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I can’t apply for another grant

Jinghua Qian, ‘I can’t apply for another grant’, Un magazine 14.2 (print, audio and digital), November 2020. Edited by Elena Gomez.

My friends keep sending me grants and opportunities. I appreciate it, I really do. It’s nice to know that people are thinking of me. But I never want to apply for a grant again. I can’t. My body recoils. It feels like taking my skin off for nothing.

We’ve all been talking a lot this year about the perverse relationship between art, money and survival. ‘Artists are in a constant state of precarity and crisis,’ I wrote in July. ‘For many of us, there’s nothing to return to, nothing to recover. The status quo is already broken. It’s an empty bowl — with a smear of racism, sexism and ableism to boot.’

In August, I followed up with an opinion piece in The Guardian about going on the dole and navigating the sadistic and absurd mutual obligations system for welfare recipients: ‘It does nothing to help people find work. It’s just a complicated, expensive way of penalising people for being poor.’ But as awful as Centrelink is, arts funding is somehow even worse. At least the dole is ongoing and not a lottery. Arts funding bodies, on the other hand, want you to craft a 10-page proposal to compete for a minuscule chance at a trickle of money. One template rejection I received this year said that only six per cent of applicants had been successful. Another rejection came to me five months after applications had closed. In both cases, the grants themselves were less than $5,000 — not even three weeks’ worth of the average weekly earnings for a full-time adult worker in Australia.1

The quick-response grants that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic were often no better. My eyes glazed over as I scanned the same buzzwords: resilience, adaptability, relief. Each time I was left confused about whether these grants were intended to provide for my welfare or to fund new projects and activities — whether they were offered as charity or investment. Each time I felt like I was handing in my CV and portfolio at the soup kitchen counter. Each time my shoulders seized, awaiting judgement, anticipating rejection. This is not relief.

For all its faults, JobSeeker is easily the most effective arts funding program in this country. Going on the dole has helped my career and my craft far more than any arts grant ever has. Knowing that the fortnightly payments will at least cover my rent is a huge relief, pulling the plug from my brimming tub of baseline anxiety. It’s also given me more intellectual and creative freedom because I’m less reliant on fitting my vision to the categories and priorities of funding bodies. I don’t have to contort my work so that it speaks to diversity instead of antiracism, inclusion instead of decolonisation, identity instead of ideology, or other bureaucratic definitions that are always just slightly misaligned with my own thinking.

Thanks to JobSeeker, I’ve done some of my best work this year. In fact, I’ve been weirdly prolific, pitching and publishing more than ever. I’m much more comfortable pitching to editors than applying for grants. Media and publishing is still subject to commercial imperatives, of course, and that comes with its own set of problems and limitations, but the grant process feels particularly alienating, disheartening and disruptive. All I ever want from the arts funding bureaucracy is time to write, and JobSeeker gives me that without getting between me and my audience. I think if more people could access the dole, and the rate were higher, it would make an enormous difference to cultural life. I would rather arts organisations fight for that than for more arts funding.

Most independent artists are already working across a range of industries in order to survive, and many rely on welfare, but often arts advocacy tends to emphasise how art is exceptional. I think it’s worth taking note of the peculiarities of making art, but we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture. We need to organise in solidarity with workers in education, media, publishing and other cultural industries, and even beyond. I’m not convinced that it’s useful or even truthful to focus narrowly on how artists are special when our needs are the same as those of all precarious workers — of all people.

The pandemic has generated plenty of chatter about saving the arts, but it’s also burnished the deep ambivalence many of us feel about this sector and how it operates. In the conversations I’ve had with other artists, there’s always an undercurrent of revolutionary rage. We’ve all been talking about how this year offers an opportunity to rethink this sector — what if we set it on fire and started over?

Arts funding is a cancer. Applying for it has become its own job, a job no one enjoys or wants. I’m not sure that anyone is even funding the arts, really — it feels more like art happens by accident as a decorative footnote to the work of endless applications, assessments, acquittals and evaluations. I’m sure some of these elements were once designed as accountability mechanisms, but they have grown monstrously out of control. Like the mutual obligation system for welfare recipients, the arts funding process is disproportionate and counterproductive. There are easier ways to give artists money.

