Abstract
In this performance-essay, T.L. Cowan introduces a geyser method for ‘situation knowledges’: text-based drawings for the description and study of explosive, complex, and traumatic expression. Rejecting linearity and mono-genricity, Cowan writes tangentially and propulsively on grief, necro-political white exceptionalism and grievability, shock, shame, rage, and extreme emotional un- and re-shaping. Embracing the stigma of cognitive disorderliness/being disordered, this essay experiments with crip-femme autopoetics for immoderate ways of being out-of-order as a technique-tactic both for automatic writing and self/life-writing, which pushes past feminist mess and claims the chaotic as an aesthetic and political superpower.
Situation 2023 – turning 50-years-old – femme necropolitics
So many situations – across many times and places – have shaped my thoughts about ‘Femme Interiorities’. Since Moon Charania first approached me about this special section, each time I sit down to write, I find myself dwelling in these situations; my focus erupts in a different (sore) spot of my femme psyche, then abates. Feelings spray and s(t)ink.
In our femme-4-femme public discussion about her book An Archive of Tongues (at L’Euguélionne in Montreal Nov 2023), Moon and I talk about a possible shift from the framework of ‘situated knowledges’ to ‘situation knowledges’. This passage held me hard as I was reading her book, and it has stuck: Archive of Tongues confront[s] and reflect[s] upon how we might read and write feminized, racialized maternal pasts and …how the brown mother's tongue/s expose a whole world where aspirations of the good life are cast aside for the everyday necropolitical; and how we might understand the affections, erotics, solidarities, socialities that are born out of impossible situations. I want to think about how the brown mothers’ tongue reconfigures itself across diaspora-time, rejects the linearity of historicity, challenges the notion of futurity, conflates yesterdays and tomorrows, queers epistemology and temporality, and opens the way for other modes of consciousness to be considered seriously – those of ghosts, for example, and the maid, the wife, the lesbian, and the whore. (emphasis added, Charania, 2023: x)
But then, as I began to craft trinkles of thoughts, the overwhelming grief would erupt again, bursting from its canker, roiling my psyche with blistering pain: Pete would never get to think again. At the same time, I found myself overcome by the shame of this particular grief: why grieve a white young man, a young white man? Aren’t they always-already mourned for? And aren’t we better off with fewer of them? How does a feminist mourn her dead white brother? I found myself catatonic with outrage in the face of white-exceptionalist necro-political mourning, and shame for being so sad to lose this kin, along with the 700 other white people who showed up at the Celebration of Life to mourn Pete. A Guy's Guy. A Hockey Guy. A Ladies’ Man. And there I was: Lesbian Feminist Media Studies Professor, robotically running the playlist and the slideshow, propping this publicly grievable death for the white rural crowd.
The oldest of nine siblings, I was 12-and-a-half when Pete was born, and I knew the sweetness inside of him. I knew his vulnerabilities, and pain, and I knew how hard he was trying to be better, to be less predictably dude-ish. I grieved for the loss of potential. I was in Grade 7 in Orillia, Ontario, Canada when he was born, and in Venice, Italy, when he died. It was a Monday afternoon, and I sat at the corner table at Corner Pub on Calle de la Chiesa after art-crawling through the Gallerie dell'Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and some of the off-site Biennale exhibits. Even with the continents, psychic universes, and the many transformations I had crafted for myself between who I was when he was born, and who I was the moment before he died, I could not stop every cell of me from being sucked back into the formations of our fucked-up childhoods, almost a generation apart. I felt the chain reaction all over again of how my queerness impacted his childhood – and, by extension, his whole life – when our medievally Catholic parents pulled Pete and the two youngest into homeschool, their response to my coming-out when I was 23 and Pete was 11.
I got his initials tattooed across my tree-trunk fingers –
[Q: What do you call a lesbian with thick fingers? A: Well-hung.]
