Author: UpTheWoolves

This chant is a classic—the classic, really, when it comes to LGBTQ rights. It came to mind as I’ve been grappling with Sedgwick’s assertion that “there are important senses in which ‘queer can signify only when attached to the first person’” (9). Upon first read I was dubious: after all, don’t we as community members strive to “queer” spaces all the time? Spaces cannot self-identify and thus rely on us as third parties to prescribe them identities (already, an important use of queer that does not use the first person.) Another issue: wouldn’t queer individuals want to be recognized and described as queer by others, who would then not be using queer in the third person? It felt to me as though the ability to call oneself queer was simply a use, and that to even begin to construct a hierarchy of queer’s best uses was to undermine and trivialize the word.

Then, I started to really reflect on the significance of the self-identification in this chant. Although not exactly in the first person, the singular of “we” is “I” in the same way that the singular for “they” might be “he” or “she.” So if a singular queer person was to hold up a sign in protest, ze might shout “I’m here, I’m queer.” This is the two-fold assertion that yes, I am actually physically standing here and yes, I am different from you. For a queer person to say this is for zem is reject the systemic erasure that commonly refuses zem name or recognition. Another person, on the other hand, cannot bestow the title of “queer” upon someone else. To call someone “queer” before that individual has first called zirself queer is dangerous “because of the violently different connotative evaluations that seem to cluster around the category” (9). The word “queer” is so rooted in strangeness and violence and hate that it is always an act of reclamation in the first person and always a potential thread in any other tense. I now feel much more amenable to the idea that “anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else,” and that the use of the first person is significant (9). I ultimately contest Sedgwick because I think there are other worthwhile uses of the word, some of which I mention above. I just now see the “important sense” embedded in the first person, and it is amazing for someone who identifies as queer to understand the power in my language.

 

Queerness, ephemeral and inherently tied to transgression, is extraordinarily difficult to define. Sedgwick wants us to think of queerness as thing to be embodied, as a term that can only be used in the first person. Halberstam, alternatively, perceives queerness as a potential in everything that is transgressive. In this view, all things have the capacity to be queer as long as their state of being opposes what is expected and normative. Mûnoz wants us to reconsider these understandings of queerness as a state to be embodied, and instead insists that genuine queerness has never been achieved. Of queerness, he Mûnos writes: it “is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1). Between this quote and the title of his book—Feeling Utopia—Mûnos establishes that queerness is less of an identity and more of a societal status that has yet to be realized.

Bearing this perspective of queerness in mind, I turn to Written on the Body. From its non-chronological form to its narrator’s ambiguous identities, this book is queer. The gender of the narrator is never made explicit—and indeed purposefully made unclear—and the variety of genders in the narrator’s partners affirms the fluidity of zir sexuality. Additionally, time is problematized as a reliable, linear experience throughout the book, particularly at the end when the narrator confesses that they “don’t know if this is a happy ending but where we are let loose in open fields” (Winterson 190). Unlike Mûnos, the novel has little certain for futurity or time of any kind—it is entirely interested in queerness as an active state of being, as a lifestyle, as a means of perceiving time and space.

If queerness is, as Mûnos suggests, “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on…concrete possibility for another world,” then this book fails as a queer endeavor (Mûnos 1). Winterson’s book is not about the future or the creation of a queer world, but instead about queerness as a state of being. Fortunately for Winterson, Mûnos’ view of queerness is an unsustainable one, it’s one that will not lead to the production of community or spaces that queerness desires. Rather, this understanding of queer as “utopia” is one that asks queer people to continue to “feel that the world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (1). Winterson’s narrator tells this story because ze cannot wait for some undefined future where zir unconventional love story can be told in a queer world to queer people. The world was missing this story, this queer experience of love and growth, and so ze brings queerness into our “here and now” (1). Ze is queer and that queerness is a legitimate lived experienced, whether or not we as a society have collectively “touch[ed] queerness” (1). So no, we do not know if this is a happy ending yet—but here we are, let loose and open, and to deny ourselves a “here and now” will surely do nothing but stunt “our possibility for another world” (1).

“Queer uses of time and space develop…in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification” (Halberstam 1).

Halberstam’s articulation of queer time and space here reframes queerness as a state of existence, one that seeks to transgress the linear path toward Hetero Happiness. Although seemingly complex, queer space and time are concepts present and identifiable in contemporary fiction. Orphan Black, released in 2013 by BBC America, is a show that follows the struggles of a group of clones to reclaim their bodies and their personal freedoms from the corporation that created them, with focus on a clone named Sarah whose backstory includes time spent in foster care. Sarah is both a clone and an orphan, someone who lacks access to her biological parents—and thus capacity to be a “daughter” in the traditional sense—and also has an unconventional yet still significant connection to the other clones who literally share her DNA. Orphan Black engages with Halberstam’s conception of queer space and time in how its characters create their own queer family identities, ones that still foster community and connection without any origins in normative family spaces.

