The Argonauts (8 page)

Christina, too, had a habit of blushing deep red while she spoke for the first few minutes of class. It didn’t make her any less cool. In fact it made us think she ran hot on the inside, that something about her passion for Gayatri Spivak or the Combahee River Collective was uncontainable. And it was. Because of her blushing, I don’t feel any substantive shame when this happens to me now, in the classroom. (It happens to me all the time.)

Eventually Christina and I became friends. A few years ago, she told me the story of a subsequent feminist theory class that threw a kind of coup. They wanted—in keeping with a long feminist tradition—a different kind of pedagogy than that of sitting around a table with an instructor. They were frustrated by the poststructuralist ethos of her teaching, they were tired of dismantling identities, tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in. So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write “how they identified” on it, then pin it to their lapel.

Christina was mortified. Like Butler, she’d spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same, and now, as if in a tier of hell, she was being handed an index card and a Sharpie and being told to squeeze a Homeric epithet onto it. Defeated, she wrote “Lover of Babe.” (Babe was her dog, a mischievous white lab.)

As she told me this story, I cringed all over—for the students, mostly, but also because I was remembering how, when I was Christina’s student, we had all wanted her to come out in a more public and coherent fashion, and how frustrated we were that she wouldn’t. (Actually, I wasn’t all that frustrated; I’ve always sympathized with those who refuse to engage with terms or forums that feel like more of a compromise or distortion than an unbidden expression. But I understood why others were frustrated, and I sympathized with them, too.) Her students’ frustration with her reticence about her personal life did not diminish their desire for her, however—sentiments such as “Christina Crosby’s leather pants make me wet” appeared regularly on the cement paths all over campus. Likely her reticence but fed the fire. (Christina admitted to me later that she knew about the chalkings, and that they had pleased her very much.)

But as the times changed, Christina changed. She got together with a younger, more activist scholar who is more vocal about queer issues, about
being
queer. Like most academic feminists, Christina now teaches “gender and sexuality studies” rather than women’s studies. Perhaps most moving to me, she is now writing autobiography—something she never would have dreamed of doing back when she was my mentor.

Back then, she said she was willing to be my thesis adviser because I struck her as serious, but she made it very clear that she felt no kinship—indeed, she felt a measure of repulsion—at my interest in the personal made public. I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?). The thesis I produced under her tutelage was titled
The Performance of Intimacy
. I didn’t mean the word
performance
in opposition to “the real”; I’ve never been interested in any sort of con. Of course there exist people who perform intimacy in ways that are fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous or steamrolling or creepy, but that’s not the kind of performance that I meant, or the kind I mean. I mean writing that dramatizes the ways in which we are
for
another or
by virtue of
another
, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.

When it comes to my own writing, if I insist that there is a persona or a performativity at work, I don’t mean to say that I’m not myself in my writing, or that my writing somehow isn’t me. I’m with Eileen Myles—“My dirty secret has always been that it’s of course about me.” Lately, however, I have felt myself awash in a fresh irony. After a lifetime of experimenting with the personal made public, each day that passes I watch myself grow more alienated from social media, the most rampant arena for such activity. Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares. I feel quite certain that my character is too weak to withstand the temptations and pressures that would come with hoisting it onto the stage of Facebook, and truly amazed by the fact that so many others—or all others, so it sometimes seems—bear it so easily.

More than bear it—celebrate it, intrepidly push at its limits, just as they should. In
The Buddhist
—which was created from blog posts—Dodie Bellamy hails the blog of poet Jackie Wang, who once posted her thoughts as they decomposed under the influence of Ambien: “6am. hello. fading fast because i took an ambien and am becoming incoherent. but the nice thing about ambien is that you can write and write and write because you don’t give a fuck, it;s good for the loosening that needs to happen in order to speak…. i was going to wrier sometrgiubf important but i snasccan6y cant read nmyg own handwriting and i hallucinate when i look at things.” Intellectually, I’m right there with Dodie, cheering Jackie on. But in my heart I’m saying a prayer of gratitude: it was an act of grace that I got sober before I got wireless.

I haven’t really thought this through (in homage to Wang?), but when I think about my more “personal” writing, I keep seeing that old Atari game, Breakout. I see the game’s plain, flat cursor sliding around on the bottom of the screen, popping the little black dot back onto the thick bank of rainbow above. Each time the dot hits the bank, it eats away a chunk of color, until eventually it has eaten away enough of the bank to “break out.” The breakout is a thrill because of all the triangulation, all the monotony, all the effort, all the obstruction, all the shapes and sounds that were its predecessor. I need those colored bricks to chip away at, because the eating into them makes form. And then I need the occasional jailbreak, my hypomanic dot riding the sky.

In Christina’s feminist theory class we also read Irigaray’s famous essay “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in which Irigaray critiques both unitary and binary ways of thinking by focusing on the morphology of the labial lips. They are the “sex which is not one.” They are not one, but also not two. They make a circle that is always self-touching, an autoerotic mandorla.

