Travels With My Father

Memories of My Father: Keeping the House “Ship-Shape”

I began this investigation by considering my memories of my father in his last years. The accounts of this remembering draw on my experiences of collaborative biographical work in which memories are written as accounts after critical groups discussions that acknowledge aspects of their constitution through dominant discourses (e.g., Claiborne, Cornforth, Davies, Milligan, & White, 2009). Added to this were caveats that come from researchers using autoethnography as creatively reimagined textual techniques. Such work can also be destabilizing of the certainties of particular discursive positions. Gannon (2006) emphasized that poststructural questions inevitably influence such writing.

Knowledge in poststructural autoethnography is sourced from our particular locations in particular bodies with particular feelings, flesh, and thoughts that become possible in particular sociocultural-spatial contexts. Autoethnography acknowledges that the body is “a site for the production of knowledge, feelings, emotions and history, all of which are central to subjectivity.” (Probyn, 2003, p. 290, cited in Gannon, 2006, pp. 476-477)

Crucial for this task is the troubling of the self that is voicing the autoethnography. Gannon (2006) referred to Barthes’s approach, where “memory is enfolded in the body” though such a body has multiplicities, discursive constraints, and “traces and unreliable fragments” (p. 483). These constraints provided framing for the texts of memory created for this article.

The following memory of my father describes a man in his 90s living with his wife in a house in a rural, southern area of the United States in 2011.

There seems to be a problem with dampness in the hallway. He has purchased a little dehumidifier—one with a water bucket he can still pick up—in order to deal with the high moisture levels he’s detected in the floor. The little machine hums away all day, and he is happy he can still carry out the ritual that keeps it going. When the beeper shows the bucket is full, he moves the old metal dolly into place—the one he used to use for moving boxes or big bags of fertilizer. Now the dolly is used for a little bucket of water but it’s still a godsend. Maneuvering the bucket onto the bottom of the dolly without spilling any water is tricky. Then he just has to get to the kitchen sink. Sometimes his feet won’t go forward; they suddenly stop. He tries to focus on an imaginary line a few inches ahead of his feet that he has to cross. Like a runner preparing for the longjump, he rocks back and forth just a little bit, preparing to go forward. Finally, he’s moving. In the kitchen it’s too difficult to lift the bucket all the way up to the sink. He takes an old quart measure and dips it into the bucket till it’s about half full, then slowly reaches up to empty the container into the sink. His arms don’t always do what he wants them to do. It takes quite a few dips to get all the water emptied, before he can reverse his steps and take the empty bucket back. The whole thing takes about an hour. He is exhausted at the end of it.

I am the omniscient narrator of this memory, which I experienced as part of my own embodied memories as an observer of this scene. I have omitted my shock at seeing how long this Sisyphean task would take. In my adherence to what I teach as good practice in disability support I did not take over the task from my father without asking. (When my father came over to the dehumidifier one morning only to express surprise that it was empty, I admitted, saying I hoped he did not mind, that I had already emptied it. I experienced some pleasure at seeing his relief.)

To give more detail about the setting in which the above actions took place, some thoughts my father might have had while carrying out this task are added below:

important to keep the house ship shape . . . it has to sell for as much as possible, to pay for Honey’s* care when I’m gone. This whole rigmarole is a chore . . . just has to be done. . . . twice a day, every galdern day (*pseudonym)

By adding these imagined thoughts, I bring in my knowledge of my father over time, presenting words that reflect his usual way of speaking in certain situations. The larger motivation for the house maintenance, that is, to ensure that the house eventually sells for a good price, is mentioned to indicate my father’s focus on strategies or actions to provide more financial support for my mother in future when she is likely to require more care. The imagined words are, then, also a way to indicate the sorts of concerns about my mother that my father had expressed to me a number of times during this period.

In the memory just described, I have animated my father as a man still concerned with physical work around house maintenance, despite his advanced years, as well as with order and continuity as an expression of care for the family. By positioning my father as carer, my story inevitably also positions my absent mother as a subject requiring care, a position of vulnerability and passivity within predictably gendered discourses.

The next memory concerns a large wooden desk, the place where writing of cheques for bill payment was carried out. My father was quite advanced in years when he asked me to take over the family finances.

