She was dressed in black sequins and dancing to Brazilian cowboy music. A rich white woman was pregnant, dancing, drinking, smoking, and laughing. However, Clara, a beautiful black caretaker woman, accepts her. She dances with her on her birthday and makes love to her. The pleasure of bad mothers, rarely seen, barely whispered—a joyous momentary escape of the expanding leaking body. In film we can create that which we can barely dream. Ana dances her way out of the screen and into the chaos of mad mothers dreaming in and out of history. A Dionysian frenzy. But muted. Let us not forget the challenge that formed that night. In the dance, Ana and Clara emerge as lovers; it is in joy we find our way. Our way is always eluding our ste Ana tells Clara that her family has cut ties with her because she is pregnant with the child of a one-night stand with a stranger, and her fiancé left her. She decided to keep the baby despite her family and fiancés and societies demands that she should. And this fairytale would seem to necessitate a beautiful birth according to a teolegy of pregnancy that depends on the creation of a human being. ‘Pregnancy can enable changes and connections that spread or spiral outward in the world and do not acquire meaning only in a prospective or retrospective sense.’ (Browne, 2022, 458). Reframing pregnancy as suspended or expanded time defamiliarizes the teleological assumption that pregnancy must result in a birth. She advocates for seeing pregnancy as paused time, or suspended time, the time taken out of any order. It can thus be reconceptualized as generative despite its endings; care becomes a form of caring for a specific person in a specific place, not because of an ideal outcome in which risk is managed. Clara the Crip-Doula The birth of Joel. The birth is in the middle of the movie, transitioning the film from Ana and Clara's relationship to Joel and Clara's birth. Joel punches his way out of the womb leaving Ana with an open belly and bleeding to death. He lies on the floor, tangled in their umbilical cord still attached to the shared placenta he dragged out of Ana's body. Clara sees Joel crying on the floor, and he looks at her; she wraps him, cleans him. The camp werewolf baby emerging from Ana, ripping through her belly and dragging their placenta with him, is not like a baby. But he looks at Clara, his eyes call to her. Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of werewolves as anomalous, contagious, and epidemic pact asks us to think of the politics of the fantastical and non-human. Crip alliances can be considered the same; perhaps we need a politics of sorcery (Deleuze, 243-247). The placenta feeds the child. The umbilical cord connects mother to child via placenta. Absorbing nutrients energy, broken down into the food of the child. Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelly author of Frankenstein, herself died in after birth. Clara is a crip doula, attending a home birth. The birth did not go well, but she was there for her before and that caretaking is a resistance to the biomedical clock. The maternal body did not reject the fetus; the fetus rejected the maternal. And she tried to leave him beneath the moon in Sao Paulo. After wrapping Joel, she takes him to the edge of a river bank under the full moon and warns her not to turn back, but she does. She almost didn’t take the call of the crip-doula. This was the choice to make the world, and the film's second part begins. The rhythms of disability challenge the world of factories and clocks. But he looks at Clara, his eyes call to her. Calling to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of werewolves as anomalous, the pact that is contagious and epidemic, can the monster, mother, baby and crip come together? Crip alliances can be thought of the same; perhaps we need a politics of sorcery (243-247). Crip doulas are eternal maternal figures that refigure the clocks of normativity to open cracks in the world for be-coming ourselves. Writing can do that too. The werewolf is a hybrid, or chimera, a human-animal; the wolves’ becoming-animal is repetitive and tied to lunar rhythms. Kateřina Kolářová defines a chimera as a metaphor that envisions monstrous differences as a disability (240-241). The hybrid power of werewolf child opens doors to such chimeric power to ‘continue to produce untidy, crooked, queer, twisted bent, crip versions of pasts. Only they will provide for more generous horizons of the present and future’ (246). The chimera of power in the mother-child relationship or the mother-fetal relationship pits the two against each other; the chimeric exchange ensures their places on the lower rings of the power tree. Every day there are 259 births every minute. Every one of these people giving birth needs specific care, not based on when they are due, their risk profile, or the potential of their future child. But their body is changing in ways that limit their ability to fit into the production clock. Werewolves need crip-doulas at every full moon. Birth is something to be experienced, not to be denied. Do you want to sleep through sex? Through life? Through love? Is it the animal nature of such a process that makes us disgusted and wish to wash it away? It is because it is a specifically female experience that holds the residual memory of a primordial time - that might if we dare enter the time, return us to the spaces of our eternal return. I don’t know what to say of the