On getting down to the nitty gritty...

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang!

I am sorry but I am getting a bit fed up now. Slightly sick and tired of how incapable people are of seeing what this is really about. The fact that what I do still evoke so many strange feelings. Why is it that there are so many things we handle better than this…
Why is it so hard to respect personal choice, why is it so hard to respect that the consensual choices of others might not be what you like. But, the opportunity for others to make those choices and turn away from lives prescribed to them by gender, class, race, age, size…whatever you would like, is what makes this world worth living in.

I am sorry but we must get personal now. This here world of assumptions of femininity is not big enough for the both of us. I am telling you, dear creators of “open” and “accepting” spaces, do not fuck with me… and beware, cute is a scare!

……

I am in the tackiest of clubs. I have told her to sit up straight to make it is easier to endure the strange feeling of being a zoo animal, little girls don’t come here. Little girls with frames don’t come here. They don’t wear silk blouse. They don’t wear silver crosses. Amongst leather pants and whips hanging from a belt, amongst eyes that measure me as a falsely conscious little girl not yet having found her place at the feet of the patriarchy.

I survive that evening because I cling on to her physically. When they look at us I look at her. There is a fatigue in her eyes the same as mine. A tire of those eyes that invade us, that measure our bodies and what we do.
When she is preoccupied with other things and I roam the vast club on my own I seek the eyes of other Ladies.
A woman with her boi on sofa…the knife slowly caressing hir fingers… She looks at me with that same fatigue, we sigh and I nod at her. I know what it’s like.

That’s when he approaches me. I must confess I didn’t like him that much prior to this either. He is the invasive kind, the exploiting kind, everyone in a space like this are vehicles for lust and that is his lust, he thinks.
I have been waiting for her which I clung to, who I told to sit up straight so that something would be endurable in this place, he looks at me with that icky middle aged man smile.
“Aaaw, little miss…” he says. “How are you?”

I am shocked. I am shocked at how easy he does it. How easy he belittles and ignores me. I am sure he knows what I do. I am sure his partner, who has seen me work stripes into shivering strong backs many a time before, have told him what I do. I am sure he knows that even if I am a girl I am no one’s girl.
I hope my eyes burn with that famous black soot I have been told they have when I tell him that I feel fine although I haven’t been able to play here since I didn’t feel safe.
Yet when I leave I am turned off, furious, hurt and sad. My invisibility was so hard to face. His, the middle aged man’s, part in that so obvious it stung my eyes.

…..

Let’s talk a bit about what he couldn’t cope with. Power. Girls with power. Let’s talk a bit about why the idea of the dominant woman is still scary. What have I done? What are we doing?

I grew up in an environment that respected my femininity, and the power I ascribed to it. I call my upbringing a matriarchy – my mother and her sister, my cousins and me, formed a bond of femininity and power. It stemmed from my grandmother and her sister, from a strong sense of survival and belonging.
I never knew of no patriarchy, I never knew that women were not allowed to have power. I never knew I wasn’t allowed to decide for others if they wanted me to do that.

And I was always just as puzzled when I saw the mindfuck in their eyes. In the eyes of men and women alike, when it didn’t match. When my body didn’t match my mind.

Or that’s not right, I match perfectly find with all my expectations of myself. It’s their expectations that I don’t match.

You see it’s not about exploitation, not about abuse and not about oppression. The way she cooks for me and the man, always a man, peeks in at us and asks me if I shouldn’t do that – as the girlie girl.

I don’t tell him to fuck off. I tell my glorious butch girl to tell the “nice” man that that is not how we do things. And she does because she loves me. She loves me when she squirms under my touch, when she bends her neck for me. And I love her when I do it, I love her the most when she gives all of her to me – I love her the most when we rip that patriarchy up by the roots, when I insert the matriarchy that fed and clothed me into the void that the loss of man-made worlds made in her.

I never understood why this was challenging. I never understood why women, girls, I, couldn’t do this? What prevents me? What would force me to do otherwise?

I am sorry but my mother, the Pentecostal, married, heterosexual mother of two, never taught me any of this. She taught me to hold my head high and give myself with love to others, and they will love me too.

So please, put your assumptions, your false notions of female sexuality and femme identities elsewhere. Please don’t put them in my lap – and mind you, don’t force them down my throat. I don’t really do that shit you see.
Ask the girls who have been mine, butches, femmes, bois and grrls alike what they felt when they were with me. What we did when we shared that love my mother told me to share. How we catered to one another.
Ask the patriarchy if it hurt when we ripped its roots.

…..

I leave that club numb. We agree it was bad night, a really bad night. I give her a quick hug before I get in the cab. I tell her she will pay for dragging me all the way there…. She knows I am more serious about then I look. I giggle as she blushes.
On my way home I write a letter of memories and paths travelled for all the women and men that ever giggled sweetly at me assumed I was nice and humble only because I was cute.

To patriarchy with love, best wishes - little girls of the matriarchy!

On being crip (sometimes not all that hip)

Recently I have been in the Capital and done things that only the Capital can offer for me. I try to make that place my new home in the future, hence I spread my roots there. Make shops, streets and people mine (in the novel I am writing there is a chapter on how to eat a city - if you are ever moving somewhere let me give it to you, it's very useful.) in doing that I try to get to know my future home.

Hence, I used the subway alot. There's a green line, a red line and a blue line. I know alot about the red line, and close to nothing about the green line, this time I tried the blue line since I was staying with someone who lived along it.

It was dreadful. I hate the blue line with a passion so deep I can feel my fingertips hitting the glossy keys of my keypad somewhat furiously. The blue line was very aesthetic - soothingly bluecolored it made me think of the Swedish childrens book Loranga, Mazarin and Dartanjang where one of the characters dwells in an all blue room.

The falsely soothing blue line had lots of elevators, great you say that the Capital provides means of transportation for it's more vulnerable habitants. Hypocracy I say!
In order for a mean of transportation to be useful it must transport its user. The elvators on the ever so soothin (is it a trick, an act to relief tension build up from travelling in such conditions?) blue line did not.

So I climbed, I don't really mind climbing stairs I do it in the comfort of my own home everyday. I only mind climbing them when I know I shouldn't have to. When there has been an opportuinty to move in a more suitable manner, but that opportuntiy is no more.
It's called climbing a stair in this text cause that is what I actually do. I climb the slippery and dirty stairs of the subway up and down, inside and out. My sweaty plams grip the shiny chrome that a thousand hands have gripped before me.
Some of these might have been crooked as my own, hanging on for dear life on to a shiny piece of metal that reflects their hard working face.
The only difference between abled and disabled bodies is that moving a disabled one is work.

Beside me abled bodies swooshed by. Heels tapping the stairs as light as feathers, hands soaring above the infected chrome.
I study them, they study me. My plaited cotton skirt covered in blue roses, the lace knee-highs making their way down my tensed muscles. The somewhat too transparent t-shirt. (This is the femme part of this text)
They have time to study me since my climbing up the stairs gives them that. I only have time to catch glimpses of them. In these glimpses I must make up my mind about them. Who they are, where they come from, where they are going and why they are going there.

When climbing these stairs I find I am on display. I try to make a room where I feel comfortable being displayed. A perfomance.
I try working my body up the stairs with force, I do not shun my gaze when those patting heels and the eyes of their bearers look at me. The situation make me as overt as I have ever been. There is no way I pass for ablebodied right now and there is indeed nothing I can do about it.

Visability has a price, invisability an even higher one. If making everytime the elevators wont work and climbing is a fact a perfomance is the only way to remain true. Do it!
Remember: it is not the body that cripples a crip but its enviroment.

When I have climbed all the way up. I brush my hands on my skirt, draw a deep breath and enjoy the security of my walker again. (Mind you mountain climbing only works if someone is behind me carrying my walker.)
As always my head is held high, my back is a straight as it can be. I make my way through a crowd that will never known I just perfomed to save my life!

Now is the time when MacGuywer would have made a cableway for himself using an
old gum and his sholaces. Sadly I have none of his skills.
-From my soon to be finished monlouge "Jonathan!" on surving as a crip!

On absolute identies

Recently I performed. It had been a while and truthfully I was nervous about performing a piece so obviously about my struggle with Femme and identity, about the concepts of girhood, womanhood and power.

My audience was blank sheet of paper to me. Mostly middleaged or older, mostly realtives of others who perfomed that same night. I was sure they didn't know much about the identites I "claim", and they didn't know much about me. It was a test, but a healthy one, for the piece and for me.

I had longed to be on stage it had been so very long since I last made a point. Since I last made words into flesh. I am mostly a writer and a director these days. Somehow I see these roles, even though I love them dearly, as passive. I am a bystander, a watcher, a creater of surrondings and ideas which I don't get the chance to embody myself.

I did what I had to do. I wrote the piece entitled "Är det där min kvinnlighet?" ("You call that my womanhood") circling around the ideas what makes a woman rather than a girl.
I spoke about my body, my tits as cupcakes when they were made to fit the woman I was becoming. I spoke about odd bits and pieces wanting to fit all in me. All in the girl and the woman.
I memorized the piece, I pounded it into the walls and swirls of my brain. I took it into my body I accompained it with gestures and movements. I made it into flesh. It was seperat from its text, it was a twin to its text. And I perfromed it.

Not knowing what the audience would make of its raunchy and sexual nature, what they would make of me in my tuell skirt my firey make-up troubled me back stage. But as always, on stage all of that vanishes. I am a vessle. Truly being on stage is a supernatural experience for me.

I realized while standing there, feet held firmly down, head held up, that I took that space. It was mine, time was mine and I could lead it either way I wanted. I was a wizard, a magician of words and bodies, and I loved.

In the audience, right in front of me, were three men dressed as cowboys. They weren't drag-ing or playing with that identity. They were cowboys. It was an absolute identity and they owned it. They knew they were manly men, they knew their manhood was power. I didn't know what to make of them. They smiled when they looked at me, they sniggered.
So I decieded, as I have always done, to focus on them.

I brought them my piece. My raunchy, cripp-femme, power-journey, from girl to woman to a girlie kind of woman. Possesing place and time, turning to them demanding to know:
How about that, is that my feminity?

They were shocked. Squriming in their seats they didn't know what to make of me. I didn't fit their box, I didn't fit their mind. But they smiled, eventually they laughed. In the end they were soft. When I got off stage they YEEEHAA-ed.
Success was mine. The cowboys loved me!

Having wine and left-over cakes with the other performers when it was all over, the cowboys approached me. They wore spurrs making a distinct sound when they moved. Telling us they were coming, taking up space, sound, room. They were daunting, tall and strong. They shook my hand, and they thanked me. Said it was "the best they had ever seen". Then they left swinging their hats they way cowboys do.
(Even though I am a writer- this is the truth.)

Thinking about it now, it's not such a strange thing. My cripp-femme identity is an "absolute thing" to me, close to my heart and something I have put a lot of thought in to in some aspects, and only learned to embodied in others.
The cowboys identity seemed to be much the same. There was a brotherhood between us. A link of understanding between the girl and the manly men.
The sister and her brothers.