Dodie Bellamy

"Kun sairailla on kaikki valta" on kirjailija-esseisti Dodie Bellamyn esseekokoelma. Bellamy käsittelee esseissään muun muassa Occupy-liikkeettä, poliittista runoutta, kotikaupunkinsa San Franciscon gentrifikaatio- ja kodittomuusongelmaa, äitinsä kuolemaa, moniallergisuutta, lapsuuttaan ruostevyöhykkeen terästehtaiden varjossa, kirjailijakollegoitaan Kathy Ackeria ja Eileen Mylesia sekä oksentamista kirjallisena tekniikkana. Kokoelman läpi kulkevat sairauden ja terveyden, turvan ja vaaran teemat, joita tarkastellaan niin yksilön kuin yhteiskunnankin tasolla. Bellamylle tyypilliseen tyyliin esseissä eletty elämä, politiikka ja ruumis limittyvät jatkuvasti toisiinsa. Dodie Bellamy (s. 1951) on tunnettu kokeellisesta proosastaan, joka perustuu vahvasti hänen omaelämäkerralliseen kokemusmaailmaansa. Yhdysvaltain keskilännen ruostevyöhykkeeltä kotoisin oleva mutta San Franciscoon ja sen kirjallisuuspiireihin asettunut Bellamy toimi 80-luvulla osana Feminist Writer's Guildia sekä New Narrativea eli uuskerrontaa, 70-luvun lopun San Franciscossa kehittynyttä kirjailijayhteisöä, jonka jäsenistä suuri osa edusti seksuaalivähemmistöjä ja joiden teoksia luonnehti yhdistelmä tunnustuksellisuutta, muotokokeiluja ja transgressiivisuutta. Bellamya pidetään edelläkävijänä joukolle amerikkalaisia naiskirjailijoita, jotka kirjoittavat esseen ja fiktion välillä häilyvää omaelämäkerrallista proosaa: mm. Maggie Nelson ja Chris Kraus ovat myöntäneet Bellamyn vaikutuksen omaan tuotantoonsa.

Bellamy's debut novel revives a minor character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm only psychic. ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ...--Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate this minor character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.

A writer takes on subjects as varied as vomit, Kathy Acker's wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, in lyric explorations of illness, health, and the body. A moving meld of essay, memoir, and story, When the Sick Rule the World collects Dodie Bellamy's new and recent lyric prose. Taking on topics as eclectic as vomit, Kathy Acker's wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, Bellamy here examines illness, health, and the body-both the social body and the individual body-in essays that glitter with wit even at their darkest moments. In a safe house in Marin County, strangers allergic to the poisons of the world gather for an evening's solace. In Oakland, protesters dance an ecstatic bacchanal over the cancerous body of the city-state they love and hate. In the elegiac memoir, "Phone Home," Bellamy meditates on her dying mother's last days via the improbable cipher of Steven Spielberg's E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Finally, Bellamy offers a piercing critique of the displacement and blight that have accompanied Twitter's move into her warehouse-district neighborhood, and the pitiless imperialism of tech consciousness. A participant in the New Narrative movement and a powerful influence on younger writers, Bellamy views heteronormativity and capitalism as plagues, and celebrates the micro-revolts of those on the outskirts. In its deft blending of forms, When the Sick Rule the World resiliently and defiantly proclaims the "undeath of the author." In the realm of sickness, Bellamy asserts, subjectivity is not stable. "When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy," Bellamy prophesies. Those defined by society as sick may, in fact, be its saviors.