Illegible narratives: towards a queer violation of life story

Abstract

‘The Women Who Hit Me’ is an exercise in queer writing. Via strategic (mis)uses of the aesthetics of creative writing, it attempts a Genetesque seduction of its readers in order to crescendo the force of its (im)potential disturbances. A novella of sorts — imagined from within the structures, the strictures, of heteronormative language — ‘The Women Who Hit Me’ engages in a self-conscious fictional game that it nonetheless plays dead serious. The focus is Jimi: a protagonist at a queer disjunction with the language that inscribes her. ‘The Women Who Hit Me’ is the coming-of-age story of Jimi’s illegibility as the textual non-binary demarcations of erotica/pornographica, supplication/confession, fiction/thesis battle like MCs until ultimately there is no victor. — Corrosive even to that which it loves, part suicide note part love letter. As well as addressing the concepts and strategies mentioned above, the exegesis is an idiosyncratic response to the metacritical problem of in/appropriate theoretical speculation. Informed by the night vision pedagogy of Williams S. Burroughs’s My Education: A Book of Dreams and the implications of reading the unconscious as a nonsymbolic and nonfigurative social force in schizoanalysis, it aims for a critico-philosophical phantasmagoria, a post-surrealist “look-behind-the-scenes” at the thinkers and poets who claim antecedence to ‘The Women Who Hit Me.’ Like the creative work, the exegesis is a queer text, working against the fulfilment of meaning and toward the disturbance of the poetics it nevertheless desires.