Rat Queens

I went to art school in Minneapolis, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, from 2005 to 2009. There, I went to my first basement shows, seeing Kitten Forever (playing a 2014 show in the video above—that’s me in the red plaid shirt) and other bands at a punk house called the Pocketknife (rumored to have been previously owned by Roseanne and Tom Arnold). I saw my friend Abby and her friends at the Pocketknife, and at the nearby all-girls school St. Catherine’s in St. Paul, as the closest real-life equivalent that I knew to the queer girl punks, Maggie and Hopey, in Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comics.

Surrounded by rad girls in bands, every inch of me yearned to be a part of their world and play music. I was still the little mermaid on the other side of what seemed like an unbridgeable distance: I identified as a queer boy, and my writing and drawing defined me, and that left little room for anything else. Abby later told me that our friend K. had said about me back then, “[Annie] really wants to be one of the girls. I think she is.”

My sculpture teacher at MCAD, Kinji Akagawa, talked about “bodyminding” and metacognition: how the body holds knowledge, and how you can think about your thinking process.

Kinji with students in 2008. Photo © Erin Nicole Johnson for the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, via MCAD’s Flickr.

I loved Kinji for his supportive air and open teachings. His classes focused on process; in a thick Japanese accent, he encouraged us not to feel done with anything. At MCAD, he was one of a couple people who gave me what felt like the safe, boundary-defined care I’d always wanted. Kinji said, like Lynda Barry did in “Two Questions,” to make work, and let the meaning come later. Kinji said, “Open up creativity. Think more about what you like to do, not what you’re good at.”