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.
“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.”
“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.”