A review of Emji Saint Spero’s disgust by Derek Denckla, curator of Praxinoscope and host of Inspiration Practice

Brainard recounts remembrances through a queer lens — Saint Spero narrates occurrences in a queered lens. Their lens is “queered” both by their own identity and by their acceptance of the dom contract that creates terms and conditions that alter the writer’s relationship to their body, its controllability/uncontrollability by a self and its visibility/invisibility by others.

I questioned an ableist entitlement about the text that made me uncomfortable with the premise and the text. The narrator is an able-bodied person who elects voluntary to disable themselves. Was this the equivalent of a sort of “ableist blackface”? This becomes confronted but unresolved during the narrator’s encounter with a disabled friend, Eno, who suffers involuntarily from the same bodily restrictions as the narrator imposes on themselves voluntarily. Was this whole writing an exercise in confronting the differently-abled other, like men forced to wear a 30-pound prosthetic pregnant bump to nurture some degree of sympathy for women carrying babies?

Or, was this premise an attempt by the narrator to externalize (and perhaps exorcise) their own internalized suffering caused by self-hatred, self-disgust arising from the over-absorption of social hatred and disgust towards their trans body?

The trans body is also a result of a voluntary choice reacting to an internal disgust or dysphoria about the body one was born into. Is this the metaphor of suffering for personal transformation? Why would a person elect to choose a trans status knowing it causes disgust in the eyes of so many people in this World? Is that the question the narrator wants to address among many more?

Like Brainard, St Spero narrates an amazing level of minute detail about thoughts, feelings, dialogue, actions, reactions and transactions. As a result the text performs a bit of artistic magic, slowing down the speech from which it was transcribed and the thoughts that underlied that speech.

I was disturbed, confused, intrigued, reminded of a line recently read from Saeed Jones “Do you think you need your pain in order to write?”