Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly o... more Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly one of the hardest working. A Toronto-based performance artist, fi lm-and video-maker and activist on a wide range of issues, Ross is also the chief architect of Counting Past 2, the fi rst festival of transsexual and transgender art and performance in North America. 1 In this paper, I look at Ross's most ambitious and professionally successful performance work to date, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, a sequence of performance monologues in which Ross brings together her concerns with sex-worker, animal and transsexual rights and refl ects upon her fi fteen years as a prostitute and activist. 2 Straddling the genres of spoken word, dramatic monologue and multi-media performance, Yapping Out Loud utilized video footage of coyotes living in the wild and being hunted, live music and voice recordings by prostitute-and animalrights activists to create multiple, shifting frames for Ross's monologue in seven acts. It is interesting that, for this overtly pedagogical work, conceived as a retrospective and self-refl ective project addressing a highly successful career (working for over fourteen years now without being busted by the cops (Ross 5), Ross employs the title she does: what does it mean for an artist, activist and prostitute to describe her spoken word as
Composition. .. leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable. ..... more Composition. .. leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable. .. Time no longer flows in a linear fashion; sometimes it crystalizes in stable codes in which everyone's composition is compatible, sometimes in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles, and codes diverge, interdependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve.-Attali 147 What is it for rules (or rule) to dissolve? Suppose we begin with the notion that both forms and processes are constitutively beholden to-and persistently susceptible to-their own destabilizing latencies. As John Corbett has suggested, composition is improvisation, cleaned up, culled from its otherness, retroactively (Corbett, 238). What was intrinsic is cut out, or what came from elsewhere to make some thing up, to exist it, is then forgotten. Retroactivity and latency are as crucial as the cut and the movement, from some elsewhere, to forgetting. This paper is beset with its own doubleness: Preoccupied with what it is not, it fugues itself, variably, disjunctively; supposes itself a subject without an answer, with too many answers. This subject, the traumatic, finds its elaboration in a reading of Ann-Marie MacDonald's novel, Fall on Your Knees. In this reading, Fall on Your Knees fabulates a psychic history of cultural, racial, and sexual hybridization through the metonymic figure of musical movement. In Fall on Your Knees, musical signatures figure and re-configure erotic and ethnocultural belonging in an economy of dissonance, desire, and repetition. The un/easy commingling of ß Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'e¤ tudesame¤ ricaines 35, no. 2, 2005 Arab traditionals, ragtime, New York blues, and jazz and opera circulates through and between locales from Beirut to New Waterford to Ha(a)rlem, sounding a history of discrepant influences and perverse attachments that traverse sentimental narratives of national, ethnic, and familial identity, transecting the romance of reparation. This paper approaches the question of the ethical via the circuitous routes of the erotic; its argument mediates urgencies arising from the traumatic effects in and of the ''real'' of European colonialism and in and of the fractured and fractious composition of the unconscious. Revue canadienne d'e¤ tudes ame¤ ricaines 35 (2005)
Wanted to know who was a memory machine. Who was a memory. She was in a bed and she was entwined ... more Wanted to know who was a memory machine. Who was a memory. She was in a bed and she was entwined and twinned with, and she was nearly thought (the moon) she was nearing the moon. Two in a bed and the Witch, was it? Under the moon, heavy breasted, and plunged into it. It was only scary. What recursive thought isn't? She awoke to the moon, full and flaccid, stinking of drunken sex, sweet with it, like a child. The romance is always two in bed and in another room , another. Some fey thing you thought you cast off, full. Under the moon, your familiar, you ' re twinned with her, cursive and strung out. Halfway across the city, or, its architecture. Your restlessness at six a.m., an appetite for water or memory, the sweat of it. You have the feeling of a wolf. Feral idylls, ferrous. The taste of lightning in your mouth. A moony child, switched in the night. Two in a bed and through the window a gray line where dawn will come. It allows silhouette: trees, clouds, horizon. Her eyes on her lover rapt, knotted in Celtic shadow: silhouette. Who she was wakened to, her appetite? The feeling of a wolf or a child behind the door you locked. Or, eagles wrapped around my neck, at the collarbone, martial. Love with its histories of war and open to the band of light, a little hopeful music, at the horizon, the willingness of light, its capacity to diffuse, to allow others, palest blue, a yellow awning of dawn. A witch, sucking her tit, beautiful as her familiar, and the precise articulation, the immediacy of tree branch silhouetted, black veins with an upward reach. (Old bones sucked, at the root.) Love against
Le narrateur-narratrice de Trish Salah dans «Quand ils sont trois» explore une subjectiviteet une... more Le narrateur-narratrice de Trish Salah dans «Quand ils sont trois» explore une subjectiviteet une sexualite liminaires. 0'un mouvement qui Cl la fois defie les definitions etroites de «la femme» ou de «l'ecriture feminine» et qui reconnaft I'experience des femmes qui vivent dans un regime ou l'on ne prend pas en consideration leur difference sexuelle, il/elle demande «qui ecrit Cl partir d'une identite feminine et quel corps la determine?» Repoussant les frontieres reconnues du corps convenablement sexueet d'un objet de desir «approprie», il/elle rappelle que «selon le cadre choisi, on peut toujours couper certaine parties du corps et en laisser voir certaines autres». En ce sens, «Quand ils sont trois» non seulement destabilise l'equation binaire homme/femme, mais resiste Cl la negation de la difference sur laquelle s'appuie la culture dominante pour proteger ou renforcer une seule representation et une seule pratique de la sexualite et du sexuel.
Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly o... more Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly one of the hardest working. A Toronto-based performance artist, film- and video-maker and activist on a wide range of issues, Ross is also the chief architect of Counting Past 2, the first festival of transsexual and transgender art and performance in North America.1 In this paper, I look at Ross’s most ambitious and professionally successful performance work to date, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, a sequence of performance monologues in which Ross brings together her concerns with sex-worker, animal and transsexual rights and reflects upon her fifteen years as a prostitute and activist.2 Straddling the genres of spoken word, dramatic monologue and multi-media performance, Yapping Out Loud utilized video footage of coyotes living in the wild and being hunted, live music and voice recordings by prostitute- and animal-rights activists to create multiple, shifting frames for Ross’s monologue in seven acts.
Drawing upon Jean Laplanche's thinking around afterwardness as translation, this article is a... more Drawing upon Jean Laplanche's thinking around afterwardness as translation, this article is an attempt to consider some temporal rhetorics conditioning contemporary possibilities for transgender, genderqueer and transsexual self-representation. It will look particularly to aesthetic problems of inscription, for instance texts figuring a wish for antecedents/ancestors (such as the Greek seer, Tiresias), as well as at the deferred action of fantasies underpinning early psychoanalytic interpretation of cross sex identification (‘the Schreber case’) and consider how such readings or fantasies might affect, even organize, contemporary sexual minority identities and relations. Further it will bring these questions into relation with the effacement of recent transsexual cultural production and activism at the transgender ‘tipping point’ while attempting to disinter and make available for re-translation subalterned histories and possibilities occluded by, if haunting, a century of psychoanalytic, feminist and queer progress.
Le texte de Salah nous trimballe ii travers difj'erentes rencontres entre Fawn, Orchid et la narr... more Le texte de Salah nous trimballe ii travers difj'erentes rencontres entre Fawn, Orchid et la narratrice. Ces rencontres, qu'elles soient de cet univers ou d'un autre, sont des suites sensuelles et sexuelles OU se melent le desir de posseder, la tendre violence, les baisers, les blessures..... OU la sexualite et aussi le sexe des personnages et de la narratrice (narrateur?) sont confondus defa90n ii creer un univers sexuel depourvu de limites. Un fantasme OU etre vivant ou mort, etre "elle" ou "il," are personnage ou narratrice ne limite pas l'experience.
Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly o... more Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly one of the hardest working. A Toronto-based performance artist, fi lm-and video-maker and activist on a wide range of issues, Ross is also the chief architect of Counting Past 2, the fi rst festival of transsexual and transgender art and performance in North America. 1 In this paper, I look at Ross's most ambitious and professionally successful performance work to date, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, a sequence of performance monologues in which Ross brings together her concerns with sex-worker, animal and transsexual rights and refl ects upon her fi fteen years as a prostitute and activist. 2 Straddling the genres of spoken word, dramatic monologue and multi-media performance, Yapping Out Loud utilized video footage of coyotes living in the wild and being hunted, live music and voice recordings by prostitute-and animalrights activists to create multiple, shifting frames for Ross's monologue in seven acts. It is interesting that, for this overtly pedagogical work, conceived as a retrospective and self-refl ective project addressing a highly successful career (working for over fourteen years now without being busted by the cops (Ross 5), Ross employs the title she does: what does it mean for an artist, activist and prostitute to describe her spoken word as
Composition. .. leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable. ..... more Composition. .. leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable. .. Time no longer flows in a linear fashion; sometimes it crystalizes in stable codes in which everyone's composition is compatible, sometimes in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles, and codes diverge, interdependencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve.-Attali 147 What is it for rules (or rule) to dissolve? Suppose we begin with the notion that both forms and processes are constitutively beholden to-and persistently susceptible to-their own destabilizing latencies. As John Corbett has suggested, composition is improvisation, cleaned up, culled from its otherness, retroactively (Corbett, 238). What was intrinsic is cut out, or what came from elsewhere to make some thing up, to exist it, is then forgotten. Retroactivity and latency are as crucial as the cut and the movement, from some elsewhere, to forgetting. This paper is beset with its own doubleness: Preoccupied with what it is not, it fugues itself, variably, disjunctively; supposes itself a subject without an answer, with too many answers. This subject, the traumatic, finds its elaboration in a reading of Ann-Marie MacDonald's novel, Fall on Your Knees. In this reading, Fall on Your Knees fabulates a psychic history of cultural, racial, and sexual hybridization through the metonymic figure of musical movement. In Fall on Your Knees, musical signatures figure and re-configure erotic and ethnocultural belonging in an economy of dissonance, desire, and repetition. The un/easy commingling of ß Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'e¤ tudesame¤ ricaines 35, no. 2, 2005 Arab traditionals, ragtime, New York blues, and jazz and opera circulates through and between locales from Beirut to New Waterford to Ha(a)rlem, sounding a history of discrepant influences and perverse attachments that traverse sentimental narratives of national, ethnic, and familial identity, transecting the romance of reparation. This paper approaches the question of the ethical via the circuitous routes of the erotic; its argument mediates urgencies arising from the traumatic effects in and of the ''real'' of European colonialism and in and of the fractured and fractious composition of the unconscious. Revue canadienne d'e¤ tudes ame¤ ricaines 35 (2005)
Wanted to know who was a memory machine. Who was a memory. She was in a bed and she was entwined ... more Wanted to know who was a memory machine. Who was a memory. She was in a bed and she was entwined and twinned with, and she was nearly thought (the moon) she was nearing the moon. Two in a bed and the Witch, was it? Under the moon, heavy breasted, and plunged into it. It was only scary. What recursive thought isn't? She awoke to the moon, full and flaccid, stinking of drunken sex, sweet with it, like a child. The romance is always two in bed and in another room , another. Some fey thing you thought you cast off, full. Under the moon, your familiar, you ' re twinned with her, cursive and strung out. Halfway across the city, or, its architecture. Your restlessness at six a.m., an appetite for water or memory, the sweat of it. You have the feeling of a wolf. Feral idylls, ferrous. The taste of lightning in your mouth. A moony child, switched in the night. Two in a bed and through the window a gray line where dawn will come. It allows silhouette: trees, clouds, horizon. Her eyes on her lover rapt, knotted in Celtic shadow: silhouette. Who she was wakened to, her appetite? The feeling of a wolf or a child behind the door you locked. Or, eagles wrapped around my neck, at the collarbone, martial. Love with its histories of war and open to the band of light, a little hopeful music, at the horizon, the willingness of light, its capacity to diffuse, to allow others, palest blue, a yellow awning of dawn. A witch, sucking her tit, beautiful as her familiar, and the precise articulation, the immediacy of tree branch silhouetted, black veins with an upward reach. (Old bones sucked, at the root.) Love against
Le narrateur-narratrice de Trish Salah dans «Quand ils sont trois» explore une subjectiviteet une... more Le narrateur-narratrice de Trish Salah dans «Quand ils sont trois» explore une subjectiviteet une sexualite liminaires. 0'un mouvement qui Cl la fois defie les definitions etroites de «la femme» ou de «l'ecriture feminine» et qui reconnaft I'experience des femmes qui vivent dans un regime ou l'on ne prend pas en consideration leur difference sexuelle, il/elle demande «qui ecrit Cl partir d'une identite feminine et quel corps la determine?» Repoussant les frontieres reconnues du corps convenablement sexueet d'un objet de desir «approprie», il/elle rappelle que «selon le cadre choisi, on peut toujours couper certaine parties du corps et en laisser voir certaines autres». En ce sens, «Quand ils sont trois» non seulement destabilise l'equation binaire homme/femme, mais resiste Cl la negation de la difference sur laquelle s'appuie la culture dominante pour proteger ou renforcer une seule representation et une seule pratique de la sexualite et du sexuel.
Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly o... more Mirha-Soleil Ross is not the most well known transsexual artist out there, but she is certainly one of the hardest working. A Toronto-based performance artist, film- and video-maker and activist on a wide range of issues, Ross is also the chief architect of Counting Past 2, the first festival of transsexual and transgender art and performance in North America.1 In this paper, I look at Ross’s most ambitious and professionally successful performance work to date, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts of an Unrepentant Whore, a sequence of performance monologues in which Ross brings together her concerns with sex-worker, animal and transsexual rights and reflects upon her fifteen years as a prostitute and activist.2 Straddling the genres of spoken word, dramatic monologue and multi-media performance, Yapping Out Loud utilized video footage of coyotes living in the wild and being hunted, live music and voice recordings by prostitute- and animal-rights activists to create multiple, shifting frames for Ross’s monologue in seven acts.