I look at the old glass-topped mahogany desk in the spare room. The desk used to be a paragon of orderliness. Now the desk has pieces of paper, pens, screwdrivers, powerplugs, and other items lying in scrambled, untidy piles. I see that one heap contains envelopes that have been opened, each with the word “Urgent!” written on it in red ink by a shaky hand.

Looking at the jumbled mass of opened envelopes on the darkened wood of the desk, each still containing its original contents, I realized that my father had stopped paying the bills. The red markings on the envelopes indicated the urgency required for payment of these invoices. However, this pile sat there while my father instead spent hours trying to track down a couple of old friends from his younger days by going through old envelopes with personal letters. As I worked through the bills, organizing payments to be sent, I was immediately surprised that one of the most regular bills, one that never missed payment, was the invoice for monthly pesticide treatment on the house.

In this text of my memory, I narrate from the point of view of a dutiful and possibly long-suffering daughter. Yet as I write this, I also feel in agreement with the view that finding old friends is far more important at the end of life than paying bills, given that the bills reference an ongoing life in a house that my father will soon leave. I recall asking my father why there was such a regular bill for pesticide treatment. He told me that it was to prevent the house being infested by termites. As soon as I took over the payment of their bills, I canceled the pesticide treatment. I recall my father’s look of consternation and surprise, as we sat once again in the lounge, when I announced that I had done this. Having delegated the matter to me, though, he didn’t question my action.

As I reflected on the ubiquitousness of pesticides, I remembered an experience a couple of years before I took over the bills.

I am sitting in the lounge one day with my parents, who are both napping in their respective chairs. I see a man in a uniform appear in the yard wheeling a container of chemicals. The man stops and lowers a hose into a series of pipes set into the ground around the house, pipes I had never noticed before. “What’s going on out there?” I say, quietly. Another family member tells me, “That’s the pesticide guy.” The man seems to be a regular visitor to the house.

The regularity of the visits of the “pesticide guy” and the flow of pesticides into the foundation of the house could be read as an enactment of safety, of workers contracted to keep the home safe from insects. This could be put alongside normative household tasks that were the background of my experience in childhood. During the 1950s and early 1960s at the height of postwar American modernism, an assemblage emerged involving consumerism no longer held back by wartime shortages, a concomitant increase in packaging of goods coming into the house and the normative employment of more and larger rubbish bins. The focus on home improvement for the woman of the house involved many complex practices around hygiene and the eradication of “germs,” a smaller but just as invidious invader of the home. The work of the “housewife” inside the home and the “man of the house” doing odd jobs on the structure of the house and garden/yard could be mapped with a modernist discourse about progress, ensuring human dominion over unwanted insects in the environment.

New complexities could be added to this assemblage around gender, home maintenance, pesticides, and disabilities when considering the setting 2 years later, when I was camped out alone in the house, getting it ready for sale. As I got to grips with the complexities of the housing market in the United States, a country I had left over 30 years earlier, I was confronted by a state legal requirement that the house for sale be certified as pest free, specifically, that I had to guarantee as vendor that there were no subterranean termite beds. Fortunately for me as surrogate vendor, I was still able to get a certificate of compliance so that the house could be sold. These events pointed to a material confluence between insects, pesticide, housing, and home maintenance. As a researcher, several paths opened as a way to explore these connections. First, I wanted to consider a link between PD and exposure to pesticides.

First Agential Cut: Pesticides and PD

Certain scientific explanations of a positivist kind occurred to me as I wrote the above memories, which is not surprising given my doctoral “training” in experimental cognitive psychology. Such explanations are set within a world crossed by rational and often linear and predictable causal lines, offering hope that some material factor could be called to account for my father’s disability. In this worldview, a useful scientific investigation might explore causal links between damage to human neurons exposed to pesticides of the kind used in home maintenance and PD. As I reviewed medical literature, I noted that it is only “late onset” (i.e., not before age 40) PD that has strong links to pesticide exposure, suggesting that accumulation across the human life span may be an important factor. As I considered this possibility, I was drawn back into reading experimental literature, summarizing studies using the vocabulary of the field. Such writing, based as it is on a particular ontological position—scientific realism—felt comfortable and familiar, offering me a place to write with confidence and certainty.

