#sector-v

[librarycards]

Hello! Sorry if you’ve posted about this somewhere already/if it’s redundant, but I thought your coinage of “transMad” was very cool and I’m wondering what that term means to you? I’m really happy to see other people talking about madness being intertwined w their gender/transness and looking forward to checking out your reading lists :))

thank you so much for asking about one of my favorite things to infodump about!! rather than rehash a bunch of stuff, if it's okay, I'm going to borrow a few quotes from past!me that i've published in different places // offer you some things of mine to read.

broadly, though, i use transMadness as a way to explore the identificatory, epistemological, methodological, and theoretical implications of an orientation (to use Sara Ahmed's term) toward bodymind noncompliance and self/selves-determination. this orientation refuses to delineate diagnostically between Maddened / transed experiences of the world/our many worlds, and instead takes this shared/overlapping ground as a jumping off point for solidarity and speculation - that is, something that allows us to imagine otherwise worlds / make them manifest through creativity and collaboration.

(Ha, and I claimed i wouldn't talk too much...famous autistic last words)

ANYWAY. here are some clips that might help explain more dimensions of transMadness. note that, in my dissertation-in-progress, i'm focusing on xeno/neogender and/as self-diagnostic cultures among queercrip and transMad internet users. i'm interested in the anti-psych liberatory potential of this digital community work, especially as it centers forms of knowledge and scholarship devalued within Academia Proper, especially because so much of it is made by and for disabled, Mad, queer, trans people, esp. youth. Onward to quotes!

On transMad epistemologies: citation/power/knowledge:

I’ll spend most of this piece looking not at what transMad is, but what it does. First and foremost, transMad cites. Even its name alludes to other portmanteaus: neuroqueer and queercrip being the best-known among them. Many people have offered many different (ever-“working”!) definitions of these terms; today, I offer co-coiner Nick Walker’s (2021) definition of neuroqueer: a verb and an adjective “encompass[ing] the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms” (p. 196). In terms of queercrip, I also return to its coiner, Carrie Sandahl (2003), who for whom the queercrip (as person and as method/movement) confuses the diagnostic gaze, bears sociopolitical witness, and performs glitchful[4], incongruous, confusing in(ter)ventions into possible community. At base, “queer” and “crip” appear as analogous, reclaimed slurs signifying marginalized transgression. When combined, they describe a loop, perhaps a Möbius strip: crip (ani)mates queer, queer tells-on crip. The specter of crip haunts queer—and even more explicitly, as we will see, trans—and the crip(ped) bodymind holds, moves, and fucks queerly. Who knows where “queer” stops and “crip” and “neuro” begin? Likewise, transMad, whose citational style leaves little room for diagnostic clarity amidst a pastiche of noncompliant text.

On transMad epistemologies: multiplicity (h/t @materialisnt):

They encourage us to remove others’ names from our bodies, to reign in unruly citations, to set “boundaries” which violate Mad, crip ethics of care (see Fletcher, 2019). In truth, any framing of individual authorship in which the body text is “mine” and the citations gesture “elsewhere” belie the inherent interdependence of all intellectual life, and particularly of transMad intellectual life. transMad plural scholar mix. alan moss (2022) argues in relation to the pathologization of multiple systems: “all people, indeed all that exists, is a system that itself is constantly enmeshed in several overlapping and interconnected systems.” In short, I am full of Is, and will continue as many more. Just as disability justice helps us understand all life as interdependent and deserving of access, a transMad approach sees our selves as numerous and fuzzy. We have permission to dispense with the need for tidy texts, with our interlocutors, edits, and iterations either obfuscated entirely or exclusively relegated to a bibliography. transMad citation may thus be considered akin to visible mending[6], creating flamboyantly messy, multiplicitous work that does not seek to pass as objective or discrete.

On the value of (crip) failure and/as "virtuality":

Don’t get me wrong: Zoom PhD work is a failing enterprise. That is to say, it is a queercrip, transMad enterprise, which is to say, it is a beautiful, beautiful project. Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware describe such “fortunate failures” in the context of “curricular cripistemologies.”5 Coined by Merri Lisa Johnson, the term “cripistemologies,” refers to “embodied ways of knowing in relation, knowing-with, knowing-alongside, knowing-across-difference, and unknowing,” ways which frequently exist outside the purview of mainstream academia.6 Curricular cripistemologies, then, refer to an intentional, queercrip deviation from normative pedagogical approaches which trades the corrective impulse of “special ed” and other rehabilitative programs, and offers instead a generative noncompliance.7 That is, rather than trying to identify, isolate, and ameliorate difference, curricular cripistemologies lean into difference as it is experienced by disabled students ourselves, querying how atmospheres of in/accessibility shape normative approaches to education and how the embrace of “failure,” not as a last-resort but as a first choice, poses potentially transformative possibilities.

