A Mad Trans Cartography: “I Leave Clues for Myself in the Darkness”
If I want to get through this mad life I’ve realized I have to make tangible maps for myself. I make them in my journals, I write them in the stories I share with friends, I use words and metaphors and parables, and sometimes very concrete reminders that help me stay on the path…I leave clues for myself in the darkness [emphasis added]. Some of them are obvious and clear as day and some of them are written in code, only decipherable when I’m in the head states that need to hear them…Sometimes they are my escape hatches. Sometimes they are safety nets…They hold metaphors and maps we can bring with us into the future (DuBrul, 2013, pp. 4-5).
When mapping the terrain
of my Mad trans bodymind (Clare, 2017; Price, 2014; Schalk, 2018),
I find myself returning
again and again
to the moments of
Mad trans embodiment
that feel like temporal and spatial
un/realities that exist
outside of the realm of time
and space, itself,
carving ulterior
pathways
through previously
clandestine portals
that manifest within
the mere millimeters
of separation between
body and essence,
self and not quite self,
a confluence of unselves
that arises
like the pause between breath
and exhalation,
a juncture that,
I’ve
been
told,
can bring peace when
one’s awareness is centered there,
this liminal space between beingness
and nothingness,
where the maps of my Mad trans
embodiment begin
and, equally,
never seem
to truly
end…
“I leave clues
for myself
in the darkness” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 4).
Walking home from my advanced doctoral
research methods course last year
where my Mad trans methodologies
and their emanant hauntings
called themselves forth into
a form and essentiality
so acutely embodied
that I dare not ignore,
I paused under the streetlamp
to give my essence -
this ghostly portent of what
existence might be
when we inhabit the between
spaces of here and there,
somewhere and elsewhere,
becoming and not yet become -
a moment to catch up,
hoping that it may finally
choose to reinhabit the corporeal
form of my Mad trans bodymind.
Despite what felt like
an endless waiting,
this essence that possessed
my consciousness or,
rather, an imprint or trace
of my consciousness,
found home in residing
a half step behind my body,
a watcher, a spectral traveler,
edges soft
and porous…
“The edge can be
a dangerous place to be -
there’s always the possibility
of falling
off” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 143).
So tangible, so visceral,
I wondered if this essence
of me,
beside me,
behind me,
all of me
and none of me,
could be seen by passersby
in the glow of the streetlight,
or by the fractal luminescence
emitted by a beingness that,
simultaneously
and contradictorily,
lacked clear shape and form,
known and,
yet,
un
recognizable…
Ghost (n.). “It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not
know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an
essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this
non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs
to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of
knowledge…Here is - or rather there is, over there, an unnamea ble or almost
unnameable thing: something between something and someone, anyone or
anything” (Derrida, 1994, p. 5). (Yoon & Chen, 2022, pp. 77-78, bolding and italics
in original).
Is it the burden of
one’s apparition
to guide one
back to the parts
that have been lost,
to the pieces of self
that must have died
along the way?
“…it will happen again;
it will be there for you.
It is waiting for you.
We
were
expected” (Gordon, 2008, p. 166).
Feeling bodies move past me,
not one making a sound,
no shudders, exclamations,
or frights,
it quickly became clear
that this splitting of self,
this rupture between body
and essence,
detached and distant,
yet bound by a temporal,
spatial,
spiritual,
and metaphysical
relationality,
was imperceptible to all
but me.
An eerie calm settled over me…
“The edges all blur -
I start dreaming
while I’m awake” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 143).
I was now
moving through this world,
or pausing as the world
moved through me,
unencumbered by
the weight of a body,
a complexly fleshy
animacy
that had yet to feel
entirely mine,
completely
and sincerely
alive…
“the material realm
was an illusion” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 143).
Floating through spaciousness,
defying the parameters of
others’ time,
existing in
the interwoven
expanse of
everywheres,
anywheres,
and nowheres,
uncertain what caused
this fracturing,
unsure of the etiology
of this
dislocation…
“I cured
nothing
because there was nothing
to cure” (Clare, 2017, p. 180),
and with no idea
how I might return
to myself,
a single,
coherent whole
that I am unsure
was ever whole
all along…
“I claim brokenness
to make
this irrevocable
shattering
visible” (Clare, 2017, p. 160).
How does one trace the boundaries
of the boundless,
of that which eludes
naming, categorization,
definition,
that seeks to reject
the ablesanist
white supremacist, colonial,
cisheteropatriarchal expectations
of “chrononormative time” by
refusing to be a “static stable subject” (Pyne, 2021, p. 346),
that queers
and trans
and Maddens
time and space,
being and essence,
existence and emptiness,
past,
present,
and that which
is still
to come?
If Mad maps help
“me get back to the place
where I have the feeling
that my body fits well on my soul” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 187, italics in original),
how and where
do I begin
to chart
pathways,
lineages,
and linkages
from me
to me,
from myself
to my ghosts
who have finally found
respite
outside of a body
whose form is still in a state
of transition,
becoming,
unfurling
towards futures
and imaginaries
that
only
the Mad parts of me
dare to envision as real,
as possible,
as enough?
“I leave clues
for myself
in
the
darkness” (DuBrul, 2013, p. 4).
Note
- Ablesanism, a combination of the terms ableism (the privileging of able-bodiedness) and sanism (the privileging of neurotypicality, able-mindedness, and the absence of Madness), is defined as “the stigmatizing and pathologizing ways in which mental illnesses/psychiatric disabilities and developmental disabilities are understood and reified through structures of exclusion, dispossession, incarceration, and death” (Aho, 2017, p. 1).
References
Aho, T. (2017). Neoliberalism, racial capitalism, rationality, and mental illness Conference handout]. American Sociological Association Conference, Montreal, Quebec.
Clare, E. (2017). Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure. Duke University Press.
DuBrul, S. A. (2013). Maps to the other side: The adventures of a bipolar cartographer. Microcosm Publishing.
Price, M. (2014). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. The University of Michigan Press.
Pyne, J. (2021). Autistic disruptions, trans temporalities: A narrative ‘trap door’ in time. South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(2), 343-361.
Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds reimagined: (Dis)ability, race, and gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke University Press.
Yoon, I. H., & Chen, G. A. (2022). Heeding hauntings in research for mattering. In Tachine, A. R., & Nicolazzo, Z. (Eds), Weaving an otherwise: In-relations methodological practice (pp. 76-91). Stylus Publishing, LLC.
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About the Author
Jersey Cosantino (they/them), a former K-12 educator, is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University, holding certificates of advanced study in women’s and gender studies and disability studies. A Mad and trans studies scholar and oral historian, Jersey’s research utilizes disability and transformative justice frameworks to center the experiences and subjectivities of Mad, neurodivergent, trans, and gender non-conforming individuals. Jersey identifies as Mad, neurodivergent, queer, trans, and non-binary and is white with education and citizenship privilege. A co-facilitator for SU’s Intergroup Dialogue Program’s course Dialogue on Racism and Anti-Racism, Jersey holds a master’s in education and graduate certificate in mindfulness studies. They are also the co-editor of the International Mad Studies Journal, a consulting editor for the Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, and a former Trans Lifeline call operator.