Inked brass knuckles, constantly in a traumatic state of fight: raging against, my sense of
and in conflict with,
myself – exteriorizing and aestheticizing this excruciatingly invisible interiority that blottos my brain and b{l}otches and bulges my face, distends my already bloated ‘meno-belly’. I ingest and absorb his trauma, overflow, am swollen with the craze of despair, am consumed-devoured by and yet somehow also engorged by our family's traumas, which, for the past 3 decades, I had tried to purge, purge, purge. ignore. ignore. ignore.
In January 2023, I found out I won a grant that I had applied for on November 1, 2022 – two weeks before Pete died. I explode-implode: nothing good is possible; good news does not exist. He didn’t have a chance to become the best version of himself, but he was getting there. In his blustery way, Pete loved having a femme lesbian, feminist sister. He showed me off. He was never ashamed of me, the way I was ashamed of him. Almost three years later, in the Fall of 2025, the grant is still unspent.
Grief and shock make my own/old life inaccessible to me. I am a stranger to myself. Everyone I know fails at being my friend, lover. Over time, they are as ineffective at comfort as zeroes. Rather, I am a zero, impossible to be multiplied by their numerously worlded worldings. Only the complexity of grief is exponential. It is impossible to explain (or to make people comprehend, apprehend, sense, know) that I don’t need to feel better. I need to feel felt. But everyone is busy: meetings, classes, other people's birthdays, dance weekends, and soccer games, holidays, deadlines, sabbaticals … keep happening. I am out-of-schedule, off-the-wall-calendar.
In grief and shock, I am so disordering and essentially inconvenient. I am a barely breathing confusion. A huge-and-getting-huger-exploding-hole-in-conversation. It is much less distressing, and thus less disorienting, to talk about me, than to me. How is she doing??? It must be so hard for you. Living with someone so goddamned frothing broiling sad and ugly and ornery, so difficult, hard to love. Getting there, getting there. Yes, yes. Sigh, sigh. She's doing her best.
Sheet-cake helps, when I’m feeling like maybe one day returning to the land of the living. Endless cigarettes and any kind of booze (my favourite form is liquid, I joke), when I’m not. These things I can get for myself. Delivery is so much more convenient than I am.
I was already disorderly, a pain in the ass, a handful, high maintenance, a piece-of-work, a Femme, before this all happened. I was already disordered by fierce and fabulous femme frivolity! But that was the good kind. Grieved and shocked, I’m fiercely wretched, undignified – a deshaped, skinless, she-wart. Un-Femmed, because it turns out that bad fierce, sad fierce, I-don’t-want-to-forget-and-get-over-it fierce is less fabulous than all the forms of queerly dignified grief that I wasn’t doing. We say we love abjection and monsters, but when you’ve been it, you discover that's not true. Hideous is only theoretically queer. There is no us that I’m inside of anymore. Everyone I know, besides my own siblings (one of them dead now), is a them to me. I feel belonging briefly two months later when my colleague's pre-teen son dies of a long disease, and a long-distance friend in his early 50s dies inexplicably and I travel to his funeral, to sit amongst the mourner-strangers because I know I know I know I know I know I know I know.
It's my own fault that my queer world believed me through all those years of saying I disown you right back. The bad risk – the shock – was to think that this familial grief could be compatible with my queer femme self – as if the queer femme self I created, who I became – became I – as I erupted/was expulsed from the family unit – was hard, fast, strong enough. Some femmes get and stay hard. I was far too soft – writhing in warping, warting pain of trying to retain my femme shape within an adversive, aversive forcefield – simultaneously sucked-in and expulsed, expanded and contracted, frozen and boiled. Stuck in the impossible middle of a wet-dry vacuum cycle – a totality. My former she-self-shape is gone (Figure 1. ‘Grief Geyser’).
