Category: 2025 Class Post

Chandin Ramchandin was a messed up individual and his personal trauma led him to his sexually assault his own children. On page sixty-five, Mootoo writes: “For the first few weeks after the shattering of his world, he slept in his bed with a child on either side.” The phrase “shattering of his world” suggests more than just heartbreak; it implies a fundamental collapse, one likely made worse by the nature of the betrayal-his wife, Sarah, leaving him for his sister, Lavania. His response is to seek comfort in his children, positioning them on either side of him as though they are the only stability he has left. But the phrasing carries a quiet desperation, as if he is trying to physically hold onto something that is slipping away. “One night, he turned, his back to Asha.” (65).  That moment of turning away is significant. Asha, his child, represents part of the family he still has, yet in his grief and exhaustion, he instinctively distances himself from her. The act of turning suggests avoidance or unconscious rejection, as if his body moves away from what he cannot face. He is not in control; the text describes him as being in “a fitful nightmarish sleep,” emphasizing that his grief and disorientation overwhelm his conscious mind. Then comes the moment of confusion: “mistook PohPoh for Sarah.” This is deeply unsettling. PohPoh is his child, yet in his subconscious turmoil, she becomes Sarah, the wife who left him. This moment speaks to more than just exhaustion-it reveals the way his mind is collapsing under the weight of betrayal. Sarah was someone he loved and depended on, and now, in his sleep, that absence distorts reality. The confusion between his daughter and his wife suggests that roles and identities in his world have blurred. His past feelings for Lavania, add another layer. Once, he had misplaced affections for someone within his family. Now, he is again caught in an emotional entanglement where love and betrayal are tied together. His unconscious mistake-identifying his daughter as his wife-suggests that his grief has unraveled his ability to separate past from present, intimacy from trust, family from loss.

“Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race … everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze.”

            This quote from Eli Clare really stuck out to me. I know we discussed it in class, but I wanted to think about it deeper and share some of my thoughts. This passage highlights the true way that identity functions. It is not a set of distinct categories we fit into, but a combination of these things and the ways they intersect and interact together that define who we are. We discussed in class how the verbs that Clare uses, “reaches; wraps; strains; folds” are important to understanding this passage. They suggest tension between these categories and how they are dependent on each other. It also suggests that there is some sort of movement, like we are always changing and growing, and the important aspects of our identity are moving and changing with us. Clare says, “To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze” (143). This line suggests that we can’t rely on categories to neatly define ourselves like we would sometimes like to because identity is fluid, and we cannot talk about one category without talking about another.

When thinking about this during class I couldn’t help but think about family, specifically my brother and I. It’s interesting to me that siblings can grow up together in the same house with the same parents and be treated so differently. I think this is more significant when there are two siblings who are different genders. Being the oldest and the only girl, I think a lot of pressure is placed on me that I don’t see placed on my brother. The expectation that I will go to school, get a job, get married, have kids. Though that’s never spoken aloud, and I know my parents love me no matter what, I know they secretly hope for that heteronormative life for me. It’s hard to grow and change when I so what to be approved by my parents and meet their expectations for me. I think these ideals are not placed on my brother so much. It seems as if my parents aren’t as concerned about whether he ends up married with kids or not. Traditional gender roles are hard to escape from, especially when gender and family are so deeply rooted in identity. Clare writes in “The Mountain”, “The body as home, but only if it is understood that place and community and culture borrow deep into our bones” (11). I feel my childhood, my family, my hometown, my parent’s expectations deeply rooted in my identity and who I define myself as.

Clare has a talent for being so deeply relatable. Though I may not share the same experiences as him, I’m able to see myself in his words. His words remind me that identity is always evolving. Identity can be intertwined with any part of our lived experience, like my relationship to gender and societal/familial expectations. Clare’s relatability reveals that while our individual identities are unique, they cross the same broader systems that shape our lives. He challenges us to recognize this and embrace the complexity of who we are.

