Vantage Points On Media as Trans Memoir, by Chase Joynt
File Under: ART
If a poem is a container built to hold more than the words we see on the page, then Vantage Points by Chase Joynt is a poetic book. If I say the book is a story of personal trauma, family history, and media events held together in a framework of media theory, it may be difficult to imagine the page possessing enough white space to also expose the context of the air we breathe and the water we drink, but that is, in fact, what the author has distilled into this field guide to the patriarchy.
The book also reads as a delightfully nerdy annotated bibliography, offering readers enticements to other artists and thinkers that provide both foreground and background in the very specific gender dilemma composition of transmasculine people.
Ultimately a graphically-compelling plea for a more compassionate world, Joynt’s efforts acknowledge the way the technology of a racialized power structure grinds up objectified individuals in its machinery, but also reveals the complexity in how even those who so-called benefit from that automation are also harmed.
The notion that this compilation be labeled “experimental”, even by its author, is an expression of the ubiquitous (and invisible, like the air we breathe) violence of conformity that the work so brilliantly captures. Indeed, the kaleidoscope, constellation, or otherwise “subverted” shape of words and images may be uniquely queer, but it is not, to my eyes, experimental in 2025. Though, I guess if that gets more mainstream viewers/readers on board, so be it. Maybe I just wish even those binaries would dissolve to allow for more collective imagination. Seems like we could use that about now.
The media theory framework of this project is assembled with selections from the work of Marshall McLuhan, a near ancestor to the author, who, among many other things, said,
“A work of art has no existence or function apart from its effects on human observation.”
May we all observe our world more clearly after experiencing these pages.
Available everywhere, but consider buying directly from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/V/Vantage-Points
Content warning for family-centered sexual violence
See Also:
This is Water
Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
by David Foster Wallace
Kai Cheng Thom’s work on Transformative and Loving Justice https://abolitionist.tools/Loving-Justice
