Author: lucifer

In Feeling Utopia, the reader is introduced to the idea that queerness, as a utopia, does not exist yet, and if it ever does, it will not be in our lifetime. It’s a “warm illumination of a horizon,” “a longing that propels us onward,” a “doing for and toward the future,” and a “rejection of a here and now” (Munoz). I think the most important idea here is the fact that the simple act of being queer– the fact that you are a queer person who exists– means you are actively rejecting the present and all the structures that come with it. By just existing, you are living in the future. Because all the queer people that came before us never existed in a queer utopia, and therefore neither do we. We can build on our past and progress, but we are always going to be reaching toward that horizon– crossing the open space between what we know and what we try to know. 

We borrow from the past and we propel ourselves into a future that we know will be better. Celine Sciamma, the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, said that “You still have to tell the story. You can’t quote. Not yet” (Sciamma). She is referring to the fact that the history of queer culture is often so fragmented (she uses Sappho’s poetry as an example) that we cannot draw on it as a simple fact but rather with memory and filling in the blanks with our own experiences. Time then, circles back around as we see ourselves in the past figures who saw themselves in our future. 

To work toward this idea of a queer utopia does not mean there are specific actions or ways to be queer. Existing and remembering does the trick. “Someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” (Sappho fragment 147). This fragment is all we have left of what might have been a longer poem, or something that means something else entirely. It refers to a future time and the writer is certain that she will be remembered, and she turns out to be right, because we are reading her words thousands of years later. Yes, they have been transcribed and translated many times over, and reinterpreted. Author’s intent is pretty much impossible to distinguish. But that means we get to decide what it means for us individually and as a community, because there’s possibility in her words and so there’s possibility in ours too. 

sappho’s poetry fragments (written down, not as she would have performed/perhaps wrote them):

 

a sappho poetry fragment, as translated by anne carson with the brackets showing where words might go:

the interview excerpt and link to the article: 

Our culture is at the stage of memories. It’s not at the stage of history,” Sciamma told me, in an early conversation. The historical record is so incomplete that it has to be supplemented, even supplanted, by remembered stories. “You still have to tell the story. You can’t quote. Not yet.” She added, “That’s lesbian culture. Sorry.” Gesturing with a cigarette, she emphasized the second syllable in a French-sounding way that made it clear she wasn’t sorry. Then she quoted Sappho’s Fragment 147: “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.”

“Someone,” she emphasized. “Not ‘this country,’ not ‘poetry,’ not ‘literature.’ Someone.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/07/celine-sciammas-quest-for-a-new-feminist-grammar-of-cinema  

Eli Clare’s dilemma of queer identity existing in rural spaces is a topic that Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain addresses. Although Jack and Ennis both deny the label of “queer” as well as any other word that encompasses an identity other than heterosexual, they both undoubtedly are – queer, that is. Their rejection of the word comes from their fear of naming what’s between them. As Jack says, “Nobody’s business but ours” (Proulx 15). Clare’s statement that he couldn’t “live easily and happily that isolated from queer community” (Clare 34) doesn’t apply to Jack and Ennis because they aren’t aware that such a community exists. They never mention outright what they talk about when they talk about it (which is not often), but they do eventually acknowledge that there is something between them: “‘Shit. I been lookin at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?’ ‘It don’t happen in Wyomin and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver,’ said Jack…This ain’t no little thing that’s happenin here’” (Proulx 30). Even if they have an inkling that things might be easier somewhere else, they both won’t consider the thought of moving together. At least Ennis doesn’t, because even as he is admitting his attachment to Jack in the only way he can, he accepts it as a fact of rural life: “I goddamn hate it that you’re goin a drive away in the mornin and I’m going back to work. But if you can’t fix it you got a stand it” (Proulx 30). This sentiment is echoed at the end of the story when Ennis is reflecting on their relationship after dreaming about Jack. He says there’s “open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe” (Proulx 55). I think Ennis’s use of the term “open space” refers to both his internal understanding of what they had and also to the open space of Brokeback mountain. They never go back to the mountain, and part of their belief is that they can only exist together in peace on that mountain. Jack wants to build a life with Ennis even if he doesn’t understand how it could work, while Ennis doesn’t see how they can “fix” what’s between them or how other people may react to it, so he just “stands” it. So instead of the rural and the metropolitan identities of queer people mixing, it’s the rurality of Jack and Ennis’s relationship that allows them the freedom to be together but also is made dangerous by other people.

