Category: 2015 Blog Post

“However I knew for a fact she was able to speak and had volumes of tales and thoughts on her head. She rambled under her breath all day and night, as long as she and I were alone.” (99)

In this passage Tyler began to think about how the employees at the center thought Mala Ramchandin lacked basic communication skills. He then went on to talk about how she would communicate only when she was around him. This passage shows the connection that has developed between Mala and Tyler through different forms of language and communication.

Despite what anyone around him may say, Tyler feels like he knows who Mala Ramchandin is as a person. By saying that he knows “for a fact”(99) that she is able to talk and communicate shows that he has a special love and appreciation for Mala that no one would be able to change.

This passage also speaks to the special bond that exists between Tyler and Mala. In the beginning of the book it was said that Mala would not talk to anyone, which is why they thought that she was not physically capable of speaking, but Tyler provided her with a sense of comfortability that allowed her to express herself how she saw fit. Tyler says Mala will talk for a long time “as long as she and I were alone”(99) which shows that she had a great level of trust in him.

Later in this passage it says how Mala Ramchandin was talking to Tyler not just for fun, but because she had a story that she wanted to tell. It seems as though through different forms of language and communication, Mala and Tyler are sharing their story with one another. For example, when Mala stole the dress for Tyler and told him to put it on she was showing that she accepted who he was as a person. She then continued to ignore him once he put the dress on to show him that it was okay to be whoever he wanted around her. Although this communication was non-verbal, she was getting a message across to Tyler, and allowing him to be himself and share his story with her. Throughout the book, this is a mutual story telling that adds to the magic of their relationship.

The well-known myth of Scheherazade reflects the ultimate use of storytelling as a mechanism of survival. Trapped in the King’s castle, the young Scheherazade tells stories throughout the night, ending each narrative at the break of dawn. The King, in an eagerness to hear the stories continued the next night, spares the life of Scheherazade, enabling her to continue to live through storytelling. Among the queer community, survival is a constant challenge (Sedgwick, p.3). To tell the stories of those who have survived queerness, is ultimately to give them life. Furthermore, it gives life to all those who are exposed to the story by providing a concrete alternative, a pathway, (Halberstam, p.2) a potentiality for a future (Munoz, p.1) a story through which all those queer (and not queer) can vicariously live through. In fact, queer space has been defined as the development of such “alternative temporalities”; a space that has the “potential to open up new life narratives” (Halberstam, p.2). In this sense, queer space may be conceptualized as the very stories, novels, accounts and archives of the queer among us.
Through the theoretical lens of queer space as a potential for new narratives and a reflection of life itself, it becomes possible to understand Shani Mootoo’s novel, Cereus Blooms at Night as a powerful example of storytelling for survival. The protagonist, Tyler, insists that recounting Mala Ramchandin’s story (and the story of those of her time and space) fulfills a particular duty: his “intention to relate Mala Ramchandin’s story” (Mootoo, p.15). In fact, Tyler’s “shared queerness” (Mootoo, p. 48) with Mala enables him to find life in her narrative, to explore the possibility and the layers of queerness through the consistent unconventionalism. If queer space can be expressed as the “potentiality of life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (Halberstam, p.2), then the Ramchandin chronicles provide a stark opposition to heteronormativity. Moreover, Halberstam’s language, namely the word “unscripted” serves to highlight the value of narrative and the written word in creating this queer space. To some extent, the very care Tyler provides for Mala is characterized by the retelling of her life – the narrative itself is what keeps Mala living. Novels of queer identity then, or more broadly, queer stories provide an essential source of life. In the context of words and the romanticization of survival stories, even queer loves become eternal: as Tyler’s fascination for the gardener Mr.Hector grows, be begins to characterize him as “ageless” (p.70), emphasizing the sheer endlessness of queer that only narratives provide.
While Cereus Blooms at Night, among many other written and not-written stories, serves as a queer space, heteronormative institutions that have silenced and suppressed queerness (Sedgwick, p.2) are what ultimately ‘kills’ queers. In combination with the “systematic separation of children from queer adults” (Sedgwick, p.2), the erasing of queer voices and thus queer lives remains a critical threat. What is really needed then, are the stories of the queer: LGBT archives provide a wealth of narratives that serves to give life to individuals who have been violently quieted throughout history. Storytelling as survival, coined by the legend of Sheherazade is easily found among many distant disciplines. In the field of clinical psychology for example, it is well-known among eating disorder researchers that one of the most beneficial interventions is for recovered individuals to tell their story to those who are ill. Why? Because to hear about the possibility of a future, when your diagnosis inherently rejects living, is to provide motivation, to provide a model – narratives then, are a path amidst thick woods: a way.

I chose to use Written on the Body to look at The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo through the lens of queer theory. Throughout Written on the Body, readers call into question the narrator’s gender. There are what society would call contradicting clues, clues that could potentially give the narrator’s gender away—if the narrator identifies with one at all—but said clues are never consistent. This absence of gender also makes for an absence of sexuality. Is the narrator’s relationship with Louise a heterosexual one? A same-sex one? Neither? This is what I would like to attempt to apply to Lizbeth’s sexuality from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps Winterson did not include the narrator’s gender or sexuality to make a point about the unimportance of them. Not in a sense that gender and sexuality aren’t valuable parts of a person’s identity, but that from an objective point of view, they should not matter. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, we are made aware of Lizbeth’s fluid—and very active—sexuality towards the beginning of the novel. She has had many lovers, mostly female. However, she also begins a sexual relationship with Blomkvist. The novel does not make Lizbeth’s sexuality something of importance, however the audience seems to have an inherent need to analyze it.

To go even further, both Winterson and Larsson could not only be making a statement about the objective unimportance of gender and sexuality, but also about society’s need for labels. When a person begins to struggle with their sexuality, they often attempt to fit it into one of the boxes society has created for queer persons (These persons are queer, why are we trying to box them again? This goes against the definition of queer.). This is because society has not only taught this person that being queer is not normal, but that this person now must name themselves so the rest of society can judge them based off of that name. We are afraid of the unknown, the anonymous. Perhaps this could formulate into why other characters from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo fear Lizbeth.

“Squint your eyes and look closer/ I am not between you and your ambition/ I am a poster girl with no poster/ I am 32 flavors and then some/ And I’m beyond your peripheral vision/ so you might want to turn your head/ ‘cause some day you’re going to get hungry/ and eating most of the words you just said/ Both my parents taught me about good will/And I have done well by their names/ Just the kindness I’ve lavished on strangers/ Is more than I can explain/ Still there’s many who’ve turned out their porch lights/ Just so I would think they were not home/And hid in the dark of their windows/ Till I’d passed and left them alone.”

 

I was thinking about the lyrics of 32 Flavors through the lens of Sedgwick in Queer and Now, “–since being a survivor on this scene is a matter of surviving into threat, stigma, the spiraling violence of gay- and lesbian-bashing, and (in the AIDS emergency) the omnipresence of somatic fear and wrenching loss.” (pg 3)

The opening lines to this song are such strong words, in my opinion. She tells the listener that she is not stopping them from pursuing whatever it is they want. She happens to be different, and she does not have any other agenda other then pointing out her right to happiness as well. Ani tells her audience that although she has learned her parents’ lessons well about how to behave with respect towards strangers, her neighbors feel they need not show her the same respect, because she falls outside of that which is culturally acceptable to them. They feel it is better to scurry inside and hide, as if she were an ominous threat rather then accept her as a valuable and equal member of the community. Maybe they do think of her as a threat, embodying an unfamiliar and frightening alternate reality to their “little pink houses.” The cognitive effort required in informing one’s self about a world full of the complexity of the human condition is hard to fit in between Fox News and Dancing with the Stars. But Ani rises above the haters, saying, “I never try to give me life meaning by demeaning you” which is a statement of strength. She does not have to retaliate at their ignorance, nor does she allow them the power over her to determine what makes her happy. “God help you if you are a phoenix and you dare to rise up from the ash, a 1,000 eyes will smolder with jealousy while you are just flying past” tells me that those who would “smolder” are absolutely inconsequential in the eyes of the phoenix, and that’s how it should remain.