Barad (2003) posited that “[d]iffractively reading the insights of feminist and queer theory and science studies approaches through one another entails thinking the ‘social’ and the ‘scientific’ together in an illuminating way” (p. 803). This does not seem to me an easy task, given the different normative position of the author of scientific or critical social texts. Instead, below, I wrote diffractively across these different literatures while emphasizing my authorial point of view as a daughter.

Apparently descriptions of PD can be found in writings of several centuries ago. I found that a physiological diagnosis appeared in the early flowering of 19th-century medicine as a science when the eponymous British doctor described “paralysis agitans,” a condition involving palsy, tremors, loss of muscle tone, and a stoop, though without loss of sensation (Naheed, 2013, p. 4). Today PD is medically characterized as the result of a loss of dopamine neurons, affecting many aspects of motor movement. It is also the most common neurodegenerative movement disorder affecting human beings (Hatcher, Pennell, & Miller, 2008), and late onset PD is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States, affecting about 2% of the population over 50 and up to 5% of those over 85 (see Kanthasamy, Kitazawa, Kanthasamy, & Anantharam, 2005). The prevalence of this diagnosis meant that tracing the etiology for my father was difficult, despite the widely reported finding that pesticides are “one of the primary classes of environmental agents associated with PD” (Hatcher et al., 2008, p. 322; see also Kanthasamy et al., 2005).

Most adults around the world have considerable exposure to pesticides of various kinds, making causal links between particular chemicals and effects on neurons harder to pin down. I decided to pursue literature on pesticides likely to have been used by my father. Dieldren is a toxin with observable effects on part of the midbrain (substantia nigra pars compacta) important for movement (Kanthasamy et al., 2005), and is also a pesticide used to control termites in crops. I well remember the environmental debates about pesticides in Australia and the United States in the 1970s (e.g., Carson, 1962) and the banning of dieldren, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and other “organochlorine” pesticides. I investigated the date for these bans to try to determine what kind of exposure my father might have had between 1950 and 2004, when he was diagnosed, and discovered,

Because of concerns about damage to the environment and potentially to human health, EPA banned all uses of aldrin and dieldrin in 1974, except to control termites. In 1987, EPA banned all uses. (Toxic Substances Portal, n.d.)

By 1987, with the ban on dieldren, my father may have been encouraged by the pesticide company to use another chemical to control termites. It is difficult to find out the exact components of many commercial pesticide products. By tracking down popular commercial brands, however, it seems likely that fipronil was the substance. Going to the literature on this compound, I learned that, in one study, rats given doses of fipronil lost those dopamine-producing neurons in the same part of the brain that affects humans with PD (Park, Park, & Koh, 2016), suggesting similar effects to dieldren. A scientist could not logically draw implications of this finding for humans, yet, taking the view of a social researcher, I wonder whether the change of chemical compounds and associated nomenclature over the past few decades provides a commercially useful way to obscure the ongoing effects of seriously harmful pesticides.

In sum, I doubt if a link could be established between my father’s late onset PD and his vigilant employment of home insecticides over a long period. My brief investigation of particular pesticides in use at various times indicates, however, that such information may be commercially sensitive (i.e., hard to identify in terms of ingredients) and hence difficult to track. My reading of the research literature indicated that there is widespread exposure to pesticides from not only a range of sources but also long-term effects of banned chemicals years later as they persist in the environment. In any case, I needed to return to the goal of this enquiry. It was not aimed at finding the kind of clear experimental causal link that could be used as evidence in litigation over my father’s health care costs. Rather, I wanted to see my father in the larger material-discursive setting that makes possible an assemblage in which high pesticide use is part of a taken-for-granted practice in the service of home maintenance as normative practice for men of certain locations.

Second Agential Cut: Connecting Pesticides and Home Ownership

If I were to take another tack, positioning myself as a critical discursively oriented researcher, I could explore home maintenance centered on the building structure of a house in conjunction with discourses of masculinity around protection of the family and provision of a safe home space. An interesting argument could be made about the unforeseen consequences of the contradiction between such masculine discourses around the importance of the home and discourses about health, preserving life, and preventing disease. In other words, the perfect family man up to date with his home’s maintenance could also be unwittingly poisoning himself and his family.