On transMadness and fat liberation: (for @trans-axolotl's Psych Survivor Zine)

A transMad, fat approach to disorderly eating requires making connections with humility and understanding, and, as I discussed above, engaging in compassionate, critical interrogation of our own anti-fatness.

[...]

A transMad, fat, abolitionist politic is one that makes room. We imagine beyond the cage, even if the details of that imagining are not yet clear. Just as we have carved micro-sites of support within violent digital and in-person contexts, just as we have learned to think about our lifeworlds beyond the paradigm of “recovery or death,” we can also reconceptualize fatness not as the enemy, but as another form of bodymind noncompliance in alliance and/or entanglement with disorderly eating practices. For thin disorderly eaters, this requires us to fundamentally challenge the way we view food and embodiment, even while maintaining a Mad respect for alternative ways of approaching reality.

On xenogenders, virtuality, and self-determination:

It is this very “irrationality” –– the “unrealness,” the “you’ve-got-to-be-kiddinghood,” that is most frequently weaponized against xenogenders, as well as their newly-coined sets of xenopronouns. The perceived and actual virtuality of xenogenders is often placed against the notion of “actuality,” in this case, of “real” (or “practical”) genders and pronouns to be used in one’s “real life.” Disabled activists have rightly resisted the distinction between online and (presumed-offline) “real life,” given that this categorically excludes homebound bodyminds, as well as those without IRL social and support circles. That said, I believe the virtual –– as almost, not-quite, proximite, making-do –– is incredibly useful in thinking about xenoidentities as transMad tools –– particularly, as transMad tools of underground collaboration / co-liberation.

[...]

What if gender was a project we wanted to fail? That is, what if trans- was a process not of getting better, not of moving-toward a bodymind more sane, more straight, and more cisheteropatriarchially desirable, but rather a line of flight on a longer trail to illegibility? Indeed, what if we replaced pathology’s narrow “path” with a trail lighted by the language of our comrades, whose linguistic interventions make and break gender in ways heretofore unimaginable? Xenoidentities, both individually and as a trans-gressive M.O., are fundamental to a broader transMad project of crafted, collective illegibility; intersubjective citation (imagine what it feels like for someone to be the gender that you coined!); and collective care that refuses a politics of cure. Crucially both virtual and digital, xenoidentities are furthermore a manifestation of the power of trans, predominantly disabled digital counterpublics, who overturn the hierarchy which places the IRL-real above the digital-unreal, making unruly, Mad space in which (with apologies to Donna Haraway) a hundred xenoselves might bloom.

On Maddening queer "diagnosis":

In her indictment of all “Kwik-Fix Drugs,” Gray further indicates the practice of forced treatment as in and of itself as a project of violent normalization, regardless of specific target or reason. The intentional ambiguity between her narrative of Madness and her narrative of asexuality disrupt mounting demands for a healthy (sanitized, neoliberal, and consumable) queerness. A Mad ace approach identifies these demands as, indeed, comparable with cis heteronormative notions of sexual maturity and responsibility – the idea that participation in culturally-normative sexual practices is a prerequisite for health (Kim, 2011, 481) and thus, personal autonomy (Meerai, Abdillahi, and Poole 2016, 21). By fusing the “lack of sexual appetite” attributed to her medications for bipolar disorder with her asexuality, Gray destabilizes the binary between healthy-sexual-diversity and unhealthy-psychopathology. She is once again disrupting contemporary queer impulses to dissociate from ongoing histories of pathologization. Here, Mad and queer/asexual activism are as inseparable in text as they are in Gray. Gray and her comrades collectively refuse both sexuality-as-“rehabilitation” (See Kim 2011, 486) and asexual acceptance predicated upon normative “health” (Kim 2010, 158) – that is, they Madden asexuality. Twoey, in her own voice, remixes the sources of her own pathologization, staggering the supposedly-divine pronouncement of the DSM across pages and bookending its extracts with her own writing and art. In this undermining of the DSM’s epistemological polish, Gray disrupts the domination of written prose over poetry and visual art, while also critiquing the role of the DSM in commercialized health “care.” Her zine opens with the lines “sex sells and sex is sold / sex was being sold and i didn’t buy” (Gray 2018, n.p.). Gray indicates a pathology perceived not only in a refusal to practice sex, but also in a refusal to buy (into) it. After all, a refusal to buy into existing sexual paradigms is for her also a refusal to buy into a feminized reproductive mandate.

[pickledkola]

THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN!!!

So, since I completely forgot about Inktober again and by the time I realized such it was already the 10th and I wasn’t about to try and catch up, I wanted to think of what to do to at least do SOMETHING for this month. Well, recently I got back into KND and there just so happens to be 5 main characters. Then I got the idea to draw said characters as other characters from media I like or think fits them as a count down to Halloween.

