You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
1. ___________________________ of legs. ______ ,practically. In ribbons______
2. Update Conversation?
3. Google wagers You Can Sleep Less!
4. Epicaricacy. I peeled back your misfortunes (as whole fingernails removed smoothly with a paring knife: orange and to the bed) and they tasted like honey.
5. The Moment: Boots with Room for Calves.
6. Maybe I was a lil too, um forward?
7. The famous MORMON masturbation factory of boys.
5. “In traumatic and war neuroses the human ego is defending itself from a danger which threatens it from without or which is embodied in a shape assumed by the ego itself. In the transference neuroses of peace the enemy from which the ego is defending itself is actually the libido, whose demands seem to it to be menacing. In both cases the ego is afraid of being damaged - in the latter case by the libido and in the former by external violence. It might, indeed, be said that in the case of the war neuroses, in contrast to the pure traumatic neuroses and in approximation to the transference neuroses, what is feared is nevertheless an internal enemy. The theoretical difficulties standing in the way of a unifying hypothesis of this kind do not seem insuperable: after all, we have a perfect right to describe repression, which lies at the basis of every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma- as an elementary traumatic neurosis.”
-Freud on War Neuroses
Below is a summary of my feelings about the election. I will never again talk about them on blag.
1. 7am this morning, Porter Square T Station: woman with pearls over turtleneck with helmet-hair half ponytail and teeth so white they were almost blue smiles holding VOTE HILARY sign.
2. As a practical joke: My ladywife hacked my archaic Friendster account and befriended Barack Obama. Who knows how long my friendster account bragged OBAMA!!! ? Who knew Friendster was still an apt place to make jokes. Is that its new purpose? One thing is certain: there will be vengeance. And the kind of vengeance that would make Leonard Nimoy proud!
I. I received another letter to the parents of femmephane from University yesterday. This one kindly numbered three reasons why families should bring a ($400) diploma frame with them on graduation day. They went something like this: to show your kid you’re proud, to show the extended family it’s really true, because otherwise it’ll get wrinkled. My shrink asked me if I was going to walk despite the fact that it will be a completely fucked up distressing day and mostly stupid. I appreciate her more.
II. Brown University’s grading system has only A’s, B’s, and C’s. That’s it. Three grades! D’s and F’s are dropped from transcripts and there are no pluses or minuses. That means that anyone who gets anything between a B+ and an A+ gets an A. And since C’s are treated like F’s almost no one gets them. 60% of the grades given at Brown are A’s. And then those students and their money apply to grad schools with those GPAs! Oh boy.
III. Okay, so it was me who pulled up the anti-abortion (anti-choice/anti-life) signs from the University lawn. But it was really to save the Republicans from their own shoddy workmanship. You can’t put down one (1) flag to represent every fifty-thousand (50,000) abortions! That doesn’t make a statement at all. Who can visualize 50,000 babies? Five, maybe. Especially because they were those cheerful little Tyvek numbers that contractors use to partition space. Maybe if they had used human fingernails (a la Juno) I would have been able to really conceptualize it. Bad work GOPs. Worst protest on campus since Pangaea’s Simulation Refugee Camp got canceled because of the rain.
d. I dreamt you sent me a card with red flowers that said: “Instead of Montreal, come to my show a week from Thursday.” The letters were large and gray, more circular than yours. Maybe your mother wrote it, I guessed but knew it couldn’t true. When I woke up I thought it might have been an old invitation, meant for someone else. You never work on Thursdays. I reviewed my unsent emails and realized I should have delivered them in red bows.
b. I was relieved to find that your captioned stills terrify me.
k. Over and over you coo “hellooo” into my voicemail as if I can hear you leaving the message. When I return the calls it’s too noisy to hear you and as soon as you pick up I lose my voice against the train anyway.
o. I part and fall into two cold blocks. I am proof of how neatly soft water can be sliced. I wished it had been different last night.
a. I weaken in four places and accordion dramatically when I’m with you. Finding the floor with my hands I tell you, again, the story about how I asked my mother How many years you get for adultery. She told me No Years because It Isn’t Illegal and I realized how much simpler my life would be. I was eight. After that I smeared my makeup and poured a whiskey for you.
b. We talked about the faces we wear in the world and who would roll the heater in. You sauteed the garlic and I poured the gin heavy with my socks pulled up high over my running tights. It was only ten but we acted like we had been talking all night.
