Like a Boy but Not a Boy. Andrea Bennett
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up she didn’t like to leave her apartment. I learned she had cancer when my cousin posted about it on Facebook. My cousin wrote first that she was upset to have unexpectedly learned of her aunt’s illness, and then, two days later, that “every disease is mental first,” and “everything is mind over matter,” and “[e]verything is about vibration.” I wondered at what stage my cousin thought that my great-aunt should have vibrated herself out of illness. I thought a series of angrier things.
If you lined up my cousin and me, my dad, my grandmother, my great-aunt, you would clearly see we were all related. Variations on a theme. If my cousin can assign vibrational blame to my great-aunt’s illnesses, maybe that helps her to not see herself in them. When my great-aunt was diagnosed with dementia, a disease my great-grandmother had as well, I thought, Well, my bipolar disorder isn’t as bad as hers. I thought, I do the crossword. I did not build my rationalizations a spiritual structure and I did not invite them to stay, but I thought them and I felt them.
Like my initial desire to distance myself from my great-aunt’s illnesses, I don’t feel proud of the compromises I’ve made to try to be, and to appear to be, one of the good sick. But I’m sure if I was faced with the same choices at the same points in my life, I’d make the same decisions over again. I do worry about the way that illnesses like bipolar disorder are rendered visible, via personal narrative and through productivity statistics. I worry that we understand illness and wellness as something that we hold and foster as individuals, and that this masks the extent to which social conditions like racism, sexism, homophobia, overwork, classism, and eviscerated social safety nets trigger and exacerbate them. This is the dark side of gleaning what we can from the narratives of the good sick in order to give better “tools” to the bad sick, to make them “higher-functioning”—is the idea to improve a person’s quality of life, or to render them a better worker? It’s also why I tap out, each year, of participating in campaigns like Bell’s #LetsTalk: they place the onus on the unwell to share their stories for nickels and dimes while raising brand recognition. Understandably, people share what is safe for them to share; I doubt Bell will chip in on my mortgage if I no longer appear quite as employable because I regularly saw an imaginary owl for a steady period in my early twenties. The result is a sanitized portrayal of illness that does little to shorten psychiatric wait times for people, like me, who rely on provincial health care to seek mental health treatment.
Sometimes, I dream about how wealthy I would need to be to take a break from feeling the fear that propels me to remain stable. I don’t dream about not being bipolar, because I don’t know where my self ends and where the illness begins, and if there is even really a difference. I don’t even know what I would dream to render the divisions between good sick and bad sick unnecessary, to make it so that we all get to remain people, without reducing some of us to possibility models—or, worse, sacrificing us to quarantine and cautionary tale.
deneige
DENEIGE WAS BORN IN 1990. She’s twenty-nine and uses the term “queer,” mostly. She also likes “dyke” a lot, so she uses that too. Deneige grew up in Coaldale and Chin, Alberta. She went to school in Lethbridge because that’s where the International Baccalaureate program was. Coaldale had maybe a population of 5,000 when Deneige lived there, and Chin had about 60 people. She moved to Chin when she was about ten, just for a couple years. Her mother’s second husband had a house there. She and her mother moved back to Coaldale when they split up.
Coaldale is very religious. It’s a bit of a Bible belt, with a high German Mennonite population. In the surrounding communities, there are quite a few folks who are Mormon as well. Coaldale has more than a dozen churches, which is a lot for 5,000 people. There were two elementary schools when Deneige was growing up. One school was mostly farm kids, and the other was mostly town kids. Deneige went to the one with the farm kids. The elementary school that she went to had Wednesday afternoon Bible studies with the local Mennonites, even though it was a public school. Her mom was a hairdresser. Her stepfather worked in construction. She hasn’t spoken with her father since she was twelve, so she’s not sure about him. Last she heard, he was running a cult out of his basement.
Deneige was raised non-denominationally, because her mother was raised Jehovah’s Witness, but her father was Mormon, and her father’s family was all Catholic French Canadian. Deneige isn’t a believer. But she had an acute fear of going to hell. It definitely shaped her. But she’s pretty staunchly atheist now.
Deneige felt very strongly that she didn’t belong in her hometown. Deneige’s mother was concerned about her and her sister’s potential drug use, given that they were in a small community with not a lot to do. So they cleaned the dance studio in exchange for ballet and dance classes, and Deneige trained in ballet for fourteen years. Deneige has never really been a small person, which was fine at her studio, but she’d go to dance competitions and the adjudicators would say things like, “No ballet dancer should be over ninety pounds.” She didn’t have many friends within her dance studio communities. She didn’t have a lot of friends in school, either. She was very anxious and depressed for a lot of her life. When she was in grade seven, she stopped talking to people, period. She read instead. She did her school work, went to dance class, and read a novel a day.
Growing up, Deneige had no clue she was queer. She knew one couple who were gay men. They’ve always been out, but it’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation. They didn’t really display a lot of public affection. She didn’t even realize that it was a possibility for women. Deneige came out to her family when was twenty-one or twenty-two. A lot of people in high school told her she was a lesbian, or called her a lesbian. But it wasn’t until she moved to Vancouver that she had the space to figure life out.
Queer theorist Didier Eribon wrote an entire book on insult as the making of the gay self, and how we get penned in by language that precedes us. Deneige teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and one of the essays she teaches is on heterosexual interpellation, which is an idea that comes from Louis Althusser. Althusser’s philosophy basically says that nobody is an individual or a free subject; we are all subject to ideology, and informed and made by what preceded us, as well as our cultural surroundings. Eribon takes up his ideas and extends them. For Eribon, the space of heterosexual interpellation shows that we are formed as queer subjects potentially before we even know that we are. We’re named before we name ourselves, in many ways, but this naming is often meant to be derogatory, meant as an insult. There’s a way in which one comes to know and understand oneself as queer through this language—but then Eribon also talks about the complexity of what it means to have been a child who has used this language against others, and what it means to come to realize that you inhabit that which is “ugly.” Deneige finds this really helpful. It’s been instrumental in terms of thinking about how certain ideologies function in our culture right now, and how they might be open to different modes of change.
Deneige was eighteen when she left Alberta. She graduated high school and then two months later, she was living in Vancouver. In Lethbridge, she had a great art teacher who encouraged her to apply to art school, and she ended up at Emily Carr. She was very out in Vancouver before she was out to her family. She was chairing the queer caucus of her student union at provincial meetings, and her family had no clue. Her friend almost drunkenly outed her to her sister once.
Living in Vancouver, getting to meet queer folks of all sorts of ages and experiences, and starting to understand a more embodied history, has felt wonderful to Deneige. She’s met people who were institutionalized when they were young, and has learned of the different ways they define family now. It would feel too simplistic to say that there are massive differences between different generations of queer people. We’ve actually lost some of the intergenerational connections that we used to have, in ways that can be quite detrimental in terms of not having and maintaining our own histories. If one’s life is illegal, community comes from specific underground spaces where everybody congregates. That space of younger folks getting to learn from their elders doesn’t exist in the same way. Queer people in Canada have done a fantastic amount of activism to be recognized as legal subjects under Canadian law. We’re more accepted into the culture as it exists; our cultures have pressed up against its norms to make a bit of space for us. Many things have been made