This image immediately struck me as weird but exciting. And a little embarrassing. It reminded me of the fact that a lot of women can jerk off just by pressing their legs together on a bus or in a chair or whatever (I came this way once while waiting in line to see
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
at Film Forum on Houston). While we were discussing Irigaray in class, I tried to feel the circle of my labial lips. I imagined every woman in the class trying to feel it too. But the thing is, you can’t really feel your labial lips.

It’s easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or multiplicity and start complimenting everything as such. Sedgwick was impatient with that kind of sloppy praise. Instead, she spent a lot of time talking and writing about that which is more than one, and more than two, but less than infinity.

This finitude is important. It makes possible the great mantra, the great invitation, of Sedgwick’s work, which is to “pluralize and specify.” (Barthes: “one must pluralize, refine, continuously”) This is an activity that demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose very rigor tips it into ardor.

A few months before Iggy was conceived, we went to see an art porn movie made by some friends, A. K. Burns and A. L. Steiner. You were feeling lonely, longing for a sense of community, identification. Unlike the close-knit, DIY queer scene you were once at the center of in San Francisco, the queer scene in LA can feel like everything else in LA: partitioned by traffic and freeways, oppressively cliquish and bewilderingly diffuse at the same time, hard to fathom, to
see
.

The movie,
Community Action Center
, is pretty great. You liked its frenzied variety and absurdity, though you felt perplexed by its banishment of cock, as you think the category of women should be capacious enough to include it—“like the blob that ate Detroit,” you say. I agreed, but wondered how to make space for the nonphallic if the phallic is always pushing its way back into the room.
In whose world are these terms mutually exclusive?
you said, justly agitated.
In whose world is the morphological imaginary defined as that which is not real?

In one of my favorites of your drawings, two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, “You’re more interested in fantasy than reality.” The other responds, “I’m interested in the reality of my fantasy.” Both of the Popsicles are melting off their sticks.

After the movie had finished, the screen flashed a parting dedication: “to the queerest of the queer.” The audience applauded, and I applauded too. But inside the dedication felt like a needle zigzagging off the record after a great song. Whatever happened to horizontality? Whatever happened to
the difference is spreading?
I tried to hold on to what I liked most about the movie, which was watching people hit each other during sex without it seeming violent, the scene of someone jerking off with a chunk of purple quartz down by the water, and the slow sewing of feathers onto a girl’s butt. Really that’s all I remember now. And that the girl having the feathers sewn onto her butt was pretty in an unusual way, and that her sexuality reminded me of mine in ways I couldn’t name but that moved me. Those parts made that little portal swing open for me:
I think we have—and can have—a right to be free
.

I collect these moments. I know they hold a key. It doesn’t matter to me if the key must remain perched in a lock, incipient.
The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window … the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window
.

Out in the lobby, a friend complains that the subtitle of the movie should have been “flip the butch” (presumably an insult), and is seriously grossed out by the sex.
Ugh, why did we have to stare at so many hairy pussies?
I drift off to the water fountain.

Like much of Catherine Opie’s work,
Self-Portrait/Cutting
(1993), which features the bloody stick figures cut into her back, gains meaning in series, in context. Its crude drawing is in conversation with the ornate script of the word
Pervert
, which Opie had carved into the front of her chest and photographed a year later. And both are in conversation with the heterogeneous lesbian households of Opie’s
Domestic
series (1995–98)—in which Harry appears, baby-faced—as well as with Opie’s
Self-Portrait/Nursing
(2004), taken a decade after
Self-Portrait/Pervert
. In Opie’s nursing self-portrait, she holds and beholds her son Oliver while he nurses, her
Pervert
scar still visible, albeit ghosted, across her chest. The ghosted scar offers a rebus of sodomitical maternity: the pervert need not die or even go into hiding per se, but nor is adult sexuality foisted upon the child, made its burden.

This balance is admirable. It is also not always easy to maintain. In a recent interview, Opie says: “Between being a full-time professor and an artist and a mom and a partner, it’s not like I get to have that much time to go and explore and play [SM style]…. Also, all of a sudden when you’re taking care of a child, your brain doesn’t easily switch to ‘Oh, now I’m going to hurt somebody’”

There is something profound here, which I will but draw a circle around for you to ponder. As you ponder, however, note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.

Of course, there are a multitude of good reasons for adults to keep their bodies to themselves, one of which is the simple aesthetic fact that adult bodies can be hideous to children. Listen, for example, to Hervé Guibert’s description of his father’s penis:

This scene doesn’t forecast damage or violation per se, but most such literary scenes (the non-French ones?) do. Think of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, by Maya Angelou, whose primal scene of violation I must have read a hundred times over as a young girl. Here is eight-year-old Maya, our narrator, reporting on the actions of her uncle: “Mr. Freeman pulled me to him, and put his hand between my legs…. He threw back the blankets and his ‘thing’ stood up like a brown ear of corn. He took my hand and said, ‘Feel it.’ It was mushy and squirmy like the inside of a freshly killed chicken. Then he dragged me on top of his chest.” This is but the opening salvo of the recurring sexual abuse of Maya at the hands of Mr. Freeman.

To be honest, however, I didn’t remember that the abuse continued until I researched it just now. As a child I stuttered out on just this one scene, so startled was I by the penis-corn.

If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp
, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—
Fame
, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.