I implore you to stop thoughtlessly using expressions like:
“…which is exactly what the Judeo-Christian faith, at least, promotes…”(names have been changed to protect the person in my Lit Theory class)
What do you mean by Judeo-Christian faith? In this case she actually means the major monotheistic theological beliefs which she feels comfortable talking about. But how about using “religion” instead of faith. Or how about saying Jewish and Christian instead of Judeo-Christian. Judeo-Christian has become nothing but a handy hyphenation to throw around when we want to swiftly reference the moral and legal structures that we feel are implicated in something mysteriously related to religion.
While we’re at it can we please refrain from referencing the following TERMS as if they are the PRINCIPLES ON WHICH PRACTICE IS FOUNDED:
Virgin/Whore Dichotomy - your way of referencing why life is hard for women
Honor/Shame Society - your way of explaining why MENA has those familial structures. Oh! Those!
I’ve been maniacally humming a lot of David Bowie for the last few days. Which is pretty cool, if you ask me. Maybe less cool for the Y trainer who came over to ask me to turn down the ipod to so I could hear myself singing. Or–rather–hear myself start to not sing, as he would have it.
I attribute my elation to the heralded return of my very dearest friend from the bowels of America. By which I mean…. the twisty center and not the shittiest place. He has known me since I was studying econ and wearing my mother’s jean jacket embroidered with Eustace Tilley. I wouldn’t want to belittle the care the rest of you have delivered. Still, the return of Ken has seen a record low for anxiety. My fake allergies have subsided, considerably. Perhaps it’s because K has a spotless record of emergency room behavior.
Had HE been at the gym, he probably would have hummed along. I didn’t tell the trainer that my ipod was off. My whole face had already exploded with adrenaline. Then I consider how Ken calls our joint singing race-to-the-bad note and think we might, perhaps, confine our music to home. And maybe a cruise or two.
In other news:
1. gin and tonics– wow, what an oversight?
2. we’ve brought in a cat, temporarily, as radical measure to take care of mice. I have forgotten so many cats in my life. I called Nico recently to ask her where we met a cat I used to know. I’ve probably convened with yours.
3. there is a second hole in my nostril. really, a third if you count the nostril itself. this time I did not do it because I was feeling impulsive but because I had some time to kill.
4. I have almost finished the first chapter of my thesis. I am going to make a new page for it on my blag. I entreat you to read it and to say scathing, critical things. I don’t have an adviser and trust you more anyway.
(see photo in previous post)
Ingredients
2.5 lbs large beets (or about three beets the size odf large apples)
2 lbs of baby carrots
2 t sugar
1/2 cup+ olive oil
salt/pepper
1 lb of split peas
6 c water
1 med yellow onion, halved
1 bay leaf
4 garlic cloves, 2 minced
zest of one lemon
juice of one lemon
1/2 c chopped mint leaves (although I’ll leave them out when I make the salad again. It would probably be better with basil or at least use less mint)
1 large shallot, minced
1 T balsamic
1. Preheat the oven to 400. Wrap each beet in foil and bake them directly on the middle oven rack for 1 1/2 hours. When the beets are tender, let them cool, peel, and cut into 1/2 inch wedges. Slice the beets horizontally so they’re about the same size as the baby carrots.
2. At the same time, toss carrots, sugar, and 2 T of olive oil in a large baking dish. Season with salt and pepper and roast for 45 minutes or until they are tender but not mushy.
3. And at the same time!! put water, peas, two whole cloves garlic, onion, and bay leaf in a large soup pot. Bring to a boil and the reduce to a simmer until the peas are a slightly tender (about 20 minutes). Add 2 t of salt and cook five more minutes or until the peas are tender. Drain and discard the onion, garlic, and leaf.
4. In a large bowl, combine the drained lentils, lemon zest, lemon juice, shallot, and mint(if you want) and 1/2 cup of olive oil. Season, if it needs it, with salt and pepper.
5 . In another bowl combine the beets and carrots with the balsamic. Arrange the beets and carrots over the peas. Serve warm or at room temperature.
The salad is especially good reheated the next day. I put some big chunks of feta all over the top, broiled it, and ate it with the left-over homemade bread turned toast.
