La chaise, la silla, la sedia, a cadeira, & pessoa

a spontaneous performative response to gendered nouns and the thread of memory.

This morning, I read an article in the Guardian about the challenges of re-gendering language across Europe. I thought of my body; I looked at a chair and thought, “That is a woman.” Then, “I must go find work clothes and a chair I can carry.”

I dressed for the rain and went into town to find Carhart. That which in my previous American incarnation is as closely associated with cows, pig feed, sharp barbed wire, pancake makeup, and rodeo queens as it is with the smell of unloading Christmas trees, the spiny weight on my bony collarbone, the sap soaking not entirely through the heavy too-big borrowed bibs. The easy way the boys loped and jumped up into the big rig, the rightness of the job: the love of the labor. Getting lost in being another strong body, lifting, shifting. Alissa had lent me her Carhart for that job. $300 for ten hours in borrowed coveralls unloading trees for empty third homes in the glittering Rocky Mountain Ski town I called home. But no Carhart of my own. It was too expensive, even from a feed store. And I had to save for ski gear. I had no right to Carhart yet. It has to be a necessity or its not real Carhart.

My emotional saturation with the brand in all it’s guises - his rough hand on my car door as he blocked my way home with his truck and asked why I wasn’t more friendly -pulled on me to find it immediately before anything more could happen this morning.

I was to go to work, I needed work clothes. The same clothes they all wore, the boys who smelled like grease and diesel, and my longing, longing, longing. But not for them. For what they had. The right to wear it without question or second look. The knowledge that they’d worn that stiff, resistant fabric in themselves, like a new baseball glove, bound with a rubber band and pressed under the pillow, a new ball, purpose-bought, nestled in its oiled pocket night after night. Yes, they’d earned it - but they deserved it even before they earned it in a way I never could.

They arrived pre-loaded with confidence, those free-heeled skiers in Montana and the trad guys banging out their own pitons on the valley floor, the way they wiped their knuckles with their rags, the way a hammer loop was never used, and yet never appeared superfluous. The comprehensive, thick comfort of the way they filled their clothes. 

There was Carhart worn by liars and lovers, by rich men who bought land and drove old trucks, who never patched a double-knee, didn’t even know it was a thing, and butter soft Carhart, handed down along with things that weren’t as soft, as tough, as loving, as forgiving. 

“That is a woman,” I thought as I walked by la biblioteca, around la esquina, and found la ropa in la tienda de skate. As I pulled on the work pants, thick and crisp and practical, priced for the liar, not the lover, for a place I’d long left behind, I thought of this sliding on as I lifted my head and took in my newly shorn reflection, still shocking in every mirrored revelation to me, no, I thought of this sliding on not as a becoming, but first as an unbecoming. The act of pulling on an act of revelation rather than covering. Why not. Often, as a woman, the act of revelation had been my most effective cloak. 

The skate shop where I purchased this aspirational costume, “Yes, it has to be Carhart, thank you,” is the first place on the planet where I’ve walked in and been gendered correctly without question. Upon entering, the feeling in the body: a steeling for the bros. Would I have to fight to prove I belonged there? Would they sell to me, talk to me, treat me as an equal, dismiss me, think I didn’t count, matter, know, understand, think I was somebody’s mum? Would they think I’d never been born a Betty, didn’t know what trucks were? 

Did they think I hadn’t bled from both knees sliding in the pool, the smooth concrete wearing away new skin yet again? The best guys didn’t wear pads. The girls, therefore, regardless of skill, couldn’t. Someone in that pool had told everyone in my small town in northern California in 1986 that these were not slide marks but carpet burns. I heard it in the miasma of noise behind me in the crowded, locker-slamming hallway. There was derision in the sound; I could feel it. I burned: I didn’t get them playing at home. I was angry about this misnaming of my wound because I wore my scars with pride. This was no carpet burn. I had had a carpet burn once, sliding on our Nylyon rug on my bony hip as I rounded la esquina, I lost my balance and burned. No. This was hard and continually earned proof I was real, that I existed as a person: a skater’s injury. Not a girl’s injury. Not a baby’s injury.

When I was older, I was surprised as I arose to find stinging on my knee, a little carpet burn, and time buckled. I understood it all suddenly - known what they’d meant before when it had not been confirmed - and in that moment, I realized, with hot shame, that I was, had become or was always destined to be nothing more than who they had mistaken me for. I think only a few months had passed, an eternity in the life of my thirteen-year-old self.

