Category: 2015 Blog Post

On your index card please write:

• Your name
• Your preferred pronouns
• Hometown
• Email address
• Year/Major
• Something interesting about yourself/fun fact (something to help me with names)

Cereus Blooms at Night

“Drenched in sweat, she stopped to catch her breath, not taking her eyes off the man. Then she dragged his unyielding weight into the sewing room. She ran out slamming the door shut behind her. Her mother used to keep a key on the ledge. She reached up and found it. She locked the door. She leaned against it with relief and then mounted the stairs. At the top she shut and locked the door.” (Page 229) The story of the sewing room, and the symbol it has represented in small vignettes in the novel, comes to its’ final scene. A fitting room to lock away the ultimate demon.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes the friendship and tenderness between Lavinia and Sarah. After Lavinia returns from Seminary school, she goes to visit the Ramchandins. Chandin feels the purpose of Lavinia’s visit is because she has missed him, but Lavinia’s joy comes from being reunited with Sarah. Chandin feels snubbed yet again. The news of Lavinia’s broken engagement led me to conclude that there are stronger emotions between Sarah and Lavinia than has been alluded to. They become inseparable and their feelings grow, until the two of them can no longer be confident that their adoration and tenderness could be hidden from prying eyes. Poopoo saw the gentle caresses and knew they meant something very special, she just didn’t know how to classify it, but was encouraged that these two women were happy, and that there was a “rightness” to their relationship that felt natural to Poopoo. Her protectiveness of the space the four of them shared was intrinsically, intuitively precious.

With Chandin growing more jealous and hostile at Lavinia’s indifference to him, Sarah and Lavinia started spending more time together when he was away, down in the sewing room downstairs, locked away from prying eyes and kept safe in each other’s company. Sarah, started leaving the house before she would have to see him. Both fearing Chandin’s reaction if they were discovered, knowing his uncontrollable jealousy and the sense of entitlement and privilege always implied but ultimately denied him, could lead him to a fit of rage. He begins to realise he was nothing more than a vanity project for Rev. Thoroughly, and his visions of inclusion to that class would remain a pathetic yearning. He was too grand for his own people, yet too lowly for the social strata he aspired to be part of. He settled for Sarah, but longed for Lavinia. That both women would have no respect nor regard for him, and turn to each other for love is the ultimate rejection of his manhood and maschismo.

The sewing room played another important role when Lavinia and Sarah were attempting to run away with the children. It was important for Sarah to clear out all things in the sewing room, all traces of what they shared, pictures, portraits, and the velvet hats of the daughters on that fateful day when only two of the four females were to find freedom, where two children were left behind to become enslaved to their father’s demons, desires and depravity.

This reminds me of that safe space, that island of emotional and sexual discovery shared by Narrator and Louise in “Written on the Body.” Both couples seeking to find a shared and mutual identity in a safe space, locked away from the oppressive heteronormative world. A space where their own truths could be explored, and dreams and fantasies of freedoms away from the threats and stigma against anyone who does not want to contort their identities to the world of male dominance and submission.

Author Note: I do not claim to be in the LGBTQ community, so everything said here is statements that I have been made aware of through social media and other sources. If I have been wrongly advised, everyone is more than welcomed to correct me (please be nice, I’m learning).

The ending of Cereus Blooms at Night was really interesting to read. I have to say, I think it left a lot think about. I like how at the end, Tyler didn’t care if he was seen by the other nurses in the nurses uniform. I think that realization plays a part into understanding intersectionalities and binaries which we have discussed in class. In the book, there is a lot of breaking of binaries, such as Tyler determining who i he by the outfit and Otoh determining who he was by taking his father’s “place” (becoming the man his mom knew). These breaking of binaries or redefining them, is what is talked about in a lot of our theoretical texts. Having these binaries can be good, creating safe spaces in which to chat with others going through a similar experience, however they also exclude people. For example, the current issue in the LGBTQ community is the erasure of bisexual people. In the binary of LGBTQ, it is supposed to include the B, which stands for bisexual. However, there have allegations that this binary has excluded bisexuals almost for the same reasons as heard from the binary of heterosexuality. Being bisexual means that a person likes both males and females, some things that have been said about this are like asking the person to choose male or female, or if the person starts dating someone of the same gender that automatically makes them gay or lesbian and creates the erasing of bisexuality.