I’m operating at this special work, eat, work, nightmare, work– level. Okay, occasionally I watch fragmented episodes of Project Runway Canada on Youtube. It’s hosted by Iman who, instead of ominously announcing “as you know in fashion, one day you’re in, the next day you’re OUT,” throws up her hands and says “sometimes you just don’t measure up.” I never predicted Iman could seem so much like a yente. Really, Lazar Wolf would be proud. There’s also a really charmingly schlumpy Tim Gunn knock-off who looks like he would be a little more comfortable on Fawlty Towers. They all kindly offer each other help and make casual references to the celebrity phenomenon, Avril Lavigne.
I’m also accepting friend counsel toward organizing my alcohol collection into a more presentable array. SOMEHOW (Manhattans with Nora, J’s sweet drink habits, a plan to bourbon balls) I have about 25 different bottles. When I cleaned my apartment I discovered the sheer volume as I consolidated them on my windowsill from their spots in cupboards, counters, and the freezer.
“You could move them around the apartment so they’re more spread out,” Ken suggested.
“But then it would look like you were hiding them,” he realized.
Maybe I could give them decorative platforms throughout the apartment. Develop elaborate personas for each of them and then respect their domain. Then! it would be clear I wasn’t hiding them.
“I could crochet them all different outfits!” I told him.
He insisted we photographed our scrabble game in progress so that we could recreate it later and then strategized about how to write scrabble in java.
Some worried onlooker interrupted, “You know they already have Scrabble online!”
Oh, we know. But thanks.
I haven’t yet found anything valuable to “contribute” to my Literary Theory class and so I am relying on coy, pretentious jokes to get me by. I give myself extra points if I think the jokes betray an intimacy between the professor and me. And he’s just the right kind of smug for it. I ran out for a moment just before class started today and the professor thought I was chasing him down, impatient for his wisdom.
“Were you looking for me?” his retinue of graduate students stop watching him expectantly and made silly conversation as if watching our exchange might be degrading to their genius.
“No. Just the water fountain. Or– whatever that signifies…” He laughed* and told me not to go down stairs, that he was, in fact, standing right in front of one! Please crouch down here! Please engage yourself in water pressure so weak that you have to practically lick the spout in the center of these congregated candidates. Yes! Please! I flashed back to public school. Was someone going to hit me on the back of the head? Were they looking at my butt? Did the rich kids have to do this too or did they all have water bottles?
One of them, self-important, self-mythic, had to move aside. I haven’t seen her for a while. She must have relocated her work once she finished her Masters. But I am surprised she isn’t around more– collecting hetero-undergrad crushes in her white leather blazer, her bleach-white hair, her square white teeth.
She is moderately gifted at regurgitating anything my lit-theory prof has written but seemingly incapable of parsing theoretical conversation and responding with any grace. I once had the pleasure of seeing her argue with Nico– and with Nico’s dark hair, dark suit, dark eyes the looked like nemeses. Later I saw her-highness-Billy-Idol run across the street and her limbs splayed silently at awkward angles. She ruined herself — a liquid marionette— and grinned.
I realized how clever and handsome I might seem if I grow more willing to strike poses.
A straight woman who has previously expressed discomfort about my gayness complimented me today. “Can I say something personal?” I blushed and we had an audience. “Is that your natural eye-color?” I assured her it was. “I think you have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen!” She was downright enthusiastic about it. She has large, blocky hands and keeps her fingers pressed tightly into two flat planes as she talks, making circles in the air.
I so rarely receive straightforward compliments from people I am not sleeping with that they catch me off guard. I terrified of being perceived as an unwelcome and desirous presence around women (like so many gay women) and stay as far as I can from normal homosocial discourse. So when that happens you can see why I immediately want to make a new friend, to cultivate sleepovers, to be able to access some non-sexual nudity. I telescope almost as quickly.
*I was shopping for yarn recently and a woman working at the store laughed loudly at seemingly nothing. It sounded like the kind of laugh a geeky student issues while trying to impress a punning professor, despite the fact that she does not understand the pun. Finally someone asked her, “what is it?” And, “Oh I was just laughing about this avatar I made for this one forum. It’s a joke with myself.”
Someone accused me of being busy and I want to elaborate.
This is my final semester and I am taking four (4) classes:
0. Tantra, 1. C++, 2. Literary Theory, and 3. Religion in Contemporary American Film.
The professors of the first three specified that their courses had a heavy work load. They informed us that we would spend (respectively: 10, 15, and 20) hours, weekly, on course work.
