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Disabled Drone: Trans-Feminist Noisecraft

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In December 2018, Steff Juniper submitted their major research paper for their master’s in Critical Disability Studies at York University, entitled Trans-feminist Witchcraft: A Psychiatric Survivor Narrative, an arts-based autoethnography on witchcraft as radical healing and the politics of psychiatric survival and disability justice. It merged theories of disability, mad, queer, and transgender studies, to ground discussions on the embodiment theories of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 2008; Ahmed 2006) and enactive cognition. Steff submitted a demo cassette tape of their drone attached to the paper, and through including creative writing, personal narrative, poetry, prose, and short story, the paper aimed to convey the emotional non-linearity of experiencing the body and language as a limited social convention to express emotion.

Steff’s drone cassette tape sits in the office at York University’s Critical Disability Studies Department for those interested in what an arts-based approach to disability studies research may look, feel, or sound like. They will be drawing on the work in their master’s thesis in the formation of their submission to elucidate how the creation of drone is a process of communication and sublimation as a neurodivergent, mad, and disabled artist. Additionally, they will explore how their identity politic grew as being foundational from the experience of ‘being a metalhead’. Their submission encompasses a phenomenological approach to their experience as a trans and disabled noise artist. Primarily, they will explore how they have used making loud noise and strong-felt vibrations as a spiritual experience and activist tool to heal themselves and empower others to use their creativity to process feelings of alienation.

Content Warnings: Gender Dysphoria, Gender-based Violence, Psychiatric Oppression, Transphobia, Suicide and Suicidal Ideation

The carnelian caught my eye, round, surreptitiously plump like a blood python. I picked it up and felt the weight in my hands, triangularly spherical, smooth points of three. It asks, how to acknowledge the weight of being alive, so that when the lightness of lightning strikes, I can notice.1

Hardback ISBN: 9781789389456
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References

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References

  1. Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, London: Duke University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Alcoff, L. and Potter E. (1993), Feminist Epistemologies, London: Routledge.64
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Banu, L. S. (2014), ‘Black noise: Design lessons from roasted green chiles, udon noodles, and pound cake’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 28:1, pp. 17–30.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Bhamra, Kuljit (2017), ‘Musical terms: What is a drone? Demystifying Indian music # 7’, Keda Music Ltd, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AarJ9a3zVeU.
  5. Bhasker, R. (2009), Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London and New York: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Bobkin, Matt (Sunn O) (2016), ‘Hearn Generating Station’, Toronto, ON, 10 June, https://exclaim.ca/music/article/sunn_o_hearn_generating_station_toronto_on_june_10.
  7. Booth, M. (2015), ‘Foreword’, in C. Gilchrist (ed.), Alchemy: The Great Work, San Francisco: Weiser Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Brown, A. M. (2017), Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, California and Edinburgh: AK Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Cárdenas, M. (2011), ‘Becoming transreal’, in Z. Bias and W. Schirmacher (eds), The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, New York: Atropos Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Charlton, J. I. (1998), Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment, University of California Press, http://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520207950.001.0001
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Chen, M. Y. (2012), Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Perverse Modernities Series, Durham: Duke University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Costa, Lucy (2014), ‘Mad studies – What it is and why you should care?’ 15 October, https://madstudies2014.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/mad-studies-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-care-2/.
  13. de Martino, E. (2015), Magic: A Theory from the South, Chicago: Hau Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Ellison, G. T. H. and De Wet, T. (2018), ‘Biological determinism’, in W. Trevathan (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Biological Anthropology, New York: John Wiley & Sons.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Federici, S. (2014), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Gilchrist, C . (1984), Alchemy – The Great Work, New York: Aquarian Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Goldberg, D. T. (2002), The Racial State, New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Greene, E. M. (2019), ‘The mental health industrial complex: A study in three cases’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 63:1, pp. 81–102.
     [Google Scholar]
  19. Hacking, I. (1982), ‘Experimentation and scientific realism’, Philosophical Topics, 13:1, pp. 71–87.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Haraway, D. (1988), ‘Situated Knowledges’, Feminist Studies, 14:3, pp. 575–600.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Heidegger, M. (1996), Being and Time (trans. J. Stambaugh), Albany: State University of New York Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Hohler, T. P. (1982), ‘The limits of language and the threshold of speech: Saussure and Merleau-Ponty’, Philosophy Today, 26:4, pp. 287–99.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Hormone’s Echo (2014), On Labyrinth Constellation, recorded by Artificial Brain, New York: The Thousand Caves.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Kafer, A. (2013), Feminist, Queer, Crip, Indiana: Indiana University Press.65
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Konnelly, L. (2021), ‘Both, and: Transmedicalism and resistance in non-binary narratives of gender-affirming care’, Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 43:1, n.pag.
     [Google Scholar]
  26. Kors, A. C. , Peters, E. (1973) Witchcraft in Europe 1100–1700: A Documentary History, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Kourany, Janet A. (2010), Philosophy of Science after Feminism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  28. Lafrancois, B. , Menzies, R. , and Reaume, G. (2013), Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Luft, S. and Overgaard S. (2013), The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Mbembé, J.-A. and Meintjes, L. (2003), ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1, pp. 11–40.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Mendolia, S. J. (2018), ‘Trans-feminist witchcraft: A psychiatric survivor narrative’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, York: University of York.
  33. Mendolia, S. , Costa L. and Chambers J. (2017), Safewards: Including Service User Voices, Toronto: The Empowerment Council: A Voice for the Clients of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, https://empowermentcouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Safewards-Report-Final-online.pdf.
  34. Mingus, M. (2015), Medical Industrial Complex Visual, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/medical-industrial-complex-visual/.
  35. Reaume, G. (2000), Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1870–1940, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  36. Regardie, I. (1938), The Philosopher’s Stone: A Modern Comparative Approach to Alchemy from the Psychological and Magical Points of View, Los Angeles: New Falcon Publications.
     [Google Scholar]
  37. Stryker, S. (1994), ‘My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: Performing transgender rage’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1, pp. 237–54.
     [Google Scholar]
  38. Thompson, E. (2015), Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy, New York: Colombia University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Trans Student Educational Resources (n.d.), ‘Definitions’, http://www.transstudent.org/definitions/.
  40. Wallace, L. (2017), ‘Trans and intersex witches are casting out the gender binary’, https://www.them.us/story/trans-and-intersex-witches.

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