totalizing force of such a birth. I can hear the critics ringing in my ears. I know that not all women are women, and gender is a performance, and that the nature of identity is placed precariously between politics, subjectivity, becoming, time, history, and science. I must go there. If we continue a discourse that completely evades the realities of experience, we will stand in the shadows of our UberMensch. In 2015 the Brazilian president declared that women should not get pregnant due to Zika virus and the threat of disability from it. Unique in its call, a national call to avoid pregnancy. Strange as this was, it happened again in April 2021 when the president asked for women to delay pregnancies due to COVID and the rise of a particularly bad variant that would affect children. Jeffrey Cohen writes that the monster's body is cultural. Born of a particular cultural moment, ‘of a time, a feeling, and a place…the monster exists only to be read’ (4). The monster challenges the finality of death and the return of birth. The monster is at the borders of difference. Here the monster delays or perhaps surpasses the borders of cultural acceptability and abjection. The monster returns. The doubling effect of contagious disability and the mother's responsibility uncannily reinforce the idea of mother-fetal responsibility in this game of false rules and deniable responsibility. Be-coming Crip Children and Werewolves Joel's safe room is hidden behind cabinets. A bare cement room like a dungeon: a string of colorful lights, a worn-out teddy bear, a mattress on the floor, a growth chart. Two chains attached to handcuffs on the cement wall. This is where Joel must go every full moon. He is gently measured, sung to, kissed, and loved as Clara locks him away and then lies in his bed. She pulls out a picture of Ana, softly singing to the photograph and remembering Ana. When Joel awakes, Clara comforts him with a bath. She shaves his arms, clips his nails, and tends to his wounds. I think of the many nights I bathe my children before bed. I remember reading stories, staying up with sick children, and attending with love to them. In film class, I was surprised that most students interpreted this scene as Clara attempting to normalize Joel. A sign that she did not accept his wolfiness. All of us fail to brush our hair at least sometimes. How much do we get our becoming animals? Or is the prison a structural reality and not a mother's burden to bear despite that she must? Upon viewing the locked-up room, I started crying—an eruption of tears. I know many crip doulas feel the same way: the endless doctor appointments, physical therapy, speech therapy, and the required caretaking. ‘We carry stories of resilience and survival, stories of growth and trauma. In sharing our crip stories, we unearth legacies of colonialism and nondisabled supremacy’ (Kafai, 65). Let us learn how to write ourselves in ways that constellate our critical cries into crip compositions, the monstrous decomposing body of self, into the text. My version of this is not for a werewolf, but I might do the same if I had a werewolf. What other option does she have? María Cepeda writes self-reflections on living with a mental disability, saying that passing as normative ‘demands great effort, passing was a gesture of defiance or a trickster strategy that subverts the academic status quo’. The mother raising a child in a world where werewolves are to be killed—isn't that also a protection and a sacrifice? The lousy mother image arises as we picture the mother who restricts freedom, but the child is not given the proper care. This film attempts to show that, yes and no, the mother does whatever one can, including various ethical risks that one takes as a caretaker, a lover, and a person in relation to others. Cepeda's writing is a mode of survival; her reflexive ethnography is a weapon she bears that she acknowledges could have adverse effects against her. This strategy may, for some be anxiety-inducing; for others, it builds resilience. ‘Instead of a banal, humanistic universalization of queerness/disability, a crip theory of composition advocates for the temporary or contingent universalization of queerness/disability.’ (McRuer, 157). An alliance of crip doulas come together to open doors for others; crip doulaing allows us to be there for one another in a unique moment, for a unique time, united by our differentials, a space/time affect that births futures to come. But for every failure, I remember other times as well. I have these openings in the world and somehow, we did something right; time stopped. My daughter was walking down a flight of stairs. I suddenly saw her start to jump, and then it was a flip, and I saw myself go to her. Time and space did not matter then; I do not know how but I jumped to her, and I caught her—time stopped, and within that moment, I saw 100 different lives unfold in 100 different ways, and luckily, I caught this one. Time does that, sometimes. Is this a way to think of the chance that The long view allows one to see all possible events and seize the one that is next, in fact, because that is the one to seize. This is also the suspension of time; when I was there, it was. It was a suspended moment in which body, mind, movement, clocks, and space all interacted in specific ways that fell outside of other times. My memory of it still creates this, if this can happen and does happen, what else might happen? Can we play with