‘GRIEF GEYSER FIELD’. T.L. Cowan 2024. Ink on paper. A portrait-oriented, rectangular, cream-coloured piece of drawing paper with two geysers shown: messy, amateur ink drawing of two holes spouting various materials, annotated with line notes. Grief Geyser 1: Title: ‘Opening a doc dated 1 November 2022. Two weeks b/f 14 November 2022 when everything changed. Hey, Pete’. Line note to title: Got the grant. Line note to geyser: Broken branches + Twigs + Bark + Leaves; Grant money still unspent; Blue Jay feathers. Grief Geyser 2: Title: ‘My friends are having conversations w/o me. Who am I kidding?! I have no friends’. Line note to geyser: Broken thread Bits & Unthread needles.
A friend whose dad died when she was a kid tells me that she was lucky to grow up without the problem of a dad. At first, I find this reassuring, and maybe I still do. But still, I find myself in a kind of Pete-drag when I’m with his daughters [they may not always be daughters, the trans* feminist in me wants to just say ‘kids’ but there is something particular about their current assigned and lively girl-ness, daughter-ness] – making myself bigger, more boisterous, re-shaping to fill in the Pete-shaped hole, as they say. I loudly throw them around hotel pools, annoying all the other adults including myself, scaring the other kids; I piggy-back them while singing songs and trying to teach them things about nature, about cities, about decision-making, about hairstyles, about thrift shopping; I go to more-expensive-than-I-can-afford Disney-themed immersive musical experiences with them and I cry while they dance. His death has given me a reverse-abortion; I am no longer child-free. Despite my raw, cankery resentment, I love his wife (my now-sister), his little girls. And just like that, they are inside of me. I fight with myself the whole way home, ready to punch everyone (all the feminists and queers) who tells me that it's/they are not my responsibility. Fuck you, anyone who is not the oldest of 9, anyone without a trauma-brain in one way or another. Anyone who doesn’t have 5 brothers and 3 sisters (…now 4 brothers and 4 sisters). The queers who say to me, ‘But were you close? Don’t you hate your family?’ Those are the wrong questions. Fuck you, who fails to grasp the situation.
Nine months later, at L’Euguélionne in Montreal – 2 weeks before 1 year after Pete's death – I ask Moon: what happens when we think about these impossible situations as impossible situatedness? Rather than the God's Eye View that fucks the world, the Femme's Eye View that Fuck You's/Fucks/is Fucked by and beyond the world? Femme tops the world? Power-bottoms the world? I am so emboldened by my conversation with Moon, feeling a gasp of femme-return, I break 3 months of sobriety with delicious cocktails next door, after trying to kill myself with drink for the first many months of ashamed grief. Thirteen days later in Oaxaca City, I drink endless Modelos and 1 tiny of mezcal, the new beginning of the new end (Figure 2. ‘Shame Geyser Field’).
SHAME GEYSER FIELD. T.L. Cowan 2024. Ink on paper. A landscape-oriented, rectangular, cream-coloured piece of drawing paper with two geysers shown: messy, amateur ink drawing of two holes spouting various materials, annotated with line notes. Shame Geyser #1. Title: ‘‘You will go completely mad waiting for life to be fair’. Richard Osman's The Man Who Died Twice (Book 2 Thursday Murder Club series)’. Line note to title: ^Joyce Meadowcroft^ Line note to geyser: You’re not supposed to compare yourself with other people, but in the meantime… teeter-totters for gauging Balance; Giant magnifying glass; Big chip on shoulder. Shame Geyser #2. Title: ‘The (Hot) Blush Geyser of Shame – after/for Eve Sedgwick’. Line note to geyser: Hot piss coming out of your eyes – like pissing your pants, but pissing your own face instead… & also coming through your pores [not a fan of simile]; Blood spots, huge blood spots, like a period stain on white pants or the white sheets in someone else's house – BUT ON YOUR FACE [not a fan of simile]; Razor blades inside all internal organs + desire to cut all ties forever + being caught With un-maintained ^unruly^ body hair except unmaintained unruly emotions that normal people either have the sense to ignore or else they JUST FUCKING DEAL.
Situation 2024 – 51-years old – A Saturday in November, the wrong time and place for
Go to studio! 7–10
Finish cleaning 10-2
Bank 2:30 + Art supplies for kids @Dollarama
Book Launch 7pm @Buddies
Someone on the subway is lugging around a huge bag of sweet potatoes. I am pulling up my thigh-saver underwear.
