The landscape of trauma is scattered with ghosts. Wolves hunkering in the shadows. Memory’s spect... more The landscape of trauma is scattered with ghosts. Wolves hunkering in the shadows. Memory’s spectral persistence and evasion. Leaky bodies and selves gathered up in the storm of pain. Genders imposed and genders made. History’s cruel excisions, scars, the spillage of wounds. A landscape in which we are nevertheless called to build home. Here, “storytelling is a kind of suturing.”
Combining memoir, lyric essay, and cultural criticism, KJ Cerankowski’s Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life. Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time.
Transgender philanthropist Reed Erickson has gained the renewed attention of trans historians as ... more Transgender philanthropist Reed Erickson has gained the renewed attention of trans historians as more of his papers become available in multiple archives. While other scholars set out to piece together the life story of this leopard-owning, four-times married, fugitive multi-millionaire who invested substantial money and energy into improving gender-affirming healthcare, I take a different approach to the Erickson archive. Rooted in affect studies, archive studies, and trans/queer theories, this essay plays with fabrication and fabulation to produce not a straightforward history, but rather, an embodied encounter with the material afterlife held within the archive. Pivoting around an engagement with the Erickson family bible, this essay embarks on a trans-temporal figuring of matter and body in order to remember the fractured ghosts of (trans)history's past, present, and future hauntings.
This essay examines how capitalism and colonialism collude to produce a high value on the “end” o... more This essay examines how capitalism and colonialism collude to produce a high value on the “end” of the erotic—the orgasm—and rather proposes an end to the hierarchical valuing of orgasmic pleasure. Through an analysis of film, literature, and the pleasures in their consumption, this essay makes the case for asexual pleasures that resist the telos of erotic settler time, moving into a queer, sovereign erotic temporality. In other words, how might we think differently about intimacies and reimagine the durations of pleasure when we interrogate the colonial construction of the normative sexual subject and imperatives toward sexual coupling? By exploring the possibilities of various nonsexual pleasures, we can question how and which bodies are constructed as healthy, desirable, and desiring subjects according to normative constructions of race, ability, age, and orgasmic potential, while also creating different modes of relationality and intimacy with the self and others.
The archive consists of memories, documents, and images waiting to be curated into a story. In th... more The archive consists of memories, documents, and images waiting to be curated into a story. In this article, the author collates archival object encounters into a transgender 'ghost story' that marks the impossibility of a straightforward history of the subject, relying instead on embodied encounters with archive objects, or the remnants (ghostly and tangible) of archival subjects. Following the materials of Charley Parkhurst and Reed Erickson, the author makes connections where none previously existed, asking: How do we put life back into the materials of the dead? What do the traces and memories of these ghosts offer the living? What do archive objects activate in the eyes that see them, the ears that listen, and the hearts that race or slow with each haptic encounter? Following these questions, this article pieces together a different kind of narrative history and transition story through the unexpected encounters with the archive and its ghosts.
It really is Fashion that has killed dandyism.- Roland Barthes, The Language of FashionIf at firs... more It really is Fashion that has killed dandyism.- Roland Barthes, The Language of FashionIf at first you don t succeed, failure may beyour style- Quentin Crisp, Sunday Correspondent MagazineDandyism is not dead. Contrary to Roland Barthes's assertion, quoted above, that fashion killed dandyism, dandyism lives on as it shape-shifts over time and remakes itself in different historical contexts. Nearly impossible to define, dandyism is an aesthetic and life philosophy; it is a lifestyle, and a queer one at that. In Dandyism, or The Anatomy of Dandyism, as it is sometimes translated, novelist and critic Jules Barbey D Aurevilly reminds us that dandyism goes beyond a manner of dress and continually elides definition: "Dandyism is almost as difficult a thing to describe as it is to define. Those who see things only from a narrow point of view have imagined it to be especially the art of dress, a bold and felicitous dictatorship in the matter of clothes and exterior elegance. That it most certainly is, but much more besides. Dandyism is a complete theory of life and its material is not its only side. It is a way of existing, made up entirely of shades" (D'Aurevilly 1988, 31). In its various shades of instantiation, dandyism may even be perceived as a queer style, one that resists definition, blurs boundaries, and specifically plays with gender and its associations with sexuality. While many scholars have argued