 

Something that caught my attention while looking at the transcripts from the archives was the lack of representation from people of color. This raised some questions from me: Why is there a lack of representation? Does it have to do with the history of people of color in this country? Does it tie into cultural and societal expectations? I wanted to know how these questions tied into the lack of representation of people of color in the archives. There is no doubt in my mind that there are people of color in the LGBTQ community (I follow a nice amount on Tumblr if that is any indication), so why so little in the archives? I don’t think it is the fault of the archives, but the fault in the society we happen to be in. I can only talk about my culture specifically, but from what I know of from experience, is the very high expectations of masculinity placed on black men. I have a younger brother and from what I remember, he was often told that he cried too much and that he needed to toughen up. The expectations on black men is to be hard, what I mean by that is to have little to no emotions and be able to handle every and any situation handed to him. Anything less than this, including being queer, warrants name calling and an unfortunate experience with bullies. From what I can understand being an East Asian Studies major (and from reading personal stories from Tumblr), there is almost a complete opposite effect in play. More often than not, Asian males are striped of their sexuality altogether, leaving a space where they can’t explore themselves. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t queer people of color, just that situations make it difficult for them to be out, which is why representation matters.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLvUljcMScQ

I guess I went with sort of a stereotypical text because the song is entitled “I’m Coming Out” but both this song and Diana Ross are significant to me. Diana Ross was really the first diva I fell in love with. In seventh grade, we had to write research papers on our heroes and I wrote mine on Diana Ross. She has always been a gay icon, frequenting pride and AIDS events. In terms of what this song means to me, I played it at breakfast on the day I came out to my family, October 11, 20011 (Coming Out Day because I live for clichés). My family didn’t really catch on until I came out to them later that night. I think Diana’s confidence and kindness really helped me with coming to terms with my identity, knowing I had “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” to listen to after a particularly rough day. The song also took place during a very pivotal point in Diana’s career, she was breaking free from both Berry Gordy, her manager, and the Supremes. And her first solo album, Diana Ross, features a very bare picture of just her. I think this can be related to queerness and the act of coming out because it is a new phase of life that is very dependent on what work you have done with yourself. Often, like Diana, we feel bare and exposed after coming out and feel the need to branch out and meet new people if the ones we used to know aren’t good enough for us. This specific performance was during her concert in Central Park in 1983. Admission was free making it accessible for all of her fans. However, in the middle of the concert, it began to downpour. And Diana continued to perform, singing a few more songs and promising to continue the concert tomorrow. This performance occurred the next day, proclaiming that a little rain can’t stop “The Boss.” Though we cannot control or predict the weather, I think that the performance relates to queerness because even though we cannot control the heterosexist and cissexist structures that try desperately try to make us not love ourselves and discourage us from achieving the same opportunities as our straight and cisgender peers, we need to put on a smile and “come out” and show the world that even if they send us a little rainstorm, nothing is going to keep us down. In case you couldn’t tell, this performance makes me very emotional and I cry every time I watch it.

Diana Ross and her Supremes

Diana Ross’ First Solo Album, Diana Ross

Diana Ross performing in the rain in Central Park

Diana Ross performing in the rain in Central Park

Hi everyone,

I’ve uploaded 2 songs written and performed by Patty Griffen, with the lyrics. These two songs really resonate with me and some of the things we’ve spoken of in class. The first is titled Tony, and addresses teen suicide caused by the bullying that many young LGBTQAA people are confronted with, and the unfairness, isolation and lonliness that can lead to hopelessness. This is why Sedgwick really spoke to my heart. I have felt that kind of hopelessness in my life, and was “talked off the edge” when a therapist gave me a book to read, which forever changed my outlook on suicide, and the terrible legacy left behind for the ones who have lost someone to the forever decision. The book is free and available online.

http://www.qprinstitute.com/forever.html

When I revealed to my ex-husband and children the depression that almost took my life, we started an honest dialog of moments in their lives where they experienced that kind of hopelessness,  also entertaining the idea. Thank God we spoke about it, because I never knew they had felt that kind of pain too. We all cried when the reality of the magnitude of grief we could have felt at such a horrible loss hit us. In shock, we promised each other that we will always reach out to one another when hopelessness feels like it will rip your soul apart. When your heart is so swollen and raw that it threatens to break your ribs to be free of you, filling you with fear and certainty that things will never change and there is no other way out, please remember that there is. Getting past the pain in that moment might seem impossible, but there are alternatives to a forever decision. The alarming reality is that those who know someone who have taken their lives are at a much higher risk of making the same choice. This devastating legacy is called the suicide contagion, because it spreads like a malignant tumor, invasive and deadly, pulling others into the grave as well. Death is not pretty, romantic, or reversible.

The second song, “Change”, is about how women are forced to conform, to keep in line with what someone else thinks we ought to be. In this song, it happens in little increments of passive/aggressive acts of “love”, because those who love us want what’s best for us, right? And every time we accept or adopt the changes that are suggested, we lose a little bit of ourselves, until the only thing that’s left isn’t recognizable at all anymore, not even to ourselves. Professor Kersh printed out a part of “Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose” for me, the section titled Compulsory Heterosexuality, and I am forever thankful for the clarity the piece has brought to my awareness and how things really are for women in the present heterocentric system. (no, I haven’t become a hater, just pissed off) So I think the next time I hear someone say something like, “I think you should wear THAT dress” instead of what I’ve chosen, I’ll answer with, fuck off!

 

In terms of some background, the block quote I will be analyzing is taken from an interview I conducted for the LGBT Oral History Project, which is not yet published. My interviewee discusses sirb’s (sirb’s pgp) experience in forming the first all black drag king troupe in Central Pennsylvania and how they used to do routines based off of the stepping of historically black fraternities. As sirb says, “We made up our own dance routine, um, our own steps, we might do a few moves of the little stepping, say one of the frats that we saw, mixed with a move from another group back in the day that we seen, just put these all together and come up with our, with what we were gonna do…Yeah, it is, it is, it’s hard to do but, if you look at a lot of steps now, it’s all mixed up. If you just really look at like all the dance steps, you get like you might have Michael Jackson, you might have James Brown, you might have, like just put together. We just added a little bit of this stepping to it without taking the frat’s moves you know we might see something like oh, we like the idea of this hand move motion, we might that. And we might see something else like oh, we like the way they did a dip, so we might go dip. Dip and then do a hand, you know. That’s how we would do it.” It ‘s interesting to think of the implications of a group of presumably gay women, or as my interviewee refers to them, “masculine identified women,” interpreting the gendered behaviors of a group of men. Greek life is seen as one of the most elitist and exclusive institutions in higher education (expressing a generalization and common opinion, not what I think). These organizations often require very rigid expectations in terms of gendered behaviors, such as very strict dress codes, only allowing opposite sex partners for dates, and having parties focused around mingling with organizations of the opposite sex. Due to the historical context of when a lot of greek organizations came into existence (in the South, immediately after the civil war), the dues one must pay, and the climate of a lot of these greek organizations right now (SAE, border control parties, Antebellum South parties), these organizations also explicitly exclude people of color and poor people. As a reaction to the racist, classist, heterosexist, and cissexist implications set forth by these fraternities and sororities, people of color made their own specifically black or multicultural fraternities and sororities. Historically black and multi-cultural fraternities and sororities subvert the elitism of these greek organizations and carve their own stake in a traditional college experience. And while all of these organizations do great work in philanthropy and community organizing, they often continue to perpetuate these strict gendered and sexualized patterns that exclude LGBTQ+ people. Doing a drag interpretation of greek life spins all of these traditions on their head. As Judith Butler says in Gender Trouble, “that the structure of impersonation reveals one of the key fabricating mechanisms through which the social constructions of gender takes place. [She] would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (136-137). As black and multicultural fraternities and sororities complicate the racialized and socio-economic presumptions of greek life while drag performances of their routines subvert their gendered and sexualized standards. This black drag performance accomplishes both of those tasks simultaneously. Drag seeks to complicate cisgender identities, saying that maybe my sex and gender do not always correlate in the way you think they should. There is a huge difference between drag and trans identities and I absolutely want to make that clear, there is a lot of cissexism within the drag community. Drag is a performance, you’re one gender in drag and another out of drag, while trans is an identity, when trans person takes off their dress or binder at the end of the day, they’re still trans. Drag is temporary, trans is permanent. Moving on to specifically drag, it blurs the lines of the gender binary by making a farce of these gender roles we have in our society, often camping up and over-exaggerating these expectations, and challenging the idea that boys should always have a masculine identity and girls should always be feminine. And drag is very performative, expressing gender in a way we don’t expect, as RuPaul says, “you’re born naked and the rest is drag.” In this quote, RuPaul seeks to critique the ways in which gender is a constant performance, an identity and appearance that one must constantly uphold, through self-policing, in order to fit into a designated role. But drag transcends and complicates the gender that one expects someone else to be and gives someone the experience to explore their own interpretation of how a boy or girl should act through what they have learned from their own experience. These greek identities are exactly what drag seeks to critique, the extreme masculinity of fraternities that is expressed through Brooks Brothers blazers, L.L. Bean khakis, and Vineyard Vines bow-ties in the most ridiculous color schemes I have ever seen is paired with the super femininity of sororities which manifests itself in Lilly Pulitzer dresses and Jack Rogers sandals, is almost camp within itself, being the extreme exemplar of what society thinks gender and sexuality should be. A black drag rearticulation of black fraternity performance complicates everything we think we know about race, class, sexuality, and gender within the greek system.

