FAST FEMINISM + For Shannon Bell

Julie Clarke ~ Hawthorn. Photo: David John Powell

This is for Shannon. I thought you might enjoy seeing the only photograph I have of me playing with androgyny. I'm wearing a pin-stripe man's suit-coat and my extremely long hair is pinned up inside my husband's Stetson. The photo was taken in the mid nineteen-eighties. I don't know that I could have been a Drag King ~ I was probably not Butch enough, but, I was certainly feminist! Like you say in your book, I have never been concerned ...with fighting men, but rather with fighting injustices (p.17).

I really enjoyed that very short section~pages 150-152 in your book in which you describe your spiritual experience of being at one with Horsey, a dog who had died after eating a bone that he could not digest. The photograph of you, naked and meditating in the garden (taken by Ionat Zurr) reveals a different side of you. You look older, less glamorous, calmer than you do in the highly charged performance photos. The old rag and ruin, which stares at us in some of the other photos is displaced here in the the raw, black-ink 551 tattoo clearly visible on your shaved mons venus ~ it is that which gapes and draws us into Bataille's Madam Edwarda ~ who, for all purposes ...is God (p.152), for it is here that you enter into that sacred space, a dark and silent abyss in which we can no longer say 'I'.

I have two chapters to read before I get to the postscript about the death of your mother, which I have already read (some 'othering' occured for me here, since I was absent when my own mother died). I am reminded of Bataille's words: And since, in death, being is taken away from us at the same time it is given us, we must seek for it in the feeling of dying, in those unbearable moments when it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us during these interludes, exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess, when the fullness of horror and that of joy coincide. (Bataille, 1989, p.141)