In Eli Clare’s chapter losing home, he talks about the realities of living as a queer person in rural versus urban areas. Clare uses the words queer, exile, and class to describe the ways in which he has lost his home, queer being the easiest to explain, exile harder, and class “the most confusing” (Clare 36). While the terms rural and redneck often carry connotations of bigotry with them, Clare points out that rural white people are not any more homophobic than “the average urban person. Rather the difference lies in urban anonymity…in the face of bigotry and violence, anonymity provides a certain level of protection” (Clare 34-5). 

This is the appeal to many queer people of big city life. You can reinvent yourself, or show yourself as you have always been without fear of having to defend it to everyone around you. No one is there to report you to your family or your boss, and there are others equally happy to find solace in their anonymity together. The term metronormativity assumes that this is the only way to be queer, essentially being out/liberated/welcomed in the city versus being forced into the closet/being endangered in rural areas as a queer person. Eli Clare acknowledges that he doesn’t believe he “could live easily and happily that isolated from queer community…My loss of home is about being queer” (Clare 34). There is a sort of paradox in these sentences. A lot of being queer is about found family, found homes. People that accept you because the people who were supposed to didn’t. And yet Clare still refers to the town he left behind as “home” and describes at length the people and the places that he misses, the neighborly attitudes, the environment that made him who he was. Clare’s “home” holds both these qualities and also the fear of homophobia should he return and the abuse he suffered growing up. He asks the question “is queer identity worth the loss?” (40). Queer identity and community is what helped heal him of his trauma and find a sense of belonging, but it’s also what cost him his home. It’s the mix of his urban and rural identities that make him who he is today, but is the loss of home enough to make someone want to change themselves? It’s this dichotomy that allows Clare the grace to write with empathy about both types of queer and rural people that he is familiar with. He maintains that even if he can’t go to his home as it stands today, the connections between rural and queer people are still important, because they’re not two separate concepts. We can’t dismiss the importance of where we come from in favor of an anonymous urban lifestyle. But we can’t ignore the very real fears that come with being queer out in the open, so to speak. This paradox of queerness and home speaks to the difficulty of having many identities tangled up inside one person. You cannot have one without the other, they are all interconnected.

“When she lifted the soup spoon to her lips how I longed to be that innocent piece of stainless steel” (Winterson 36), evokes the type of love that is displayed in Romeo and Juliet. However, with a closer read, both of these love connections can clearly be classified as obsessive rather than passionate, controlling rather than romantic. The all-consuming language (“the blood in my body” and “resurrected”) as the narrator describes Louise simply eating soup gives way to sexual connotations (“take me in your mouth” and “pleasure”). It’s not simply an objectification of the lover, but a desire to be her only source of sustenance, to have ownership.

Louise’s body is functioning normally, and, like all humans, she needs to eat to survive. The narrator inserts themselves into this fundamentally human act and makes it about their perceived connection with Louise, their need for her, and their need for her to need them back. They are not content with being her company, they need to be her lifeblood. The connections between bodies and food is obvious in the repetition of certain words like “mouth,” “lips,” and “blood,” in tandem with “vegetable stock,” “vermicelli,” “soup,” and “butter.” This is a dangerous type of obsession, because on the surface it seems passionately romantic, so as not to invite argument or denial. Because of this, a question of consent can be asked, because Louise is not aware of the narrator’s train of thought as she is eating her soup, she is not aware of the fact that she is being sexualized to such an extent. To put so much of yourself into one person is to saddle them with the responsibility of the magnitude of your love, something which they might not be comfortable with. It is also risky on the narrator’s end, because if Louise remains unaware of these feelings she is likely to hurt them, or even if she is aware, it’s almost impossible to not hurt the people you love. There’s a power imbalance on both sides in this passage, one because Louise does not deserve to be obsessed over in such a way, and two because one person should not be given the power of obsessive love over another.