time? In love, caretaking, and mothering, one must be able to hold some ground, to be the object of resistance. This is inevitable. This failure cannot be avoided. Caretaking requires some imposition of value into our children's diets. Or do they impose as well, I think we are gathering ourselves against forces that rely on squashing our dreams. The love of the space of being-with becoming love. This is often the requirement of feeding what we have and our budgets can afford. And then there is the gut needs of those with severe dietary restrictions. Allergies, autoimmune, The Politics of Children’s Diets, is laden with judgments by well-meaning outsiders and kin. This is not just childish behavior; it is how we define ourselves in relation to our friends, family, and work; at times, we are pushed, and at times we push. This is to learn our boundaries. The boundaries are leaky. Joel's rebellion has severe consequences; he turns into a werewolf and kills his friend Marco. Spinning the wheel of fortune, she searches for her son, roaming the city and dropping breadcrumbs to lead her baby home. Their love is a magic bond linking Joel back home to Clara Crip time challenges the past and future from the perspective of the present. When we go too far back into memory, we forget where we are; when we spend too much time in the future, we forget about joy in the now. And in Clara's search for Joel, she questions her choices, and she has no way to stay lost in the past or stuck in the future. She must act. The passionate present walks us between the past and future to act as we can or rest if necessary. Joel eats meat. And Joel also goes to the dance. Waking up unaware of his murderous night, he draws a mustache on his face to embody adulthood and perhaps the imagined freedom accompanying it. He ventures towards the joy of the outside world. At the dance, he turns into a werewolf, becoming an animal. He has the power to tell his friends to run. Please run. The crowds begin to see the boy-werewolf, and a history of fantastical stories of towns rallying around monsters takes form. Clara shoots him in the leg and sneaks him back to the comfort of their cement prison room. Chained to the wall, the crowds gather their pitchforks and lights and run to their door. As Clara tended to Joel's wounds, she chained him to the wall, sang him a lullaby, and said, ‘I do not want you to be hungry.’ As the crowds break into the house and their voices come closer, pounding on the door, she unchains him. Briefly, they look at each other. He recognizes her even as a werewolf and her demeanor eases as he shifts. They grab each other's hands and stand together, letting go of their clasp and facing the cement room door, and the film fades away to black. It is them against the world. And this is how it is. Crip kin are everywhere. In this film’s crip chimera, we connect to a microchimeric krip-cin-aesethic. As Bradway and Freeman insist, our kindred are part of kinship worldmaking that must, ‘understand kinship as a way of doing relationality that is also always a way of thinking relationality — kinship as embodied, aesthetic, and erotic theory.’ (18). I felt a connection to Clara as the tears erupted; I knew that somehow in this fantasy world, someone knew what it meant to love someone and must do things you do not want to. I do not lock my children to basement walls. I do take my son with CP to physical therapy and neurologists and occupational therapists at varying tempos, depending on the advice of doctors and schools. He does wear a brace at night—it is soft, but it's not comfortable. Some nights he does not wear it. But he wants to, or sometimes he does, and sometimes he does not. The brace helps stretch the tightness of spastic muscles in his calf. I do not have close to the number of interventions right now that other crip children and caretakers might have. I have close and distant kin who need much more complex care, from feeding tubes to major surgery to force decisions between leg lengthening or amputation. I have crip kin with seizures and need the room clearing to make space to soften the space for their safety. Crip connects us, as we know not when crip can come. Illness and age haunt us, and this we are starting to know. But what of our crip children and our crip childhood. If we were all children once, can we remember and desire the rhythms of childhood? The love shared between us connects us – this is the stickiness of temporal pauses and reflections. And these crip kin children are also from our past, and I will have more crip kin in the future. The haunted past of echoes of crip kin institutionalized and lovingly embraced in pasts where crip caretaking at home was a rarity. And I have crip creeping daily into my focus, to my ability to keep on task, to order the world for those I love. I want a crip-doula when I find myself falling from myself. This all creates a burning desire to continue writing and thinking and loving and dancing and enjoying in the name of the crip child. Not a future unknown child but all crip children everywhere, here, now, and in the unknown future and past. Crip is a relational identity, a positive way of rewriting ourselves in relation to negativity. It is not the Sacred Child that justifies atrocities against the future. It is not in his name. In the process of intake for therapies and education services, a social worker had a one and half hour conversation with me, including a large section