A Review of Chase Joynt’s Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir
(2024, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 256 pages)
By William Kuhns
“…my kind of study in communication is a study of transformation…”
Marshall McLuhan, “Living at the Speed of Light”, 1974
What can you say about a book that strains at becoming so many books, it feels ill-confined, almost imprisoned, within its own pages?
Chase Joynt is an award-winning filmmaker, born and raised in Canada, now living in Los Angeles. Joynt has written Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir, an extraordinarily constrained and constraining book. Vantage Points is a lucid memoir of a small town Ontario girl’s youth being thwarted and robbed by the serial sexual abuse of a malevolently self-indulgent uncle, known to the reader as X. Vantage Points is a kaleidoscopic splashwork of memories that often invoke media experiences, such as a recording that establishes a primal date of the uncle’s transgressions – not at 8, as the later Joynt originally suspected, but at 13. Vantage Points is an open-hearted homage to an uncle several stages removed, named Marshall McLuhan. Chase’s great-grandmother Mabel McLuhan (born in 1886 to William McLuhan and Margaret Murdoch) was a cousin of Marshall’s father Herbert. Vantage Points is also a stitchwork that knits all the threads of this remarkably multi-dimensional memoir into a weave highlighted by passages from the writings of Marshall McLuhan.
I have read only one other trans memoir, perhaps the earliest of them all, Conundrum, by Jan Morris, published in 1974. I remember that book as an elegant and impressionistic treatment of a celebrated travel author’s search to discover a long-suspected hidden identity and to have that occluded identity enabled and become made acceptably public by the grace of hormones and scalpel. Vantage Points bears only one point of resemblance to Morris’s graceful account: accomplishing the transition between genders. I am certain that Vantage Points, a deeply thoughtful glossing on the juncture points between memory and media – reads like no other memoir in memory, trans or otherwise.
Chase was born in 1971, and consequently belongs to a generation for whom media experiences are the keys to unlocking the meaning of other experiences. Any memoir writers seeking to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about their lives would be wise to master Joynt’s Vantage Points, particularly its exquisitely media-savvy approach to life events large and small.
But the book also rebels from its fascination with media, plumbing depths of ache and silence that no one can read without registering a powerfully resonant ache. In telling how his abusive uncle, X, bribed her with cigarettes, Joynt writes:
Some of my favorite memories from high school are of secretly smoking at the lake. There, cigarettes functioned as currency and capital to ease the anxious slippage between friendship and flirtation. It is in this scene that I recognize how X enabled ways of self-soothing that were also self-annihilating. The most enduring consequence of his contact: for me, to feel desire is to first feel shame. (164)
Among the many distinct pleasures of Joynt’s memoir is its construction. Here, in full, is the Table of Contents of Vantage Points. Some of it should be deeply familiar to readers of Marshall McLuhan.
- ANCHOR (Introduction)
- ALBUM (The Medium Is the Message)
- SPEECH (The Spoken Word)
- MIXTAPE (The Phonograph)
- TIMELINE (Clocks)
- ACCESS (Roads and Paper Routes)
- TONE (The Telephone)
- CAPTURE (The Photograph)
- HORMONE (Telegraph)
- WORN (Clothing)
- ANGLE (Movies)
- CONTEST (Radio)
- REACT (Television)
- TRUMP (Games)
- CHOKE (Ads)
- CONTEXT (The Typewriter)
- SKIN (Housing)
- HALLMARK (The Written Word)
- SIGHT (Weapons)
- SPINE (The Printed Word)
- GUT (Appendix)
Often, the most intimate memories of Vantage Points are interstitially woven with striking media insights. In one passage, Joynt recalls Sunday afternoons when the women sat at tables playing cards and the men filled the den, watching football or basketball on TV. The young girl who would later become Chase Joynt wandered freely between the two worlds, bored by the women, fascinated by the men.
As a child, I always thought it strange that large groups of white men would convene to critique what could only be summarized as Black male excellence. The room was so full of commentary but so little talent. In retrospect, I learned that television revealed just as much about the men watching as it did about the men on screen and that embracing Black athletes on Sundays allowed white people to feel less racist. (144)
We are privy to what the mature Joynt thinks and feels about the events of that childhood. We are not given much of a notion of just what that child felt:
X lived three blocks from the local high school, because I never reported him.
Malcolm [another predator of children] turned himself in.
At what point can one recognize, even in hindsight, a behavioural point of no return? And what stories must be constructed to justify such transgressions?
Many times, I have wanted to know, wanted to ask these questions of X.
Instead, I exchanged letters with Brian. (170-171)
One of the great charges of Vantage Points was to encounter what felt like ever-fresh words from a book I know well, to hear the angel whispering at Joynt’s shoulder repeating words from Understanding Media. McLuhan is not only a media philosopher to Chase Joynt, filmmaker and astute observer of a media-inundated culture. As the great-grandson of Mabel McLuhan, Joynt can proudly announce Marshall McLuhan to be a distant uncle by blood.
To me, the most luminous passages in Vantage Points were those that slipped McLuhan’s words through Joynt’s experiences with an effect as apt as the fit of the correct button through a buttonhole:
McLuhan argued that we habituate to technologies to make them less painful, and I have found the same to be true of masculinity. In this text, my family is a technology that produces me as both masculine and feminine in turns, and I harness that instability of association, as well as my transition from female to male in my twenties, to think across gender and genre simultaneously. (12)
“[McLuhan writes:] “It is the theme of Understanding Media that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary ”closure of the senses that cause us to conform to the pattern of experience presented.”
[Joynt writes:] It is the theme of Vantage Points that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of masculinity can head off the ordinary ‘closure’of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. (15)
McLuhan died on December 31,1980 – six months before I was born, twenty-six years before I transitioned, and thirty-eight years before I would start writing him into our family history. (22)
For McLuhan, “getting in touch” is a matter of the senses, “of sight translated into sound and sound into movement and taste and smell.” Words, as technologies of explicitness, both translate and obscure our experience.
To see X in her inbox, to read his articulation in language, is to be reminded of my body.
To see X in my inbox, to read his articulation in language, is to be reminded of his smell. (39)
To help my mother find her own answers, I shuffle through the material hauntings and traces of my grandfather-in-ruin, recognizing him as the X of another story. “When the interrelatedness of many things is made plain,” explains McLuhan, “then the mind is freed from any watchful fretting over any one of them.” (204)
Have I mentioned that this small paperback book is designed to make great effect of its photographs and graphics? It carries echoes of more than one McLuhan book – there are no direct quotes but there are many echoes in layout from The Medium Is the Massage of 1967.
I urge anyone to read Vantage Points, a memoir of electrifyingly fresh perceptions, both personal and media-ignited, the best of them often modulated through Marshall McLuhan’s voice.
