Worlds apart
Trish Salah
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Kill the Robot, by Maggie MacDonald (McGilligan Books)
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Two Valentine's releases resurrect feminist critiques of future world orders
The woman who protests the patriarchal order of things has long been figured as both delusional and preternaturally insightful. Just think of Cassandra, with her apocalyptic visions of the fall of Troy, doomed to be disbelieved until it was far too late. The classic feminist example was told by Marge Piercy in her 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time, the tale of Consuela Ramos, a woman committed to Bellevue because she believes herself to be time-travelling between her life on the ward and two competing futures, a pastoral eco-feminist utopia and a corporate techno-patriarchy. Piercy discloses and contests the naturalized and seemingly inevitable social violence of this world as Consuela comes to realize that she (and we) play a decisive role in determining which of these futures may come to pass.
There are powerful resonances with Piercy's seminal work in two recent publications from McGilligan Books, Debra Anderson's Code White and Maggie MacDonald's Kill the Robot.
Kill the Robot narrates an alternate history of a world not quite our own, in which the Reagan assassination was followed by the rapid erosion of the nation-state and the global ascendancy of corporate giant ESoft. In MacDonald's techno-capitalist dystopia, leftist metaphors are literalized and made hyperbolic. Computerized checkpoints limit people's mobility based on the credit they possess. The police, and other state institutions, directly serve the corporations. MacDonald's heroine, Moore White,
contracts a virus from her boyfriend - is it consumerism? capitalist alienation? heterosexuality? - which she fears is changing them... into robots: "a robot is not a playful mechanical kitten.... The robot is a slave to a program, the program is a token to token relay system. Clink-clink. The sound of money. Here are your orders."  |
| Code White, by Debra Anderson (McGilligan Books) |
If all this sounds a little heavy-handed, it is. Nonetheless, it works, and works well, partly because MacDonald's prose is as speedy and sharp as her critique, partly because MacDonald's nonlinear narrative shuttles us unpredictably and with urgency between Moore's nightmarish present, just a few metaphors or years ahead of ours, and an all too familiar past. (Moore is morbidly nostalgic for the simpler times of cold wars between superpowers rather than corporations. If one world has already ended, MacDonald's protagonist is trying to live through the ongoing apocalypse of the next.)Debra Anderson's Code White holds a different mirror up to what counts as reality. Chronicling the experiences of a femme dyke on a Toronto psych ward, Code White juxtaposes genderqueer subcultural style, mores and politics with the heteronormative common sense of institutionalized life. Like Piercy's Consuela, Anderson's Alyx is confronted with the "crazy" character of her own values and desires within the disciplinary space of the mental hospital, and of the social world it seeks to replicate in those consigned to its care. Alyx's struggle, like Consuela's, is as much with the literally mind-numbing violence and routine of life on the ward as with the question of her own judgment. On the ward it becomes difficult to know whether it is revolutionary or just nuts to try to deconstruct gender hierarchies by wearing a phallus under one's pyjamas.
With prose that is alternately soaring and as gritty and mundane as the subject matter, Anderson evokes the tension and tedium of trying to maintain impossible but gorgeous desires while regaining the strength and grounding to realize them. As much a novel of trauma and recovery as a critique of the conditions we create for those in recovery, Code White poses important questions about the ongoing pathologization of queerness in psychiatric practice and about how we know what wellness, integrity and sanity are in the first place.
Check out Debra Anderson and Maggie MacDonald reading from their new books (along with fellow McGilligan authors Zoe Whittall and Klyde Broox) at the McGilligan Showcase for the Festival Voix d'Amériques, 5-7 p.m. on Feb. 14 at the Casa del Popolo, as well as after 9 p.m. at the anti-Valentine GrrrL RIOT at Pharmacie Esperanza
