Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles)
2.09
Fantasy Fanny
by Travis Hedge Coke
In recent days, I have been listed by an unelected politician, a professional rabble-rouser, as an ethnic fraud and a “secret Jew.” You and I know how I feel about anyone who thinks “Jew” is an insult or something incompatible with multiracial or mixed existence.
That becomes a funny thing, though, and if you are not Jewish, you hesitate on using, “Jew.” Jewish person. Queer person, too. Because you may think this, may think that, but it is not about you.
I have been belittled and attacked for not being trans or queer the right way, and embracing the wrong kinds of people as trans and queer. I reposted a link to a 1997 trans-centered magazine’s Star Trek cover issue, you see.
When the alien queers come out…
For a long time, Lord Fanny was aspiration for me. Shifting pronouns smoother than he shifted wigs, she was an icon, a style, a dress you or I could put on. The coolest Indigenous character in anglophone comics. I mean, the coolest.
(Marjorie) Cameron (Parsons Kimmel) and Grant (alternate identity goes here) Morrison know the value of a good wig. Samuel Leroy (Sam Jackson) Jackson.
Wig on. Wig off. Wigstore riots. Fanny was that cat.
Indigenous, trans, nonbinary and snarky and kind and fun and smart and stylin.
Was there an inherent sexism in her trans nature? Her style?
Is her style and trans nature the same and one?
As an unenrolled Indigenous mixed enby, I do not particularly, like to talk about specifics of religion, of practice or ritual. Unlike Fanny, I cannot stand the term “shaman” as it is so often applied. Shamans come from particular practices and the ethnographic application to almost all non-Abrahamic religions exhausting. It is hurtful. It has damaged the share idea of so many practices, so many peoples.
Fanny, like it or not, is complicit in that damage.
Either you become their token, their selectee for theme months and special features, or like Boy and Fanny, you hide yourself in a multiplicity of identities and spectral lives, a spectrum of experience. Exarchates expellere!
Is Lord Fanny doing Cameron in a red wig in the New Mexico desert? Is Lord Fanny comfort therapy for demons in the American military church? Here comes the sun.
Lord Fanny owes no one an explanation of why they have roots in Brazil and Mexico any more than King Mob owes anyone an explanation of his heritage and his nationality, but one is more frequently questioned. There are good and there are other reasons.
Doin’. Doin’.
“This chapter has been needed for too long,” as Shirlee Lane said.
Part of being alive is to be complicit in damage doin’.
Someone got mad, the other day, because they realized Grant Morrison has a tendency to throw shoutouts to drag acts in their work. There can be no reason except mean-spirited mockery, correct? Hinge and Bracket, Danny La Rue, these are malicious, sexist performance. Yes/No?
Grant Morrison can be a man and more than that. Or, other than.
We can be he/her/them or something else.
I try to always say people can use whatever pronouns they want for me as long as they are being polite. I tend to look at gendered terms as roles and maybe I am a good daughter, a good uncle, a good big sister, a good brother, and maybe I am not, but someone might need a good sister more than good uncle, and it is nice if I can be that. I remember when my mom was a Naropa fellow (years before I would read there, as a professional). Fresh from the reservation, I was so bucolic as to be bucky. Adults telling me I was like Krazy Kat. A sprite, a kat.
Erasure is easily done, and easily repeated, because our words hold so much but never all we need to describe all of anyone or any thing. Allness is complex. The emotional aggregates of dancing or a face flexing in feeling are not words any more than pulsing vibrato is a painting.
Fanny is a sprite, a kat. Fanny’s family, friends, colleagues or enemies can use a variety of pronouns and the pronouns do not define Lord Fanny, they define the role in which those other people see Fanny in their spectrum. Fanny has her own spectrum.
I choose primarily feminine pronouns for Lord Fanny because I got my own going on. It would be super weird to be a woman or a man, a boy or girl. It would be a weird world and we already have a weird world. But, we all live in the Fortunate Isles and they can traverse twenty-three hundred miles if you are ill enough or have to sum up.
Small weird world we have. Full of fear and stress and a drive to be smaller. To reduce weirdness. To avoid the risks that come of being too big.
All it took for Fanny to be colored far lighter of skin than anywhere else in The Invisibles is blonde pigtails and daisy duke shorts. To pass and to be read are distinct; intransigent; untangleable; intangent; noncanonic; cantonment; levee and parlay; not parley.
The world will not beat you up, but plenty of folks in the world will. They make their will look like the world. Those yes/no binaries that seem reasonable, only posited to freeze frame the Earth. They frame you and the Earth for sins that probably do not exist. The sin of being able to be connected to a fear.
I think a particular comics author is a genius. A visual artist, a writer, a visionary with a strong, if laser-focused eye-line, I do not really seek out to read his work any longer, though I cannot bring myself to toss out my copies.
He was criticized, once, for making a comic in which trans women are abused for the delight of a fairly cis-oriented audience. He justified it on those ends.
He suggested Grant Morrison, who he did not count as part of that community, shut up. But, he was not really telling Morrison to shut up, any more than he still jumps onto online communications to take jabs. He was telling the rest of us to.
I have been followed by a truck, had glass broken over my head, been shouted at and kidney punched for making a girlfriend “gay.” They also called me a “prairie n____.” I dislike writing out the n. The dashes may seem weak or wishywash to you, but you can deal with it. We know what I mean.
You know what this means. Step up. Step out of the weird pasteboard safety set and deal.
*******
NEXT: Non-Causal Time
And previously…
- Prologue/Series Bible
- Chapter One: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 1)
- Chapter Two: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 2)
- Chapter Three: Robin Roundabout
- Chapter Four: How Did Helga Get in Here?
- Chapter Five: Boy Our Embarrassment
- Chapter Six: Once I Was a Little Light
- Chapter Seven: Sacrificial Greed
- Chapter Eight: Dreams Like This
- Chapter Nine: Whose to Tell
- Chapter Ten: The Dead Weight
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
The George Herriman Library: Krazy & Ignatz vol 1-3
Corsets and Crinolines Norah Waugh
Mirar Adentro/Looking Within: Selected Poems, 1954-200 Nancy Morejón