“The constantly diminishing future [referenced by queer poet Mark Doty],” Jack Halberstam writes in his 2005 work In Queer Time and Place, “creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now … Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS … by rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity,” (2). Literature as a form of expression oftentimes relies on a rather linear understanding of plot and narrative: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement are taught as scripture to students from a young age, forging an understanding of what “good writing” is that can be challenging to dismantle. On the contrary, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body takes these conventions as almost a challenge, crafting a narrative whose temporality (or lack thereof) is crucial to its composition and broader perspective on relationships.

Written on the Body presents itself as an inherently-queer work in the narrator’s ambiguous gender: they invoke past relationships with both women and men, and given the reference to secretive gay lovers, it can be reasonably inferred that queerness is othered within Winterson’s narrative world. Therefore, queerness takes on the sort of marginalized identity it does in our world, to an extent. Jack Halberstam’s reading of queer time as a direct reaction to the long history of oppression and hostility the queer community has faced, then, takes on greater credence in Written on the Body as an expression of a legacy larger than the narrator’s rocky love life.

The thought process behind this post is not fully explored, but I believe that the implications here span beyond either In Queer Time and Place or Written on the Body and moreso concern the manner in which we read queer literature. Queer literature itself emerges as a consequence of a legacy that any one of us cannot fully comprehend, and Written on the Body exists as a stellar example of how, to use the words of Eli Clare’s The Mountain, language is “haunted, strengthened, underscored” by the bodies which have shaped it (11).

“I grew up to the words cripple, retard, monkey, defect, took all the staring into me and learned to shut it out.” 

The list of slurs, starkly presented without conjunctions, mimics the overwhelming accumulation of these words throughout Eli Clare’s life. Their placement in a single sentence (bam, bam, bam, bam, bam!) illustrates the relentlessness and inescapability of the labels. Clare writes he—“grew up to the words”—meaning these disparaging words have been a constant for the entirety of his development. The phrase “learned to shut it out” indicates survival but not resolution; language’s wounds remain even if they are silenced.

Clare complicates this depiction of linguistic violence by exploring how marginalized people navigate the tension between self-hatred and pride. He writes: “The body as home, but only if it is understood that language too lives under the skin… They mark the jagged edge between self-hatred and pride, the chasm between how the dominant culture views marginalized peoples and how we view ourselves, the razor between finding home, finding our bodies, and living in exile, living on the metaphoric mountain.” The metaphor of the razor demonstrates the power of words– they cut, wound, and represent the precarious boundary between acceptance and rejection. 

The mountain, a recurring symbol in Clare’s work, also functions as a metaphor for linguistic violence. When describing the decision to climb Mount Adams, Clare acknowledges: “Climbed surely because I wanted the summit, because of the love rumbling in my bones. But climbed also because I wanted to say, ‘Yes, I have CP, but see. See, watch me. I can climb mountains too.'” The repetition of see emphasizes the internalized pressure to prove oneself through unmistakable action, forced by the ableist gaze. The mountain becomes a linguistic construct as much as a physical one, representing the unattainable standard of overcoming disability. Clare’s eventual decision to turn back suggests a rejection of these imposed narratives, yet the mountain’s grip implies that the violence of language cannot be fully escaped. Words remain “written on the body,” if you will, forever shaping how we see ourselves.

In “You’re the Only Friend I Need”, Heredia shows how Noel and (especially) Fabio are othered gender-wise by both their male and female peers.  Throughout the story, the two friends are thoroughly ignored by the boys of their school.  Outside of the bounds of this story’s timeline, it is implied that Noel and Fabio were long ago abandoned by the other boys because of “the secret that everyone knows, but no one braves themselves to say” (p. 35).  They possess mannerisms which position them as “less than” their male peers, because of how societally, AMAB people who adopt femininity are not just seen as vaguely strange, but also are looked down upon for “giving up” masculine power which is supposed to be coveted by all members of society.

