Hayward/Crawford Textual Analysis. Levi Barringer. for: Prof. Ian Carter. Normativities.

13 Dec 2010

Both Hayward and Crawford mobilize theories of bodily contingency on place, situating

urban and rural landscapes as centers and margins of queer life, respectively. This analysis

examines two artists whose “maps” act as contingencies of bodies, identities and geographies,

drawing from ideas of temporality, the uncanny, and imperceptibility in both texts. Hayward

refers to Stryker’s historical pastpresents,1 while Crawford employs Bonta and Protevi to

illustrate a spatial turn from geographical to human landscapes.2 These diverse, yet sticky

temporalities merge when interpreting Katchadourian’s Mended Spiderweb interventions.3 Both

theorists use uncanniness to demonstrate contingencies of bodily expressions that dissolve

boundaries between subject and object, body and landscape. In both accounts, this mobilizes

static notions of closeting/passing as points of departure for exceeding stabilized frames of

queer/trans narrative intersubjectivity. Finally, a discussion of imperceptible “autotopographies”

in both texts directs analysis of the deterritorializing power of visuality in Kuitca’s Untitled

“maps,” which suggest ‘unthought knowns’ of absent (unconscious) bodies.4 Katchadourian’s

and Kuitca’s intersubjective “maps” incorporate divergent temporalities and imperceptible

contingencies between bodies and landscapes, which serve to continually reinterpret “transverse

orientations” of queer and trans bodies populating texts, cities, discourses bodies, and memories.

To begin a critique of temporality in both texts, we turn to Hayward’s deployment of

Stryker’s “pastpresents (an always present past in the present).” She continues, “History is

entanglement, knotting, a game of cat’s cradle that maps impressions and corporealities through

libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, and psychical cartographies.”5 This interpretation

reminds me of an idea put forth by Haraway in a recent lecture of an “ever-thickening historical

present,”6 which she also continually refers to as a “cat’s cradle” in human/animal cycles of

life/extinction. Stryker, Hayward, and Crawford eschew, rather than “stay the trouble” of animal-

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activist discourse and localize transsexual bodies as sites of entanglement, impressions, tracings,

intensities, and cartographies. By applying metaphorical figures of “maps” to bodily

topographies, both texts demonstrate temporal contingencies of identity and geography.

Hayward writes, “Bodily expressions (i.e., transsexual transitions and spider weavings)

emerge as intensive maps, values composed of transverse orientations toward a shared world.”7

Her brief mention of Katchadourian’s Mended Spiderweb series (fig. 1 & 2) points toward an

“abjected nearness” between humans and spiders, bodies and habitats.8 These temporal human

extensions of actual spiders’ weavings are always rejected and discarded by the arachnids, who

methodically deconstruct and re-assemble webs that once appeared to have been abandoned.

Hayward turns to Wittgenstein for an arachnid example of language complexity in the most

Benjaminian sense. The linguistic act of repairing “‘a torn spider’s web with our fingers’ (2001:

39)”9 demonstrates language’s material weakness and its distortion and deformation across

multiple translations. Thus, temporal production of a social order through language indeed

becomes “more about distribution, collection, variation”10 of individual and collective bodies,

memories, and temporalities.

Crawford’s use of temporality incorporates spatial production through dwelling and

nomadism. His deployment of Bonta and Protevi, as well as Deleuze and Guattari explores the

margins of memory in smooth and striated topographies. Crawford emphasizes a turn toward

“non-geographic assemblages…not restricted to geographical pursuits at the scale of the human

or the landscape” in an attempt to “deterritorialize” and “productively [unsettle] the geo-affective

subject.”11 Both texts demonstrate transversal power of mapping bodily topographies, also by

way of the uncanny and imperceptibility.

Crawford refers to “the bodily uncanniness that inspires wrong-body narratives,’ and

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Hayward/Crawford Textual Analysis. Levi Barringer. for: Prof. Ian Carter. Normativities. 13 Dec 2010

emphasizes a Deleuzian turn toward uncanniness as “the capacity to become.”12 Hayward

attributes “Unheimlich” to an “expenditure of surplus liveliness” and links it to a capacity for the

dissolution of hierarchical boundaries. Such hierarchies include a social order that frames

narrative practices of closeting and passing in forming transgender subjects. Hayward addresses

the risk “that trans-people may appear animalized”13 in comparing them to spiders. She does little

to expand on a distinction between animality/animatedness, but her invocation of Stryker’s

“poesis (an act of artistic creation)” reflects Crawford’s “capacity to become” that exceeds

narrative frames of coming out and transitioning. This harkens to a creative spark, anima, or

liveliness onto which the Freudian Unheimlich registers social taboos of perversion that lead to

practices of passing and closeting.

Both Hayward and Crawford critique “narratives of conversion” and “counter

narratives…the desire for passing” by demonstrating transitioning bodies’ extended capacities

for environmental “assemblage” and “symbiosis.”14 An invocation of the uncanny in discussing

temporal contingencies attempts to reveal what is concealed, hidden in the stickiness between

identities and geographies. Both texts emphasize a breakdown between interior and exterior

topologies.15 Crawford explicates this idea through a critique of Prosser, pointing to “an

unsurprising collapse, perhaps, given that the singular site of the body is the affective space

where both cycles of reification are produced and played out.”16 This cultural collapse into

symbolic social categories disavows intersubjective narratives of trans- becoming. According to

Crawford, “refiguring the relationship between affect and signification” requires incorporating

others into personal phenomena, as well as “places outside of one’s (embodied) home.”17 The

disruptive force of incorporating other topographies, habitats, and addresses demonstrates a

deterritorializing function leading into our discussion of imperceptibility.

