System Failure - A Manifesto for Masochism is a piece of aural performance poetry, advocating an intersectional approach to queer feminism. If working towards undoing our roles in systematic power structures like gender, class, and race can be uncomfortable, then embracing this learning process can be seen as a kind of masochistic pleasure. The body text is rendered illegible through overprinting, the same media undoing the language it creates. Its illegibility demands a cisgender audience listen to the queer voice which wrote the text — through an intimate, cassette recorded audio track.
Legibility/illegibility is just another binary we impose upon language. When something looks only akin to text, we feel compelled to interpret. Where the queer body is concerned, being read is being seen, but being seen is not always desired. Often the body just wants to be heard.
Typeset on a 1960’s typewriter and duplicated on a flatbed photocopier, the work is printed as an A6 pamphlet, bound by hand in an edition of 100, and distributed through Body Bilingual Books.