An entirely different investigation could follow from the memories I used earlier, if instead I were to investigate discourses around home maintenance that include pesticide practices. I could search for a strong association in publicly available statistical data that cover both pesticide use and the U.S. housing markets, looking for any large, quantitative data analysis that might find an association, for example, between house sales in geographical areas with and without policies on pesticide compliance. Finding such a correlation would, though, offer me little in the way of explanation at the level of the individual homeowner’s (i.e., my father’s) point of view on housing or health. I could instead seek qualitative studies that might track the experiences of homeowners attempting to sell homes, documenting the different ways people might engage with the pesticide issue as they struggle to sell homes in the difficult buyers’ market that emerged after the 2008 global financial crisis (see Mishkin, 2011). I suspect this might draw me into conducting my own study should not previous research be found. I could perhaps carry out an ethnographic study, involving interviews with other homeowner participants and document analysis of policies and products they might have used or known about. With my leaning toward a postcritical paradigm, I would then put the analysis into the context of the Anthropocene era (see Somerville, 2015), indicating ways that human families are trapped into environmental destruction by policies sensitive to consumer rights regarding purchase of quality homes yet insensitive to environmental effects ensuing from such policies.

A discursive analysis points to a potential trap for the caring father positioned by discourses around family and masculinity to ensure that the family home is a place of protection and provision. The cultural ideal for the family home, as illustrated in popular media such as advertising, is of a solid, usually stand-alone structure with room for separate spaces for members of the nuclear family. The family forced by economic circumstances to live in a car, or in a house where the roof leaks, where plumbing no longer works, or where there are large cracks in the walls, would not fit this ideal, nor would a house with obvious signs of insect infestation such as holes in the wall or softened timber (or pieces of new timber installed in the midst of older wood, indicating a repair of some kind). It is only since starting this project that I learned that my family’s first house, the one to which I was brought home from the hospital as a baby, had had a termite infestation. I vaguely remember that my father spent a lot of time in the basement, a place that fascinated and scared me with its poor lighting, big pile of coal, and very noisy washing machine. A relative tells me that my father somehow replaced the subfloor of the house while we were there, removing the infested wood, and from that time on was vigilant about preventing the military “march” of termites into our homes. This memory can be understood as part of the social history of that era in the United States, where rates of marriage had skyrocketed as soldiers returned from the Second World War, and the home became a place of refuge in a world that had been “saved.” Home and family were “what we were fighting for” (May, 1992). To conclude, by carrying out qualitative research involving homeowners and pesticides, I could perhaps demonstrate a larger causal pattern implicating discourses of masculinity and home ownership around pesticide use in contemporary capitalism and, ultimately, create a contradictory link between masculine discourses around family protection and environmental discourses around poisons’ debilitating effects on communities.

This study could show the folly of culturally sanctioned discourses of masculinity that are literally toxic for the family patriarch. Such research might be socially useful if it encouraged people to question the housing regime that requires high levels of exposure to poisons in order to keep a house salable, and a family financially afloat. This proposed qualitative research study might still offer limited possibilities for understanding what happened to my father.

Third Agential Cut: The Posthuman in Critical Disability Studies

In this journey so far, it seems that research texts can move us closer to our ancestors or push us further away. An analysis of the housing market, just mentioned, would distance me from my original quest to discover possible debilitating effects of pesticide exposure on an older human body. However, I did not want to focus on the debility that affected my father. Writing in critical disability studies (e.g., Goodley, 2013) avoids detailed accounts of suffering of individuals because of the underlying assumption of deficit (Oliver, 1990). There is also a critique of the influential “social model” that emphasizes barriers in the environment that prevent people’s expressions of normative competence (e.g., in mobility or verbal expression). Disability studies analyses influenced by poststructural theorizing offer a counter to medical conceptualizations and their assumed deficits. Fritsch (2015) would add to this the performative aspects of a “neoliberal hegemonic social imagination” (p. 43) with limited places for presenting lives with disability as worth living. Therefore, if my research were to describe in detail the effects of pesticide on human health, I might fall into the trap of relying on a medical interpretation of impairment (see Goodley, 2013). At the same time, I wonder about the avoidance of discussion of impairment as it might be expanded within medical discourses; would such avoidance provide difficulties for any platform of advocacy regarding environmental harm such as consequences of pesticide exposure?