Fabio ends up getting into a fist-fight with a popular girl after she calls him an offensive term because of his femininity, which Heredia describes as “unapologetic and exuberant.”  It is important to note how this resistance on his part is positioned within the story.  This reaction is not seen as Fabio reclaiming some level of masculine violence, but on the contrary, cements that Fabio is less than a “proper” boy is supposed to be.  It’s implied that his male peers wouldn’t even have deigned to fight a girl, because doing so would be construed as putting themselves on an equal playing field as her.  “After Fabio’s fight, there was no question,” Heredia writes.  “Fabio was a girl-fighting maricon, and Noel, by association, was maricon adjacent, far too close to be considered straight” (p. 36).  Even in fighting, which is typically considered a very cis-het male pursuit, Fabio’s context has doomed him to not-quite-boyhood, not-quite-girlhood.

When Noel decides to wear a less stereotypically-feminine outfit when going to the party with Fabio and Ren, Fabio is again quick to lash out, especially after Noel describes his decision as wanting “to look more cool than girly” (p. 39).  This, again, is an understandable reaction after Fabio has spent his entire adolescence being scorned by almost everyone he knows for expressing any amount of femininity.  A bit earlier in the story, when Ren is putting on makeup, Fabio is described as looking “as if he’s found a pearl after searching long and hopelessly in the dark,” and is lost for words.  Finally, someone Fabio looks up to is offering a path which doesn’t acquiesce to the default ideal of what someone like him should want to be.  However, his walls immediately spring back up when Noel expresses less comfort in himself looking girly and says it’s uncool, which once again places Fabio’s desires at the bottom of the familiar societal hierarchy.  He had been vulnerable enough to take the leap into presenting fully feminine, which Heredia established that he tries to do only when he feels safe, and is met with his best friend unexpectedly orienting himself with masculine ideals after all.  No wonder Fabio’s so defensive – it takes so little for his true self to be denigrated, explicitly by the gender-conforming boys and girls around him, and even implicitly, when Noel unthinkingly expresses that girliness can’t be cool, and that coolness is what they should strive toward.

While Reading Eli Clare I found a lot of passages particularly striking but one I couldn’t get out of my head comes from The Mountain reading “The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies. My alcoholic, Libertarian father and his father, the gravedigger, from whom my father learned his violence. I still dream about them sometimes, ugly dreams that leave me panting with fear in the middle of the night. One day I will be done with them. The white, working-class loggers, fishermen, and ranchers I grew up among: Les Smith,John Black, Walt Maya. Their ways of dressing, moving, talking helped shape my sense of self Today when I hear queer activists say the word redneck like a cuss word, I think of those men, backs of their necks turning red in the summertime from long days of work outside, felling trees, pulling fishnets, baling hay.”(Clare, 11).

I love this passage for a lot of reasons. Mostly because of all the different topics Clare touches on within just a couple sentences. In class when we first discussed the concept of ownership of the body, and trauma written on the body, my immediate thought was ownership of the body after sexual violence. When we discussed how one can reclaim the body, my first thought was tattoos. I thought specifically of Medusa tattoos that represent survivors of sexual violence, and semi-colon tattoos that represent suicide attempt survivors. Personally, I have a tattoo of the NEDA symbol which represents my eating disorder recovery. This phenomenon is what my brain jumped to, but tattoos are just one example of physically reclaiming a traumatized body. This type of reclamation of the body is what I believe Clare is talking about when he says “The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.”(Clare, 11). I believe this can refer to both physical trauma left on the body, as well as mental trauma that can begin to manifest physically.

Within this same passage Clare also tackles generational trauma saying, “My alcoholic, Libertarian father and his father, the gravedigger, from whom my father learned his violence.”(Clare, 11). Part of what I believe makes Eli Clare such an exceptional writer is his capacity for empathy. Here he is even willing to look at what made his horrible abusive father the way he is. Here, Clare shows that his father learned his violence, he had his own trauma written on his body. However, Clare still writes about his father and the abuse he suffered at his hands in an unflinching way. He does not fall into the trap of believing his father’s abuse is in anyway justified. No of my favorite sayings is it’s an explanation, but not an excuse, which Clare makes very clear here.

