This Incurable Rage : An AutoEcology

If identities are incurable, so then is our rage.  Thirty-three years after Robert Pollard wrote “I am a Scientist” for his band Guided by Voices, I’m still struck by the lyrics and their impact on me. “i am a scientist - i seek to understand me / all of my impurities and evils yet unknown / i am a journalist - i write to you to show you / i am an incurable and nothing else behaves like me” are the opening phrases to a song that goes on to claim that the writer is also lost, a pharmacist, and someone who is either on the edge of creative self-harm, or struggles with an addiction (“I shoot myself with rock and roll”).  

This song about self-discovery at its peaks and in its shadows.  I proudly claim the identity of an incurable. And in my shadows, as I explore the reality of what has been created around me, and learn how each trick of the fascist light is used to manipulate, I roll towards allowing myself the full spectrum of human emotions, including rage.

The paradox is that despite rhetoric, racism, and colonialism, I know that everyone is sacred.  Identity is inherently incurable, because it’s not a disease.  At every intersection of marginalization, there aren’t just words, diagnoses, or labels that describe our identities; there is more: our bodies, minds and spirits.  Over four hundred years of a fascist empire, one simple truth has remained: no matter which identities those in power call sick, none of them have been curable.  

Dehumanized, stigmatized, and pathologized, we bear a record of the ways we have resisted their myth.  Even in their zealous nature, the manual-writers have always had to eventually admit that these marginalizations aren’t shortcomings of anything but society’s need for control and conformity. Time and time again we have reclaimed our racial, gender, sexual, disability, neurodivergence, and even class identities from this idea that they must have a fix.

The racialized eugenics of the American class system have never ceased, and what else does this gnawing fire of genocide lay claim to?  It is responsible for the deaths of innumerable queer ancestors, both with the unchecked HIV crisis and the suicide risk of trans and non-binary children. What changes if our goal is not to gain power within the systems that have harmed us?  What paradigm shifts if we place less emphasis on goals and more emphasis on the inherent value of human existence and how we connect with things around us?  What narrative begins to grow in its place?

For me, the answer lies on the land on which we live and work.  A garden plot left untended will return itself to nature.  Those things that are labeled weeds, like thistle and dandelion, give us traditional medicine.  What words could we collect or reject as bodybrains who begin to revel in our own sacred medicine?  We reclaim words like queer, trans, crip, and mad.  We can delight in the new words that emerge like neurokin or genderexpansive.  We can explore the dynamics we give one another as offerings of the land as we return its sovereignty.  We owe to it our breath, and more.

The potential voting bloc of all marginalized voters, accounting for intersectional identities, equals 46 million, roughly 32 percent of the adults eligible to vote in the US.  Restoring felony voting rights could add an additional 4 million people to the voting pool.  Voter suppression tactics still severely limit the ability of all these people to be counted.  This means that voting cannot be the only answer to systems that are constantly re-inventing ways to stifle change.

Rooted in joy, resistance, and interdependence, we can position ourselves away from the idea that we are blight.  We can understand what oppressive systems have taken from us, and we can reject them.  Rejecting the idea that we need to be fixed or cured of our identities, we can tell ourselves new stories. 

Inherent in this process, I find the rage that Alice Wong championed.  As one of the most visible members of Sins Invalid, the group that created the 10 principles of Disability Justice, she often spoke about rage as a tool for change.  It is also a feeling that we have been taught to associate negatively with destructive or violent action.  Alice Wong often asked us: What if, enraged, we find our power to shift these narratives together? My hope is that we champion our identities as the Incurable, and invite everyone else to do the same.