I think a competition-based funding model is inherently destructive. I don’t understand why it’s accepted that in the arts, sport and entertainment industries a tiny elite should profit and everyone else should suffer in poverty for daring to try. Even under capitalism, that’s not how it works in most professions. Funding shouldn’t be a prize or an honour, it should provide a living wage so people can make art without some other source of wealth or income.

We’ve all been talking about this for such a long time and I’m so tired of it. I don’t want to tinker with this system, shifting the priorities and massaging the language. I’m not excited about heralding a new cohort of gatekeepers. I’m not interested in diversity and inclusion. I just want to overthrow capitalism already.

Ultimately, I don’t believe in meritocracy. I don’t believe in excellence. Survival is not a reward. We all deserve to have our basic needs met.

I don’t understand why it’s easier to get paid to administer arts funding than to make art. I don’t understand most of the jobs that exist in this society — they seem to bear no relation to the world that I live in or what it needs. They bear no relation to what I understand as value or a life worth living. Capitalism devalues so much work that’s important and necessary while creating jobs that just tick boxes and move money around. I think that might be the most dystopian thing in this hellscape. We live in a time when no one needs to be hungry, homeless or overworked. It should be possible for all of us to thrive. I want a radical redistribution of time and resources, a reimagining of labour and value. I want to unravel this tangle of art, money and survival so that the next time we talk about this, it’s an entirely different conversation.

1. For May 2020, full-time adult average weekly earnings in Australia were $1,713.90. See: ‘Average Weekly Earnings, Australia,’ Australian Bureau of Statistics, 15 August 2020.

Jinghua Qian is a Shanghainese writer living in Melbourne, on the land of the Kulin Nations. Ey has written on desire, resistance and diaspora for Overland, Meanjin, Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian.

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Walking away, backwards; or, woman-lite in women’s lit

Jinghua Qian, ‘Walking away, backwards; or woman-lite in women’s lit’, Feminist Writers Festival, 20 November 2020. Edited by Cher Tan.

When I got asked to write something for Feminist Writers Festival, I started to say no. I typed up a new version of the response I’ve sent so many times that I should probably just save it as a template: Thanks for thinking of me! I really appreciate the invitation, but at present I feel it’s not my place as not-a-woman to take this platform…

But Cher and I chatted a bit more, and I came around to the idea that perhaps this conversation is worth having in public, especially in a feminist literary space.

*

Leaving womanhood reminds me of the apologetic way I exited the church – looking to the altar, sidestepping, genuflecting before turning my back on the cross. I used to be a woman and a Catholic, and it seems that until I commit to a new god or gender, I’ll forever remain a lapsed Catholic and womanish. Woman-lite.

In early 2015, I wrote this poem while on the cusp of leaving:

leaving traces

being a woman costs too much
were it a job I’d have quit

but that’s not it, as such
it feels more like kin
like folks I didn’t choose
but begrudgingly belong to

other women make it
almost worthwhile

but that’s not it as such,
it feels more like a place
that follows me as I leave

like I don’t really speak the language anymore
but somehow it still shows on my face

All these years of wearing
elsewhere in my eyes
can I afford another layer
of answering why I am here
where did I come from
what is my real name

I am solid until I’m touched
then diaspora
       one thousand pieces
of wandering
                       my face already
conveys
                                                       too much

*

Whenever I’m asked to speak or write or perform for a feminist event, I see myself go out of body again. For a split second, I slip into a parallel life of being a woman and doing woman things. I mean, I don’t know what ‘woman things’ are – maybe I never did – and probably binary gender is a prison even for cis people. Of course I don’t think that feminism is only for women, or that feminist spaces should necessarily be women’s spaces. But I also know that I’m accepted by the sisterhood because I’m seen as woman-lite. Close enough.

I’m not a woman and I’m not a man. Genderfluid, if I’m forced to answer, or nonbinary, though that doesn’t always fit. It’s okay if you don’t know what that means, because sometimes I don’t either. Whenever I’m asked to identify with a gender, I offer a string of finicky metaphors.

I grew up as a girl. I’ve been referring to myself with gender-neutral pronouns – inconsistently – for the last fifteen years, even when I was cis. I stopped understanding myself as a cis woman around five years ago, but the only thing I did to ‘transition’ was to revert to my birth name. I am still interpreted and interpellated as a woman most of the time. I am not trans enough for most trans people. And I hated writing this paragraph: I hate describing myself in this naked and banal way, but I don’t think any of this will make sense otherwise.