With that said, starting off the countdown is Numbuh 5 herself! Tbh I struggled for a little bit on what to do for her and originally considered doing Sasha from Amphibia but quickly realized I liked Katara from ALTA better for her!

Lets hope this time I can actually follow through with something.

[irlnumbuh4]

[kommandonuovidiavoli]

Today I asked people to send me pics I can redraw with Sector V 2.0 (because I can't sneakly put them in KND scenes since coffcoff they are from the future, so I had to adapt) and this is the finished result of the lineart I posted and deleted.

A little rant under read more.

Sorry, today was a really heavy day... I got insulted, my art and comics were called "shitty" and "something no one cares about" and it hit hard... it brought me back to times I thought were long gone since people involved are gone for good.

But... here we are. It got me too hard. Idk if I'll do more but if you want, you are free to send a scene you want to see them in. All together or just one or two characters, it's ok (if you wish, you can specify what characters, too).

Adults and Villains can be included. If you sneak a teen in, it might become a Sector V TND member, if it fits.

I already got 3 of them (two of which have the same pic and YES!! I will do it next when I have free time or more than an hour or breathe and people are not calling me names and play victims when I counterattack). And yes, if you sent one and found another good one, send it in too! I will make a separate post for everything!

Anyway... thank you all for your support. This is mostly for you.

I'll be fine. I just need to sleep now.

Enjoy.

[sketchingdemonss]

la la lucky guy🍀

[fallen-gabrielle]

A KND meme for your soul

[artsygirl0315]

Teens teens and their dumb shenanigans, Especially these siblings💙

[Finally managed to do their teen designs, Have some Delightful teens taunting Sector V after an argument]

[midnight-the-goth-artist]

I actually made these WAY back and completely forgot about them 💀

I was trying to make Sector V alt fashion designs but only got around to making Nigel and Kuki. Nigel is grudge/punk and Kuki is scene!

I wanted time give Nigel more demon features and scars from the delightful incident bc I can❤️‍🔥

And I tried making teen designs!

Only did Abby and Hoagie tho :’)

I sincerely apologize to all Wally lovers, I didn’t realize I didn’t make anything for him at all 😭 I’m gonna try to fix that eventually-

[torra-and-the-toons]

Ok, I’ve been thinking about this request for a while, but have been putting it off.

Could you do a drawing based off the episode L.O.C.K.D.O.W.N? It’s one of my favorites and the vampire designs are generally cool and deserve more attention!

Anyway, enjoy 😋

I'll be honest, the Vampires weird me out but only because of the spanking aspect (and the fact they had to spank a grown man to change back like excuse me??) Their designs are cool as hell though. If they existed without the spanking aspect, they wouldn't weird me out as much.

This might not be quite what you had in mind, but one of my coworkers told me a funny pun that I thought I could use for this very request.

I like to think it's the real reason they were so determined to change back lmao.

[tuckersgrave]

missing knd more than usual tonight

[kidsnextdoor-doodles]

Little doodle of @kommandonuovidiavoli’s oc Penelope

[nctsboodle]

"Oh fu-"

Meme-worthy screencaps of the Sector V guys (plus Numbuh 362) getting scared. You can use one of them or all of them.

Now includes PNG versions:

And also a group version:

[irlnumbuh4]

ERM GUYS ITS KND’S 21ST ANNIVERSARY

[kommandonuovidiavoli]

In the teen au, does sector V have any group hobbies they do together, outside the spy work?

There are many, actually!

Favourite one is Friday Nights at Nigel's. They watch old movies, talk, and play board games during those nights. Sometimes alcohol is involved, but nothing else. Usually, they stay up all night, but one of them manages to fall asleep at some point (bets are on Nigel) and the poor boy always wakes up confused as hell seeing it's his turn to draw cards....???

(idea came from grandkid @kandykatz ADUAH WORK THAT BRAIN)

For the rest, they have different interests that rarely coincide.

Nigel likes to read and sometimes manages to talk about books with Abby. Kuki only read romance novels, while Wally and Hoagie are only into mangas.

Sometimes these two manage to draw them all to watch an anime together. They tried with Fullmetal Alchemist but it took MONTHS since everyone stopped watching at Nina and then Huges...

There are the couples doing... couple stuff, idek what they do. Probably kiss, hug, and laugh like idiots.

But, well... they sometimes talk about going out partying together, but never actually do it.

That might change since the Party of the Century is approaching...

[numbuh]

[fallen-gabrielle]

My take on the Princess Peach Showtime! meme with Sector V and the Deligthful Children! Plus special guest star appearance my self insert OC!

Individuals under the cut:

Sector V:

The Delightful Children From Down The Lane:

And my OC: