On Invitations
LOT: “Outsider art.” Outside what? I’m right here.
In the second edition of The 53rd State Occasional, edited by Will Arbery in 2018, Will asks a collection of theater-makers about invitations:
"I want to know who is invited to your show. Or what that invitation looks like. Or what an invitation is to you. Or if there is more that you’re inviting than people. Is there an event, a collision, an upheaval, a nesting doll of more invitations, a silence you’re inviting? [...] But now I’m interested in where you draw the line. Where does the invitation stop? Where does the show become yours and yours alone?"
Four years later, with his play Corsicana, Will seems to be asking a reformulated version of these questions; this time, though, it’s not (only) about theater. If we think of theater as a collective rehearsal of alternative social structures and modes of relating to one another — or, in other words, a ritual — then we can understand Will’s questions as being about who we invite into our structures of belonging, our care, our society. Who do we invite? And who is left outside?
Corsicana takes place in the city of Corsicana, Texas, following Ginny, a woman with Down syndrome, and her half-brother Christopher, as they navigate their mother Leanne’s recent death. Near the beginning of the play, Justice, a librarian and honorary aunt of Christopher and Ginny, gives a copy of Pyotr Kropotkin’s book, The Conquest of Bread to her friend, Lot — an “outsider artist,” though he resists the term. Kropotkin, a Russian anarcho-communist writing in the 19th and early 20th century, advocated for the essential human right to well-being, which he believed could be achieved through decentralized power, voluntary cooperative labor, and mutual aid. At the core of his beliefs is the assertion that we are all responsible for one another and our collective endurance. Kropotkin proposed that the main obstacle to the right to well-being for all is the privatization of property. Building on these ideas, family abolitionists, over the past 50 years, have pushed back against the privatization of care, arguing that all forms of care should be equally accessible to everyone in society, not just those lucky enough to be invited (whether by birth or otherwise) into a family that can provide for them.
The pandemic has taught us many things, and perhaps chief among them is how irrevocably interdependent we all are. Contrary to one of the tenets of capitalist America, there is no such thing as true self-sufficiency; structurally and socially, we rely on one another to keep us safe and to keep us going. The instinctive impulse to retreat into ourselves and “look out for our own,” though it can feel like the easier or even the only possible response to crisis, is in fact a myopic one that prioritizes individual, short-term survival over collective endurance. Often, “our own” are our family — specifically, the nuclear family, though sometimes it includes members of extended or chosen ones. Corsicana offers the questions: what happens to how we care for one another when the family isn’t all it’s promised to be? When the family is ruptured? When the person who holds it together dies?
So much of the joy and mutual care in Corsicana enters through the open space that Leanne’s death leaves behind, even though this openness is deeply vulnerable. It can be frightening when the nucleus of the family is cracked open; it can feel like a gaping wound. It is uncomfortable to be confronted with the mutual responsibility we have to one another beyond the bounds of family. For many able-bodied people, this confrontation with societal interdependence is a mostly avoidable one — or, at least, it was more so prior to the pandemic. The same is not true for most people who are disabled, who are failed time and time again by the American capitalist culture’s valorization of independence and individual productivity, by the privatization of healthcare, and by woefully underinvested structures of support and intimacy beyond the lottery of whichever kinds of care their families are able to provide.
Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, a foundational thinker in disability studies, observed in her 1997 book Extraordinary Bodies that unlike other, “seemingly more stable marginal identities,” disability is “more fluid, and perhaps more threatening” in that “anyone can become disabled at any time.” Her emphasis here on the fluidity of disabled identity challenges the frequent pathologization of disability in our culture, which falsely suggests that it is only those who are distinctly “disabled” have “special needs,” or require dependency on a particular kind of care from others. In reality, of course, we all need care from one another, in different ways. This is not to imply that disabled individuals don’t have particular lived experiences in their bodies which profoundly impact how they move through the world, or to at all efface the fact that different bodies require different kinds of care. Rather, I point out the instability of “disabled” as a discrete, fixed category as an invitation to reconsider where and why we draw a line around some needs, bodies, and care to mark them as extraordinary, and not others. It is an invitation to reorient ourselves, to focus not on why individuals face challenges moving through the world, but what it is about the structures of that world which exclude them from accessing the right to well-being in the first place.
In Corsicana, Justice extends such an invitation to Christopher, who struggles with the sudden responsibilities of becoming a primary caretaker of Ginny and of their household:
CHRISTOPHER: …I could just go in and get groceries and I don’t. I don’t make things better. And look at all this dust. What am I, the king of dust?
JUSTICE: Oh— well there’s a writer I love who calls dust “matter in the wrong place.”
Justice is referring to Kropotkin — but nearly 90 years after The Conquest of Bread, Garland-Thomson uses the same vocabulary to talk about disability: “...[A]ll disability is in some sense ‘matter out of place’ ... what does not fit into the space of the ordinary.” Such language shifts critical focus away from personal “extraordinariness” and onto the exclusionary structures that constitute “ordinary space.” It removes the onus on individuals to compensate for how their differences in ability (whether circumstantial, bodily, temporary, or chronic) impact a capitalistic notion of worth based on productivity, and affirms the belief that people are valuable not because of what they are able to produce or do, but because all human life has inherent value. This rejection of the pathologization of disability is also responsible for how we now think and talk about neurodiversity. There are many ways to be in/with one’s mind and body, as opposed to one ordinary way outside of which are only “developmental or intellectual disorders.”
The so-called “outsider artist” Lot, then — who builds sculptures out of trash — troubles the border between what is excluded and what is included, between who is and isn't invited inside his art as well as his home. There is great courage in Lot’s (and Will’s) determination to challenge where invitations stop, even while knowing how hard it is to walk away from the deeply ingrained impulse to retreat into solitude when things get scary. How hard it is to continue to extend an invitation into your space and your heart when somebody hurts you. How much easier it can feel to lock your gate, retreat into your room, stop seeing your friends, stop making art, stop wanting to share. To make both your pain and your care yours and yours alone. And so, Lot persists: he chips away at building a space — and a world — where nobody has to be on the outside anymore.
Aydan Shahd
Artistic Fellow