Still swirling in grief & shock, and pulsing with a new-found cancer canker on my face (which is [luckily] unlikely to kill me right now, anyways). All temporality & disruption.
The book launch (not mine, not Moon's, someone else's, another femme's) – thematizes femme joy. I am out-of-my-mind with rage, disappointment, disagreement. I have cancer. I am wasted. I lose my shit. Why are these femmes not talking about Palestine?
The Palestinian exception. The trans* exception. ‘Femme exceptionalism is just mean girls being Mean Girls…’ I think this thought, and I can’t unthink it.
Is it possible that the femmes who kept going to Michigan because lesbians need joy too and it's so hard to find it, can also keep hosting an event during a genocide and not talk about genocide? Does one create the possibility of the other? This femme necropolitical just kills me. Slay, but in a bad way.
My bodymind erupts. Oops, I GEYSER’ed again: I try to get on stage, grab the mic. I stumble, poll the audience, screaming: ‘WHY AREN'T WE TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE?!?!?!?’ I am ordered-escorted out by my supportive, kind, rational they-friend, who perpetually keeps their shit together, and is constantly cleaning up mine.
Compartmentalizers shall inherit the Earth. Apologizers shall inherit …?
I wish I had a different attachment style. As it is, I am a
Messy Controlling Bitch. Tears, suicide, drunkenness. Domination, not in the sexy way.
My femme necro(a)political style: when I pack for a trip, I obsess about what clothes to pack, because this is what I will be wearing in the photos in the slideshow at my funeral.
Interiority is aspirational. I feel shallow until I am too deep and sink. Do I even have one? Are my emotions dysregulated, or just on the outside?
The slip beneath a belted dress refuses to stay hidden; peaks out, becomes visible, exterior shot. In the ‘80s, 9-years-old wearing Queen-Sized Control Top Pantyhose.
You are slipping.
You are your pain is showing.
I thought I was just high maintenance.
Takes too long. Never enough time.
Quiet Comfort 45.
Shall I theorize the chronomasculine? This is not a generalization I am comfortable with, but let's be uncomfortable with it for a while.
Many femmes are very organized. And many organizations are very femmes. Many femmes are exceptional. I am very organization-y as in, in the movement. But my superpower is chaos.
Opening credits: Working Girl. Song: ‘Let the River Run’, (but I always thought it was called ‘The New Jerusalem’) all Staten Island ferry and secretarial sneakers. I’ve often been told I look like Sigourney Weaver – and let me tell you, I really wanted to be her in this one. Sure, she is power-voracious ridiculous and gets humiliated, but what else is new? It's asking for the taking. Trembling, shaking. Oh, my heart is aching. We’re coming to the edge, running on the water.
It was the wrong time for
Free free Palestine!
Free free Palestine!
Situation 1987 – 13 years old, grade 8 – stop all the clocks
The school bus comes to pick us up at 7:10 am. Every morning, I run late, racing around trying to find everything I have lost, trying to remember everything I have forgotten. I am the oldest.
Running out of the house, I crash into the sliding glass door, face first. The glass door/time wins. My face loses. Ear, cheek, teeth, eye, nose, forehead, chin. Smashed.
In the following weeks, I seem to be running a little less late. Maybe I have learned my lesson?
Shortly after, while yelling at a younger sibling (approx. 6 years old, just old enough to tell time) for being so immature, he yells back at me: ‘Well at least I’m not the reason mom & dad had to turn all the clocks ahead by 15 min!’
It was just a year or so after Pete was born. The sliding glass door was installed when my parents put that addition on the house – the one that made it look like an army-for-God bunker (which it was), all flat face and small windows – the year he was born. I was 12 when he was born. 13 or so when I flattened my face against time, but not for the first time, nor the last time.
