Current cultures of care follow a necrophilic impulse, identifying community needs along diagnoses or political ideologies. To express a need that falls outside these predetermined schemas, or worse yet to act on it, is to prove yourself toxic, problematic, dangerous. The parts of life that are messy — when an episode will not yield to self-care; when colonised people resist their conditions by violence; when being in community means resolving conflicting needs — are either catalogued or excised.
Writer and theorist Paul B. Preciado refers to the condom as a ‘necropolitical body’ — a body which is marked by a relation to power and death and conducts power via the ‘giving of death’.1 We can think of the technology of the condom as one which sustains fucking since certain risks become mitigated with its use, and certain futures of responsibility and care are ruled out. Importantly, the condom does not only sustain fucking: it sustains fucking when done with condoms.
The ubiquity of necrophilic structures of care lead us to another vector of power — the pharmaco-infographic. Misreadings of bell hooks; proud claims that we don’t owe anyone anything; using personal boundaries as an excuse to de-home trans women. This new technology, the pharmaco-infographic, reworks vocabularies of care to direct us inward and nullify any future in which we are marred with the discomfort of being challenged or changed. A whole industry of self-care structures itself this way. Adjective as manoeuvre; existence as a schizophrenic if/then. Find the adjective you prefer and apply the solution you are given.
American writer Lily Scherlis traces the origin of boundaries in pop psychology to property: ‘teaching us to relate to other people as […] the one thing social systems are most determined to protect’.2 The boundary is by definition a limitation, not just of how others can interact with you but of the ways you can be. Identity is the property line, and care is the technology to sustain it. Here are the conditions through which you may enter what is m(in)e. Here are the grammars of my property.
If I set a boundary around my triggers, I limit my actions to avoidance when they arrive. An entire counter-discourse arose in response to the popularisation of trigger warnings, arguing that constant anticipation of being triggered instead increases distress with no potential for release. The anticipation increases your response, without allowing you to process the living thing.The naming becomes a burial. With no room for alteration or redefinition, nothing new comes of the relation. It sediments and reproduces only itself, indefinitely.
The language used in this execution of care terraforms the geography of our interconnectedness, flattens out its valleys and rezones its marshes in service of a predetermined map where none can find themselves changed or connected in an unplanned moment of trespass. A conception of care which forgets life in turn forgets the autonomies and pleasures of the thing. Under these grammars of care, property law is the only law. As though exaltation is not fragmentary! As though to be fragmented is not a necessary by-product of experiencing the ecstatic! As in Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, and Traumatophillia: ‘[in contact with the abject] When the orgasm came, he said, “I exploded into thousands of tiny pieces…hanging out in space like overheated pieces of dust.’3
Grammar itself is one site of this confinement. Pronouns are somehow the main key to be shared, as though acknowledging the effort put into my presentation is a violation. The pronoun circle confines the group’s relations to that which can be spoken. She/her/AMAB/tranny/butch/dyke/femme/AMAB/tranny/lesbian/AMAB/trannytyrannytranny.
I am pro-grammatic abolishment. A ‘language … not implicitly held to account of identities … or the frequently fetishistic methodologies of art movements’ from Caroline Bergvall, snuffed out in the class icebreaker.4 A care infused with the living material of our body, one which wrestles in the filth of exchange is a care that demands violation.
Please, please, break into the property that is my body and notice it is female.
Transfeminitiy is a violation of boundaries. First the self, in the intramuscular shot and the suppository and the scalpel. Then the category, blurring the edges of gender, of biology, of social relation, and then everything else. To bury the strangeness of it all in cis-normativity, to excise what is cringe, to conform to the words offered — this is a trap. So am I.
This is not a metaphor. I’m dissolving the nuclear family under my tongue, right next to my estrogen. I am going to infect your friends and loved ones. I am the social contagion that you are worried about, harbinger of the change that propagates in your cells of its own volition. After Fatima Jamal, ‘We are not just girls who die powerless, without breath, without a voice, without commitment, without resistance’.4
[1] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, The Feminist Press, 2013.
[2] Lily Scherlis, ‘Boundary Issues’, Parapraxis Magazine, 10 July 2023
https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/boundary-issues.
[3] Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, and Traumatophillia, NYU Press, 2023.
[4] Caroline Bergvall, Middling English, John Hansard Gallery, 2011.
[5] Fatima Jamal, ‘Transness As Metaphor: ‘On Kokomo City’,’ Seen Journal, 10 October 2023
https://www.blackstarfest.org/seen/read/issue-006/kokomo-city-fatima-jamal/.
