LIMP AS A MINCE: DISABILITY, DESIRABILITY, SHAME.

[CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG]

The language of orthopedic surgery and detention overlap. Correct was the word used by doctors to refer to me as a child. Only they weren’t referring to me, the be-sawed rugby players, I was incidental to my foot.

I was my foot.

I was born incorrectly, indebted to a technology that would later ‘correct’ me. The limp I have is a trace. When I stand, I stand corrected but when I walk, I walk with a limp.

– a mince.

A limp is a link between weakness and homosexuality. Atonal like the mince, which is hubristic and inefficient, walking takes more labour > effort > pain with a limp. Moving is more work, sometimes involving other muscles like the face or hands. The limp, because of this excess energy is coded as impotent and feminine. To mince words is also to ‘waste them’, to be unobjective and to let emotion in. The requirement on disabled people to narrate, testify and ask for care, leads to service users being seen as weak or submissive rather than the systems of power themselves being flagged as ineffectual. As “trans and disabled people,” Zoe Belinsky writes, “our debilitating conditions of proletarian existence do not derive from us alone. Instead, they arise from the economic structures that constrain us.”

In the institution, trans and queer people have already fallen from grace and have to work extra hard for legitimacy. Trans masculine people are routinely infantilised, babied, coddled and told we are confused women unwilling to accept our lesbianism. We transition because we want the cushion of male privilege (lol) and because we have failed at being women. Trans masculinity is pathologized into a disease of the will and read as a submission to patriarchy. So, what does it mean to be trans  masculine and choose to be a submissive? What does it mean to be read as incapable, and to want  the feeling of incapacitation?

[HARCAMONE] 

The powdered murderer walks with a limp. He dresses only in white. He is the dusting of chalk that police use to coat ransacked houses with. He is the prison labourer and the object of the writer’s fantasies. The book the writer is writing is called Miracle of the Rose. The man’s name is Harcamone, and he has killed a child. Everything in the prison revolves around Harcamone. Like  Helen’s eidolon at Troy, he is a projection. Harcamone also revolves around himself, which is to say he is fulfilled in the objects of his holiness; his penis, his wrist support, and the ladder he carries. His crime is the most heinous of all the prisoners, which in the logic of Jean Genet’s text, makes him the most holy. He is inextricable from the awful fact of his crime. “His crime,” says the writer, “is like the absurd mystery of a rose in bloom.”

[HAPPY ACCIDENTS] 

As children we desired casts, braces, slings, and glasses. We wished to wear the accessories of the physically experienced. Bash faked an eye test so she could get some prescription frames. We were jealous. We scrawled our names on the broken bones of our friends. Leasing ownership. Harriet shoved a Malteser down my cast using a twig when I broke my wrist. I forgot about it until I found it congealed to a muddy lump when the doctors whizzed the cast off with their circular saws. 

‘NURSE! NURSE! A wound.’

‘It’s only confectionary, silly! Lick it up now.’

The lust for impairment waned as we grew into adults and different barometers of cool took over. Though Harriet would still occasionally go theatric in a crowd ‘n mime kicking my leg with hers. I’d twist my dickie leg all the way round exploiting my double jointedness, camping it up most royal. Passers by gasped. I didn’t mind pimping my monstrosity out like this, for the sake of the bit. And yawn. It made me feel special.  

“Children become bandits to resemble the bandit they love,” writes Genet.

 The terfs will reel, and it’s a secret, but being trans is contagious.  

Protect your children from the scars they covet. We are the moral menace. 

#Dead infectious.  

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RECRUIT RECRUIT RECRUIT!

1 in 10 is not enough! 

RECRUIT RECRUIT RECRUIT! 

3 in a bed is not enough!

RECRUIT RECRUIT RECRUIT! 

– (ancient protest song) 

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“Young thief always be borne by the reverie that makes you the resplendent creature you would like to resemble!”  

– Jean Genet 

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Transexxxuality reveals life to be a narration.  

I am the handsome ones I desired to become and by whom I was egged on. 

I am the bandits I love. John, Pierre, Tristan, Sabretooth, Mons, Ishmael, Red Ranger.

I was not born trans. 

But wounded yeah, by some accident in the womb I slept thru.  

[HUMAN THEREFORE DIVINE]

They could not get away from it. Their body. Peskiness personified. What if being out of your body was precisely what put you in it? Jeans sticking to sopping thighs. The band of pain across  your little foot.