Situation 2024 – 51 years old – killing time
A year after that conversation with Moon, also in November, I’m diagnosed with skin cancer on my femme face. Three Novembers before this, in 2021, my dear, wonderful femme Aunt died after a small spot of skin cancer was removed from her leg and then the wound got infected when she returned to the hospital for her dialysis, and she died three days later, bleeding – and by that I mean blood seeping – through all the pores of her body. Sepsis.
On the morning of my surgery, waiting for the time to leave, to get to the clinic on-time, I worry about my underwear, paint my nails. Interior shot: ‘In case I die on the table’, was what was going through my head, but on the outside, maybe it just looked like I was killing time.
The wound and skin graft are gnarly and satisfying. The scar, a medically necessary body modification across my left cheek. Everyone either tells me that it will heal well and there won’t be a scar, or that scars are sexy. Exterior shot: my face in pain. Finally, I know how to make it convincing.
Situation 1980 – 7 years old, grade 2 – waiting to inhale
At the beginning of every school day and after each recess, we line up outside the back doors of the school, in the threshold between yard and classroom. Teachers stand at the head of each line, one line per classroom [in a few years – almost 6 feet tall by age 12 – I’ll be taller than all the teachers, even the men], and we spiral around each other wanting something to do with our hands and faces. It is almost always Winter, and the other girls each have a Chapstick, which they pull from their pockets and apply – cherry, grape, apple. My mother won’t buy me a Chapstick, and I haven’t figured out how to buy my own, because she also doesn’t have any money to give me an allowance, and rejects the notions both of an allowance and of Chapstick, on principle and by necessity. At the time I hadn’t (and forever haven’t) figured out how to save any money, how to have financial goals. As we fidget in line, I finger the smallest of Tupperware containers in my pocket, a red plastic shot glass with a foggy lid, just the right size for a scoop of no-name Vaseline (petroleum jelly), perfectly good for any chapped body part. Once, and only once, I pulled out this Tupperware while shuffling in line (on line as they say in the USA), I dig my finger in and apply a globby blib of jelly to make my lips moist & shiny like everyone else's. But girls are very mean and they all ran away holding each other' hands, gasping-screaming-shrieking that I was putting snot on my lips. So, a few days later, when I found a Vicks VapoRub Inhaler on the sidewalk – yes it was used, but certainly not used up – I pocketed it. And next time in line, while the other girls unchapped their lips, I inserted the inhaler into each nostril and sniffed.
Situation 1986-to-present – waiting to erupt
As a teenager, instead of acne, I got canker sores. For years and years my mouth was full of them, invisible (lucky?) and painful. Once I had a canker on my gum that lasted so long, a molar grew through it. Acne on the inside, my femme interior.
Thirty years later, in Iceland (I know, how the fuck did that happen? Who am I to get to travel to Iceland?!), I encounter the geyser in Geysir. Geysa, from the Old Norse, to gush, to run forth, to go quickly forward. Always a gusher, I immediately identify with/as geyser, in both canker and explosive form. Apparently unpredictable, she was [I insist geyser, Geysir, Geysa is femme] very active when we were there – thrilling, terrifying, blasting, blistering, trembling, shaking. Drunk, lonely, gathering force, frenzied and raging, she can’t stop herself. What's more, she doesn’t want to (Figure 3. ‘Geyser Field/Method’.)