Although most of the clones inhabit the queer family space in their reference to one another as “sisters,” it is actually a non-clone, Felix, who exists in perhaps the queerest family space in the show. As Sarah’s foster brother he has no “legitimate” familial relation to her, yet Sarah fiercely defends his status as family whenever its legitimacy is questioned. When her clone-sister Helena behaves aggressively toward Felix (in episode 2×05), Sarah immediately insists: “Hey, you treat him with respect, you got it? That’s my brother, which means he’s one of our sisters. Family.” Sarah’s assertion is that Felix’s connection to her, which is not through blood, necessities a connection to Helena, who is also a “sister” of Sarah’s. She even uses the word “sister” to describe Felix, not “brother,” since Helena would accept more easily the word that is also used to describe their clone family, with whom their connection is inexplicable but deep. Sarah’s sense of her family space is queer—it transgresses the common notion of what family is or ought to be. By creating characters whose identities inherently defy tradition in this way, Orphan Black seeks to highlight and valid the queer family space.

“I still wanted her to be the leader of our expedition. Why did I find it hard to accept that we were equally sunk? Sunk in each other? Destiny is a worrying concept. I don’t want to be fated, I want to choose” (Winterson, 91).

The narrator offers these thoughts during their tenuous coexistence with Louise and Elgin, when Louise is still trying to balance her loyalty between her husband and her affair. A confusing time for our narrator, they express in this passage a lack of stability and a desire for some semblance of control. The narrator wants Louise, for example, to “be the leader of [their] expedition,” acknowledging that the two of them are attempting a feat together and that someone needs to take charge of its success. Even more anxiety is expressed through the feeling of being “sunk,” which the narrator experiences so strongly that they state it twice. To be “sunk” is to be forced to stagnate, to be trapped without option for progression or change—or even a way out. This is clearly not a desirable state for our control-seeking narrator, even if it is with Louise.

“Destiny is a worrying concept” for our narrator because they cannot exert control over it, and neither can their beloved Louise. For what good is Louise as an expedition leader if fate has already dictated that their expedition should fail? Here the narrator makes explicit their opposition to being “sunk,” claiming that they “want to choose” their path instead of being manipulated by their potential fate. This opposition of destiny and choice is especially powerful here because of how the narrator seeks choice through Louise; they do not “want to be fated” but they still want Louise to lead, like they want to exert control but only some. It is as though the narrator is uncomfortable with their lack of stability and also feels incapable of accepting the responsibility of choice.

The narrator’s struggle for control is reflected in the novel as a whole, primarily through the non-linear mode of storytelling. The narrator guides us from one scene to another, one relationship to another, offering hints about how each piece fits into the greater story but ultimately revealing only what they deem relevant. The narrator exerts control by telling the story exactly how they desire, but in doing so they forfeit the ability to dictate all of the details (such as the narrator’s gender.) Because the narrator only offers specific pieces of the story for examination, we iare left, much like Louise, to “lead the expedition” and draw our own conclusions, to make decisions on our behalf and the narrator’s.

From Written on the Body:

“The potatoes, the celery, the tomatoes, all had been under her hands. When I ate my own soup I strained to taste her skin. She had been here, there must be something of her left. I would find her in the oil and onion, detect her through the garlic. I knew that she spat in the frying pan to determine the readiness of the oil. It’s an old trick, every chef does it, or did. And so I knew when I asked her what was in the soup that she had deleted the essential ingredient. I will taste you if only through your cooking” (Winterson 36-37).

This passage, which takes place before the narrator has an affair with Louise, actually describes a crucial part of their courtship. The narrator claims that they “will taste [Louise] only through [her] cooking,” like they long to know Louise in an intimate way but are forced to put a barrier between them for the sake of propriety. The use of food as courtship is effective here because eating is inherently sensuous, much like sexual intimacy. The narrator even references Louise’s body and brings her physicality into the creation of her food through Louise’s spit-test. The narrator wants to get to know Louise through their mouth, through the food that Louise creates, the same that literally contains Louise’s saliva. Their mouths touch in spite of the narrator’s attempts to keep a safe distance.

In fact, Louise’s spit might even be the primary thing that the narrator is looking to take in. After all, lots of food is referenced in this passage but it is all in service to finding Louise’s taste beneath this food, all about the narrator connecting to her through the vessel of food. The narrator realizes that Louise’s hands had touched all of their food and they immediately “strain to taste her skin,” looking for Louise’s flavor instead of the food’s. It is a flavor that is evidently missing, the “essential ingredient” that has been left out.

This sense of unconventional intimacy falls into a larger pattern of the novel, of the narrator having markedly different romantic experiences with all of their various partners (tales that are all told out of order, another untraditional element to her affairs.) The narrator’s lovers are of all sorts and all experience intimacy in different ways—for I the radical it was blowing up museum bathrooms, for Jacqueline it was quiet domestic life—and Louise is another person with whom the narrator experiences unique intimacy. The current love is no better than the last love, and this way of representing relationships legitimizes all of the narrator’s partners as valid, important, and capable of unique love.