that queer expressions of gender do not necessarily correlate with homosexual desire, today, the sexuality of genderqueer dandies is often speculated on and interpreted as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In some cases, scholars of dandyism have reminded us that despite his effeminacy, the dandy male is indeed heterosexual. What is often missing from these readings is the possibility of the dandy as celibate or asexual.1Although there is a historical association between the male dandy and a disinterest in sex, today's oft-hypersexualized conception of queerness tends to eclipse that possibility when we look at the dandy of the contemporary moment. For example, Tim Gunn, a revered gay American fashion icon, continues to shock fans and the blogosphere with his admission of nearly thirty years of celibacy and his self- identification as asexual. In this essay, I make the case that Gunn embodies the aesthetic and persona of the contemporary dandy, thus supporting the idea that dandyism is indeed still alive and, further, that today's dandy has something to teach us about masculinity and the ways in which sexual categories are constructed around gender presentation and normative expectations of sexual desire and attraction.Monica Miller, a scholar in African American cultural studies, suggests that "dandies must choose the vocation, must commit to a study of the fashions that define them and an examination of the trends around which they can continually redefine themselves" (2009, 8). As former faculty and chair of the fashion design program at Parsons School of Design, author of two books on style, hit television personality of Project Runway fame, and host of his own makeover show, no other popular American figure today seems more committed to the vocation and study of fashion than Tim Gunn. Through this demonstrated commitment, along with his "redeployment of clothing, gesture, and wit," to confuse constructions and assumptions of gender and sexuality (Miller 2009, 5), I read Tim Gunn as the quintessential contemporary "pop" dandy figure. Both in his television persona and his writings, Gunn performs a style of the new millennial dandy: he is finely dressed, astute, well mannered, proper, public, and quite fashionable. He revives the asexual history of the dandy through his own coming out as "sort of asexual" and cataloging of twenty-nine years of celibacy, all while maintaining his gay identity. To be clear, I am not interested in presenting Gunn as a figurehead of any type of movement, nor am I concerned with an analysis of his person. …
The landscape of trauma is scattered with ghosts. Wolves hunkering in the shadows. Memory’s spect... more The landscape of trauma is scattered with ghosts. Wolves hunkering in the shadows. Memory’s spectral persistence and evasion. Leaky bodies and selves gathered up in the storm of pain. Genders imposed and genders made. History’s cruel excisions, scars, the spillage of wounds. A landscape in which we are nevertheless called to build home. Here, “storytelling is a kind of suturing.”
Combining memoir, lyric essay, and cultural criticism, KJ Cerankowski’s Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life. Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time.
Transgender philanthropist Reed Erickson has gained the renewed attention of trans historians as ... more Transgender philanthropist Reed Erickson has gained the renewed attention of trans historians as more of his papers become available in multiple archives. While other scholars set out to piece together the life story of this leopard-owning, four-times married, fugitive multi-millionaire who invested substantial money and energy into improving gender-affirming healthcare, I take a different approach to the Erickson archive. Rooted in affect studies, archive studies, and trans/queer theories, this essay plays with fabrication and fabulation to produce not a straightforward history, but rather, an embodied encounter with the material afterlife held within the archive. Pivoting around an engagement with the Erickson family bible, this essay embarks on a trans-temporal figuring of matter and body in order to remember the fractured ghosts of (trans)history's past, present, and future hauntings.
This essay examines how capitalism and colonialism collude to produce a high value on the “end” o... more This essay examines how capitalism and colonialism collude to produce a high value on the “end” of the erotic—the orgasm—and rather proposes an end to the hierarchical valuing of orgasmic pleasure. Through an analysis of film, literature, and the pleasures in their consumption, this essay makes the case for asexual pleasures that resist the telos of erotic settler time, moving into a queer, sovereign erotic temporality. In other words, how might we think differently about intimacies and reimagine the durations of pleasure when we interrogate the colonial construction of the normative sexual subject and imperatives toward sexual coupling? By exploring the possibilities of various nonsexual pleasures, we can question how and which bodies are constructed as healthy, desirable, and desiring subjects according to normative constructions of race, ability, age, and orgasmic potential, while also creating different modes of relationality and intimacy with the self and others.