‘Geyser Field/Method’. T.L. Cowan 2024. Ink on paper. A portrait-oriented, rectangular, cream-coloured piece of drawing paper with two geysers shown, the top of the paper is torn off and raggedy: messy, amateur ink drawing of many holes spouting various materials, annotated with line notes. Numbers starting top left, moving counterclockwise. Geyser 1: Title ‘Hot Water Pumps’. Geyser 2: Title ‘Tinsel’ Geyser line notes: insert data to heat up pumps. Geyser 3: Title ‘A surprise every time?’ Geyser line notes: Unused massage oil; oil spill; rescue mission ^at risk^ cat toys. Geyser 4: Title ‘Perceived (REAL) Career overlooked – someone else gets credit 4 your femme imagination → meltdown. Geyser line notes: self-induced imagination abortions so no one gets all the credit for your ideas again. Geyser 5: Title ‘Someone talks to you in an “I’m being” reasonable tone of voice. Geyser line notes: just diarhea just diarhia just diherea [sic]. Geyser 6: Title ‘Rock Twine Crochet’ Title line note: Try weaving “finger knitting rocks; [drawing of three holes/rocks joined by finger-knitted twine]. Geyser line note: explaining hard feelings to a rational brain about how you feel that doesn’t make sense to other people; how to feel a hard story that doesn’t make sense. Geyser 7: Title ‘Geyser of naturally occurring ground-up pop can tabs mostly diet coke and fizzy water’. Geyser line note: – exploding at pressure? – sets it off? Geysers 8 & 9: Title ‘Femme disorder disordered femme’. Geyser line notes: barfed up mac + cheese + red wine hangover; eyelashes + chewed off nail polish and fake nails.
Impossibly situated, she lives in, through/with (and creates) impossible situations.
If we think with Geysa, eruptivity (insides bursting forth) is the situation that we are all waiting for, hoping for. Time is measured in anticipation between eruptions.
When we theorize feminist mess, messiness as method, are we really prepared for the mess that is, the messy situations, our messy situationness? How long it takes to find something, to know what to find? This essay is three months overdue; a year-and-a-half late; unfinished, impossible to finalize; but maybe there is potential here?
The situation here right now:
Gmail: 1–100 of 54,017
Outlook Inbox: 9835 unread emails
Firefox, Chrome, Safari: hundreds of open tabs lay dormant, saved for future thinking.
Four open suitcases erupting with black jeans, tights and track pants, T-shirts, sweaters, sweatshirts and bras, socks, crusty thigh-savers, and a full-size Hitachi Magic Wand plus its charging cord, a burst turmeric capsule. The attachments for an electric razor that exploded when plugged in and turned on in a shared apartment in Berlin. A sinus rinse bottle and a blue plaid shirt that I wear when I’m grieving.
‘Femme Disorder’ 3–6
Fix bike – 6–7
Bike to school – 7–9
Meetings 9–11
Teach 11–1
Fam Dram 1–2:30
Massage 4:15
Call Christine 6:30
Make crackers (Figure 4. ‘Impromptu Femme Picnic Geyser’.)
IMPROMPTU FEMME PICNIC GEYSER. T.L. Cowan 2025. Ink on paper. A portrait-oriented, rectangular, cream-coloured piece of drawing paper with the top edge ripped off//torn edge; 1 geyser shown: messy, amateur ink drawing of a hole spouting various materials, annotated with line notes. Title: ‘IMPROMPTU FEMME PICNIC GEYSER. Line note to geyser – pointing to different sketchy shapes erupting from the geyser [top right counter-clockwise → top left]: Dips. – hummus. –smoked pea + feta. –vegan Ranch dressing. Pistachio caramel shortbread layer bars. Crackers homemade and otherwise. Leftover Roast Chicken + veg made at 10 o’clock last night. Leafy Greens. Bubbles. What kind of hair conditioner are you using?
Misery is only one set of Geyser situations. The capacity and propensity for eruptive affect as manifested by extremophilic lifeforms, femme and otherwise – for example the intense delight of an impromptu picnic with a friend, made up of the normal stuff we pack for ourselves for lunch (thank you dear A) – is all that is required. In some emotional ecosystems, big feelings are an ordinary occurrence. Approach with awe. Protect yourself if necessary. Anticipate hot tears, flying rocks, periods of (in)tense calm.
Geyser ecologies can help us to cultivate explosive niches for extreme feelings, safe times to explode, to be forceful, to be tangential, immoderate. Whether it is safe or not, an extreme response is sometimes the most just response; sometimes femmes need to fight. Sometimes we need to fight back together or alone, in situations and chaos we create, or in which we find ourselves.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies Centre at the University of Toronto.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.