But none of that happened; they were busy opening the shop, they had arrived with their own secret longings and self-discoveries, and I wasn’t there to waste their time or steal anything. I walked in as though I belonged, the micro-theatre of the self-playing out only a heartbeat before the action followed; I strode in all significance and signifiers crossed and firing in opposite directions and felt la tienda de skate wrap its arms around me, the familiar decks of the 80s on the wall high above my head, OBEY staring back at me, the clothes of the ghosts of all who made up the relative safety of the feral pack I had run to when home became unbearable lining the walls all around me.

In my quest for a chair to be a woman for me - just for the morning - I’d found my bifurcated thirteen-year-old self seeking the solace of Carharts in a skate shop. A young boy was vacuuming, and two more men shifted stock around, another was behind the counter, checking emails. I was seized with the impulse to buy a zippo with the Union Jack, showcased under the register like they’d always been. Like they had at the Varsity Theatre, where I saw the Dead Kennedies. Because I could, today, and I couldn’t then. And I’d wanted one so badly. Because Benjamin Kolowitch had had one, and he taught me to say “Fuck You,” and mean it.

The eldest, when I asked for some help to find my size, looked up and said, “Chuck, would you see if you can help them find their size? They are looking for Carhart.” It was so subtle, and so simple, and so straightforward. Some distance built with the bellows of that simple gesture: “They’d like them in black, please.” 

The young boy had put the vacuum away and stood by the till. The boy was not a boy. The boy was a small, mature person of indeterminate gender with curly hair and a bull ring piercing their nose. They had a broad chin and a sense of being utterly at home in themselves and in the shop. I had done them the disservice I’d always hoped would stop being done to me: I’d assumed.

They smiled, open. I had tried my newly cut hair differently this morning, combed back rather than touseled forward, and with an actual comb and not my fingers. Was I wearing la chaise on my head? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was el coche instead. I hadn’t meant to put on a signifier. Was I signifier suddenly enough, or had the act of pomade and comb-back been the wink, and had the world taken it on, and was I suddenly allowed just to be They, unburdened by her?

Rooted on the spot, waiting for Chuck, shooting the shit with an ex-skater of my own age, I felt like I was hurtling through space. I split my universes with the dexterity of a nuclear spider and throttled on through the inky black of the unknown, throwing sparks in all directions, there, silently in the skate shop. I had thought Annie Lenox as I caught my reflection, walking out of the house, but the truth is, I looked like my father, and I liked it. I always had.

I reached out for my receipt and my new gold-plated Carhart. It costs more than it does in the US. You don’t buy it at the feed store here. Confused by my elegant rain coat and my soft cashmere scarf, stabilized by a large, practical city umbrella and my black hoodie, I clutched my uniform to my unbound and hopefully disappeared breast behind the baggy blackness of my oversized leather jacket and smiled, Instagram handles exchanged, promises to look out for each other around town trailing in the breeze as I entered the street again.

La silla, la sedia, la chaise, a cadeira. That had taken longer than I expected, shopping on line is so much faster, but not really, it takes no interaction and then days to arrive. I hadn’t meant to focus on the uniform. I just wanted it on me, on ME on my body so I could begin to experiment.

I walked, in a desperate rush to find her: The chair. I could see her suddenly, more clearly, my woman, a cadiera, aided by the distance and the relief provided by la ropa and this simple gesture of the skate shop guy Themming me. 

Eventually, I found her, my woman, my chair. She came in pairs, as women often do. I slung her and her friend over my shoulder and tramped across the bridge to the studio, where, with the door closed and the theatrical black floor shining back at me, she transformed. 

She was not the chair I expected her to be but or wanted her to be: I had formed a plan as I carried her and her companion to my place. I would relate to this object as a woman - in the ways I had been related to. I would do this slowly, noticing what it felt like as I embodied each positionality. That was my plan.

But she had other plans. I’ve heard this about women. Once I had let her touch me, I could not get her off me, the awkward, stinking clunk of her painful and inconvenient presence. We wrestled, I succumbed, she bit me, I was surprised, hot tears came, and it was awkward to wear my woman as people strolled by, trying not to stare. 

Now we exist: these women and me. I left them facing each other in the window at RuptureXIBIT when I was done and came into the back in my work clothes to organize the installation materials, to look away, to let the bell ring on and on.

Intensification Machine is a performative, experimental installation-in-progress taking place at RuptureXIBIT now through 21 January.

Walk by and look through the window to witness spontaneous performances that occur during the build, and visit RuptureXIBIT.com for opening hours, talks, tours, performances, and texts that develop along the way.

Find Kate Howe on Instagram here: @katehowestudios