For Genet, the flaw in the carpet that proves it was not made by God is the mark of God himself. The criminal’s tragic lapse or flaw — in Greek the word is hamartia, meaning the hero’s mistake in  judgement — is where poetry escapes. The murderer’s crimes, or as Genet calls, them “slips of the  tongue” damage the integrity of the ‘phrase’ as a whole and threaten social understanding, but, for Genet, it is precisely these “faults – they are deeds” that produce poetry. 

Bulkean the burglar has a quirk. He pukes “on dough.” As a burglar on the outside, whenever cash was discovered on a job “a kind of nausea made him vomit on the bills.” As Genet relays, “the whole prison knew it, and no one ever dreamed of joking about it. It was as strange as Harcamone’s limp or Botchako’s epileptic fits… and this strangeness aggravated his beauty.” The strangeness of Bulkean being sick equates to the strangeness of Harcamone’s infirmity and the paroxysms of epilepsy in Genet’s eyes.

Queer/strange/messy/weak bodily facts and reflexes — faults that can’t be hidden —produce poetry through their idiosyncrasy. The puking made Bulkean more himself, in spite of himself. This quirk aggravates his beauty — as in irritates it. And makes it bloom the way a rash reddens when it is itched. The unspoken pact of the child prisoners never to laugh at these conditions is a type of networked care and respect. The children form their own protection racket  in the injurious prison. As the poet Nat Raha testifies, “no institutions exist to help us survive - we  survive because of each other.”

When I was a child, whenever I threw up at school I would feel so fucking stupid. Blindsided by my  bodily functions. Looking back, the feeling is one of embarrassment. Being comforted was part of it. I didn’t want to be acknowledged in the act. It was some threat to my self-sufficiency, my masculinity. The strangest thing was how my clothes felt afterwards. I was hyper aware, in the aftermath of throwing up, of my outfit. Just how wrong it was. Like the person that had dressed that day didn’t know they were going to be sick, which kinda made me my own joke’s butt.  

Bridget O’ Connor taught me that disability is fluid. Living with a physical disability means learning from your own body, how it feels and how it changes over time, and monitoring its desires and limits. Economically too, there are times when we are more able to afford to be disabled or  trans than others. Disability “is a process,” writes Belinsky, “rather than an identity rubric.” Marx believed that the landowner with a personal impairment can never truly be called lame. Money enables and poverty disables.  

Extreme poverty is one of the adverse childhood experiences that make a person more likely to commit violent crime, believes Professor Gwen Adshead, along with neglect and a specific relationship between masculinity and shame. “Gangsters of stature have none of these wounds which our childhood suffers and which it itself causes,” writes Genet in Miracle of the Rose. There are no bandits of stature in the penal colony. Even Harcamone, “that powdered murderer” fails, why? Because the bandit or gangster cannot grow to stature — i.e. normatively ascend the daylight ranks of wholesome criminality — within the warping rack of the institution. Proletarian queer and trans people are often barred from the heterosexual family unit (sovereign, hermetic, able-bodied) and deprived of social reproduction in the form of love, care, safety, and food. Genet, as a writer in prison, performs social reproduction. He administers care and love and sexual relief through his  labour. He also creates gender, inventing a means of sexual and political transgression through his descriptions of liberating rituals of gender and rituals of pain. He garlands these rituals without pathology or morality. In Genet’s world shame is elevated. The human has to undergo shame and  suffering in order to attain glory. And the most potent threat to normative masculinity is faggotry.  

The faggot’s refrain: Help me go to hell. Maybe more people will understand me there. If hell is full of people like me, then hell is where I want to be. Thrust low, in darkness, among friends. 

“I would call it infernal,” says Genet of the institution, “if it wasn’t so damp and sad.”  Good / evil / shame / glory and always the body.  

Fuck or be fucked - Darwin.

[EPHEMERA] 

To accept deformity, infection & ugliness — the fetishism of pain and its ephemera — is potentially not only useful, but required. Divers, who has syphilis, uses a pet name to refer to his weekly injections: “Piquouze,” expressing, “the secret tenderness the pimp feels for both the remedy and the ailment from which he suffers but will never be cured.” 

Harcamone’s limp is mysterious, but not connected with manliness the way his wrist support is; it is a strangeness not to be joked about. The strangeness is a weakness that is coded as feminine. As limps go, they don’t help a prisoner run away. When I have been in various states of incapacity (braced up to the nines, dangling on a precipice of anxiety) I have thought ‘Shit! If I need to bolt  from this dog/ fire/homophobe/locust plague, I’m gonna be so fucked.’ I like my bike for this  reason, it is the technology that carries me. It cares for me with its random allocation of bruises. My  organism doesn’t end at my clubbed foot or my polished nails, it encompasses my 27-inch rims, my demon phone, and my GMO cock. And today, this book and the holyhorny congregated inside it. O and this bread, saltless, which I take with the day’s rays and a promise to be good. 

In Genet’s portrait of Harcamone, he is carrying a ladder. “The ladder carried him,”Genet writes and I think of José de Ribera’s portrait Clubfooted Boy (1642). The boy is barefoot, one of his feet is twisted like baby pics of me before my operation and he grins directly at us. He carries his crutch on his shoulder and a sign asking for ALMS (a word for help or donations) in his hand. In Genet’s description of Harcamone and in Ribera’s painting, the use of the crutch and the ladder have been upturned – literally. They are wooden paradoxes of no material use, which seeds them to the imagination. Ribera’s clubfooted boy reminds us that poor, disabled people do not have the  luxury of choosing when and how to expose their wounds. Or how their physical difference may be coded. 

Have you seen CRIP CAMP? The documentary about a 70’s summer camp in the Catskills for teens with disabilities. They get crabs, muck about, sing, and some later join the disability revolution. One of these teenagers is Steven Hofman. He has floppy hair and a Joe D’allessandroey face sweet with haystacks. We are shown some footage of a cabaret night the group goes to in San  Francisco. Steven comes out in a wig and corset in his wheelchair with two beautifully made fabric hands groping his tits. He performs “Sweet Transvestite” in just his pants, dancing and writhing on stage to the lyrics “I’M NOT MUCH OF A MAN.” Earlier in the film, over dinner, Steven says, “if you are a handicapped person and you happen to have a passive nature about you, you are really screwed!” The play on screwed here, like screwed as in FUCT and screwed as in fucked, show the expert work of gender irony Hofman is carrying out.  

Gender labour, defined by Jane Ward, is the daily work trans people, mostly femmes, do in community to affirm and validate “someone’s gender irony, transgression or exceptionality.” In a world where being able to function means being socially legible, the practice of gender labour restores power to trans crip people. Types of gender labour include doing drag and making porn, using bro for your transmasc mate, lifting weights, and giving tattoos.

[GENDER IN MOTION] 

For any utopian, anti-capitalist project to survive (this is Wesling), it must incorporate the politics of sexual transgression. The injuries left by heterosexuality are life altering. The heterosexual family unit delegitimizes trans and crip experience by fetishizing white, straight, and able-bodied  subjectivity. Twisted means crippled, but it also means perverted. What can we learn from our battered bodies, our shame infested sources, and the filthy ways we fuck about the giving and receiving of care? 

“It’s hot for me to sub,” says a friend, “it’s fun to play with age for instance, when being infantilised is so much of my experience of being trans masc. It’s both icky and hot, maybe they’re the same. Like the physical determinism can be a bit much, and sometimes I want to break out of it, I’m short – girly – crippled – and I have a tiny dick! Like was I always gonna end up here, was this my  prophecy?!”

You too, 

you were bound to come.  

You couldn’t live anywhere else. – Genet 

In my thirties, I am my foot again. Objectified in earnest. I can learn to care for my body from those who care for it and how I care for them in return. I can integrate my scars by renewing the vows we made to each other in childhood. In watching her kiss my foot, I can learn to care for myself, the feminine parts too. It’s what Genet said about his “pack of poor devils,” their puking, their limping  and their kinks, their womanly laughs and their fantastic seizures. It is in their flaws that they are shown to be “wounded, irreplaceable,” irreducibly fucked, and totally themselves. 

References

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About the Author

D Mortimer is a writer from London. They/he/she is interested in the crip unknown. Their first book, a collection of essays and poetry entitled  Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. They are a techne scholar in English and Creative Writing at The University of Roehampton and are currently completing a practice based PhD there called, The Beef Journals: Naming the Uncertain in Transgender Subject Formation.D Mortimer is a writer from London. They/he/she is interested in the crip unknown. Their first book, a collection of essays and poetry entitled  Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life was published by Pilot Press in 2021. They are a techne scholar in English and Creative Writing at The University of Roehampton and are currently completing a practice based PhD there called, The Beef Journals: Naming the Uncertain in Transgender Subject Formation.