‘I do not want to pass’: embodiment,metaphor,and world-making in Patrick Staff’s Weed Killer

Abstract

Medicalized and often surveilled shifts of the cancerous and/or trans body intersect in generative ways: metaphorical and material, symbolic and systemic. This piece discusses Patrick Staff’s (2017) video Weed Killer through an analysis of its source text, Catherine Lord’s essay ‘The Summer of Her Baldness’ (2003) along with prior queer and feminist explorations of cancer, disease, and pain, to build a transfeminist analysis of how the experience of cancer treatment reveals the constructedness of femininity as well as the ablism underlying binary gender systems. Staff’s work creates alignments and ruptures between sets of a potentially intersecting politics, which bear the weight of naturalized gender, pharmacological mediation, ‘passing’, and debility.

Keywords

cancer contemporary art disability studies gender transgender studies video

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bourke

(2014) The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 17.

Butler

(2009) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Erevelles

(2011) Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave.

Foucault

(1973) The Birth of the Clinic, trans. AM Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books.

Goffman

(1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In: Newman

O’Brien

(eds) Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Hayward

(2016) Lessons from a starfish. In: Hint

Giffney

(eds) Queering the Nonhuman. New York: Routledge, 249–264.

Jain

(2007) Cancer butch. Cultural Anthropology 22(4): 501–538.

Jain

(2013) Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lord

(2004) The Summer of Her Baldness. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9(1): 263–305.

10.

Mukherjee

(2012) The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning.

11.

Prosser

(1998) In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press.

12.

Puar

(2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

13.

National Institutes of Health Report on Carcinogens, 14th edn: Adriamycin. Available at https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/roc/content/profiles/adriamycin.pdf (accessed 1 December 2019).

14.

Scarry

(1987) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. London: Oxford University Press.

15.

Sontag

(1978) Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

16.

Spade

(2006) Mutilating gender. In: Stryker

Whittle

(eds) Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 435–441.

17.

Stacey

(1997) Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer. London: Routledge.

18.

Stryker

(2006) My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamonix. In: Stryker

Whittle

(eds) Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 244–256.

19.

Sward

(2017) Remedy + poison: Patrick Staff on agitation in art + what it means to represent the pain of others in Weed Killer. AQNB. Available at: https://www.aqnb.com/2017/09/21/remedy-poison-patrick-staff-on-agitation-in-art-what-it-means-to-represent-the-pain-of-others-in-weed-killer (accessed 30 December 2019).

20.

Tseelon

(1995) The Masque of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life. London: Sage.

21.

Van Ommen

Cromby

Yen

(2017) The contemporary making and unmaking of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. Subjectivity 9: 333–342.

22.

Waskul

Vannini

(2007) Introduction: The body in symbolic interaction. In: Waskul

Vannini

(eds) Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body. New York: Routledge, 1–18.