The Rare Kind: The Stakes of Intersectional Storytelling
The best art is made by the rarest individuals. I would say I am a rare individual, but my art is far from the best. When I talk about art, I mostly mean my creative writing endeavors, although the illustrations I make for them are a part of my work: my art. What I have in common with the best artists is the rarity of individual self. Rarity by definition is abjectly isolating, singular, uncommon. While what I produce is far from the best art, I am one of the rarest individuals. I am many things, among them schizophrenic, chronically ill, and a person with dissociative identity disorder (DID). I am also transgender, nonbinary, and Vietnamese-American.
If you ever speak to enough schizo, psychotic, or folks with a dissociative identity disorder, you’ll realize that within each of these diagnostic categories is an extremely individual, irreplicable experience. When they are comorbid–among other disorders–on top of LGBT identities, on top of marginalized racial identity, you get the result of an exceedingly rare individual. This isn’t even to mention the lifelong trauma of emotional neglect by parents who deeply love and care for their ‘daughter,’ who is not and has never been you, a nonbinary transgender man of an alter who took over after the original–also nonbinary and transgender–individual could no longer handle existing.
This is all to say: there is no one like me on Earth, and there will never be anyone like me.
Now, to start with a story of the isolation of rarity. Whenever I try to meet people who seem to be my people, at least superficially, I end up joining groups of LGBTQ+ WRITERS. I have come to realize that these groups are first and foremost drawing from a category of dominant groups, or people who have assimilated far enough that they resemble or conform to dominant groups. When people talk about writers, they presume to speak about Normal people who write and happen to be LGBTQ+. They are first and foremost drawing from normal people. And these normal people write in normal ways, which, I, being a rare breed, inherently am unable to fathom because I am Crazy.
What is it like, I wonder, not to fight for your life when you write?
In every story I write, I am attempting to seize the narrative–the narrative of schizos, psychotics, DID systems, disabled people, chronically ill people, transgender people, nonbinary people, and Vietnamese-American people–and these identities are more often than not inextricably intertwined. My life depends on it. The ability to make it possible to undo–even only in one reader’s mind–centuries of stigmatization and marginalization and oppression is how I fight for my right to live and be understood for who I am, and how I am. I don’t want to be obfuscated by the stigmatized media representations of “psychotic” or “psychopathic” serial killers, or serial killers with DID. I don’t want to be seen as the pitiable, pathetic, and victimized disabled and chronically ill people–who never once have anything resembling true agency. As for Viets, I’ve only ever seen us as comedic relief janitors or gangsters. And of course, none of this is to even touch upon the rampant transphobic, and particularly transmisogynistic, jokes in most television sitcoms.
These representations are internalized and reproduced in every single work of popular media that touches on one of these topics (and just one at a time, of course), which is shaped in how people understand and misunderstand these individuals, including myself. The typical person will not knowingly encounter a schizophrenic person. (Many of us are quite good at hiding.) When a schizo person discloses their schizo status, the first thing the typical person will think of is, Oh, schizophrenic? Like in all the crazy killer movies? And this fundamentally shapes their impression of all schizo people because these violent media reproductions are all they know about schizo people. They don’t know it’s not real because they’ve never encountered the real deal. And because of their trust in the media not to lie, they will believe that schizo people are inherently dangerous and can become violent at any time, even when they do encounter the real deal.
When I encounter a normal writer in an LGBT WRITERS chat, I realize that the trauma of so many stigmatized marginalizations makes me unable to bond with other writers in normal ways. I write in order to fight for my life against the media representations that actively seek to harm me. Many normal writers do not even consider mass media as a threat to their lives, and they happily create stories that conform to popular media tropes. They do this for fun. A normal writer–even an LGBTQ+ one–might write a gay knight/prince high fantasy story just because it is fun and cute.
I do not have the privilege to do anything merely because it is fun and cute. My mind will not allow me. My immense drive and core need to be known and understood for who I am will not allow me. Making art fueled by my experiences of marginalization is how I keep my voice from being silenced. And I need to speak to survive.
For me, writing and art is primarily an expression of identity and experience, along with a method of seizing my narrative and defining its boundaries. I write and I draw as part of a way to choose how I am defined, rather than having the world decide who I am based on what I am (schizo, DID, disabled, traumatized). I think about trauma in terms of seizing the narrative of trauma. Everything is a story, and if you don’t tell your own, someone will try to decide what it is for you. Your story, your truth, is at stake when you are marginalized, and the popular impressions of your identities are decided by the most privileged, most dominant groups who control media representation.