Drawing upon Jean Laplanche's thinking around afterwardness as translation, this article is a... more Drawing upon Jean Laplanche's thinking around afterwardness as translation, this article is an attempt to consider some temporal rhetorics conditioning contemporary possibilities for transgender, genderqueer and transsexual self-representation. It will look particularly to aesthetic problems of inscription, for instance texts figuring a wish for antecedents/ancestors (such as the Greek seer, Tiresias), as well as at the deferred action of fantasies underpinning early psychoanalytic interpretation of cross sex identification (‘the Schreber case’) and consider how such readings or fantasies might affect, even organize, contemporary sexual minority identities and relations. Further it will bring these questions into relation with the effacement of recent transsexual cultural production and activism at the transgender ‘tipping point’ while attempting to disinter and make available for re-translation subalterned histories and possibilities occluded by, if haunting, a century of psychoanalytic, feminist and queer progress.
Le texte de Salah nous trimballe ii travers difj'erentes rencontres entre Fawn, Orchid et la narr... more Le texte de Salah nous trimballe ii travers difj'erentes rencontres entre Fawn, Orchid et la narratrice. Ces rencontres, qu'elles soient de cet univers ou d'un autre, sont des suites sensuelles et sexuelles OU se melent le desir de posseder, la tendre violence, les baisers, les blessures..... OU la sexualite et aussi le sexe des personnages et de la narratrice (narrateur?) sont confondus defa90n ii creer un univers sexuel depourvu de limites. Un fantasme OU etre vivant ou mort, etre "elle" ou "il," are personnage ou narratrice ne limite pas l'experience.
Transfeminist International! examines the relationships between the multiple, intersecting crises... more Transfeminist International! examines the relationships between the multiple, intersecting crises of neoliberal capitalism; the global rise of fascism and white supremacy; and ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations, including self-proclaimed ‘feminist’ politics antagonistic to trans existence. Five luminaries of transgender theory—Marquis Bey, Jules Joanne Gleeson, Elle O’Rourke, Trish Salah, and McKenzie Wark—discuss political resistance against organised transphobia, its institutionalisation, normalisation, and violent expression across political spectra, geographies, and sociocultural contexts.
Transfeminist International! is a call for an insurgent, intersectional, abolitionist transfeminism.
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To βιβλίο Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! εξετάζει τις σχέσεις μεταξύ των πολλαπλών, διασταυρούμενων κρίσεων του νεοφιλελεύθερου καπιταλισμού· της παγκόσμιας άνοδου του φασισμού και της λευκή υπεροχής· και των κινητοποιήσεων «έναντια του φύλου», συμπεριλαμβανόμενων και των αυτοαποκαλούμενων «φεμινιστικών» πολιτικών οι οποίες αντιτίθενται στην τρανς ύπαρξη. Πέντε λαμπροί θεωρητικοί της τρανς θεωρίας —το Marquis Bey, η Jules Joanne Gleeson, η Elle O’Rourke, η Trish Salah και η McKenzie Wark— συζητούν πως αντιστεκόμαστε ενάντια στην οργανωμένη τρανσφοβία, τη θεσμοθέτησή της, την κανονικοποίηση και τη βίαιη έκφρασή της σε όλο το πολιτικό φάσμα, σε διάφορες γεωγραφίες και κοινωνικοπολιτισμικά πλαίσια.
Η Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! μάς καλεί σε έναν εξεγερτικό, διαθεματικό, καταργητικό τρανσφεμινισμό.
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Papers by Trish Salah
Transfeminist International! is a call for an insurgent, intersectional, abolitionist transfeminism.
///
To βιβλίο Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! εξετάζει τις σχέσεις μεταξύ των πολλαπλών, διασταυρούμενων κρίσεων του νεοφιλελεύθερου καπιταλισμού· της παγκόσμιας άνοδου του φασισμού και της λευκή υπεροχής· και των κινητοποιήσεων «έναντια του φύλου», συμπεριλαμβανόμενων και των αυτοαποκαλούμενων «φεμινιστικών» πολιτικών οι οποίες αντιτίθενται στην τρανς ύπαρξη. Πέντε λαμπροί θεωρητικοί της τρανς θεωρίας —το Marquis Bey, η Jules Joanne Gleeson, η Elle O’Rourke, η Trish Salah και η McKenzie Wark— συζητούν πως αντιστεκόμαστε ενάντια στην οργανωμένη τρανσφοβία, τη θεσμοθέτησή της, την κανονικοποίηση και τη βίαιη έκφρασή της σε όλο το πολιτικό φάσμα, σε διάφορες γεωγραφίες και κοινωνικοπολιτισμικά πλαίσια.
Η Τρανσφεμινιστική Διεθνής! μάς καλεί σε έναν εξεγερτικό, διαθεματικό, καταργητικό τρανσφεμινισμό.