2003-04-18 - 12:01 a.m.
Less than a week ago, I sat in a friend's room in San Francisco, gazing out the window on Capp Street at the sunny street corner below. Back in Seattle, I have a strange sense of time elapse. Two weeks and one new body later, everything feels no less familiar and no less routine. I guess this is the moment that I realize just how home I am here.
I've been taking pictures of my new chest, all freshly cut up and put back together. I love the way it looks, taped up like a half-finished project, scabby nipples and remnants of pre-surgical pen marking still visible. I can only take posed pictures with props, and even then, only if they are sufficiently tongue-in-cheek. It's the stomach-turning body-obesession of "before/after" photos that have inspired my newfound camera-shyness. The creepy "look at me now!" focus of weight loss before/after photos, scar reduction photos, acne improvement photos and so on make me nervous to take part in this odd practice of modification-as-improvement. Not to mention the utter body-focus of gender transition, the way we are all supposed to be on a consistant path to shaping the "right" body that we've always felt we should have had, and the way that it can only come through hormones and surgeries and other expensive things. I'm excited about my chest, it makes me feel alien in precisely the ways I wish to. However, I don't want to pretend that I thought my old body was hideous (I didn't), and I don't want to think of this as an "improvement"... just something wonderfully and thrillingly different. That said, it's fun to look at, fun to observe the way I stand and walk, the way I suddenly look like the poncy, hollow-chested, bellied lad I fancy myself. I look forward to the way my alien chest will be becoming itself for months-- the way it will heal, the shape it will take on, the way the scars will form, and so on.
The strangest part about my surgery was the timing. I left for San Francisco a week and a half after the war started, and just a week after some friends and I finally put on a big event we had been planning for months. I spent the crucial weeks of war resistance either getting ready for surgery or lying in my friend's bed watching "Purple Rain" and "Office Space" on Percocet. The timing felt bizarre... never before have I done anything quite so self-indulgent as chest surgery, and this indulgence felt thrown into relief by the pronounced urgency of war resistance. Through my painkiller-induced fogginess, I wondered about questions of privilege and wealth, having to do both with my surgery and with political action. I thought about the doctor who lives in a live/work space in a city that expels its artists and longtime residents and welcomes instead fancy plastic surgeons as tenants. I thought about the sum of money I paid him that is paying for that rent. I thought about the insurance that I no longer have but would not have funded this surgery even if I did. There is a myth of choice here, the choice to slice up (some would say mutilate) my body, the choice to get a job that would pay for it. It's this myth that springs from the grander bootstraps myth of this weird nation we live in, that looks at a mountain range and calls it a level playing field, that pretends that our opportunities are more or less similar, and that disparities are our own fault. It's creepy to think about how this nation's backward lies form the foundation of the privileges I access to make these "choices" which are not even on the choice-radar of many people.
Similarly, I think about the issue of choice and how it dictates our methods of resistance. How we choose for example, or don't, to get arrested and why, who bears the brunt of the inevitable violence of this, and how our differing visions piece together in the way we formulate our strategies (and whose visions are eclipsed by others' visions). There is a difference between fighting because we want to and fighting because we have to, and the consequences of these look very different. I marveled at the patches and posters around San Francisco, adorned with a beautiful and simple bird, that say "SF Stops Wars." I heard tales of the city being shut down for three consecutive days. I heard some voices of trimph, "We won!" (won what?) and some of anger, "I'm fucking pissed that I had to fuck up my city to show that I'm pissed and that we won't take this." I wondered how those voices might change in tone, what actions might change, who would or would not be present if there were soldiers or bombs or gunfire on U.S. soil. For whom is resistance an issue of survival? For whom is it an issue of rightousness or morality? For whom is it an issue of guilt or pleasure? For whom is it just what we do? How do all of these questions parse out the way we understand what we decide to do and how we decide to go about it?
Now that I'm back in Seattle, the war is suddenly over. Technically, anyway, or in the collective mind of U.S. citizens and leaders. I'm left to wonder which war we're talking about when we say it's over, and how many people in the U.S. who have been resisting in various ways will think their job is done. It's so easy to protest and resist that which is tangible, it's easy to envision barrels of oil aside pools of blood and feel enough rage to propel us into city streets yelling at the tops of our lungs. It's another thing entirely to articulate the deep irony of cigar-smoking, camoflauge-clad military officers sitting on velvet couches in conquered palaces, shaking their heads, appalled at the disgusting excesses of the dictatorship in a nation rife with poverty. And it's almost an unimaginable leap to envision people in the U.S. taking to the streets on any waking day to protest the intangibles that got us here in the first place, in this war, in this lopsided distribution of wealth, in this iron-gloved chokehold that keeps us pretending that we should always save our rage for these utter outrages like wars, and not interrupt our daily lives for the difficult-to-articulate, abstract resistances.
Lately, I can't stop talking or writing like a propagandist. But of course, nobody can. I want to get out of this rut we have worn for ourselves of believing that protests and taking to the streets in financial districts is the only way we can resist. I want to stop fueling resistance through hoping for media coverage and coming up with catchy soundbytes. I want to, like SF, stop wars. And I want to do it deep, like not just erasing camoflauge from one particular landscape before it creeps into another. Like breaking the machine that thought of camoflauge in the first place.