“He’d used the word screwball, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we’re defined by our desires, I was in a lifetime of trouble” (Sedaris 29).

At this point in David Sedaris’s book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris recalls his experiences taking guitar lessons with a “midget” named Mister Mancini. After seeing people ostracizing and mocking Mister Mancini in a restaurant, Sedaris decides to come clean about his distaste for guitar and secret passion for singing. After singing the Oscar Mayer commercial in a Billie Holiday voice, Mister Mancini calls him a “screwball,” telling him, “I don’t swing that way.”

In this passage, Sedaris repeats the words “he meant” as he reflects on Mister Mancini’s reaction. This repetition connotes the significance of the implications of Mancini’s use of the word screwball to describe Sedaris. “He meant” suggests that when Mister Mancini calls him a “screwball,” he wants to say something else. By stating, “He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute,” Sedaris hints at what exactly Mancini really “meant.” Since Mancini wants Sedaris to “play his guitar like a woman,” naming his guitar stereotypically masculine names, such as Doug or Brian, implies that he is sexually attracted to men. Additionally, mentioning that he should have “taken up flute” references the tendency for people to associate “feminine” things, such as the flute, to gay men. This shows that he is perceived as an effeminate gay boy, leading the reading to think that Mister Mancini means to say faggot or gay instead of screwball.

In “Queer and Now,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick emphasizes that the word queer can often “deepen and shift” with meaning as it intersects with different identities such as language, skin, migration, and state. Although Sedaris may have not been specifically thinking about queerness when he had this experience with Mancini, it can be applied to the situation. When he sees that Mancini is ridiculed because of his identity as a “midget,” Sedaris relates Mancini’s place as an outsider to his own experiences being marginalized due to his perceived sexuality. Although Sedaris may have felt a shared identity of “outsider” or “queer” with Mancini, his homophobic response to Sedaris’s singing shows that notions of queerness is not universal. Sedgwick states that “anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else” (9). This passage therefore sheds light on Kedgwick’s ideas about the importance of first person in queer identities.

” ‘There were plenty of screwballs like you in Atlanta, but me, I don’t swing that way – you got it? This  might be your ‘thing’ or whatever, but you can definitely count me out.’ He reached for his conch shell and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I mean, come on now. For God’s sake, kid, pull yourself together'” (17).

In Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, she writes “consider the fact that we have become adept within postmodernism at talking about ‘normativity,’ but far less adept at describing in rich detail the practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification” (Halberstam, 4). In this sense, Halberstam is saying that there are cultural assumptions within society that create “normativity” – a standardized way of being. People who identify themselves as queer, therefore are opposing the conventional forms of association, belonging and identification which Halberstam mentions.

In the passage above, Sedaris is recounting his experience with his music teacher, in which he scrutinizes Sedaris for resisting the heteronormative ideals by performing a musical number and being proud of it. Earlier in the chapter, Mister Mancini had questioned David’s sexuality when he chose to name his guitar “Oliver,” after his hamster. Mister Mancini wanted Sedaris to give a feminine name to his guitar, render it a female, and sexualize the guitar so that he could physically dominate the instrument – become powerful and confident in his artistry or lack thereof. Although there are more representations of gays and lesbians in literature, movies, and television than there were fifteen years ago, society rejects the opposition of gays and lesbians to conform within the patriarchal, heteronormative culture in which we live. Instead, associating, belonging, and identifying conventionally within society, considers you to be significant as a person. This is what Sedaris attempts to resist – but in this scene, he succumbs to the influence and pressure of Mister Mancini and hides his lack of interest in women’s breasts and physical stature and drops his dream of becoming a singer.

