Vantage Points

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By (author): Chase Joynt

Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

A provocative book by an acclaimed writer-filmmaker that combines memoir and media as seen through a trans lens

Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt’s previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt’s family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them. To do so, Joynt stages a series of vignettes that place memoir in the context of other sources, media, and stories to create a tapestry – a montage-like experience of reading with surprising and revealing juxtapositions.

Joynt writes about difficult pasts and connects them to contemporary politics and ways of being, employing McLuhan’s seminal Understanding Media as an inciting framework. Vantage Points is a kaleidoscopic reckoning with the impact of media and masculinity on the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, a unique and highly visual approach to trans life writing, and an experimental move between gender and genre.

With black-and-white illustrations.

AUTHOR

Chase Joynt

Chase Joynt is a Toronto-based moving-image artist and writer who has exhibited his work internationally. He recently received a Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

Chase Joynt has created a truly unique text of media as trans memoir He presents his personal narratives only within the context of other sources media and stories such as the writing of wellknown Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan with whom Joynt discovers he has a previously unknown connection The result is a book that brazenly flouts conventions of both genre and form Its a bold experiment that is as visual as it is textual as intellectually challenging as it is artistically triumphant Autostraddle Best Queer Books of the Year

Vantage Pointsdefies genre conventions It is a metareckoning with the work of famed Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan whose edict the medium is the message Joynt prods ponders and explodes to exciting effect throughout The work also serves as an arresting family memoir about the long tail of childhood trauma It presents itself as an exciting formal experiment while offering a moving reckoning of normative masculinity with a trans lens Thomas McBee forBOMB

An effective experiment in form and a moving exploration of how context colours interpretation and how both affect the nature of truthThe WalrusBest Books of Fall 2024

Im not sure anyone has ever encountered a media theory as moving as thisVantage Pointsrealizes the profound possibility of media theory to operate itself like a technology and mechanism of survival Sarah Sharma coeditor ofReUnderstanding Media Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan

Joynt delivers an original meditation on trauma and transitioning Drawing on the media theorist Marshall McLuhans writings to reflect on surviving childhood sexual abuse Joynt juxtaposes episodes from his life with McLuhans insights creating meaning through literary montage Enigmatic yet evocative this demands to be read on its own termsPublishers Weekly

Genre and form defyingVantage Pointsis a remarkably subversive book by one of our generations most brilliant trans mediamakers At once a vigorous intellectual engagement with the work of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan a lyrical family counterhistory a formal experiment and a powerful reckoning with inherited trauma violence and relatedly normative masculinityVantage Pointsis an absolutely unprecedented nonfiction project thats as inventive as it is deeply moving I loved this book Thomas Page McBee author ofAmateurandMan Alive

Vantage Pointsis a stunning work that offers new ideas compassion and hope for a kinder egalitarian future that may let us all heal breathe and truly be Elliot Page author ofPageboy A Memoir