There were two other things I did as part of my ‘transition’ (although that feels like far too momentous a word to describe these reversible administrative tasks). One of them was to ask my friends to refer to me with gender-neutral pronouns. The other was to leave all the women’s groups I was in – mostly networks for women of colour. Even when I was cis, I was never white, so I was never all that comfortable in most Australian feminist spaces to begin with.

The following year, I left the continent. By the time I came back to Australia three years later, a lot of these women’s groups had shifted their remit to accepting various configurations of ‘woman and other’: women and nonbinary folk, for instance, or everyone but cis men. Effectively, these groups feel like women 2.0 or women* or women+. Women – which is to say cis women – and people with footnotes. Women plus women-lite. After all, these are feminist spaces converted from (cis-centric) women’s spaces, and they show their bones.

I joined several groups for writers and editors that still have names like ‘Binders Full of Women’, though their descriptions specify that genderqueer and nonbinary people are included too. Most of the genderqueer and nonbinary people in these spaces seem to be people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB), like me.

Feminist spaces typically welcome AFAB nonbinary people while freezing out nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth (AMAB). Often, there are more AFAB non-women in women’s spaces than there are trans women. As a nonbinary person who is not a woman yet easily accepted as one, my presence in feminist and women’s spaces is often framed as part of a positive shift towards greater trans inclusion: oh, trans people, we have those! But I know the hospitality I receive is frequently also a form of trans erasure – an insistence on seeing us as the genders we were assigned. The overrepresentation of AFAB non-women in these spaces can reinforce the exclusion and marginalisation of AMAB people.

Everyone has their own interpretation of this. I’m not necessarily asking AFAB nonbinary people to withdraw from feminist spaces. Neither am I asking all women’s groups to include nonbinary people. It’s okay to have things that are just for women, as well as things for not-men, as well as things for everyone who wants to see the end of patriarchy. I get that we’re all still figuring out how to do feminism beyond binary gender – it’s an ongoing process of collective political imagination alongside individual calibration. But I’m always reassessing myself in relation to gendered spaces: Is this too woman for me? Am I going to be useful here? Personally, I’m also pretty accustomed to not feeling at home anywhere – and this is often a good thing, a productive tension. The can of worms fertilises the soil.

But whether it’s Feminist Writers Festival, Facebook writers’ groups, or other feminist literary initiatives like the Stella Prize, I think it’s important to remember that you can’t simply tweak the category of woman to accommodate nonbinary people. Nonbinary disturbs the foundations of binary gender because it’s supposed to. It’s intentionally an interruption, a question as well as an identity.

Some nonbinary people would prefer to depoliticise and domesticate it – to say that my being nonbinary doesn’t affect you and your gender, and that it’s just another identity in a sea of gender diversity, that it’s not an ideology. That’s not totally true for me. I do think my gender should make a difference in how you think about yours and vice versa. Gender is relational and mine isn’t constituted in a vacuum. I’m not sorry for making this complicated. Ask me to do a feminist thing, and I have to ask: What is the relationship between feminism and women? What is a woman?

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It doesn’t work like that | VCOSS

Jinghua Qian, ‘It doesn’t work like that’, Victorian Council of Social Service, 16 July 2020. Edited by Miriam Sved. Commissioned for the VCOSS #MyCorona series.

This is not your typical unemployment story. My experience is a little unusual. But maybe that’s precisely the point: the Covid-19 response from both state and federal governments makes certain assumptions about how we work, and a lot of us just don’t work that way.

I’m a writer. But often writing doesn’t really pay, or rather, the type of writing that’s worth doing tends to pay poorly, slowly, and irregularly, if at all. Writing is both a vocation and a profession but it’s often not a job in a recognisable way. You cobble together a living out of various odds and ends while trying to build a career, and if there happens to be overlap between your life’s work and the things you get paid for, then you consider yourself lucky.

I’ve been lucky. Over the last decade, I’ve had jobs ranging from call centre operator to head of news at a well-regarded international media outlet. I’ve also drawn freelance income from writing, editing, public speaking, performing, radio and podcast making, producing events, transcribing, and proofreading. And I’ve done a lot of unpaid work in arts and activism, both for myself and for the world I want. I’m used to keeping lots of plates spinning.

