#riva lehrer

[chronivore]

Riva Lehrer

[whilereadingandwalking]

Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer is a masterpiece of a memoir. Devastating, sharp, and cruel. Lehrer's writing is absolutely superb. It is often difficult to read, because being born with spina bifida in 1958 was considered a death sentence, and she endured terrific medical trauma and creulty, ableism, and abuse over the course of her life, as well as a codependent, often fraught relationship with her mother. The memoir is about a desire for normalcy and independence that later transforms when she discovers the Disability Culture movement and focuses her art on the crip mindspace and body.

This book was incredible from start to finish. Lehrer's writing is poetic and rich. One powerful through-line is the cultural understanding of "monsters" and the way society sees the disabled body and existence. The level of medical malpractice described in this book with both her own journey and her mother's is horrifying if (unfortunately) not surprising. I underlined and circled entire passages in this memoir. One of its strongest discussions is of building and supporting Disabled spaces (while it also acknowledges the power dynamics that still remain within those spaces), from the school she went to as a kid to the spaces she later discovered. It's also a terrific memoir just about the coming of age of an artist and a queer woman.

My one gripe with the book is that the placement of the art and illustrations didn't always really make sense. I wish they had accompanied and complimented each other more cleanly, because the art is superb and fascinating, and deserved to be highlighted more closely against the stories Lehrer was telling, which it did nearer to the end. I'll also say I hope they make a trade paperback size! The heaviness of this book and its photo paper makes it very unwieldy.

Edit from Riva Lehrer herself! "Leah, if you read this, the art was placed with intention; I confess that at times the relationship is subtle. They’re not illustrations, which are made to enhance a story. These works are my alternate memoir."

Content warnings for ableism, medical trauma, r-slur, substance abuse/addiction, sterilization, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, suicide and suicidal ideation.

[displayheartcode]

golem girl: a memoir by riva lehrer

[dead-desires]

Riva Lehrer, on Golem Girl / Alice Dromurat Dreger, on One of Us

[kctor2]

"The Latin roots of 'monster' are monere, meaning "to warn," and monstrum, an omen, or a supernatural being that indicates the will of a god.

If I once was monere, I'm turning myself into monstrare: one who unveils."

-Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer

[gatheringbones]

Karen Hammer “A Scar Is More than a Wound: Rethinking Community and Intimacy through Queer and Disability Theory.” Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 68, no. 2, 2014: ["As suggested by Lehrer's relationship to home as a kind of space that is both confining and liberating, and Feinberg's above description of Jess's arrest, the prison cell becomes for crip and queer subjects a real and metaphorical site of violation and intimacy. When we begin to work on what McRuer calls "imagining desires and bodies otherwise", we can look to situations and locations of discipline as also sites of interconnection. In the graphic prison scenes found in Stone Butch Blues, the butch body is othered and criminalized because of a perceived lack of able-bodiedness— i.e., normative embodiment— and unacceptable gender performance and sexual orientation. As Shildrick asks, "What strategies.... must be in place in order to ensure an illusory security, and how may they be contested?" The conditions of othering for Feinberg's Jess and Lehrer might be different, but a similar self/other confrontation in confined spaces exists in both works through which community and intimacy take shape and normalizing strategies are contested.  

When queer and crip subjects become victims of horrific violence the oppressor reveals his pervasive anxiety about his own vulnerability and contingency. As Lehrer suggests, in order to neatly categorize the bodies we encounter, we create a system of "flashcards" that allows us to quickly and seamlessly identify a particular race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. When unable to easily match a body with a category, we may experience a dual sensation of revulsion and attraction. There is a sexual component to this classification; as Lehrer writes, they are like "flash cards strobing a route between head, heart, and pelvis". Nonetheless, when this revulsion/attraction dialectic becomes overwhelming, violence may ensue. Through this drama of otherness enacted on the level of the everyday, "it becomes clear that it is the encounter with an anomalously embodied other positioned within the arena of sexuality that is the most threatening and disruptive." Sexuality can be described as already self-shattering and, therefore, the queer and/or crip body can be seen as doubly threatening because of these "flashcards." A good example is a sexual encounter that abruptly ends for Lehrer when her date becomes overwhelmed with her otherness: "I guess, after all, you were spooked by me." Yet, the devastation of rejection within the confines of her own apartment does not eliminate the possibility of kinship and intimacy. In queer/crip communities, relationships form within the effects of systemic violence, as though this trauma and othering subjects may be more likely to realize their own existence as messily and acutely contingent.

At its core, the reaction of the cops to the butch body must be viewed as a result of this fear of interdependence, and the fear of what the Other represents culturally and symbolically. In Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy approaches the body as a "site of contestation," as well as "a shifting and changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration and reconfiguration." His analogy of the body as "battlefield," though tied here to the construction of race, is particularly relevant for Jess, as the war over gender and normative embodiment is fought on a physical level, particularly in the prison cell. Clearly, what the lesbian queer and crip body represents is the potential for a "breakdown in a well-ordered society".]

[purpleweredragon]

At Northwestern [Riva Lehrer] teaches first- and second-year medical students a course named “Drawing in a Jar.” The jars contain fetuses…one or two jars always contains a fetus that had spina bifida. She knows what the narrative around these jars would be if she wasn’t in the room. “Someone would show these (jars) as mistakes — ‘We’re showing you because medicine is trying to fix this. It’s shocking, it shouldn’t happen and it probably won’t in the future.’ What gets forgotten is that people do live like this. So I tell my students about what it means to live with this, and I talk about the wonder of what they are looking at. “In these jars, they see how a body is put together, relationships to other vertebrates, antecedents. What they should not see is a disaster but a symphony. All these bodies are notes in an orchestra, each one a different sound. We don’t shove them into the land of the tragic mistakes. And we won’t hide them away. We live, like everyone, in parallel.”

Artist Riva Lehrer paints portraits of people with disabilities — minus the mock heroics, the ‘freak show’ or the toxic staring

[bookstand]

Not My Review: Golem Girl - A Memoir by Riva Lehrer

Not My Review: Golem Girl – A Memoir by Riva Lehrer

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