Open Access
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I almost killed my mother when I was born. I was born two months too early and I weighed 3.3 pounds. My mom said that she lost five pints of blood when she gave birth to me. For a long time, I told people that she lost half the blood in her body; not that she lost five pints of it, but that she lost half of it. Thinking about it now, it seems impossible that my mom would’ve lost so much blood. I must have made it up or misunderstood her, and then, with time, it just became one of those obscene details that you believe and normalize as a child but then question and rethink as an adult. Could my mother have lost so much blood and lived?
In this personal reflection, I revisit my childhood body as a pathologized site of unruly excess and frame this excess in terms of my inverted expression of girlhood as a fat, Brown, gender queer kid in London, Ontario. My reflection is organized around three short stories: The story of the childhood bully who tried to kill me, the story of the kindergarten teacher who tried to expel me, and the story of the school that misdiagnosed me with ADHD. Weaving these stories together, I conclude that the pathology of my last story is linked to the violence of the first two, as all three moments hinge on the desire to control and contain the excess of my difference.
This poem is inspired by, and dedicated to, all the radical academics I know who still drink Starbucks. It’s also dedicated to myself because I know, not so deep down, that I continue to choose my own daily capitalist grind and the fleeting illusion of comfort over more radical acts of decolonization and global solidarity (although, to be clear, I do not drink Starbucks).
If decolonization is not a metaphor, then poetry is not a luxury. In my practice, I turn to poetry when I feel more than I think; when I want more than I critique. Poetry is theory without punctuation. It’s hope without capitulation. It’s rage without code switching. It’s remorse without shame. When I write papers, I stew. I map. I obsess. I agonize. I revise and submit. Revise and submit. Revise and submit. When I write poetry, it’s because my soul is itching to say something that my mind wants to read. It’s where our spiritual wounds bleed and we come face to face with the psychic pain of the Anthropocene. The existential grief of colonialism and genocide and racism and constant death are easily contorted in academic writing. But in poetry, it’s grief that does the contorting. In poetry, I feel more than I think. I want more than I critique.
The study of Queer Necropolitics has established that white futurity regularly relegates trans women of colour to zones of death and sacrifice. What has received less attention, however, is how trans women of colour use art to challenge these murderous assemblages. A primary example of this is Shraya and Lee's (2019) graphic novel Death Threat, which re-envisions a series of transmisogynistic hate letters that Shraya received in 2017. Taking Death Threat as my point of entry, I ask how trans women of colour can repair death into live-affirming art, giving substantive focus to the text's tendency to conflate the literal death of the body with the ‘social death’ of being misgendered. From here, I explore how Death Threat transforms the death worlds of trans women of colour into sites of agency and, in so doing, troubles and expands the analytical boundaries of Queer Necropolitics.
In May 2022, I was invited to participate in a small community-based panel about wealth inequality hosted by ThriveYouth (then known as DAREart), a community youth group based in Tkaronto that provides a platform for children and young adults to pursue creative expression, learn and think critically, and “develop the skills and confidence needed” to promote transformative action (ThriveYouth, n.d., para 1). Bringing together community leaders and social justice-minded high school students, the panel was organized around the question “what is wealth inequality and why does it exist?” The question struck me as the type of question students might ask during a lecture or tutorial, or which a keen peer might pose at a conference. However, I had been invited into the panel not as an academic but as a community organizer, and so I answered as such. I felt a great pedagogical and creative liberty in that space, and in response I was inspired to write down my thoughts, as a poem, one which wove together my multidimensional experiences with wealth inequality as both person and organizer. The result was a very full, very alive description of wealth inequality (or, as I prefer, wealth inequity) that I would have never expressed if I had been constrained to academic jargon and rhetoric. Whereas academia often requires us to “prove” and “validate” all our thoughts and feelings, typically by using three-dollar words, poetry allows us to embody and express them as is, free of citations and structured analyses. I performed the poem, found below, to the youth who then attended the 2022 panel in Toronto (followed by an equivalent event in Vancouver).
This article uses a life course perspective and in-depth qualitative interviews to examine binge-watchers’ perceptions of their television viewing practices. Three central life course principles organizing this analysis are:1. trajectories, transitions, and turning points, as well as the concepts of social and historical context, and linked lives. Findings suggest that respondents’ evaluations of binge-watching is conditioned by their past experiences, institutional shifts in media production and consumption, Western norms of productivity, and the television viewing practices of their family and friends. Through a life course perspective, this article maps the ways in which these factors collectively shape the experiences and attitudes of Canadian binge-watchers . This study adds to the limited sociological scholarship on binge-watching by using a life course perspective to demonstrate the ways in which the television viewing practices of binge-watchers are informed by a complex array of social and personal factors. In using a life course perspective, this article is able to connect the binge-watching experience to long-term changes in one’s television viewing habits as they occur in social and biographical context, thereby enabling a holistic and multidimensional examination of binge-watchers ’interpretations of how, why, and when they watch television.