of questioning regarding how I felt during my pregnancy. Was I sad at all? Did I experience any trauma, even moving or sickness? Did I take any medicine? How was the birth? The causal linkage of mothers affecting visual processing learning issues through intrauterine psychological trauma is weak at its very best. The point is to make you look back, take stock, and ensure you are not one of the worst: a drug user, a poor deranged pregnant monster mommy who is abusing your child and will need intervention. Of pause, that makes me compose a choreography of compulsory normativity. My privilege is a form of power to push through such witch-hunting with little dirt on my shoulder. Nevertheless, the linkage between the past and the fact that I may be to blame, not just for reading, but for my child’s atypicality, my own invisible neuro-divergence, somehow maybe they do know my father died during my first pregnancy. Do they know I am not normal and how normal do I have to be to navigate this tightrope of normalcy? Would that count? The intra-actions that measure and make deviant mothers are ritualized in school, insurance, doctors, physical and speech therapy intakes—the narrative of failed normalcy. The mother next door may not be inhabiting the world one imagines. Despite the advances in reproductive technology, care for reproducing people and their creations and losses and kin are nowhere to be seen. The leaking stained, and tired are everywhere. They are in your genes or gut, and they even once wiped your butt. Or if they didn’t, someone did. And that someone is another leaking, stained and tired one. But the reality of pregnancy and birth and miscarriage on the body completely alter anyone's physical ability to work; the caretaking involved in the first years of a child’s life is incredibly demanding for mothers of young children who are disabled or not have intensive needs that current society does not accommodate. And for the mother of a disabled child facing the already impossible world of mothering, they are faced with a double burden of now narrating their deviancy in the Able-National state to barter for care and attempt to deflect societal witch-hunting to find their evil ways that resulted in the swerving variant. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell define able-nationalism as “the degree to which treating people with disabilities as an exception valorizes able-bodied norms of inclusion as the naturalized qualification of citizenship” (113). Through structures of medical and educational systems, parents narrate their children’s disability in a story of overcoming. This narrative is overwhelmingly about valorizing the values learned from the disabled child’s life story. As Amanda Apgar points out, these reinforce ableism, heteronormativity, and white supremacy through chronological overcoming narratives. Apgar advocates reading parental narratives on disability as relational and that we “embrace the instability, along with the tensions produced in the body of narratives – the inevitability of care, of failure of recuperation, of reiteration – as productive in the possibilities to which they point: the margins.” (p. 174)… but yet a mother’s love persists. And something clogs up the systems of capital and control. Perhaps a crip-doula composition creates openings toward a non-linear narrative and reading that might break the book. What we are missing is empathy. Can we see ourselves inside each other, in this time, another time, and another place? What song would lead us into each other’s dreams? Nevertheless, joy is not always there without pain. Eli Claire's poetry states, ‘we cannot afford to forfeit imagination.’ (256). Margaret Price reminds us how time also hurts. Motherhood is heavy with its tempos of demands. Is there any joy in our failures? Falling brings us forward to the future, ever less gracefully, yet atypically we move towards something. Within the rhythms of cyclical crying, there is no prediction. That is what is possible about opening the materiality of our rhythms in time. All at once, we have biomedical time, measuring babies' growth via wave technology that vibrates a map, the fetus kicks, marking its womb space, and the placenta remains at the end marking its own time-space. Maternal care is marked by the allegory of eternal love but interrupted by the impossibility of the sacred maternal, and then the rhythms are not so easily domesticated. The routine is revolutionized by listening to the waves; it is not in the measurement. Finding one way out, it is the sensations of routine that mess up our act. And we can vibe to another rhythm; we can see that we all share an emerging spatial, rhythmic possibility of taking on the praxis of crip-doula. One cannot predict the baby's cry or when madness returns when sickness comes. Conclusion The crip child is every child, the monster mother is every mother, and the crip-doula is an ethical response that occurs in crip time. I have tried to weave together a web. The web is messy, full of leaky bloodlines and bodies and meat and sex and memory and desire. This is the work of being with becoming. We might all see ourselves as a mother, as a child. Our bodies are children; our memories and abject desires are children. Let us crip doula our own children into being. These children are crip. These mothers are expanding the realm of thinking crip to the mother provides, for me, a way of writing my body into the disembodied