Before the pandemic properly hit Australia, I was working at an online media outlet as a writer and editor on a fixed-term contract. I left that job in early March to become a full-time freelancer. A week later, the country went into lockdown. The arts sector (my main client) was totally devastated as theatres, galleries, cinemas and music venues closed. Media outlets also started slashing their budgets and shedding staff.

I was terrified. I was supposed to be building my freelance business but instead it seemed like the entire industry was collapsing. Plus, maybe the world was ending. I kept seeing petitions calling for more government support for the arts, which I dutifully signed, but it felt like holding a placard in a tornado. I was reeling from shock and glued to the news, too struck with grief and uncertainty to apply for any of the grants or relief funds that started to pop up. I also didn’t know how to answer the question of how much income I’d lost because I’d only just started.

But I was still writing, still pitching, still numbly hustling away. There were the weeks where everyone only wanted Covid-related content, and then suddenly everyone wanted to read about something else. I struggled to come up with ideas; almost everything seemed in poor taste for this crisis.

When I did get work, it was beset by all the predictable freelance problems: by mid-May, I was still waiting on payment for work completed in March. For some commissions, I spent more time chasing payment and wrangling paperwork than I’d spent doing (and being paid for) the work itself. As a freelancer, I usually have few rights and no leverage to negotiate, though salaried staff aren’t necessarily faring much better – a few of my articles are stuck in limbo because the companies are going through layoffs.

It seemed like I’d chosen a terrible time to leave my job, but there were also benefits to joining the teeming ranks of the unemployed during a global pandemic. So many mutual aid groups sprang up. Newspapers that are ordinarily devoted to vilifying welfare recipients softened their stance. The federal government doubled the payment that jobseekers receive. On the one hand, it made me feel sick to see how politicians and media commentators divided up the deserving and undeserving poor, but on the other, it showed me what a critical mass can achieve. What a testament to the power of the collective! It only took a pandemic for people to see that social security is just as its name implies – an essential feature of a safe and healthy society.

Eventually, I managed to get on the dole, which I probably wouldn’t have been eligible for under the normal rules. It was still a frustrating process – no one would advise me on whether I was supposed to apply for Jobseeker or Jobkeeper, and most of the available information didn’t make sense for sole traders – but overall it seemed less punitive and humiliating than the usual Centrelink experience.

I was already a union member with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance – which suspended fees for members who requested it – and in March I also joined the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union. It feels like there’s an opportunity now to turn some of the lessons of the pandemic into real change.

So much of the emergency response from state and federal governments seems to misunderstand the ongoing precarity that many of us are in. Writers are far from the only ones for whom the pandemic just pours fuel onto the pre-existing problems of capitalism today, but the crisis has made it very obvious just how unsustainable the arts and media industries are, even as people consume more news, music, television and film than ever.

As Jacinda Woodhead – then editor of long-running literary journal Overland –wrote last year, the Australia Council for the Arts funding system fosters a ‘disposable arts culture’ focused on the new and shiny. As a result, artists are in a constant state of precarity and crisis.

That means that for many of us, there’s nothing to return to, nothing to recover. The status quo is already broken. It’s an empty bowl – with a smear of racism, sexism and ableism to boot.

In May, Naomi Riddle, editor of online arts platform Running Dog, wrote:

The arts community, then, continues on in a state of unending precarity. But a consequence of this tenuousness is a refusal to reckon with its decades-long reliance on government subsidies, philanthropic donations and corporate sponsorship. […] Is it any wonder that when some of us hear the phrase ‘art sector’ combined with ‘unprecedented times’, we find ourselves without the capacity or the belief or the will or the desire to invest whole-heartedly in ‘saving’ it?

It feels like a cliché at this point to say that a reckoning is long overdue, but it’s true. The way things were – it wasn’t working. I’m not sure I have anything cogent and concise to say about my hopes for the months ahead, because I can only whisper, naively, sheepishly: What if we never go back?

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How coronogamy (coronavirus-induced monogamy) reshaped my sex life

Jinghua Qian, ‘How coronogamy (coronavirus-induced monogamy) has changed my sex life‘, MTV, 24 June 2020. Edited by Alice Griffin.

I’ve been polyamorous for nearly 20 years. Non-monogamy is all I’ve known, and normally I don’t like to define things in a hierarchy, with a primary partner and secondary partners. To me, part of the point of having open relationships is that you leave the paddock unfenced. Things go how they go.