 

In Written on the Body the main character has troubles with their identity. Because we never find out the sex of the narrator, it leads me to believe that the author chose to depict X as confused. Confused in sexual preference and sexual identity. In contrast, in Me Talk Pretty One Day the main character, David, is from a young age, identifying with female or feminine norms. We spoke about shame in the beginning of the semester and on page 10, David talks about hiding his stacks of Cosmopolitan under Boy’s life and Sports Illustrated. The concepts of shame and conformity run wild through our readings. What I find to be very interesting is this need in grade school to have someone like Agent Samson in the school. While at first I should have realized the negative connotation around her due to the analogy of being taken out in handcuffs, I assumed it was just because David was embarrassed because of his speech impediment. As I continued in the first chapter it is disheartening to think that teachers try to correct more than just a lisp. David’s efforts to cover his lisp corrected the scrutiny from the teachers but Samson could not change him as a person. The idea of shame, again, comes up in David’s concern that he would be stranded alone if Agent Samson were successful in “changing” the other boys. The fact that the boys just became quieter speaks to the shame, too. By keeping their mouth’s shut, harassment could be kept to a minimum. But, this leads to a sense of isolation that I believe was the ultimate reason the narrator in Written on the Body also ended up being isolated in a cabin in the woods. With everyone trying to change people to make them become “normal” those who are not going with the norm feel the need to hide. People in power, whether parental, school, political, etc. are social dictators of this matter. In my own experience, if my parents get made at me, well, ok. But, when they say they are disappointed in me I feel so shameful and disheartened. Shame is a horrifying feeling that David and the narrator have to continuously overcome.

“…anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of Boy’s Life or Sports Illustrated, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received.” (Sedaris, p10)

This particular essay, Go Carolina, draws implicit comparisons between trying to correct a lisp in speech therapy and trying to “straighten out” a “bent” sexual identity. The first part of the above quote serves the double-purpose of making the similarities clear through bringing up the subject of gender, which is closely connected to orientation, and then showing the effects this has on on the people subject to it–no correction is forthcoming, and the “patients” merely learn to better conceal their “condition”. The second part gives everyday examples of the deceit involved, and thus of the impacts big and small on their lives.

I saw a strong connection between the theme of this passage and the theme in Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal. In his work, Warner discusses the incorrectness of the feeling that, “controlling the sex of others, far from being unethical, is where morality begins”. People in authority seek to prevent or limit “abnormal” sexual practices, including homosexuality, and use this suppression to amass social or political power. We see this in a smaller scale in Sedaris’s work, where the school system and Miss Chrissy Samson try to straighten out his speech impediment, while also using the therapy as self-improving status transactions. Agent Samson repeatedly condescends to and chides Sedaris, and he also notes the way his teacher repeatedly and unnecessarily brings up the subject in class. The crowning event of the narrative occurs later, when Samson guilt trips him into saying thorry, and then mocks him for doing so. There couldn’t be much of a better comparison for the way Warner describes authority figures using the shame of sex to bolster their own authority. And the similarities continue when Sedaris describes what results from these tactics: no actual change in beliefs, only lies as they continue like before, but in secret. The boys change their words instead of the way they say them, and hide their “girl thing” interests behind the expected boy interests that they lack.