The experience of PD may have appeared at the conjunction of a number of intersecting discursive and material practices coterminous in the body of my father. As a researcher, I would like to be able to offer an analysis of the pesticide–debility link within, perhaps, a larger critique of practices surrounding home maintenance associated with toxins.

Fourth Agential Cut: Beyond the Human/Nonhuman, Homeowner/Termite Divide

Bringing in a new materialist perspective provided a challenge to what I might consider my ontological positioning as a researcher. This is also consistent with Barad’s (2003) proposal that intra-action collapses distinctions between the knower and the known, and that “[a]ll bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity—its performativity” (p. 824). As Mazzei (2014) tells it, taking a Baradian diffractive analysis

functions to move [us] away from habitual normative readings that zero in on sameness toward the production of readings that disperse and disrupt thought as I plug multiple theories into data and read them through one another. A diffractive analysis is not a reduction of data using a series of concepts, much like coding would require. Rather, it takes a rhizomatic (rather than hierarchical and linear shape) form that leads in different directions and keeps analysis and knowledge production on the move. (p. 743)

In such an analysis, which owes much to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), there is an entanglement of the material with Foucaultian discourses and their flows of power. It is important to “to consider how the material is always already discursively produced and the discursive is always already materially produced” (Mazzei, 2014, p. 745). One challenge, then, is to consider how the discursive is materialized in the production of subjectivities and through performative language.

Instead, following a line of flight suggested by Barad’s version of the new feminist materialist turn, I would like to turn my gaze away from my father’s illness to consider nonhuman material factors. As I considered the toxins to which my father may have been exposed, I sought an analysis that would go beyond a predictable environmental story of abuse of the planet and its foul consequences for the human population. Following this new line of ascent, I could instead focus my gaze as a researcher on the virtual family of termites planning to set up home in my parents’ house, re-citing the human/nonhuman binary before moving beyond it. This is consistent in many ways with my position as a researcher and teacher in disability studies: I turn my gaze away from the body of my father toward an imagined world from the insects’ point of view. This is a huge ontological shift that takes my research on an entirely new line of flight, one for which my studies have not prepared me.

Jane Bennett (2010) suggested that there are many expressions of vibrancy in matter beyond that of the human. She asks,

How, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or “the recycling,” but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter? What difference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand? What issues would surround stem cell research in the absence of the assumption that the only source of vitality in matter is a soul or spirit? What difference would it make to the course of energy policy were electricity to be figured not simply as a resource, commodity, or instrumentality but also and more radically as an “actant”? (p. 9)

These questions help me to turn away from the focus on the aging body of my father toward, instead, his battle with termites over my lifetime. The possibilities for analysis change if the gaze focuses on an encounter between swarms of insects and the diversity of human bodies in contact with such insects—or attempting to remain encapsulated in dwellings where such contact can be avoided. Why did I imagine that the only sources of vitality in the story were the human agents who are purveyors of pesticide, those feeling the effects of long-term exposure or those involved in home maintenance or pest-free housing policies?

Following the diffractive patterns suggested by Barad, what would it mean to cut matter differently, leaving aside the individual disabled body and indeed the human point of view altogether and instead to focus a gaze on the virtual termites living in the ground around the house, being attracted, perhaps to the damp ground caused by an inaccessible pipe leaking under the floor where the dehumidifier now sits?

Another agential cut begins with entomology from a human point of view, within the positivist ontology of biological studies. With some trepidation about crossing academic lines of expertise, I first turned to online entomology resources from a U.S. university course.

Termites feed primarily on the cellulose and lignin found in plant cell walls; these compounds are the main ingredients of wood and all paper products . . .

Ecologically, termites play an important role in the environment by helping to break down and recycle dead wood and other plant tissues. They become pests when their appetite for wood and wood products extends to human homes, fence posts, building materials, cardboard, and other valuable products. (Meyer, 2016)

As an academic educator who has done some research on science education, I can comfortably position myself as a researcher who works with the cultural artifacts of texts in science education. The focus of this text is on the termites’ problematic appropriation of “products” “valuable” to humans.