The archive consists of memories, documents, and images waiting to be curated into a story. In th... more The archive consists of memories, documents, and images waiting to be curated into a story. In this article, the author collates archival object encounters into a transgender 'ghost story' that marks the impossibility of a straightforward history of the subject, relying instead on embodied encounters with archive objects, or the remnants (ghostly and tangible) of archival subjects. Following the materials of Charley Parkhurst and Reed Erickson, the author makes connections where none previously existed, asking: How do we put life back into the materials of the dead? What do the traces and memories of these ghosts offer the living? What do archive objects activate in the eyes that see them, the ears that listen, and the hearts that race or slow with each haptic encounter? Following these questions, this article pieces together a different kind of narrative history and transition story through the unexpected encounters with the archive and its ghosts.
It really is Fashion that has killed dandyism.- Roland Barthes, The Language of FashionIf at firs... more It really is Fashion that has killed dandyism.- Roland Barthes, The Language of FashionIf at first you don t succeed, failure may beyour style- Quentin Crisp, Sunday Correspondent MagazineDandyism is not dead. Contrary to Roland Barthes's assertion, quoted above, that fashion killed dandyism, dandyism lives on as it shape-shifts over time and remakes itself in different historical contexts. Nearly impossible to define, dandyism is an aesthetic and life philosophy; it is a lifestyle, and a queer one at that. In Dandyism, or The Anatomy of Dandyism, as it is sometimes translated, novelist and critic Jules Barbey D Aurevilly reminds us that dandyism goes beyond a manner of dress and continually elides definition: "Dandyism is almost as difficult a thing to describe as it is to define. Those who see things only from a narrow point of view have imagined it to be especially the art of dress, a bold and felicitous dictatorship in the matter of clothes and exterior elegance. That it most certainly is, but much more besides. Dandyism is a complete theory of life and its material is not its only side. It is a way of existing, made up entirely of shades" (D'Aurevilly 1988, 31). In its various shades of instantiation, dandyism may even be perceived as a queer style, one that resists definition, blurs boundaries, and specifically plays with gender and its associations with sexuality. While many scholars have argued that queer expressions of gender do not necessarily correlate with homosexual desire, today, the sexuality of genderqueer dandies is often speculated on and interpreted as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In some cases, scholars of dandyism have reminded us that despite his effeminacy, the dandy male is indeed heterosexual. What is often missing from these readings is the possibility of the dandy as celibate or asexual.1Although there is a historical association between the male dandy and a disinterest in sex, today's oft-hypersexualized conception of queerness tends to eclipse that possibility when we look at the dandy of the contemporary moment. For example, Tim Gunn, a revered gay American fashion icon, continues to shock fans and the blogosphere with his admission of nearly thirty years of celibacy and his self- identification as asexual. In this essay, I make the case that Gunn embodies the aesthetic and persona of the contemporary dandy, thus supporting the idea that dandyism is indeed still alive and, further, that today's dandy has something to teach us about masculinity and the ways in which sexual categories are constructed around gender presentation and normative expectations of sexual desire and attraction.Monica Miller, a scholar in African American cultural studies, suggests that "dandies must choose the vocation, must commit to a study of the fashions that define them and an examination of the trends around which they can continually redefine themselves" (2009, 8). As former faculty and chair of the fashion design program at Parsons School of Design, author of two books on style, hit television personality of Project Runway fame, and host of his own makeover show, no other popular American figure today seems more committed to the vocation and study of fashion than Tim Gunn. Through this demonstrated commitment, along with his "redeployment of clothing, gesture, and wit," to confuse constructions and assumptions of gender and sexuality (Miller 2009, 5), I read Tim Gunn as the quintessential contemporary "pop" dandy figure. Both in his television persona and his writings, Gunn performs a style of the new millennial dandy: he is finely dressed, astute, well mannered, proper, public, and quite fashionable. He revives the asexual history of the dandy through his own coming out as "sort of asexual" and cataloging of twenty-nine years of celibacy, all while maintaining his gay identity. To be clear, I am not interested in presenting Gunn as a figurehead of any type of movement, nor am I concerned with an analysis of his person. …
Uploads
Books by KJ Cerankowski
Combining memoir, lyric essay, and cultural criticism, KJ Cerankowski’s Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life. Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time.
Papers by KJ Cerankowski
Combining memoir, lyric essay, and cultural criticism, KJ Cerankowski’s Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life. Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time.