Defensa

Figure 7: Pissing on Pity. Photo: Cat O’Neil (Image description: A queen-sized quilt suspended from metal shelves.

The quilt has yellow natural dye splattered across the front with the words “fuck me” in velvet, appliquéd slightly off centre. On the top left corner and the bottom right corner are small black bee silhouettes cut out of felt and sewn onto the quilt top.)

Weeping to myself I lament aloud, “fuuuuuuuuuck meee.”

With a sultry and inviting whisper I plea for you to “fuck me.”

Through a quick and forceful exhalation I cry out in anguish: “FUCK! ME!”

Playfully yet sternly I demand that you “fuck me!”

Throughout my adult life, the bed has been a place of refuge. A site of violence. A dank, piss-soaked tangled mess of shame. A deeply passionate site of desire. The bed has been a place of hopeless isolation as well as the intimately familiar terrain of lovers. While positioned on top of, underneath, and tangled in between the sheets, I have experienced pain as trauma, pain as pleasure, pleasure as pleasure, and pleasure as violence.

Through Pissing on Pity, I explore the ways in which we make sense of our experiences of pleasure and pain, and how they are blurred and complicated in relation to our histories of violence. While reflecting on my own sexual encounters and sexuality and how these have been mediated through the act of being both unknowingly drugged in social settings and

professionally medicated, I open up the current conversations regarding rape and consent by placing it in dialogue with the often violent and physically invasive experiences of being psychiatrized.

5.4.1 How to Get Through an Artist Talk About Pissing the Bed as an Adult [BREATH]

My name is Jenna Reid and I want to start this presentation with a content warning: I will be talking explicitly about sexual violence and institutional violence. Please take care of yourself in the way you need: get up and leave if you need, find a friend to process your feelings, be kind to yourself if this causes you distress.

Have you ever woken up in your bed, feeling slightly damp, only to realize that you’re lying in a puddle of your own piss? Does your answer change if I ask you that question again but preface it with the condition that your age is anywhere from 18 years old (yes years, not months) to present day? I have. And yet I’m actually not going to spend any more time describing in

detail those deeply personal moments where I have found myself lying in a bed uttering the phrase: “fuck me,” “fuck me,” “fuck me”

[BREATH]

Instead I’m going to talk a little bit about the conceptual aspects of my piece Pissing on Pity as well as the ways in which my process informs my creative practice. Drawing on the

phrase “piss on pity,” the origins of which stem from disability rights movements’ organizing, this piece positions the intersections of madness, gender, and sexuality as tied to experiences of structural and institutional violence. This moves us out of the individualized narratives of madness and sexual violence that see the process of recovery as inspirational and in which the medical model and psychiatric institutions do no harm. It requires that we move away from the commodification of individual recovery stories and into more complicated discussions that call on systemic violence. It also requires that we consider more complicated notions of community – a repurposing based on the critiques that mad queer experiences can contribute to these

conceptualizations of why and how we come together and activate.

[BREATH]

As a mad queer woman currently in a hetero-passing relationship, I am constantly coming out. Except I’m not. My own past histories of rape and sexual violence are deeply tied to the violence I have experienced in relation to the psychiatric institution and inform the way I relate to my own sexuality and relate my sexuality to those around me.

[BREATH]

Since the age of seventeen, consent, sex, and the bedroom, for me, have been laced with drugs – those given to me knowingly and unknowingly by strangers, experts, professionals, often with the end goal of making me a quieter, more compliant, less present version of myself.

[BREATH]

When we talk about sex, sexuality, consent, and rape culture without a consideration of the institutions that play significant roles in promoting, perpetrating, supporting, and justifying the violence that we experience, the conversations remain superficial, are rarely constructive, and isolate our experiences as being both relational and yet simultaneously highly individualized.

[BREATH]

And yet the violence I’ve experienced through forced penetration and unwanted, non-consenting sexual intercourse and touching cannot be separated from the time my psychiatrist told me that wetting the bed was a reasonable medication side effect to deal with as he perceived me to be acting “more normal,” the countless times my psychiatrist described the repeated sexually based attacks as delusions, or the time I recounted being raped to a psychiatrist only to have the experience explained by him as what was wrong with me; the result of my symptoms of being hypersexual.

[BREATH]

So while I live through my own experiences of trauma and violence in relation to my madness, my sexuality, and my gender on a daily basis I actually don’t talk about them very often. Not because I’m full of shame or embarrassment or discomfort, but because I think to highlight my individual experiences and myself can risk missing the point. When sharing intimate details of the violence and trauma I have experienced, I am constantly positioned as the inspiration, fitting into the concept that disability activists call inspiration porn – just getting up and out of bed and on with life is, apparently, remarkable. Even more so, my personal story gets mined by others – professionals, institutions, and the general public – in order to position me as the “model patient” – the appropriation of my story gets used by those in power to further their

goals: “take drugs, see professionals, and you can have a normal life.” This positioning of me as a form of patient porn dismisses the great deal of violence and trauma I experienced just by nature of being a patient.

[BREATH]

In my creative practice I work primarily with dyestuffs that come from the natural world around me. In order to do this ethically I have to be considerate of the larger environment and ecologies, being aware that my imprint on the world around me is not a one-way relationship. I have to be thoughtful about the larger systems that exist and how my views of plant life as a resource for dye material need to be seen through a lens that considers more than just my own needs and experiences.

[BREATH]

In this way my process weaves into my aesthetic and informs the development of my conceptual ideas. Through my piece Pissing on Pity, you will see the juxtaposition of the mark making that comes as a result of painting with nature-based dyes alongside the imagery of the bee. This calls upon both the interdependent as well as individual aspects of our lives, our communities, and the complicated ways in which they form and function. It brings together and separates the spaces we hold to be both deeply personal and collectively political.