Cavar is a transMad writer-about-town, author of five chapbooks, and editor-in-chief of manywor(l)ds.place. They are a PhD candidate in cultural studies and science and technology studies at the University of California, Davis, where they’re working on a dissertation about anti-psychiatry, gender anarchism and identificatory self-determination on the internet.

I spoke with Cavar about their science fiction novel Failure to Comply, which was released in late 2024. We discuss values-aligned publishing, the merits and constraints of genre, body modification, language and hope in liberatory and anti-capitalist spaces, and writing science fiction during times of rapid, turbulent, and often ominous technological advancements.

Failure to Comply is “an abolitionist text concerned with trans, disabled, and Mad liberation as a speculative art”.

Keene Short: Hi Cavar, I want to start by asking about your experience working Featherproof Books as your publisher.

Cavar: It’s been fantastic. I was very concerned about finding a press for this novel that was values-aligned in a variety of senses, including my craft and non- or anti-genre approach. I didn’t want to be semantically brutalised by a copy editor.

KS: Throughout the novel, the antagonistic regime named RSCH, uses capitalised, bold messages, such as STOP. What inspired this usage? And where do you see that operating outside the text?

Cavar: The simple answer is that I am a psychiatric survivor, and I’m Mad. The STOP was derived from a technique in cognitive behavioral therapy called Stop Thought. I learned about this when I was in the psych ward.

Stop Thought is basically a technique of countering thoughts that “exponentially catastrophise”. So, the counter to ruminating – which is itself a pathological term – is, according to many in the psychiatric industry, a technique called Stop Thought. This is the shit that sells when you go into a psychiatric facility: suddenly, the goal is not even to heal, it’s to make you compliant.

I think that the epistemological model that psychiatry is grounded in is not redeemable. That should be a top concern for anybody organising toward a livable future. Psychiatry is a form of policing.

Perhaps an interesting question is: what do we collectively do about the inevitable risks that happen when you are operating outside of frameworks you’ve been told are safe? What happens when someone is in a crisis, and you’ve chosen not to call the cops? When someone is trying to kill themselves and you have made a commitment not to forcibly institutionalise them?

In Failure to Comply, by placing Reya and the narrator, named I, and other characters in the context of the wilderness, I was trying to figure out how care plays out in light of all of these material risks. And then I amped it up to 11 by having all of these wildly unsanitary surgical practices happening. That’s the benefit of writing speculative work.

KS: I’m curious about the origins of the novel’s concept of self-hacking as a form of body modification. In the novel, characters who escape the reaches of RSCH and into the woods graft a new limb onto their body or a new organ inside themselves. I’m curious where this idea comes from, and why the narrator self-hacks a third arm and a second stomach in particular?

Cavar: I was thinking about prosthesis, but also gender affirming surgery within a larger context of conceptual body modification that isn’t easily medically capturable.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these documentaries, but there was this one guy who turned himself into a tiger through body mods that everyone found very controversial, because people felt entitled to his body, even though it was his. Another example is people getting elf ears. They’re doing procedures that are kind of trans-adjacent, in terms of bodily autonomy, personal choice and affirmation.

There’s this one guy who started removing people’s nipples upon request, which is super common when you’re getting a mastectomy. It’s also super common among a certain subset of trans people to not have nipple grafts and to simply have their nipples removed. I currently have nipples despite having had top surgery, although in hindsight – given the healing process – I probably would have chosen not to if I could go back. They’re a real pain in the ass to heal. They just look like infected pepperonis for a really long time.

But this guy is removing people’s nipples, and he’s this random cishet dude getting weird culture war comments and he’s like, I’m literally just doing weird stuff to people’s bodies because they pay me for it! It’s really funny to see the ways that these topics materialise in everyday discourse.

These kinds of conversations were really influential on my thinking. In the novel, we’re not using the word “queer”, and we’re not using the word “trans” and we’re not using the word “disabled”, because ‘normal’ knowledge doesn’t work here. How are we imagining modification and autonomy, anyway? What I found was that I don’t see a functional difference between hormones and top surgery and someone wanting to get a second stomach added, or another arm [in the context of the novel].

