Editor’s Note: kari’s mark

by Julian T. Brolaski & erica kaufman

if gender is made-up and strictly enforced, you have to wonder what else is made up . . .
how deep is the conspiracy? is the world really flat?

“How deep is the conspiracy? is the world really flat?” edwards asks—questions simultaneously grounded in social routine, upending our histories (which are fictions anyway), and reminding us never to dismiss apparent givens.

This compendium (literally, that which is weighed together) is a gathering of work by artists who have been touched by kari in various ways, states, places, genders, politics, mediums, years. The sheer number of pieces in this book, and the variety of forms they take and individuals they represent serve as testament to the tremendously wide scope of kari’s work and activism.

kari’s genius moved others to their own words, art, action—following a mandate of reclaiming the very words we speak and write—writing our selves, our other(ed) bodies, into a foundational post-gender post-genre state. This book is the start of what hopefully will be a much longer conversation.

As Ron Silliman writes (of iduna), “these are identarian texts for an identity totally up for negotiation.”—a call for action and reaction. edwards’ “Subject: statement” closes with the recognition that:

identity is a tool for momentary defense against historical locality, historical permanence with borders, but the body is flux mechanics, writing a queer writing a queer text is fluid, outside inside, inside a body space with no boundaries, a realization that there is no singularity without borders, dogma and a belligerent linearity.

it is not imaginary borders turned into religious incarceration. boundaries are not queer, sovereign boundaries are colonial, location of the self within the state. queer location is a discontinuity within the panoramic whole, taking into account the unaccountable, accounting self in space, attempting language.

By “attempting language” as a way of combating the oppression of forced identification, kari shared with so many others this desire not to write the self into a genre, rather to find a space where gender could be written out, where a body can exist just as a body—not a body gendered, but a body othered, a queer fluid body, “a body without organs.”

kari’s authorial “signature” undoes the authorial body in favor of a visible obfuscation—strikethru: kari never just signed, but rather crossed out hir name and wrote “NO GENDER.” The erasure—well no, the palimpsestic remaking of the name into a symbol for the dismantling of enforced gender codes is a profound and provocative gesture—the name is still visible behind the NO GENDER, as if behind bars.

kari’s crusade for a world where NO GENDER is an option is also an argument for the autonomy to chose whatever language suits one’s clothes. To wit, edwards’ character p. in a day in the life of p.: “p. who in some zones is referred to as sometimes, something, whatever or both.”

NO GENDER is both a grammatical and a political subversion. A crucial moment in one’s upbringing is the moment when he/she/sie/they/xe... is taught what a proper noun is—a word or phrase that merits capitalization—and how pronouns should function, the substitution of a name, themselves often gendered, with an indisputably sexed meme.  From Latin pronomen, in-place-of-name, for kari a pronoun could be a straightjacket, a destructive, binding, pseudo-name:

it is the space one holds, not an essential objectification one is held in, where one is stabilized into things in space, places with borders, bodies with procedures, proper behavior by corporeal containment, compulsory reproductive management, polarizing populations, producing mythological projections, slicing every single living energetic instant into bipolar neurosis for further control of an imagined boundary.

This “imagined boundary” is the identity hinge gender hangs on—for which pronouns clarify the discursive binary. They indicate not only who is speaking to whom, but what the physical body of the written or spoken-to person looks like, and how they are gendered according to a two-party system.

That there are supposed to be only two options vexed kari.  Thus hir paradoxical stance, as Paul Foster Johnson points out, “kari edwards’ insistence upon ‘no gender’ is a transparent and bold statement of poetics, but one that is ironized by the fact that edwards was a self-described gender activist.” This insistence is a functional paradox: the evacuation of gender as a means of becoming multiply or fluidly gendered—queer. Or not wanting to be labeled a “transgender poet” but speaking out about trans issues daily and prolifically.

kari’s NO GENDER is perhaps a more productive approach than Monique Wittig’s decision to use “J/e [as] the symbol of the lived, of this cutting in two which throughout literature is the exercise of a language which does not constitute m/e as subject.” It is a refusal to accept the abject, to truly take control over the social forces that class bodies in space. Wittig reminds us, “we have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us.”

But who has the right to choose what to feature? What idea can we call our own?

