4.11
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
Girls to the Front
by Travis Hedge Coke
Put on a Butchies or a Jessicka song, and feel. Guilt? Why? The politics. What?
Put on Sleater-Kinney, Ya Kid K, Shonen Knife, Strawberry Switchblade and the Gymslips.
While the practice of Girls to the Front can be criticized as anti-feminist or disenfranchising of women, or erasing nonbinary peoples, presuming male violence or domineering, engendering gender wars, performative signal virtuing, these critiques hold water best when the presenter and consequences are kept out of the sphere in which the practice is occurring or invoked.
Outside The Invisibles, I can say that Dane McGowan is a he/him lesbian, that Lord Fanny is absurdly cool and wonderfully awkward, that as a nonbinary person I am unoffended by “girls to the front” calls at concerts or speaking engagements, that it is nice the women, in the comic, sometimes got to talk to each other or go have adventures without the boys.
Inside the comic, I think I understand the good and the bad reasons – the healthy and sick-making reasons – for Boy hanging out so close with Ragged Robin, or feeling close to Dane/Jack Frost, and not King Mob or Lord Fanny. It is not that Fanny and Mob are the magicians of their friend-group, their height or nationalities.
I am unoffended by “girls to the front” but that does not amount to much. Nobody saying it is tryin to offend me and it is a shock if anyone waves me up.
“Whether bees ever steal eggs from another colony in order to rear a queen is another matter,” writes Suelen Oliveira França.
Someone recently said they wanted me in a women’s gathering as a woman and I thought they meant, as they were woman. They did not.
My default is that nobody wants me for nothing.
I know this is untrue.
I am unoffended by calls for “girls and nonbinary people to the front!” because I fall in categories and do not feel I belong.
Yet, I am offended, beyond myself, when it is suggested that nonbinary is not included in trans; attempts to make queerness fight queerness, pitting the self-identifying transsexual and he/him butch with the self-declaring crossdresser with the comfortable transgender with the fresh-faced nonbinary they/her, a crowd of sissies gathering on the side the frill under their skirts swishing as they cheer on the blood and flash of knives.
The hive anxiety in The Invisibles, coming up like so much bee vomit in many of the comics by many of the divers hands, is hive reassurance. If X is a hive, than a hive is X. Eusocials to the front! We make up this male/female and “queen bee” stuff for politics. Bees have no queens as we know of. Monogyne colonies are not. Ergonomic machines of people parts, or biofilm mimicry in a swathe of people. Modular. Clonal. At rest. At bets. In sets.
Not the hardest thing to do, to be true to you.
Still, pretty hard. [Cue laugh.]
“Gender is performative,” because – not that it is a performance – heterosexuality and cisnormative gendering require, socially, culturally, colonially, to be reaffirmed and referred by an implication to all to perform and perform a belief. Heterosexuality and cisnormative gendering failing to exist outside of the affirmation of the enforced and incurred performing.
To be centered is not to be central. In societal scenario, “minority” implies but does not mean a group which has a lower population than the “majority” group.
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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.
Refuse to Disappear. Tara Betts.
Robin Hardy. The Wicker Tree.
Willow’s Song. Paul Giovanni.
The discography of Jack Off Jill.