"Joynt delivers an original meditation on trauma and transitioning. Drawing on the media theorist Marshall McLuhan's writings to reflect on surviving childhood sexual abuse, Joynt juxtaposes episodes from his life with McLuhan's insights, creating meaning through literary montage . Enigmatic yet evocative, this demands to be read on its own terms." -- Publishers Weekly "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 well-known 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. It's 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 Points defies genre conventions.
It is a meta-reckoning 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, for BOMB "An effective experiment in form, and a moving exploration of how context colours interpretation--and how both affect the nature of truth." -- The Walrus ("Best Books of Fall 2024") " 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." --Elliot Page, author of Pageboy: A Memoir "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.
" --Thomas Page McBee, author of Amateur and Man Alive "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." --Sarah Sharma, co-editor of Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan.