Lessons From a Starfish

This chapter focuses on the lyrics from “Cripple and the Starfish, " a song recorded by Antony and the Johnsons that deliberately uses a discredited, pejorative term for a disabled person to evoke the difficult or negative feelings associated with being stigmatized. The “growing back” capacities of the starfish become an opportunity for thinking through the difference between notions of the “transformative” and the “regenerative” in transsexual discourse. In ‘Cripple and the Starfish’, transformation is indeed a fusing of organisms, energies and sexes. The starfish seemingly appears as a stand-in for transsexual transformation-the animal appears only as a tool for thinking about beingness. Some species of starfish also reproduce asexually by fission, often with part of an arm becoming detached and eventually developing into an independent individual sea star. Some sea stars have the ability to regenerate lost arms. ‘Ripple’ with the ‘Cripple and the Starfish’ creates the carnal foundations for prefixial enactments that take meat and meaning seriously.