The queer body, the body othered is not no thing, not no place.  One indeterminate is not nowhere, there are infinite theres along the continuum.  In theory.  But it is a deathly and dangerous position in practice, to literally not be recognized by the state, to be a body unclassifiable, a place where no thing in the mainstream discourse can stand in for one.  Where one looks on while others blithely participate in that seemingly genteel ceremony of replacement: he or she.  

together we watch for snakes and other pests, weather apathy, exchange cautious platitudes amid stick pronouns, search empty ocean remnants in an empty ocean.

kari’s disruption of that ceremony is the gift sie gives to the world, & to any transperson, activist, anarchist, revolutionary or person who makes experiment w/ language.  kari makes manifest and beautiful and viable a queer writerly personhood that exists w/o gender markers, that is not nowhere in-between:

something was getting ready to relax into a $4.00 ice cream sandwich when someone placed a personal pronoun directly on p., that whatever had abandoned years ago.

Yet a person off the page, on the street still needs to be able to enter a bathroom safely, to pass—as fucked up as passing is—in order to fill out a form to qualify for personhood, in order not to be harassed, not to be beat up, not to be killed.  kari demonstrates in hir work that embodiment w/o a gender is not an impossibility, and p. enacts Deleuze and Guattari’s theory that the body without organs functions as soon as you begin to desire. 

The Body without Organs is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the BwO.

In furthering this rightfully disruptive claim upon the real, Trish Salah points out that “Millot writes that we transsexuals make a demand upon the Real, for its adjustment. Just so.” And, just so, what’s with all these pronouns, Rachel Blau du Plessis asks—“push them over a cliff!”  But we need them, the organs, the pronouns, to survive.  edwards (in an interview with Akilah Oliver) proclaims:

Gender is one of those things that is assumed to be solid, where in reality it is both a social construct and a personal choice. And like everything else gender is neither solid nor permanent, its only permanence is perpetrated by the state, family, or the church. So the shifting narrative is more representative of life…

A “real” text must permeate subjectivity, must change the language, the syntax we speak together—disrupt and reconstruct the droning chorus. In “When Our Lips Speak Together,” Luce Irigaray writes, “[i]f we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history” (205). edwards recognizes that history needs rewriting, and the way to accomplish this is to begin with socio-politically forced demarcations. To find / create / name a space where gender is written out.

edwards’ collection, obedience, takes naming and renaming as one of its main concerns—exploring and undoing identity and its labels as always in flux, always transient:

depending on the country
and proper name
given by the institute that names names
names the damned

For “those named that want to dename themselves,” kari recommends allowing the alphabet soup to choose your name for you daily. Or ask others to guess your name and use whatever they choose.

NO-NAME SHOULD BE PERMANENT—NO NAME CONSTANT

The signature too is a thing that stands in for the person—signare—to signal, an emblem for the person, their mark.  As an authentication of their personhood.  The proposed erasure of the self under the force of that position is startling—hir signature.  Replaces a negation with a negation, but the effect proliferates, the difference spreads. The smallest idio/grapholect—kari edwards  

NO GENDER

did I tell you that’s what it’s like? . . . I mean, here I am riding along in my car and the gender police pull me over and demand that I circle either the, “F” or “M,” and if don’t, I am informed I won’t receive my pension, subscription, monthly medication, food stamps, taxes, or student loan repayment plan . . .

These texts celebrate kari’s mark—and insist that we must continue to take on and bamboozle our oppressive cultural nomenclature. kari, we’ll keep reading your work, and continue the conversation and the protest and continue to challenge gender race class binaries and speak out about violence against transpeople and protest the two-gender option on governmental forms and public bathrooms, and take it to the streets and not shop at corporations and piss in a jar and use all kind of pronouns and let children decide their own gender.

kari, your work will keep calling keep inspiring the rewriting and re-visioning of speech previously ingrained. kari, you perpetually push the line of what one thought was possible to achieve both in verse and in how one positions oneself in a life. so, let’s undo the words that bind us, let’s write ourselves a space in a post-gender world.

Works Cited

Brolaski, Julian T., E. Tracy Grinnell, and Paul Foster Johnson, eds. Aufgabe 7. Brooklyn, NY: Litmus Press, 2008.

Blau du Plessis, Rachel. “Draft 88: X-Posting.” Jacket Magazine 35 (2008).
http://jacketmagazine.com/35/duplessis-draft88.shtml

Deleuze, Gilles and Guittari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Szhizophrenia. trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

edwards, kari. a day in the life of p. Honolulu and New York: subpress collective, 2002.

edwards, kari. obedience. New York: Factory School, 2005.

edwards, kari. post/(pink). Boulder: The Scarlet Press, 2000.

edwards, kari. “Subject: Statement,” in EOAGH: Issue Three, Queering Language. ed. Tim Peterson.
http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/edwards.html

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Salah, Trish. Wanting in Arabic. Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2002.

Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

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