The Dreamer, the Dreaming, the Dream

In “Seeing Gender,” anarchist novelist, poet, and playwright Kathy Acker tells us that when she was a child, the only thing she wanted to be was a pirate.1 Pirates could send men down the plank, see the sights on the high seas, and swing from the yardarms. Pirates could be who they wanted to be. Acker tells us that pirates could be and do these things because pirates lived in books and, just as importantly, pirates were not girls wearing girdles and white gloves and dead in/to the world. Pirates existed in the living world, and because of this, pirates had fun.2When Acker grew up, she still wanted to be, still wanted to live with, the pirates (and she did of course and she still is a pirate in the living world to many of us). She writes:In the piece that opens this issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Jane Speedy and Bronwyn Davies write the living world following Jane's stroke, which leaves her momentarily silent but not without laughter. Or playfulness. Or fun. Jane writes:I now walk with a stickwhich I brandish at young menwho do not get out of my way in the park.I clomp along, not silently at all,I have become rather noisy.I dance now only in my dreams,but in them I am stilla wild and roaring girla twenty-first century pirate/academicaljust like I always was... .Bronwyn replies to that “wild and/roaring girl/to the piratical academic” and they begin a conversation; they go to see what the pirates know about fun and laughter and wonder, writing each other line by line, swinging from the yardarms, flying then leaping into “the space in between page and woman. ... one artist and another/one writer and another.”The essays in this issue take up the language and body and laughter and flight of the piratical academic, writing about selves and lives as “becoming other,” rather than “reterritorializing” the self and “conforming to a code of dominant utterances,” as Speedy and Davies remind us in their repetition of Gilles Deluze and Claire Parnet's Dialogues.4Following Speedy and Davies's opening conversation, Jason Burnett writes the experience of psychosis in and as poetry, creating conversation with an “other” self, an alien, outside the world. Acker writes about this in terms of the “constitutive outside” of gender and matter—the body and its materiality in particular—noting: “as a girl, I was outside the world. I wasn't. I had no name. ... Though I couldn't be named, everyone was naming me.”5 Burnett writes and rages and leaves silent all of the ways he is set apart—simultaneously outside the world, outside his body, outside himself and yet named by everyone around him in an Otherness that is not his own.When Acker grew up and ran away with the pirates, having thrown off the names girl and woman (the names of nothing), she was left with nothing. Nothing but the name pirate, “which seems solely metaphorical.”6 L. Hailey Dresher and Suzanne Enck reckon with the power of language—the power of literary devices such as metaphor—and how it emboldens and fails us as we write the “poetics of living,” even as we face death. They tell us that while they have taken great care to present the narrative of Drescher's relationship with her student, Anna, who died of Ewing's Sarcoma, “like most of life's most meaningful relationships,” Drescher's “relationship with Anna's family cannot be categorized cleanly, [her] role in Anna's life and death cannot be defined neatly, and the impact Anna had on [her] has not yet been... resolved. Death, like life, is messy.”The messiness of death, and life, and bodies, means that for those of us who live outside the living world—outside of meaning and naming and presence—language, as Acker puts it, “isn't good enough.”7 She tells us that instead of having no name, or having only the metaphorical name pirate and the mimetic repetition of patriarchy (along with her inability to be)8 she “want[ed] to see [her] body.9 Remember, though, that Acker is an anarchist writer. Rather than abandon language, she searches for her body by taking us (via an analysis of Lewis Carroll's) Through the Looking Glass. She asks, “what if language need not be mimetic” but instead “might deeply be connected to... language”?10The next three stories take Acker's quest and question seriously, looking for the body as it exists outside of weight-conscious, able-ist, and normalizing narratives. Nathan Hodges's consideration of body weight and body image writes his body as it changes and moves along the scale, questioning our efforts to control our weight and their toll on our emotional as well as physical health. He wonders what might be possible if we toss out our scales and other systems of measurement and comparison and in so doing let go the notion that body weight is equal to health and personal worth. Could we then be able to see our bodies and thus ourselves better?Julie-Ann Scott writes through and with her “almost-(but not really)-passing disabled feminine body.” Returning us to the idea of the constitutive outside, Scott sees her body as it moves through, across, and between the movements of bodies and genders. Her work begins a conversation about how we “indulge in, feel trapped by, and resist” compulsory able-bodiedness.”And Claire Smith asks us to see our bodies outside of discourses of “normal” movement and the “acceptance of disability” that seems compulsory for persons “coming to terms” with chronic illness. Rather than coming to terms, Smith tells her body as a series of departures or movements away from normalizing discourses and toward living in new ways once thought unimaginable.At the close of “Seeing Gender,” Acker writes:The essays in this issue of Departures write in languages of the body, asking us, like pirates happening upon their long-sought buried treasures, to become at once the dreamer, the dreaming, and the dream. I hope that as you read them, you enter, however briefly, into a living world full of joy and grief, dreaming and swinging from the yardarms, laughter and fun. I hope that these works inspire you to live, like Speedy and Davies's piratical academics, in wonder

Aesthetics · Art · Dream · Psychoanalysis · American Literature and Culture · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Latin American and Latino Studies · Neuroscience · Philosophy · Psychology

• Seeing gender

  Open Access•Kathy Acker•Critical Quarterly•1995

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