Radio as a Passageway is an experimental audio essay written and edited for radio broadcast. Inspiration for its form comes from William Burroughs’s tape experimentations and his theory of language as a virus. I imagine this piece being heard by long haul truckers or archivists in fifty years who have to distinguish truth from fact, as we do when researching the invention of radio and the life of Nathan Stubblefield.
When prompted by the topic of “Shapeshifting and the Otherworldly,” I thought of my identity as a transsexual woman and Bruno Latour’s definition of the body and its capacity for affection; that is to say, my body became more describable as a woman as I learned to be affected by more and more elements (being called slurs, taking hormones, having gay sex, etc.).1 I would like to challenge the notion that shapeshifting and the otherworldly belong to the unreal and suggest that they are completely ordinary.
I once met with the matriarch of my sangha for tea, Carolyn White, in East Lansing, Michigan, where we spoke about Buddhism and transmissions of knowledge. I spoke honestly about my reservations within my practice and how I was hesitant to commit myself to a concept such as enlightenment because I understood it as something for the exceptional, the genius, the unreal and the unattainable. Carolyn looked confused and corrected me, saying it was as ordinary as doing the dishes and that everyone, every day, has moments where they touch enlightenment. Dear reader, I call on you to develop your discipline in identifying strategies for bringing shapeshifting, the otherworldly, enlightenment, and revolution into your daily life—today. We mustn’t let these practices be reserved only for the fantasy and the avant-garde.
In Birth by Radio, I adopt multiple voices to present information to the listener. A recurring voice, the fictional estranged tranvestite daughter of Nathan Stubblefield, Laura, reimages the life of Stubblefield’s son, Bernard, who struggled to find work and was arrested as a young man after running away from home. The details Laura shares are autobiographical to my own. I am estranged from my father, and I came out as a transgender woman over the air at KRUI in Iowa City, Iowa. While I was influenced by primary source documents I found on the Stubblefield family, I also took inspiration from historical fiction works such as the novel I, Claudius and the film Watermelon Woman.
This work is about the immense power and limitations of language and of radio. One of my favorite qualities of radio is its irony in a post internet world. You have the theoretical reach of tens to hundreds of thousands of people—and no one is listening.
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Endnotes
- See Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies,” Body & Society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 205–29
Lorelai d'Andriole