Publisher's site here.
Homofactus Press is an attempt by Jay Sennett to build a new collaborative, grassroots publishing company to publish works of interest to FtM audiences. I've been given the chance to read and review some of the articles for the forthcoming anthology Self-Organizing Men. I thought I'd take this chance to see if the lith is interested in talking about their publishing model or the forthcoming anthology.
As part of Homofactus' Participatory Art review, I asked Jay for a chance to read some of the submissions prior to publication, and he sent me three non-fiction articles and a poem, all of which were very interesting, very engaging reading.
The first was by Bobby Noble, and may be a sample of his upcoming book on FtMs and incoherence of identity. The fundamental point seems to be that "butch," "lesbian," "white," "trans," and "man," along with "queer" and "heterosexual" all interdepend and coexist in his identity, and by extension, those of many trans men. However, these identities also differ, and their inherent contradictions are part of their importance.
His article is well-researched, and valuable particularly in its consideration of racial privilege and its interactions with male privilege and masculinity. However, in speaking for a segment of trans men, Noble can sometimes give the impression of speaking for all in a way that I don't quite agree with. My own experience has very little in common with his depiction of the interdependence of FtM transness, masculinity, and butchness. I have never identified as a butch, or as a lesbian, or as masculine. For me, my transness is located in the parts of me which are not male, not masculine. I am not trans by virtue of being too masculine to be a woman— I am trans because by society's standards I am not male enough to be a man. I don't identify with masculinity or with butchness, two identifications which Noble seems to suggest are integral to the universal incoherence of FtM experience.
The second piece I received, by Nick Kiddle, further explores this incoherence, but in a way which did not take masculinity and butchness for granted in the way I felt Noble's piece did. Indeed, the article explores the experience of a (not simplistically) male-identified person delaying transition in order to give birth and breastfeed a child. While Nick's is a more straightforward narrative of "My Experience Being Trans," a familiar enough framework, it is different in that it is not (yet) a transition narrative, and it follows a path which dismantles the standard transsexual narrative. It does not seek to build a new theoretical framework for understanding something universal about transsexuals; instead, it shows how past attempts to do so have failed. In this sense I find Kiddle's work more successful at demonstrating the incoherence that Noble proposes.
The third piece is potentially the most problematic, and thus, to me, the most interesting. It is by tim'm west of Deep Dickollective, and is titled "About Radicalia Feminista. Phallacies and Queeries: A Phaggot's Contemplations." Rejecting a colonialist academic tone, he engages in a personal reflection about the gender essentialism inherent in a particular strand of feminism. He names this strand "Radicalia Feminista." In some sense he seems to be mistaking the straw man of feminazism for actual feminism, which troubles me. But he is also engaging with a real phenomenon— that of exclusionary feminists who declare the Michigan Women's Festival a celebration of all women while excluding trans women from the festival's grounds, the gender essentialist feminists who reify a gender binary that oppresses tim'm not less than it oppresses me. But then, having done so, he makes passing reference to "those who do parodies on the feminine but who fix it all the more in doing so; the cross dressers who desire to be 'real women'." I confess that his fluid style continues to surprise and confuse me, and I am not sure yet to what degree that is beneficial for making his point— which I read as the assertion that gender equality is best brought about by dismantling gender stereotypes, rather than reifying them, and that some strands of feminism accomplish the latter rather than the former. He writes:
I refuse to go into the desert to become a revolutionary unless I can bring the monsoon with me, unless my solitude can call forth kisses of ancestors who did not fit a gender, but were made to fit one. There have to be rites of passage that don't require disconnection. I write and theorize in order to build a monument for the dead that recasts them, not in the way that some have come to know them-- as men and women restricted to half-selves in order to secure the patriarchal order. I want to erect a monument for ancestors who wept and screamed (sometimes in secret and at other moments violently) because of the burden between their legs and the tyranny that would define the rest of their lives because of it.
He also writes:
Some of the feminists have written men wrong. Rather, what they write about men seems so non-representative of me. I have never accepted manhood; and most of my life have represented, only in form, that gender that is both defined by my biological constitution and a socially prescribed performance.
Race is a big factor here but one that is implicit, rather than explicit, in this article. Men usually have full access to male privilege when they pass as white and heterosexual. Men of color don't benefit from male privilege in the same way, and gender dynamics play out differently in ways I'm not yet familiar enough with to try to discuss, in relation to this article. I think a more explicit examination of race and gendered privilege would be beneficial for my understanding of this piece. It's probably a reflection of my limitations that I need that extra help, training wheels for my racial consciousness.
west's poem, "Bent," is a little more accessible for me. And it's also my favorite piece here. This first verse I especially relate to:
Somewhere sandwiched
Between the bully and the sissy
There was me
Trying to produce in mirrors
A man I could actually love
And want to keep
I know I haven't provided a hell of a lot to go on, but I invite people to talk about some of these topics, as well as ideas about Homofactus and its future. OnetwothreequeerbookpatrolGO! |
