Liminocentrist
Mundane Name: Cassidy Vlkzmrzl
E-mail: liminocentrist [hat-h] everythingiscleanlyresolved [d+ergot-erg] com
Occupation: Artist
I’m the artist here. To avoid further consumption of valuable internet, I point you to my introduction here.
1: Art
Drawing strips is time-consuming. Even mspaint webcomics are labour-intensive. Each panel you see here is between half an hour and two hours of drawing and sketching; fifty minutes to an hour being the average. And matter-art is one one stage in the process.
Meet. Plan. Write. Sketch. Re-sketch. Draw. Scan. Edit. Arrange. Post. Review. Repeat.
2: Qualms
I still don’t know what to think about this strip. We’re good - I’ll tell you that much. We’re bright, and quick and clever and I think we mean well and say some ringing things. We screw up sometimes, and come off like unaware privileged assholes - but we’re headed in the right direction.
I’m often at odds with the attitudes of my co-workers, and even the strip itself, but that’s polyvocality for you.Four times the output. Six times the support. Eight times the creativity. But you don’t always agree with what your name is on - and other people don’t always get that. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we should own up to our role in something larger that we don’t always like. Maybe we should understand that diversity is strength - and “intellectual diversity” means “disagreements, arguments, and unease about what you put your name to.” It means compromises. It means not shutting out others as traitors. It means social change that doesn’t satisfy anyone 100%, but that’s a damn sight better than what we’d have otherwise. It means that we are strong, not despite our disagreements, but because of them.
3: Motivation
And I do it for free. Why? I like drawing? I’m a smart-ass? I want a platform for some kind of gender radicalism? There’s more than that.
What you’re seeing here is another side of growing up after/as the cultural changes of the Rights Movements of sixties and seventies slid over the public consciousness, soaked in a bit, changed our corner of the world (sometimes irrevocably, if only in my fantasy life), and went back into the ocean. What you’re seeing here is the bolder part of said generation who grew up being expected to question gender and value social justice, but who found that when started to take the next critical step, we got spat at from all angles.
(a) First, we say to one group that we’re feminists or value worker’s rights, or like the social safety net, or think that employment equity has worth, or that maybe we shouldn’t spend so much money on the military and… people curse at us about what we believe in, drawing mainly on outmoded stereotypes. We try to explain, we get more damn stereotypes. Especially when we talk about feminism - which is why I’m going to focus on it.
(b) Second, we turn to another group and say that we have some qualms with a-particular-poplular-strain-of-feminism-as-practiced and can see other ways of doing it, and no sooner has half a suggestion left our mouths than we’re branded as either ignorant, the enemy or evil.
(c) Third. But what really stings is when we see our friends, who tried to voice the same critiques and questions, shrugging their shoulders and giving up: to hell with the world - let’s screen its signs out with electronic entertainment and numb its impact with cynicism.
So what you’re seeing here is anger. It’s anger with roots in trying to synthesize either sides of a nigh-partisan and wholly unnecessary split, and being labelled as “lunatic” on one side and “traitor” on the other. It’s anger at watching the hopes for radical democracy being submerged under a generation where many of its critical minds give up on saying anything contraversial.
So I’m sorry if what we say is shocking or crude or even just wrong, but this is what we’re thinking, and we need some avenue to express it where we won’t be judged and dismissed before we’ve finished our first sentence.
Yes, we take a critical eye to gender. No we aren’t lunatics.
Yes, we take a critical eye towards activist praxes of gender. No we aren’t traitors to the cause.
Maybe we’re right, maybe were wrong. More likely, we’re bits of both - and this is how we learn.
Maybe we can get things started here, and take the dialogue to the chatrooms, backrooms, bathrooms and classrooms. Or maybe we’re just spinning our wheels, but this is our narrative space.
So, please, read-and-think. Read-and-think before you respond. Read-and-think before you call us ignorant or lunatics. Read-and-think before you agree with us wholeheartedly. Or don’t. I mean it’s really up to you.
Hoping for some sort of dialogue -
and maybe a better world,
- Liminocentrist
