“The Child.”

This writing attempts to approach the figure,

the figure of “the child,”

the imaginary of “the child,”

the material of “the child,”

the repetition of “the child,” which is never a singular person, object, or subject,

“the child” which is never simply “the child.”

“The child” is.

“The child” is obscure.

“The child” reflects our constant immaturities, our understanding of the past, and

the constant investments we make in the future: we are children made, who make or fail to make children, and much of our world is structured around investing or denying investment in “the child.”

The preservation of the world for “the child.”

The destruction of the world in the denial of “the child.”

This writing attempts to deny either of these excessive leaps, while still leaving “the child” in its being in a completely uncomfortable space like a face tucked into a bucket of puss. “The child” has particular resonance because of the stifling of reproduction that occurs in queer intimacy: my own body is biologically nonreproductive regardless of what intimacies it seeks. But “the child,” “the child” is a much more complicated and troubled space than reproductivity or infertility suggests--it is an object we invest our future into, and it is the object we trace both our self-construction and destruction through as we ourself, regardless of age, are often still structured as children, as immature, as returning to childhood in both our stupidity and our graves. Indeed, “the child” is also an object that is itself a self, a self that itself seeks strange intimacies, and many queer bodies find origin stories in the odd, erotic moments found in the strange sexual intimacies of their childhoods.

But as we project, as we extend, onto “the child,”

we never gain access to as we remain “the child”

ourselves, if only in part.

“The child” itself is a black void,

“the child” never understands itself as it swells out of and into intimacies like the

throat of a barnacle in the same bucket of pus collected from our inhuman scars. Indeed,

this is not a comfortable space to write into, but one in which I, “the child,” find certain

openings.

“The child,” in its facticity, finds its gender, its sex, its class, its race, its ideology as it unfurls all material through a lens in retrospect of “the child.”

“The child” is the lens through which we structure the flooding material of the world

as we are children ourselves, wounded, “the child” in these writings is an endless and uncomfortable refraction of the expanding space between the square of the casket and the circle of the womb, of the opening, the stretching of the harsh and absurd space therein. There in the skin:

the womb,

the throat,

the eyes,

the anus,

the ears,

the grave:

“the child” contains all of these openings laid over each other, and makes the

replication of their shape into a tube through which to digest the world into its blank void,

into its inaccessibility, into its childishness, child.