My Academia page has a pretty up to date archive of texts
Excerpt from A Mouth Swallowing the Storm”
The cove, with its folds, chatters, ripples, striations is overcoded by settler geology language. Is
not home, is not campsite, is not hunting ground, is not fishing spot, is not hearth and campfire,
is “a treasure chest” of “artefacts”, proudly collected and interred in museological displays,
humidity controlled, protected against their journey towards dust, as their home would have it.
The otoliths have been listening across time that isn’t measured in ages but in moon rises, star
formations, cycles of birth and death, times of plenty, in fire and in ice. In smoking ceremonies.
The second time we went to Hallet Cove.
I saw the darkness descend. I saw the moon rise twice. I saw the waves going backwards
FORTHCOMING: Barratt, Virginia, and da Rimini, F. “A Mouth Swallowing the Storm”, Axon Journal, 43 no. 2 (2020)
Excerpt from “Cyberfeminist Timelords”
There were four. Of this I am fairly certain. C(o)unt them.
I remember this:
on the bus, they leaned in and whispered:
does the gen stand for
gender or generation?
Nothing is decided.
(for in the zero of the undecided is the roiling energy of becoming)
Instead the four simply fashion a vapor into the shape of an X
and set it free
Excerpt from “Vocal Womb and the ekphrasis machine (we die)”
Capture
Long thing, black snake light tipped goes up up into her nose. The insertion appears effortless. You see Eve’s throat waiting, moving like an animal, the stretchy mucus, the roof of her mouth, the muscular movements of the tongue. She uses a monitor on the floor in front of her to guide the scope down the back of her nose and into her throat. The music starts.
Is it going the wrong way? Is it going up up into the orbit of the eye rather than down towards the epiglottis, the laryngeal folds?
Excerpt from “Monstering the Logos Eros”
i mean we’re all damaged goods, right, and if we look with the naked eye (scales fallen) we get to see each other’s ragged parts, where selves become unseamly, and the fraying fabric is endearing and sobering, because yes, we see frailty and broken bits and tremulous insecurities. this mutual seeing—it’s like two wounds are kissing, and pathogens mingle and then there is an infection.
we are all we are all we are all so shattered and undeserving. and yet, pure. you know.
Excerpt from “SkipToEnd”
searching for a memento. what to do with a life-to-date and its accretions? you put it all neatly to bed in a skip, covered by a favorite rug, the crocheted op-shop rug, the comforter. you leave one woolen corner draped over the metal edging. a friend recovers the coveted comforter. it becomes part of the archives. the mongrel archives. the shapeless and fluxing interpretive archives, boxes growing soft with time and slumping under the weight of stories.
Mirror-shading Haraway, VNS Matrix regarded the “boundary between science fiction and social reality” as “an optical illusion,” and created some hybrid creatures of fiction to perform a static glitching across quasi borders, reconstituting in the material on one side of the screen or the other, the screen being a portal, no more opaque than the skin of a river.
Into this diffuse space, the virus of the New World Disorder, All New Gen and eir brood, instantiated themselves.
We, the human carriers, bared our throats to the fangs of medusa and, intoxicated by her visionary poison, we became-incubator of worlds of words, hatcherie of entities, ectogenetic mothers of monsters, contested agendered creatures that defied representation.
Excerpt from “SLICE“
i stop in the middle of a blizzard of leaves,
dancing in the sudden hot wind. close my eyes.
(this isn’t happening)
nature’s abstraction performs distance,
wilderness, estrangement. in the smoke haze, in
the finch frenzy, in the snapping whipbird call,
in the hot (still) breeze, in the glittering glittering
green-there i fall together in grace.
(this isn’t happening)
in this moment of bursting free of the infinity of
suffocating folds i am beautiful
Barratt, Virginia. “SLICE”, Plinth Journal no.6, 2016
Excerpt from “Vice and the Sincerity Emergency”
These images, in their erasure of any hint of messy, ugly, living and dying women, allow a kind of not-talking about suicide. They allow us to not-see Sylvia’s cherry-red face, or the cyanotic blue hue of a strangulation, or the broken body and caved-in skull of a self-defenestration. The problem with these images is that they also allow us to not-see a meaningful representation of the moments before the act, which for these women were probably not ‘quiet’ or ‘eerily beautiful’ but filled with terror and desperation at the dissolution of identity. The problem with these images is their use of the suicide act – which, if nothing else, is a sincere one – to sell the insincere transience of coolness, a consensual hallucination of infallible, almost Stepford-like autonomy.
Barratt, Virginia and Addison, H. “Vice and the Sincerity Emergency”, July 9th, 2013
For selected publications, see full resume (download from home page)