“Genre and form defying, VANTAGE POINTS is a remarkably subversive book by one of our generation’s most brilliant trans media-makers. At once a vigorous intellectual engagement with the work of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, a lyrical family counter-history, a formal experiment, and a powerful reckoning with inherited trauma, violence, and (relatedly) normative masculinity, VANTAGE POINTS is an absolutely unprecedented non-fiction project that’s as inventive as it is deeply moving. I loved this book.”
HIGHLIGHTS
SHORTLIST: HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
BEST NON-FICTION BOOK OF 2024: CBC
BEST QUEER BOOK OF 2024: AUTOSTRADDLE
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.
““In this impossible-to-classify work of nonfiction, trans writer, filmmaker, and critic Chase Joynt uses text and images to explore memory, masculinity, forms of language, archival violence and memory, the history of media, pop culture, and more.... If you’re looking for something unusual and beautiful, thought-provoking and funny, tender and smart, and, most of all, if you love a book that feels like a work of art—this unconventional memoir is for you.”
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“VANTAGE POINTS is 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.”
“I’m not sure anyone has ever encountered a media theory as moving as this. VANTAGE POINTS realizes the profound possibility of media theory to operate itself like a technology and mechanism of survival.”
“It’s a bold experiment that is as visual as it is textual, as intellectually challenging as it is artistically triumphant.”