| Amanda Armstrong�s Opening Statement |
| The gift is the impossible that we all desire; because it annuls itself the instant it would come to be, if it ever does, the gift is what we most want to make present. The gift is our passion and our longing, what we desire, what drives us mad with desire, and what drives us on. |
| Since my body will never be physically able to bear a child, however, these intense desires for pregnancy are laced with melancholy. I long for something that is impossible. Somehow though, this melancholy acts as an empty tunnel within my belly around and through which so much warmth gathers and passes. I�m not sure how, but I so often powerfully feel that my belly is full of life, and nurturing new life � this despite, or strangely because of, the impossibility of pregnancy. It�s this impossibility that gives me an overwhelmingly rich taste of the gift that the process of pregnancy could be � it alerts me simultaneously to the powerfully magical movements and terrible fragility of our bodies. More than this, my embodied yearnings for pregnancy lodge me within another, unreal, world � a world in which I am able to bear children, and in which the intense and impossible longings of others around their bodies are realizable. This world swims in my belly, I move, and write, with an absurd trust in the possibility of its being realized. Some day, I hope that I might help give birth to this magical world, a promised land overflowing with milk and honey. |
I�m worried that I am making a mistake by suggesting that all of us, as trans people, experience our genders in basically the same way: as that which haunts us. I'm worried that, in suggesting this, I box us in and simply establish a new demand that we have to meet in order to be accepted as legitimate: "either you are haunted, or you aren't really trans. "And, god knows, we don't need any new codes of legitimacy policing our bodies and our stories. We have enough to deal with already. With this worry in mind, I'm writing the. section to the left tentatively; my fingers are just lightly touching the keys. I assume I'm fucking up with a lot of what I'm saying. But maybe something that I say will speak to your experience, revealing that we share something profound, something that might be shared across our communities. Maybe something I say will help us to see our fates as tied up together, or know more fully that our dreams for liberation are inextricably linked to each other's dreams, and the dreams of all others. It is this promise of collective liberation and new community that keeps me writing, despite the danger that what I say will simply divide us, and our communities, further. |
| the ghosts of gender and the haunting of history |
| In past months, recurring, sharp, and expansive desires to bear a child have lodged themselves in my belly. These desires have spiraled out in multiple directions, leading me towards excited envisionings of living as a mother, restructuring life priorities around a child, breastfeeding, carrying a young person on my back, and watching a child grow and learn while sorting out, with my girlfriend Alana, how to sustain this process in responsible ways.
Since my body will never be physically able to bear a child, however, these intense desires for pregnancy are laced with melancholy. I long for something that is impossible. |
| an opening: yearning for the impossible |
| Ultimately, haunting is about how to transform the shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of peaceful reconciliation. In this necessarily collective undertaking, the end, which is not an end at all, belongs to everyone. |
| Right now, I�m in the middle of reading a book called, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Written by a transman named Jay Prosser, Second Skins is the first book that I�ve read that starts from the assumption that trans people should be respected and our stories listened to, this because we have something precious to teach everyone about the nature of embodiment. Prosser argues that, when we attend closely to trans people�s stories, we notice that trans people usually talk about body modification as something that allows us to return to, or re-member, the bodies that we already knew ourselves to have. He argues that, premodification, our bodies-to-be live as phantasmatic, or ghostly, presences-presences that haunt us, calling us to bring them to life, to flesh them out. Following this call allows us to feel at home in our bodies, as the ghost of our gender can rest comfortably in our (remade, yet original) skin. |
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