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 Crawford defines imperceptibility as “more exhilarating” than “passing” through Deleuze

and Guattari’s “becoming-imperceptible” as an act of remaining unnoticed, unseen, and

unrecognized.18 This move attempts to deviate from affective bodily narratives that territorialize

and organize bodies into cohesive, readable queer identities. Instead, Crawford writes, “this

equation of imperceptibility and becoming disrupts the teleology of coming out and

transitioning.”19 In other words, divergences of temporality through becoming and

imperceptibility lead to narrative counter-strategies that continually reformulate identity by

tracing expressions and intensities onto bodies and landscapes.

The formation of transversal narratives in producing subjects connects to Hayward’s use

of “’autotopography” (Bal, Gonzalez) in reference to Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture and

installation. Hayward prefaces these “spatial, locational, and situational…material signs” of

“self-identity”20 by comparing Bourgeois’ Spiders series to Lyotard’s flaying of the body into a

map: “‘the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the

lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist and ankles.’ (1993: 1)”21 Kuitca’s

osseous map of San Francisco (fig. 3) lays out a street grid in oil and acrylic made entirely of

bones. No other body parts are present, and several districts are omitted, including the

Tenderloin. The map itself ends at Ashbury; its omissions resemble a narrative affect of blighting

the “abjected nearness” of lives and bodies inhabiting the city’s margins, thereby rendering them

unrecognizable.

Kuitca’s Untitled “maps” printed on twenty mattresses (fig. 4) “call out to us with their

bodily associations. But using these surfaces as actual beds would render the maps—tools for

navigating bodies through space—unusable and invisible.”22 The painted surfaces of the floral

patterned mattresses, mostly acquired from thrift stores, depict lines representing only roads and

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Hayward/Crawford Textual Analysis. Levi Barringer. for: Prof. Ian Carter. Normativities. 13 Dec 2010

rivers—connective circuits of transmissions. After a time, however, the troubling “repetition or

mislocation of city names...suggests that there is an inevitable sameness to our movements, or

that we’re fated to being dislocated.”23 Kuitca’s absenting of a homologous narrative undermines

Western cartographic traditions (and social orders) by rendering tangible an absence of memory

in maps, from which these queer and trans discourses attempt to assemble “material refrains and

constraints.”24

In conclusion, these texts and images demonstrate a “deterritorializing potential of not

being recognized...of finding or crafting ceaseless mobility in seemingly static and conservative

locales in ways that may never move trans urbanites."25 Hayward writes the “Spider as a piece of

habitat, a synecdoche of the city…always topographical.”26 The architectural spider metaphor

extends a continuous thread between bodies and gridded (striated) landscapes. In contrast,

Crawford deploys Ian Buchanan in discussing smooth space: “‘deterritorialization names the

process whereby the very basis of one’s identity, the proverbial ground beneath our feet, is

eroded, washed away like the bank of a river swollen by floodwater ’(2005, 23).”27 These texts

appear to diverge on ideas of nomadism, dwelling and habitation, which allow for a collapsing

into symbolic orders of cartography. However, by studying intersubjective artistic maps, we get

more of a sense of what Hayward calls trans-becoming, which she declares, “is never a collapse

of boundaries, but always a reworking, refreshing, reframing of those limits.”28 Comparative

analyses of Hayward and Crawford’s texts in conjunction with Kuitca and Katchadourian’s

“maps” serve to interpret the temporal, uncanny, and imperceptible forces of transverse

orientations and trans-becoming. In contrasting the spider and “floodwater” as disparate and

even oppositional ideal models of trans-becoming, which one more expands possibilities of

multi-species world-sharing?

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NOTES
1. Hayward, Eva. Spider/City/Sex. pp. 253
Crawford, Lucas Cassidy. “Transgender Without Organs? Mobilizing A Geo-Affective
Theory of Gender Modification.” WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly - Volume 36,
Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2008, pp. 127-143
2. Ibid. 134-37
3. Ibid. 265
4. Ibid. 242-44) Hayward cites Mieke Bal in reference to Jennifer Gonzalez’s
“autotopographies.” She points toward Bal’s claim that visuality is the realm where the
‘unthought known’ resides—which could also be read as the Freudian unconscious. This
analysis proceeds within the “anti-Freudian” discourse of Deleuze and Guattari, and
reconceptualizes the Unheimlich as a counter-strategic narrative.
5. Ibid. 253
6. Haraway, Donna. Tracks of Unloved Others, 2009.
7. Ibid. 252
8. Ibid. 265
9. Ibid. 265-6
10. Ibid. 266
11. Ibid. 137
12. Ibid. 133
13. Ibid. 237
14. Ibid. 249. Ibid. 132-3
15. Ibid. 252
16. Ibid. 131
17. Ibid. 132
18. Ibid. 140
19. Ibid. 141
20. Ibid. 244
21. Ibid. 242
22. Harmon, Katharine. The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography.
Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 2009. pp. 187
23. Ibid. 188
24. Ibid. 244
25. Ibid. 130
26. Ibid. 245
27. Ibid. 135
28. Ibid. 254