text. The font is my blood, and the risk is exposed. Dare the ink stain the body? Do the birthmarks write me, or am I writing them? The webs we weave are not only weaving us—they are being woven. May this inspire another spinstress-ing crip queer child to spin a web of chimeric imagining. The three-headed Chimera is only frightening in the rearview. Mommy doesn’t see the rearview. She is seeing herself seeing you. The ‘mother, ’ sacred and deviant, sees herself being seen and sees you being born, as her and as her changed by you and as her changed by another and as he changed into another. The mother is not a static figure: she is dismembered, remembered, and sacrificed in the name of the true sacred – love. Open the crypts to childhood and let the monstrous emerge. Mommy Baby Monsters dance at night. To the light of the moon, shining in. Works Cited: Apgar, Amanda. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2022. Butler, Judith. ‘Kinship beyond the Bloodline.’ In: Bradway, Tyler and Freeman, Elizabeth. Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form. 2022. New York, USA: Duke UP, 2022. https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1515/9781478023272 Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP. 2010. Clare, Eli; ‘May Day, 2020’ South Atlantic Quarterly 1 (April 2021); 120 (2): 255–256. DOI: https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1215/00382876-8915952 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2018. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses).’ In Classic Readings on Monster Theory, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, 3–25. Amsterdam: UP. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781942401209.006. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi Brian. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn 1988, p. 575-599 Kafai, Shayda. 2021. Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid. Kafer, Alison. ‘After Crip, Crip Afters.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 2021; 120 (2): 415–434. DOI: https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1215/00382876-8916158 Kolářová, Kateřina. ‘The inarticulate post-socialist crip’ Culture—theory—disability: Encounters between disability studies and cultural studies (2017): 231–249. Khúc, Mimi. Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency: A Journey in Love Letters. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 2021; 120 (2): 369–388. DOI: https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1215/00382876-8916116 McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory. New York: NYU Press. McRuer, Robert. 2018. Crip Times. New York: NYU Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular-Plural. Edited by Werner Hamacher and David Wellberry. Meridian. Oliveira-Monte, Emanuelle K.F. ‘Queering Brazilian Horror: Race, Class and Sexual Orientation in As boas maneiras (2017)’ REGS, 2021, 47, 1 31-50 https://doi.org/10.14321/jgendsexustud.47.1.0031 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Price, Margaret. 2021. ‘Time Harms: Disabled Faculty Navigating the Accommodations Loo’ South Atlantic Quarterly120, no. 2: 257–277, doi: 10.1215/00382876-8915966. Rosi, Braidotti. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Ryan, Sara & Katherin Runswick‐Cole. 2008. ‘Repositioning mothers: mothers, disabled children, and disability studies.’ Disability & Society, 23, no. 3, 199–210, doi: 10.1080/09687590801953937 Samuels, Ellen, and Elizabeth Freeman. 2021. ‘Introduction: Crip Temporalities.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly. 120, no 2. Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined. Durham: Duke UP. Shildrick, Margrit. 2022. ‘Maternal–Fetal Microchimerism and Genetic Origins: Some Socio-Legal Implications.’ Science, technology, & human values 47, no. 6: 1231–1252. Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. 2010. “Introduction: Ablenationalism and the Geo-Politics of Disability.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 2: 113–125. Narcissist Architects of Nothing
Mirror, Mirror on the breath - broken reflection, We—played the persona. #narcissists Lead role of our toxic era, scapegoat, villain, victim. black masks, purple wigs, pink whips, red velvet boots—reach thigh highs performed our parts, dancing in depths of red light - late night spores spread. underground dankness. devious. snake charmer. divine stage-- —lay strewn with broken glass. Documented. Snap. Print. Lock. Shards. Child’s foot. I tried to clean. Band-Aid. A broken mirror's legalities, unraveled realities He snaps, "Alexa, play different music," Blood-- —streaks, a crimson map in the white sink, tears merge—lost in the drain. I dream of you, and your wolves returned wet angry teeth windows kiss me, don’t say "Words. Love. hate. Forgive. Forget. Fuck. stains" words—acidic, warriors melting my false image of intellect. Addict of You. Why no kiss - embrace intimacy darkness within you - am i not invited? Crave chaos, raw and unfiltered, scars and all. Just a fly on your walls, wishing butterfly kiss dreams Play pretend? Old Fashion? Lights out. Stew Stove. Prairie-Core. Love lies, we lie, but not about us. Beneath the stars, a moment without strain. Me and you, the night, The stars' light we can lay here? shooting stars - guns and grief. cupids coment cunt. you shoot. I come. did we let those wolves destroy us? I build mazes, pathways to a starlit lie. “We keep