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Munoz, 1).

Throughout the novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, characters such as Otoh and Tyler seem to share a sense of queerness with Mala Ramchandin. For example, while discussing his complicated relationship with Mala, Otoh states, “I felt as though she and I had things in common. She had secrets and I had secrets. Somehow I wanted to go there and take all my clothes off and say, ‘Look! See? See all this? I am different!'” (Mootoo, 124). In openly saying that he wanted Mala to see his androgynous body, Otoh suggests that Mala understands his unconventional, or queer, means of existence. At first, this comparison seemed somewhat unprecedented, especially with a perspective of queerness only in relation to gender and sexuality. Otoh and Tyler exemplify the complexities of gender and sexuality through their means of gender performance, and, although Mala has lived a life of anguish, she does not seem to exhibit characteristics of queerness in gender or sexuality.

Yet, upon further reading, I can now see how Mala may fit into queer discourse. As Munoz’s notion of queerness suggests, transgressions of conceptions of “here and now” can constitute queerness. Throughout the later years of her life, Mala rejects the “here and now” of the present world and often chooses to live in the past to create a possibility for another reality in which she can protect Pohpoh, punish her father, and pursue a relationship with Ambrose.

 

Everyone in life and in Cereus Blooms at Night has secrets. They are masqueraded in different ways and the severity of each is different. The most notable skeletons in the large closet that Shani Mootoo has created are Mala’s childhood that was filled with abuse, different love affairs with Chandin and Lavinia and Sarah and Lavinia, Tyler’s sexual identity and preference, and the disappearance of Mala’s father.

 

When recounting the event of killing her father, on page 229, it starts as a struggle, She is unsure of what to do and jumps around his body, “did she only imagine the vapor of hot air that passed over the blade? She jumped up and, extremely vigilant, edged her way toward his feet.” But as the recounting continues, Mala becomes determined and has a plan to get Chandin in the sewing room, locked away where nobody could find him and she would be at peace “She locked the door. She leaned up against it with relief and then mounted the stairs.” She was free.

 

This said, she was never happy with missing Asha so when Judge Bissey came and delivered her letters to Mala I was surprised that she wasn’t upset that they were never delivered because of the Mailman’s fears. Continuing with secrets and my lack of faith in our current legal system, Judge Bissey’s secrets are alluded to on page 243. Anyway, the notes came to Mala as a sigh of relief almost. She wasn’t angry but happy to know she was ok and give her hope of reuniting.

 

Secrets are powerful, but eventually they become liberating to share once you have the right audience. We talked about confession in class and that to be coerced into confession is not the same as doing it on your own. It took Mala a long time to admit to her father’s disappearance but with the way the book ended, I believe that guilt was gone and there was only hope for Asha and her reuniting

Actions have consequences. This is an idea idea that many people know, but few people are aware of how horrible the consequences can be, or how small the action. Of course, one has to figure free will into this as well, because that is how choices are made. One could argue that when Asha and Pohpoh’s mother left it had the consequence of abandoning her children in an abusive situation, but why blame her for her husband’s decisions to commit this abuse anymore than one would blame her daughters for not leaving.

It was an unpleasant shock to me, however, when reading the last section of Cereus Blooms at Night, to realize that there was one unequivocally bad decision and decision maker on whom a large part of the blame for everything that occurred could be placed.
One of the primary themes of the story is to not judge people so harshly, evidenced first by the trial of Mala where the literal judge decides to be merciful because they do not fully know what happened, and later on by the large number of queer characters who are or are not treated as odd by their neighbors: Otoh living life as a man, though not being genetically male; Nurse Tyler’s job and dressing up to impress/entertain Mala Ramchadin; and Ambrose’s sleepiness and then wakefulness, while he also kicks himself harder than anyone else for what was done to Pohpoh.

This theme was most heavily and horrifyingly reinforced, however, by a single line in passing about a decision made by another character who as yet has suffered no ill consequences despite the misery brought into Mala’s life. “None of Asha’s letters were ever delivered because the righteous postman, deeming the Ramchadin house to be a place of sin and moral corruption, refused to go up there” (243). Any of Asha’s letters delivered at any time could have given Pohpoh the motivation and means to run away from that place of sin and join Asha in a happier life. Instead, the postman’s judgement resulted in the victim being subject to worse and worse abuse, culminating in madness. Jesus ate with lepers, and through his kindness they were saved. In a story where “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is a recurring theme, I feel comfortable enough with my own actions to judge the postman as, at the least, intentionally failing in his duties. At the least.