Consumption – eating, ingesting and excreting – is the other area where bodily autonomy is super contested. We see this in ascriptions of eating disorders given to people on hunger strike. We see this in pathological associations of anorexia. The presumption underneath is that a certain contingent of people being in control of their own lives is somehow undesirable.

Failure to Comply is out now through Featherproof Books.

KS: Do you consider this a hopeful novel, and if so, where in the novel, or outside of it, do you find hope?

Cavar: [Abolitionist activist and organiser] Mariame Kaba said that “hope is a discipline”, and I agree with that. I think that hope is a practice. For me, figuring out how to end this novel was a challenge in and of itself, because I didn’t want to go the route of “everything is fixed” or “everything is terrible”.

I realised that part of writing a book like this means writing up to the very point at which I don’t know enough to write anymore, which is why you see so many crumbling syntactical moves and blanknesses in the novel. So many of those things are the result of me thinking, There’s no word for this, no language, so I’m just gonna go: blank blank blank. They’re borne of the realisation that there is nothing else I can do to represent this, so I’ll non-represent it.

I was really scared to write the ending because I knew it wouldn’t be a real ending, but I realised the ending didn’t actually need to focus on what was happening inside the walls of the novel or inside the walls of RSCH, but what conclusions and feelings that I had come to over the course of writing.

I also came to a conclusion that trapdoors are inevitable. Every reality, as much as it is invented, has that photo negative, that underside. Finding it won’t necessarily fix anything – it might make things worse – but the point isn’t to have a direction, but to know that the trapdoor is there.

And this doesn’t mean that imagining otherwise is always a site of good resistance. I end by pointing the narrator, I, toward both another possible reality in which they have been rendered compliant, and also toward whatever exists beyond it, to say these aren’t their only two questions. There is an otherwise here. I didn’t want to prescribe anything to that otherwise; I didn’t want to clarify it because it exists beyond the realm of my thought, but I know it’s there.

KS: The uses and abuses of technology – for surgery, for surveillance, for medicine, for data collection – are a major theme in the novel, both in the oppressive setting and in characters’ resistance and liberation. What are your thoughts about the state of technology now?

Cavar: I owe a lot of my thinking about the drawbacks of technology under systems of neoliberalism and racial capitalism to people like Ruha Benjamin and, more recently, to Legacy Russell. These are Black feminist theorists talking about the brokering of data as an expansion of chattel slavery, and the accumulation and usage of data as a means of controlling populations more broadly. Also, Simone Browne writes about contemporary policing and surveillance practices and their relation to slavery and settler colonialism, and the literal ones practiced in prisons and psychiatric institutions.

Anything understood as speculative, if it is imaginable, is happening somewhere, to someone, even if it looks different. My fears around new technologies are less about what the future could look like, and more about who the future is already happening to. In the example of climate change, it is discussed as something that might happen in the future, when entire islands are already going underwater. I’m concerned about who’s already trapped in the future.

KS: I’m thinking of this passage near the end describing a last generation of activists who used slogans such as, ‘THINK ME WEAK/BUT I AM POWER.’ Like their bodies, they deviantly grammared. I wonder what your thoughts are on claiming, using, reusing, breaking or fragmenting language?

Cavar: I first learned that grammar could talk about something other than parts of speech when I read the paper ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’ by Hortense Spillers, which is subtitled ‘An American Grammar Book’. It talks about this process during the Transatlantic Slave Trade by which African persons were transformed into chattel as the founding grammar of US American society, and this thinking about the world was extremely influential for me.

Poetry has been really helpful. Reading more about variations to English like pidginisation has helped with that. Also, in my sophomore year of college, a beloved professor told me that I was allowed to make up my own term if there was no term, and then I saw that reinforced within the trans communities that I moved through – being in a place where it was completely normal and expected to change your name, change your pronouns, change your signifiers. Go by something no one else understands.

All these things together – even if they aren’t direct super-material means of Resistance ™ – illustrate cracks in a grammar that society presumes to be natural. Calling attention to those cracks is extremely important.

Failure to Comply by Cavar (Featherproof Books) is out now online.