To attempt to cut matter differently, a turn to the research on which such entomology courses are based would seem helpful. From my perusal of literature in entomology, I learned that in the past 45 years, the number of invasive termite species worldwide has risen from 17 to 28 (Evans, Forschler, & Grace, 2013), presumably related to our warming climate. I also learned of a critique questioning the attention given to possibilities for control of termites through biological means, and arguing that interest has been unrealistically optimistic, even biased, and showing “poor understanding of termite biology” (Chouvenc, Su, & Grace, 2011, p. 69). So as not to fall into the trap of ignorance implied in the last statement, finally, I sought a meta-review of studies of termites’ own defense systems (Šobotník, Jirošová, & Hanus, 2010) that detailed the evolution of particular pincers, glands, and secretions in termites as well as behavioral features such as self-imploding organs as an aspect of “exploding suicidal behavior” (p. 1017) in some species. In my brief foray into entomological research, the ontological position of the realist researcher was initially a comfortable place for me to be, allowing me to forget about elderly parents and find myself completely focused on the termite world presented in research studies in this field. The study of “chemical warfare” in insects then shattered this familiar, territorialized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) story about insects, pointing to my ignorance of and obliviousness to the complex movements and explosions in other species around me.

Barad reminds us that matter is not simply that of mindless objects overseen by their human conquerors; somehow the discursive aspects of these constructions also need to be added to this analysis. It might be useful to follow the line of ascent pursued by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), in their strategic moves that acknowledge yet fly beyond the psychoanalytic. They focused on multiples such as the pack rather than the individual animal, as “[t]he pack is simultaneously an animal reality, and the reality of the becoming-animal of the human being” (p. 242). Whether in war, in hunting, or in crime (and perhaps home maintenance), “there is a borderline for each multiplicity” (p. 245). Moby Dick “is neither an individual nor a genus” but a “borderline” that has to be struck “to get at the pack as a whole, to reach the pack as a whole, and pass beyond it” (p. 245). Drawing on Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Kafka, Muir, & Muir, 1973), they noted possibilities for the formation of a new rhizome, mutating perversely and eventually shaking loose, “challenging the hegemony of the signifier” (p. 15). For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), becoming-animal is not about an original stable identity but a search for more freedom beyond dualistic definition, beyond an imagined return to nature. This signals the possibility of a line of flight worth pursuing.

Locating a New Assemblage

In this journey around my father’s later life, I have traveled beyond familiar territory as a researcher. My onto-ethico-epistemological positioning has altered. Barad might remind me that the goal of looking beyond the human/nonhuman binary is not resolution; that is, my search does not need to make contemporary humans and termites intelligible to each other. Instead, I seek the agential cut that somehow juxtaposes the human beings trying to hold onto their bills and their friends in the face of encroaching infirmity with all the forces that lead to the inevitable cultural logic of home preservation that relies on pesticides being poured into the foundations of the family home.

Endings

When I started this project, my goal was to present a woman with dementia as a new kind of intelligible human self. My gaze instead turned to older men, home maintenance, pesticides, and neuromotor disabilities linked to the last. Thanks to new materialist theorizing, my gaze has turned away from the body of someone with PD toward the world, a world in which human pressure for housing leads to a clash with species occupying the same spaces for different purposes. Surely there is a better way to live. Different actions flow from this thinking, ethically speaking. Could we question the way families live, in what kinds of structures? Could we question housing markets that penalize families that live in houses with insects, given how many species are on the move as the earth warms? Could we consider ways to support panicky homeowners to get the tools they need to care for their families without relying on poisons?

Returning to the figure of my father and others like him, what is the impact for survival of the constraints offered by masculine discourses of provision, protection, continual war against alien (insect) invaders, all of which are normatively valued, celebrated culturally in so many ways, yet leading to destruction, to loss of bodily integrity, to shaking that goes right down to the foundations? What are the possibilities for intra-active complexity in viewing the subjectivity of the home-maintenance man constituted within various competing discourses? These contradictory discourses include modernist concerns about progress and militaristic deployment of chemicals as defensive weapons, as well as discourses harder to place within masculinities involving social responsibilities for family and environmental care beyond the human/nonhuman divide. We are going to need all the theoretical tools we can find to attempt to get beyond the intransigent discursive lines that territorialize our lives, looking for tiny cracks in the flooring that expose constantly changing differences we live among.