The Sedaris reading really hit home and his personal testimony on his childhood was something I could really relate to. A recurring theme throughout the first chapter was the idea of the nelly boy, the DMAB person who has an all too familiar attraction to everything feminine and whose eyes glaze over once someone mentions sports. Sedaris describes the symptoms usually associated with people who, like me, have childhoods with too many show tunes and unfortunately not enough AXE deodorant, “there was some connection between a sibilate s and a complete lack of interest in the State versus Carolina issue” (9). He goes onto say that usually see us in your neighborhoods, questioning all you thought “men” should do and, “baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing” (9-10). There is something inherently wrong about being a boy with “girly” tastes. Crane and Crane-Seeber articulate why nelly boys seems to make cishet people’s skin crawl in their essay, “The Four Boxes of Gendered Sexuality: Good Girl/Bad Girl and Tough Guy/Sweet Guy.” The nelly boy falls in the category of a sweet guy which they describe as queer, artistic, affectionate towards male friends, not obsessed with sports, colorfully dressed, emotional, and a good listener. In a straight context, “their wives may keep their own names because for these men, being in an equal partnership is more important than the patriarchal symbol of ‘owning’ their wives and children, having their name be the ‘family name'” (Crane and Crane-Seeber 212). As John D’Emilio articulates in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, gay men threaten the very fabric of American society because they do not adhere to the heteropatriarchal norms imposed upon them, they are not fulfilling their duty of controlling and oppressing women. (that’s not to say gay men cannot be oppressive). I think I should clarify that right now I am taking a bunch of communities and generalizing them as men with a more feminine gender expression, even though the readings may not see them as the same identity, they are policed and punished by society in very similar ways. Michael Warner comments on this, “nelly boys and butch girls can be f**bashed or taunted, and being heterosexual will not protect them very much” (37) (due to personal experience, I don’t like using the heterosexist f slur as I think using it inherently gives it power, no matter who says, a stance I am sure a lot of straight and LGBTQ+ identified people alike disagree with but (ain’t it funny what we see eye to eye on, ~oppressive language~) it’s just my personal preference). Sedgwick also references this connection between society and the regulation of gender expression, “the complicity of parents, of teachers, of clergy, even of the mental health professionals in invalidating and hounding kids who show gender-dissonant tastes, behavior, body language” (2). Sedaris’ speech teacher is an embodiment of said complicity, regulating the “gay lisp” experienced by David and his classmates. As he says, ” did they hope that by eliminating our lisps, they might set us on a different path, or were they trying to prepare us for future stage and choral careers?” (Sedaris 10-11). It’s no coincidence that all the boys in speech therapy probably later expressed a “deviant” gender or sexual identity. Their collective speech pattern brought conventional speech patterns (constructed by cishet rich white men) into question and ergo had to be eliminated. In summary, nelly boys are consistently persecuted and forcefully modified by social structures and community policing because they do not adhere to gendered norms and do not fill their designated role of dominance over women.

In “In A Queer Time and Place” Halberstam notes that, “because we experience time as some form of natural progression we fail to realize or notice its construction” (p 7). We experience time linearly and therefore we extrapolate from our experiences and emotions in a linear context and tell stories in chronological order. It is how we experience our life therefore it is how we make sense of ourselves for other people. Linear time is our norm, making it “invisible” and of no note. Written on the Body rejects this norm as the narrator fails to tell their story in chronological order. The novel starts off with acknowledging of the narrator and Louise’s affair. The narrator then peppers in stories about past lovers and begins to tell the events that took place before/while they and Louise began their affair. All this time the narrator jars the reader by skipping back to previous lovers while giving very little to no chronological context to where these lovers fit in. This “queering” of the storytelling is one of the many deviant/queer facets of the novel.

Another deviation that is present in the novel is the extramarital affair Louise is having with the narrator. Halberstam says, “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalitites by allowing their particiants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (p 2). Each of these facets of life is expected to occur within a specific timespan. They are expected to happen linearly. You are born, you fall in love, you marry, reproduce, raise your offspring, retire, travel, die. Deviating from this formula is queer. Louise disrupts her linear progression by having a marriage with the narrator, “I’m going to leave him because my love for you makes ay other life a lie” (p 98). An affair not only interrupts the progression from marriage to (more if there was any) reproduction, but can completely halt this progression with the correct timing. An affair can leave a cheater without stability to raise a child or without another person to have a child with. One deviant act (cheating) can lead to a complete derailing from the expected path. Halberstam’s analysis of time (and how it is expected to pass) explains the cultural rules pertaining to time that the narrator from Written on the Body breaks.

Salvador Dali 1943

Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of a New Man