But I live with my girlfriend and no one else, so once the lockdown started in Victoria, we found ourselves in social isolation together. At first, I found it confronting to be thrust into what felt like forced monogamy. ‘Coronogamy,’ I called it – coronavirus-induced monogamy.

Before lockdown, I was seeing a few people but all quite sporadically. I figured if I wasn’t even going to spend time with my fam, then it didn’t make sense to get together with relative strangers. My girlfriend has an ongoing lover who she normally sees pretty often but they also stopped meeting up in iso.

For sure, I missed the specific thrill of these encounters, of foreign bodies in orbit all fresh and keen. But it wasn’t just that. There have been other times in my life when I’ve happily been dating just one person, but it was never under the stricture of monogamy. This felt different and inorganic. Though ultimately, we decided ourselves that we wouldn’t see other people for a bit, I resented feeling like the state had steered me into precisely the kind of relationship hierarchy I’d spent so long trying to avoid.

There’s a lot of advice out there for people who are ‘opening up’ their relationship – not so much, it seems, for what to do if you’re ‘closing down’.

One of the reasons I had decided to be polyamorous as a precocious and overly online 15-year-old was because I felt my friendships weren’t less important, or even categorically different, from my romantic relationships. Monogamy seemed like a false and arbitrary way to classify attraction, intimacy and commitment. But now we’re asked to divvy our entire worlds into the essential and inessential. That’s fair but still uncomfortable.

I’ve been feverishly following news about the pandemic since January, reading story after tragic story, so I take the health precautions very seriously. I’m not in any doubt about the severity of this situation. But nonetheless, as a queer person of colour who relies on a lot of different people for care and support, I winced at how government responses reinforced the nuclear family as the primary organising unit of society. It made me think of that poster by Deborah Kelly and Tina Fiveash that depicts a retro family eating sandwiches: ‘Hey hetero, when they say family, they mean you!’ Very quickly, we saw how lockdown laws targeted communities that are already overpoliced while wealthy white neighbourhoods received few fines.

It feels very much like some ways of looking after each other are more acceptable than others. So that’s the awkward context in which I am effectively experiencing monogamy for the first time. There’s a lot of advice out there for people who are ‘opening up’ their relationship – not so much, it seems, for what to do if you’re ‘closing down’.

For me it was important to be conscious of how the lockdown was affecting my emotions and our dynamic. As well as having little contact with other people, isolation meant that my girlfriend and I were spending a lot more time together because she was working from home. I need hefty doses of solitude, both as a writer and just as a person, so I had to remember to set aside alone time. Organising mini-dates at home helped us be more deliberate about the time we were spending together and created a sense of occasion within the amorphous sludge of isolation.

There are definitely times where I’ve relied on a variety of lovers and others to anchor me to my body. That’s not possible now.

While time was disintegrating, space was also warped. Everywhere outside my flat seemed more or less equidistant, so I took that as a sign that I should put more effort into my neglected transnational friendships. I also started sexting friends and strangers, turning off the geolocator in apps because it didn’t matter anymore whether someone was in Manila or Milan.

I’m not really a sender of nudes (though I happily receive them) but I found a lot of pleasure and intrigue in text-based flirting. It felt like a wormhole into the way I used the internet when I was a teenager in the early 2000s – anonymous, disembodied, and intensely intimate. I’m often nostalgic for that kind of Livejournal-era sentimentality so that was really appealing. As a genderfluid person, I relished how cybersex let me build my body in words, and I discovered that the lockdown could be weaponised in all sorts of fun and kinky scenarios. It’s a good time for anyone who gets off on withholding.

But quarantine can also trigger its own special brand of dissociation and dysphoria. When everything is unreal and endlessly deferred, it’s all too easy to ghost on yourself. Some days I seem to just disappear. The boundary between my body and the internet is dissolving more with each day and despite this situation originating in a virus, it seems that if I stay in my room, there’s nothing that will force me to confront being flesh.

My friend and fellow polyam queer, the comedian Lisa-Skye, broke up with a lover of 7 years during the lockdown. “It’s a weird fucking thing because you can’t do that stuff, healthy or otherwise, that you might normally do,” she told me. “You can’t go on a few inconsequential dates or bang a random. You have to sit with the decision.”

There are definitely times where I’ve relied on a variety of lovers and others to anchor me to my body. That’s not possible now. The best and hardest part of this has been having all the time in the world to work out how to be my own primary.