Materializing Tension: The Laborious, Woven Documentation Of a Black, Queer, Crip Bodymind in Indira Allegra's Documented Disability

Abstract

Materializing Tension:The Laborious, Woven Documentation Of a Black, Queer, Crip Bodymind in Indira Allegra's Documented Disability Tamir Williams (bio) The right not to work is the right not to have your value determined by your productivity as a worker, by your employability or salary....It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work. -Sunaura Taylor, "The Right Not to Work" To the viewer, the fluffy, large pillow against which they rest their back might appear to belie the difficulty of their performance and the labor in generating their woven document. Sitting uncomfortably upright in their bed, they work to produce a warp with silk threads whose ends are secured between their lower teeth and tied to a wooden warping paddle that they tightly cradle between their thighs. (see Fig. 1.1)1 The tension between the paddle and their mouth is thus achieved through a consistent straining or warping of their own body: locked thighs, tilted head, and hunched shoulders. It is this straining—this labor of holding tension—that enables them to weave. Over the course of an eight-hour filmed performance, they work to produce a woven account of their labor value and their social navigation as a queer person of color living with an invisible disability. Each word of this account is slowly and laboriously enunciated, as they simultaneously work to insert thin strips of paper (the weft) between the shed of their oral loom using a shuttle (see Fig. 1.2).2 Though barely discernible in the performance—as listening and reading are not the modes of engagement that they wish the viewer to have with their document (see Fig. 1.3)—the transcript for the testimony held in the woven document reads: [End Page 82] I have a disability. Because I have a disability you cannot see, I have to prove that I deserve to have the right to [tell] you the level of production I can offer to society without being stigmatized for it. Today I stayed home. Whatever I could not accomplish in bed was not accomplished today. I have the right to be believed even though you cannot see my disability.3 Contemporary textile and performance artist Indira Allegra works with "tension as creative material" to explore issues of the bodymind,4 disability, institutional violence, and (bodily) memory.5 Allegra's pieces Documenting Disability (2013) and Documented Disability (2013) are an eight-minute-long, triptych video documentation of their bed-bound performance, and the woven account produced from that performance, respectively. Each was exhibited in the "Creative Labor: Queer-It-Yourself (QIY)" show at the San Francisco SOMArts Cultural Center in 2016. The video work does not present a linear visual progression of them weaving the document; rather, the film confounds the process. Examining the three asynchronous shots, the viewer constantly oscillates between different points in the document's creation. Arguably, Allegra creates a "cripping" of this craft practice.6 As the three videos loop, the viewer witnesses Allegra's radical self-assertation of the value of their labor capacities, which deviate from neoliberal capitalist definitions of "productive." By turning to the Western, traditionally femme labor of weaving to enact this radical documentation, Allegra calls our attention to the ways in which the labor capacities and labor values of certain bodies have always been brought into question. The labor of this craft process is akin to the labor of making the needs of their Black, queer, invisibly disabled/crip bodymind believable within the U.S. neoliberal capitalist system. [End Page 83] Bodyminds are assigned values that equate to their levels of productivity under neoliberal capitalism. Enmeshed in this institutional power structure, disability documentation in the United States thus works to simultaneously legitimize and justify the labor capacities and value of bodyminds that deviate from "normative" levels of productivity. This is particularly true with regard to cases concerning access to accommodation and government aid. Allegra's Documenting Disability and Documented Disability provide...