I am also producing one (1) Senior Honors Thesis, of indeterminate length, without the benefit of a thesis adviser! I am also producing one (1) Senior Women’s Studies Project, which will dutifully enjoy NO material overlap with my Senior Honors Thesis!
I am also revising two (2) stories for publication.
I will be accepting food, alcohol, and in-depth critiques of my work until May, 19th (5/19/08) on which date I will no longer be matriculating in the Jumbomain of University.
(hey, you guys, with the HUGE questions relegated to parenthetical comments!)
In a comment on my post “The Butch-Femme (public) Embarrassment, past and present” d asked:
The reductive part of my query is: what makes a femme if it’s not the performance (I mean that in the linguistic and not the theatrical sense) of a set of culturally intelligible feminine behaviors/appearances/responses/demeanors?*
And so I’ll answer it, now. But I want to be clear that I understand and value a broad range of queer identity, expression, and relationships. I am not anti-butch/butch or femme/femme. Nor am I AT ALL advocating against alternative identifications. I’ll repeat what I wrote earlier: people should self-categorize (or not). What I am writing about is my self-categorization as femme within a butch/femme model.
Femme is not just a performance of culturally intelligible feminine behaviors in the World. To me, at least, it is also:
1. A performance within broader queer social contexts and within butch/femme communities. (Even when a femme isn’t actively in a butch/femme context she still has butch/femme in mind in orienting her performance in the world)
2. A certain kind of active and sincere love and camaraderie between butches and femmes. And a history of that love (if not for the individual, at least within queer history) which assures both butch and femme that they can be recognized, desired, and loved without compromising. I think it is important to recognize that butch and femme are not purely performance. I have rarely met a butch or femme who has had the safety and wealth required to perform gender solely as a radical political act. The butches and femmes I know (those I recognize as my family and my people) have always been Queer in the most strictly denotative sense of the word– and have regularly been endangered and hurt because of that Queerness. But acting differently isn’t an option. Among the other things it does for butches, butch/femme may create a space where the butch body can be ideally imagined. A femme respects the butch’s radical misplacement in the world- her enclosure in a body that imperfectly (and traumatically) represents her. Butch/femme becomes a place where the butch body is perfectly at home.
If and when butches and femmes first encounter gay communities they often feel alienated by them. In part because butch/femme has a history of embarrassing lesbian communities and in part because gay communities often organize in order to achieve seemingly superfluous things. Why do we care about a mixer or advocating for gays in the military if our queer lives have always about surviving our queerness? Why would we advocate for gay marriage when we are still being denied entrance to unions, denied access to proper healthy care, and spending so much time hungry and homeless, without family. These are all basic elements of survival and shouldn’t require heterosexist legitimation through marriage to access (for queers or anyone). So butch/femme becomes a double retreat.
3. A specific way of navigating the problem of unsolicited sexual desire for the femme through both the solicitation of desire and the refusal of desire. A commitment to a navigation intelligible differently to the world-at-large and within a butch/femme context. Butch and femme bodies are both public property in different ways. For femmes, as for all women, there is first the fact of having a sexualized body. There is the additional problem that since men know you are gay they 1) believe they understand and can “see” your sex acts 2) believe your sex exists purely for their consumption 3) want to prove that you’re actually straight (and, charmingly, expect that they are the first man who’s tried to teach you the ways of the world.) I lived with these day traders in NY with NC and one of the first questions one of them asked me when I told them I was gay was “does that mean you’re a virgin?” These are problems for all dyke-identified women, of course. It gets more complicated for femmes because we perform femininity and solicit desire. After all, one of the most toxic aspects of gender hierarchies is the way that women’s sex becomes the culprit for men’s desire. Because it is one of the most toxic aspects this blame desperately requires a femme’s performance, constant critique, and perpetual ambivalence (if she is to survive the world).
I think the problem gets even more complex when you start to consider what kind of obligations and challenges might be added by involving oneself in sex work. And historically many femmes have been involved in sex work. When the femme’s body is ACTUALLY being consumed for money men begin to believe she owes it to anyone who can pay. And when being desirable and delivering pays the bills, what happens to other desire? All of the sex worker’s acts are called into question– particularly her sincerity and her desire for her partner. The invited-desirer (here I mean the (potential) lover as opposed to the voyeur, the john, men, the public) can feel guilty about her own lust for the femme. Sex work, of course, also complicates the veritable mine-ridden landscape of sex, pleasure, fear, memory, and pain that already exists for the femme and the butch.
For the butch, butch/femme can be a place where historical community makes a butch’s bodily homelessness, her stoneness, more immediately legible– for the femme it might provide a space to meet people versed and willing to work with the political and emotional realities of sex work.
4. A coming together of all of these elements whereby the existing butch/femme frameworks are both challenged, fulfilled, and challenging and fulfilling to the femme. That is, whether the soothing comes from a butch, a femme, or herself, a femme finds/makes a livable space for herself in butch/femme. The femme structures/defines personal soothing within the context of butch/femme and then goes to butch/femme to find/make a recognizable haven where she is read and understood.
I realize that I haven’t even begun to answer the question you’ve asked. And, because I write specifically about desire in almost every facet of my work, I’ll try to address that part of the question in the future. But for now I hope this clears some things up.
*Please do read the comment in full! I even linked you, for godsake.
I’ve only had cable for a few flu hours but, thanks to jazzy dancing pharmaceutical logos, I already know:
-which contraception I would use (were I at risk for spontaneous pregnancy)
-what might actually be wrong with my vagina (whenever I feel a pesky itch as I shop with my girlfriends)
-how to get rid of raw chicken related odors and leave my kitchen worthy of my cleaning timid husband and sons (should that contraception fail)
*from a fortune cookie
1. Wrangling a Pigeon with Aplomb
2. Foreground: some bread I baked in nick of time. Baked provolone with herbs and provolone. Dispersed: Ashley’s wine specially selected to complement the menu.
3. Split-pea salad with roasted carrots and beets. Recipe to follow.
4. Ken and Ashley want to meet a hipster and I phone a friend. Ken strikes commemorative pose.
5. Apples to Apples begs questions: can four beers stand in for shuffling cards?
6. At long last Ashley and I shuffle our feet in the same room.
I am planning to write a series of posts about butch/femme and maybe I should have started with one about my own identification as femme or sex as a femme or whatever. But I didn’t. I started with something that required me to go back and define my own identifications as I progressed. Footnoting got annoying and so I left big things for another time. I’ll answer your questions but also write more later.
I hope it’s alright that I’m reposting these here…. Should the author oppose to the repost or the linking, I trust she’ll let me know.
If femme identity is only constructed during sex with butches, will your memoir be a sort of academic pornography? Also, does that mean we are only a certain percentage queer femme, determined by length of time engaged in butch/ femme relations divided by sexual lifespan?
I’ll start with the second part. I don’t think that femme identity is only constructed through butch/femme relationships or through sex with butches. I’m a queer femme (involved in some butch/femme model) in public, in private, at school, at work, even when I’m not with a butch at the time. I construct it when I get dressed, put on my makeup, carry my body, interact with women, interact with men, perform, fuck, speak, and write.
However, I don’t think that I am actively performing my femme-ness (eesh) when I’m sleeping with other femme-women. Some butches and femmes would oust me from femme for ever sleeping with non-butch people. My identity doesn’t get suspended, I just perform it differently.
As for the first part. I really hope my memoir will be pure pornography. Doesn’t that sound much better? I certainly think so. Ideally it will only be academic because I’m receiving credit for it.
Isn’t the very idea of a ‘femme memoir’ dependent upon a revisionist critique of your sexual identity?
Definitely. I’m not sure that memoir can ever been anything besides a revisionist critique. Even if I were to, say, publish diary entries or photographs or something– they would still be phrased through the present. There is an imperative to retroject femme identity to birth, isn’t there? (The way dykes walk around talking about how their parents knew they were gay at 5. Which, honestly, is just as fucked up as when the parents draw those kind of conclusions.) I’m confident about being a realized femme though. I believe you can become a femme and it’s not just a matter of- say- recognizing you always were one. I am certainly not planning to write a memoir about “how I came to identify as femme” and go along explaining everything as if it were a step toward a forgone conclusion. I am calling it a femme memoir because either I will be focusing on how/when/why I have identified as femme and interacted with the world.
…
p.s. If you haven’t already, don’t google “erotic memoir.” It will only make you unhappy.
Wow. Well, at least the bar’s set low?
I started a reading project to get me going with this femme memoir. I’m taking the temperature of the butch-femme/femme lit field so I know where to go with my own creative nonfiction project. Perhaps you’ll have feedback.*
Before I start, I want to be clear that I am talking about butch/femme and butch and femme (right now, in this context) in reference to people who identify as butches and femmes invested and active in a relationship with butch/femme. I am absolutely not talking about femme-looking women or butch-looking dykes who do not identify as such but are unceremoniously grouped with them by the uncomfortable, the condensers, the anyone who will. I, I promise, will not.
Yesterday, I read Joan Nestle’s A Restricted Country and in her chapter, “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950’s,” she considered a compelling argument about why butch/femme is so publicly reviled. (Yes, I said reviled. Contemporary rhetoric might have you believe that butch/femme is the norm and that alternate identities/relationships are rare and so endangered by butch/femme overrun homogenization. But that argument comes from fear and eh-hem *hegemony* and not reality) Joan, writing in the 80’s, explains how butch/femme relationships embarrass lesbian communities (1950’s-80’s, with a nod to longer ago) but I’d like to reconsider her work as it pertains to younger, emergent queer communities and the dynamics within them.
Nestle says that butch/femme couples make sex unavoidably visible to the public, producing a shameful subculture that non-butch/femme-identified lesbians cannot (but are forced to) explain to their empathetic straight-friends. Butch/femme sex is obvious to the public because 1) the phallus is obvious 2) butches are, in part, butch because of their deft sexual expertise– something onlookers might experience as skill developed from doing sex to/practicing on(?) femmes 3) straight men and women and lesbian women identify the femme with a heterosexual, bottoming woman, and can envision her sexuality, giving it imaginative life.
Of course otherwise-identified lesbian women are sexual, too. I don’t mean to say here that butch/femme is an inherently more sexual relationship than others. Rather, their relationship, whether actually sexual or not, reads always as sexual. I am also not arguing that femmes are inexpertly sexual (HA!) or bottoms. But butch/femme sexuality is readily intelligible to the public in these ways.
Nestle has this sort of brilliant point when she re-evaluates the moment at which an onlooking man demands of a lesbian couple, “Who’s the man?” This question, Nestle explains, reveals more about the limitation of heterosexual sex and the anxiety surrounding that limitation. The man’s shout embarrasses his girlfriend and reveals his own lack of expertise instead of condemning perversion. I’m not going to talk about queer heterosexual people right now so let me continue before it comes to that.
Given the state of butch-femme (butch/femme-unfriendly “radical queers” needle us, dyke friends excuse my history of dating butches as a coincidence or fetish, I get more queer-ok points for having also slept with non-butches…**) I would like to extend and adapt Nestle’s argument into the present. A new sex of queers are ashamed: the ones who believe that the perfect, queer, gender-expression is an androgynous genderqueer one, and believe that the perfect queer desire is unfettered by appearance. They believe that the most hetero-patriarchy-smashing queerness is the sex-filled kind in which everyone sleeps with everyone else.
This produces a femme/butch-femme-hostile environment because it begs butches and femmes to queer themselves so they are visible as queer and radical to a dominating, young group. It also embarrasses genderqueers by upsetting their perfect model of desire. If the perfect queerness requires unbounded desire of every-body, then the perfect queer is politically mandated to want every other homo to wear the body that the desirer desires. While femmes still “look like femmes,” they might not be sexually attractive to andro-queers–making the requirement to fuck them more difficult.***
Ultimately, the embarrassing problem of butch/femme is still about the visibility of their sex. The perfect contemporary radical queer not only desires everyone and is desired by everyone in return but also produces and experiences boundless, perverse, desire. We could provisionally identify him as a kinky switch. But this kind of sex is not actually fulfilling to everyone (or anyone) and so the necessity for all-encompassing sex increases. If everyone is doing everything then everyone will be fulfilled, accidentally, at some point or another. Of course, this is not how sex, queer or what have you, actually operates. People do avow tastes and desires and then, we hope, practice them. I refer to these iconic, imaginary, ideal, figures because their presence in a young queer public consciousness determines the way queers treat each other.
Butch/femme relationships do not publicly share this genderqueer model of sexual desire. They embrace something specific, perverse, and extremely variable. But, to others, the sex might look circumscribed, limited (in the way it used to look old-fashioned and hegemonic.) So to the straight world we still look like sexual perverts (which is dangerous but, I think, worth it.) And to the queer world we look like a relic or just like a bunch of repressed lesbians (which hurts.)
*Some of you are butches and femmes. Some of you are my sister or Ladywife. For the rest of you– I’m not sure what we’re starting from so I’ll try to be clear.
** Because femme is a construct, I believe it cannot exist when I am not constructing it. Since my femme-identity is not constructed during sex with non-butches, I wouldn’t explain myself as a femme when I am sleeping with femme-looking women or non-butch identified dykes.
***The fact that they might not desire the andro-queers is not the pertinent question because so many people accept the pervasive andro-queer project as queer ideal. (Thanks Judith Halberstam!!)
This is how you found me yesterday (thanks to wordpress BLOGSTATS!!!):
1. soubrettes
2. can’t see cervix
3. take Valerian to ease GYN appointments
4. river phoenix dead
I can’t see what you see. What’s with that? The whole world is populated by soubrettes and the real but I can’t tell them apart. Certainly not from the way you’ve described them.
At Port Authority yesterday (don’t tell my shrink) they were paging a Foster Scipio to meet his party. Slouched against the wall and wondering if NC sat in this same place the time she didn’t make it to Boston, I craned to see if some Roman general would swagger around the corner. With mandala, with “entourage.”
Bob Herbert (NYT) identified Nevada as the national capital for misogyny in the : the biggest problems for women, he thinks, are prostitution and rape in the military. (!!??!!). Who has been caricatured into a columnist for the sake of no one? I can’t tell. Is it misogyny itself?
At PS1 I tried not to walk on the S/M asphalt and admired Kathe Burkhart’s haiku in Dutch chocolate. We were three hours into a play about how to treat the woman your ex-boyfriend slept with once (1). I didn’t have a copy of the script– so tried to ad lib, slipping into some straight, empathetic character, and then when I couldn’t fake it I tried to be a good audience, then finally went quietly about my business as the show went on. A sample:
1: If I run into her should I completely
ignore her? That’s what I was going to do.
2: You should say hello, but in a
really cold way. 1: I guess so, Oh My God. There she is!
2: Wow, she’s not sexy. She’s actually really
ugly. 1: She has HPV, you know!
2. You should make him call her and tell him that she has HPV so you can know for sure.
Chorus: Yeah, Yeah, you have to know for sure!
Some other time, between dancing and dancing, the Internet, history, perpetration, and rumor caught up with me. I was recognized from only e-photographs and called from texting to my feet. She was wearing pants and a friend. This is Brooke, you have such a normal voice! she exclaimed, we hugged and she went to the bathroom. She wasn’t the same size, shape, consistency that I was promised! I stood still.
For my senior project I am either writing a memoir about my femme identification
or
doing a project about queerness, the internet, and representations of desire. In either case (or perhaps for the sole reason of) figuring out the answers to both of the questions at once. They aren’t extricable. I try to locate myself from my brand new Tantra class between the general, the columnist, the ladies and the girl who isn’t sexy, and Hairshirt.
In the past week I’ve ____, ____, ___, and ____. And before that, babysat for a real live child. She was long-haired and clever with a whole notebook of cute pictures she has taken (arranged in order of cuteness). She pulls her mother’s article proofs out of the waste basket and adds her own editorial marks. I resusitated my second grade bunny drawing skills and taught her how to draw a bunny. J taught her pig-latin–and, I’m afraid, perhaps a little real latin as well. Before J and I got there she said to m.o.m:
“Quick, remind me of their names? Max and Ruby?”
Terrifying, I know. As I have already been Max, this time I got to play Ruby in the live version.
I later found out Max and Ruby are animated bunnies. Wiki provides a brief description of the program:
Each episode consists of three self-contained vignettes. Within each, Ruby is typically engaged in some sort of project or activity, while Max has a particular mania of his own which either runs counter to his sister’s or distracts her. Amusingly, Max’s dialog within each story is usually limited to just one word or a two-word phrase, which he repeats periodically. For example, “Tow truck!” or “Jellyballs!” By the end of the story, Max’s passion often dovetails with Ruby’s in some way, to her benefit and delight.
At dinner she informed us that when her friend comes over,
“We usually put one noodle on the floor.”
“Why,” I asked.
“Uh, because it’s funny?!”
I’ll refrain from identifying with a child or saying anything about wisdom from the mouths of babes. Both would be utterly specious and only accessible cliche. It would be more accurate to cite wiki for the accidental insight.
New York?
Understood. Until Tuesday.
My (real) applications are done and I’m all foldering and dust now. More later. More soon.
(For now) the tools at my disposal: camera phone, inks, sewing machine, new bread recipe-sink or swim, whistling.