quite” She whispers (not I) You don't let me in. I see you, a distorted reflection. Can we forget everything for hate? Come back to bed. Worlds apart, I wait. Who did you become? Justice is laughing with the fire, dreaming of we. You built this nightmare. shattered glass. piss on stairs, Just leave. I'm gone the real you, let me in. why? did you shut every gate? it was in darkness, our light, defined we. I shattered more than Glass. I shattered us. But you broke me first. Or did the clock stop us. Fate’s Ticking and Toking. “It's Not Abuse If I Don't Love You.” No more real roses, an insulting gift, ravens' omen, a cage of stark white. awaiting me. Amazon sent American plastic dreams. Shit clings to these windowless walls, one towel begged from the kind guard. Washing shit. Reading Garfield. What is this place? Eight cop cars, a suburban shit show, shattered glass, a kaleidoscope. Glass hits the light just right. Red jumpsuit, Red plastic glasses, guard's reading hangs heavy: "Planned this, didn't you?" Defenseless smugshot shrug: never plan style, following forms accusations hurled, Me, i am mother. With a heart now a hole. i thought i knew pain. i know nothing. The cuffs are too tight. Heavy. This hole is heavy. Trial. Green heels. White Dress. Ankle Cuffs. I think a spanking here would have sufficed. She did just what I wanted, the dumb slut. Finally snapped, good girl. Now she's locked up, where she belongs. He watches, smug in his white truck's reign, Fantasy alive wife branded, burning witch. Branded Ass. Passion as Hate. Spank me harder. Protective order, a weaponized lie, babies guarded away in your mothers mansion, a silent cry. They're better off without her, away from all this drama. Stability in the familiar lines that drew me. I act in false innocence and light - the night - the plot - Does not matter - get her away she must be punished a danger to me. Fluorescent glare, a constant sting, 24 hours. Inner Light Stay on. Don’t Let the Wolves Raise the Children. yet hope remains, a wildflower's spring. He builds walls, having mastered pain, while I yearn for pleasure, like sun after rain. Rising sideways, finding helpers, cleaning and clearing. Faith. I never knew. Until now. Not like this. Giving up solid truths and future fakes. Looking up to the unknown. Light Shine Bright. No weapon formed against me. I am the abused, the one in danger. Right? I am, aren't I? He: She is blind to the game, NPC, a mere pawn. Checkmate. Me: Main Character. Energy awaiting movement. Hole hearts feels even the slightest chance Chess or Checkers. I fly above with ravens' wings, a coven's courage takes to the sky. This dissertation examines representations of motherhood in literature, film, and media to interrogate how notions of motherhood are constructed and maintained, with particular focus on works featuring marginalized maternal embodiments. Drawing from phenomenology, disability studies, and new materialist theory, it analyzes the entanglements between human and non-human elements to conceptualize maternity, kinship, and care work outside frameworks of compulsory able-bodiedness. In doing so, it aims to expand understanding of reproductive capacity and the maternal beyond dominant social and medical models, with implications for how we theorize gender, the family, and human-technology relations.
The reading list is composed of texts that inform an examination of motherhood in literature, film, and media. The specter of maternity travels throughout the investigation of the elusive ‘mad mother’ that haunts contemporary society (Morrison; Faulkner). The dissertation starts by asking how motherhood has become both a literary and cultural figure during the 20th century. Through investigating the relationships between power, media, literature, and technology the ethereal figure of the ‘mad mother’ is exonerated (Atwood; Shelley). This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach drawing from queer phenomenology, crip theory, cyberfeminism, new materialism, and disability studies to examine changing representations of motherhood across literature, film, and media. Weaving between these perspectives, it analyzes four key themes - maternal absence, technological transformations, virtual motherhoods, and transformative maternal embodiments - through an intersectional lens attentive to race, gender, ability, and sexuality. In doing so, it brings together the work of theorists such as Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer to investigate norms of reproduction through a lens of compulsory able-bodiedness. Drawing from Aimi Hamraie's notion of "crip technoscience," it engages new materialist conceptions of pregnancy from thinkers like Donna Haraway, Margrit Shildrick, and Karen Barad to explore embodiment as intra-actively biological and technological. Furthermore, borrowing from David Mitchell's negotiation of disability, materiality, and affect, it examines maternal subjectivity beyond dominant social and medical models. By reading texts spanning different historical moments through this intersectional methodology, the dissertation aims to conceptualize reproduction, kinship, and carework in ways that expand beyond a deconstruction of the maternal body. The proposed first chapter, entitled "Phantom Wombs: The Specter of Maternity", investigates the haunting presence of motherhood depicted across various literary and artistic works. Through examining absent, neglectful, and even destructive mothers, it explores how maternal absence becomes a powerful narrative force shaping both individual and collective experiences. This chapter will analyze Toni Morrison's Beloved to examine how the legacy of slavery continues to haunt conceptualizations of motherhood. It will also draw from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying to examine his alternate portrayal of a rejecting mother. References to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of being-with will aid the investigation of the "ephemeral absence of self" that informed early 20th century ideas of maternity. Certain works in the dissertation bring up issues of racial melancholy and intergenerational trauma passed through absent maternal figures. Silko’s Ceremony illustrates intergenerational trauma passed through absent maternal figures. Pedro Almodóvar’s film All About My Mother explores becoming a mother amidst remembering one's own childhood abandonment. Terese Marie Mailhot's memoir Heart Berries provides a powerful account of the haunting of not being able to become a mother. Preston Singletary's artwork Raven and the Box of Daylight, featured in an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, also depicts mythological maternal figures through bold forms and colors. This section analyzes how Singletary's pieces contribute to conceptualizing maternity and the transformation from darkness to light. Together, these works unpack how maternal phantoms shape understanding of self and community across different eras. The second chapter "Wombs of Iron: The Mechanization of Motherhood" analyzes how maternal roles and experiences of motherhood were transformed during industrialization and the accompanying technology. It explores the ‘mechanization of motherhood’ through examining a range of literature and film from different eras that speak back to the processes at work during this era. Frankenstein, Brave New World and The Awakening will explore anxieties around changing gender norms and technologies of birth. The reading list includes works that inform examinations of motherhood while also complicating notions like "pro-choice." For example, Brave New World reveals how choice itself is constructed, questioning what choice actually means in debates around abortion and eugenics. Aliens also depicts the maternal body as a site of radical political potential through the figure of the Alien who represents an alternative to dominant futurity. The third chapter is tentatively titled "The Holographic Hearth: Virtual Liminality in the Digital Age." examines how digital technologies have led to new conceptualizations and portrayals of motherhood and the "maternal space". It explores how the rise of virtual environments, artificial intelligence, and online connectivity has transformed understandings and performances of maternity. Through analyzing the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the television programs WandaVision and Dead Ringers, the chapter considers how AI, virtual reality, and depictions of emerging biotechnologies shape human-machine relationships and caring roles. The show Dead Ringers in particular depicts twin doctors experimenting with innovations in childbirth and fertility, raising questions about the medicalization and commodification of reproduction related to debates in reproductive futurism. Analyzing through the lens of "virtual liminality", the chapter seeks to uncover new meanings of home, parenting, and reproductive freedoms emerging at the intersection of physical and digital realms, with a focus on issues of ethics, control, and what constitutes "natural" vs technologically-mediated motherhood raised by works like Dead Ringers and futurist theories around an accelerated integration of the biological and artificial. The proposed fourth chapter, “Transformative Motherhoods,” analyzes works that feature diverse forms of non-normative motherhood outside traditional frameworks. This chapter examines how LGBTQ+, non-biological, and other alternative models of maternity depicted in texts and media productions such as Raised by Wolves, The Argonauts, and Future Home of the Living God challenge dominant conceptions of parental roles and family structures. Through exploring stories centered on queer mothers in films including Good Manners and alternative family structures as they are mediated across temporal, technological and biological bodyminds, in Conceiving Ada, the chapter argues they expand understanding of maternal identities and responsibilities as lived experiences. The complex space between maternal responsibility, pro-choice, and pro-life rhetoric is focused on through a crip material feminist lens using films such as Serial Mom and Berube’s memoir, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. Analyzing these through a lens of "transformative motherhood," the chapter explores how diverse maternal narratives offered in works including School for Good Mothers and Ceremony offer renewed perspectives. It suggests representations of non-traditional mothering depicted in the specified works can create discursive space for more inclusive and justice-oriented understandings of care work, dependence, and who constitutes a "parent." These texts can also open pathways to rewriting narratives that limit the collective imagination and praxis of parenthood. Film & TV & Art (10 selections)
Literature (25 books)
Theory: (25)
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