I want to be remembered for who I am, not what I was. And as someone whose world is rapidly shrinking due to disability severely limiting mobility, the only way I can make a mark on the world is through my art. These are the stories of everyone I was; these are the stories of what I felt; these are the stories of everyone I am, and predictions of who I will become. The stakes here are my life. My permanence and meaning of life. Many other avenues for self-actualization are closed to me as a disabled person, and the hand I was dealt means that I have limited chances to be remembered by the world, to make any impact at all beyond the artistic. It is exceedingly unlikely I will ever work a real job. It is becoming more and more unlikely that I will be healthy enough to go outside with any relative frequency without extreme taxation on my body. Hell, I can barely stand in my kitchen for an hour without needing to lie down for hours more.
For a lot of people who are normal in the assimilatory sense, the stakes aren’t this high. Their identities aren’t under threat–or if they are, they don’t feel the threat intimately enough to be traumatized by it to the point of being unable to speak about it in terms of what it is, and thus being forced to to express the truth in terms of what it isn’t. Many normal writers tell stories that they think are an interesting idea, whereas I write as a mechanism of survival and attempt to make my voice–that of a very, very rare kind–heard. The stakes are very different. One writes to entertain, and one writes to cope. For me, writing is a form of emotional catharsis. For what I can’t say aloud. For what I can’t look at in its true form, and whose truth I can only whisper in intricate, labyrinthine obscurities. Lyric and poetry, rhythm and the rare rhyme.
At the time of writing this, I do have a knight/prince high fantasy project in the works called LIONHEART, but it is with an entirely Vietnamese cast, and it is in a Vietnamese-American high fantasy fusion. In a nutshell, the protagonist dies of chronic illness, and when he dies he transmigrates into the world of a novel he was reading, wherein he rapidly realizes he still has his chronic illness, but this world gives him the freedom of self-determination rather than a life consigned to the hospital. This world has effective magical pain medication, though it is of course not without its limitations. This knight/prince love story is first and foremost a chronic illness and medical trauma narrative about the way being silenced by those with power over you is traumatizing.
The knight/prince love story aspect of it is cute, but the core of it involves seizing the narrative of trauma. It is not something I am writing because I think the idea is so fun and so adorable I just had to write it, it is something I am writing because I want people to see I deserve to live.
However, an honest disability trauma narrative is a hard sell. On top of it being Vietnamese. A secret about publishing: only one marginalization at a time gets published. You can be gay, but you can’t be Vietnamese and gay. If you are both, then the setting must be tried and true and otherwise non-threatening to the status quo, such as a high school drama mysteriously full of white people who surprisingly never do a single racist thing in their lives, or characters of color that never once mention race or racism or posit white people as the dominant group and theirs as a marginalized group. You can talk about race, as long as you never talk about white people in any negative light whatsoever unless they are stock caricatures of racists, who are Bad People. Racists can never be kind, sweet, or otherwise compassionate. No, no good white person is ever racist. You can also replace this with homophobia, etc etc.
Anyway, my point is that the truth–if too subversive–is regarded as too niche-market to sell commercially. And you can be too subversive just by having two marginalized identities at once, particularly if you’d like to talk about experiences of marginalization where white, straight, cisgender, neurotypical, etc folks are the ones who have ever done an ounce of wrong without being introduced as The Bad People, Who Do These Things Because They Are Bad And Thus Nothing Like The White Cishet Reader.
To further elaborate on my point, my knight/prince story is going to be a hard sell because it is a gay Vietnamese-American disability trauma narrative. Wow! Three marginalizations? In genre fiction? Hmm…seems a bit risky, don’t you think? Whereas the normal LGBTQ+ writers who want to write a gay knight/prince story that is most probably about abled and neurotypical and cisgender white people, although of course they would never consider it in those terms. They’d present it as being a radical, refreshing story about gay people in fantasy. Incredible. Really making the biggest, most transformative change here. This is the story the gays need!
Of course, the question is, Which gays need this story? and the answer is always, Not my kind.
The gay white knight/prince story is exceedingly likely to be Commercially Successful at the same time it is exceedingly unlikely to be groundbreaking, powerful, or unique in a significant way, due to the same factors that lead to its success in a commercial market. My work might be unique and transformative, but it is exceedingly unlikely to be successful.
I will die an insignificant, strange writer whose words were forgotten.
This, however, doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying to make work worth remembering.
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About the Author
Xuan Nguyen is a disabled and transgender writer and artist who does music as FEYXUAN. They focus on the intersections between transgender identity, divinity + monstrosity, and stigmatized mental and physical health. Their work has appeared in Prismatica Magazine, Rogue Agent, and beestung. Their short fiction chapbook, LUNG, CROWN, AND STAR, will be published in December 2020 by Lazy Adventurers. They can be reached through their website at feyxuan.com or on Twitter @feyxuan.