Within this same passage Clare brings up class in a very interesting way. He concludes my chosen passage saying, “Today when I hear queer activists say the word redneck like a cuss word, I think of those men, backs of their necks turning red in the summertime from long days of work outside, felling trees, pulling fishnets, baling hay.”(Clare, 11). This made me think of our in class conversation about “passing the buck.” I believe here that Clare is talking about queer people passing the buck not onto other types of queer people, as we discussed in class, but into other social groups. Here, Clare talks about “rednecks” and how the term originally referred to working class men, typically in the American South. Being from the South myself, this is something I’ve discussed a lot with my father, especially prior to and right after the 2024 election. We’ve talked a lot about how Trump seems to have an iron grip on this population, despite Trump representing the opposite values in many ways. Many, but of course not all, working class Southerners, at least that I’ve grown up around, will pass the buck on to queer people, and many other minority groups, when the system fails them. Clare’s writing made me start thinking about how these groups might be constantly passing the buck off to each other. Using “redneck” as a slur, and writing off all working class Southerners may seem productive to some people, but it is its own form of discrimination, namely classism. This is also what I mean when I say Clare has an incredible capacity for empathy.

The inclusion of this scene in the collection demonstrates the coexistence of fear and courage that often accompanies the navigation of queerness, especially when approaching queer spaces. Noel, in this moment, hasn’t dressed up in the same feminine way as the rest of his friends, but Ren crafts a space where Noel can still engage with the experience in his own comfort zone, subtly encouraging him to embrace his cuteness while remaining true to himself. This interaction highlights Noel’s inner conflict: as he looks into the mirror, he sees a “creature of the night,” a birdlike, crow-like figure. Relating to the stigma of nightlife being something shame worthy. His discomfort with his appearance reflects a broader tension in queer identity, where the fear of not meeting societal standards of gender or beauty often battles with the desire to express one’s true self. The compact mirror, traditionally a tool of self-reflection, becomes a symbol of exposure and self reflection which Noel struggles with. Meanwhile, Ren’s gentle act of holding his chin and applying makeup, which may seem simple, represents a deeper intimacy and care. This small act of vulnerability contrasts with the looming fear Noel feels about potential violence from external forces, such as the threat of police brutality. This moment depicts the ways in which Queer people can craft spaces for one another. Ren creates a safe space for Noel to explore gender expression without the harsh judgment of the outside world, reinforcing how queer solidarity can provide the courage to move forward in the face of fear. Noel’s refusal to let his fear “paralyze” him further emphasizes the resilience embedded in the queer experience—courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the ability to continue despite it. Even with the threat of bodily harm through “meeting the baton” of homophobic cops, Noel is encouraged by Ren’s kindness.

“‘Go and make some tea, darling, will you,’ he said and off she went.  

‘Do you have to pay her to be so obedient or is it love?’” (169)

“I’ve always had a wild streak, it starts with a throbbing in the temple and then a slide into craziness I can recognise but can’t control. Can control. Had controlled for years until I met Louise.” (174)

`The narrator of Written on the Body makes several snide comments about Elgin’s “hot date” when they show up announced at Elgin’s home in search of Louise. Even though the narrator was not expecting Louise to be with Elgin, they were hoping that Elgin would tell them Louise’s whereabouts. They were hoping that, even after Elgin and Louise’s separation, Elgin would still be obedient to Louise. He would tell the narrator where she is because he loves her, and therefore he follows her, putting his self-interests behind her interests. (And we all know that Louise was interested in the narrator.)

But Elgin was not obedient to Louise, and he did not tell the narrator where Louise is because he does not know. Louise ran from him, he was following her but she ran, and she hid. Love is obedience. But you cannot be obedient if there is no one to obey. 

The narrator snarls at Elgin: ‘Do you have to pay her to be so obedient or is it love?’ I think the narrator’s thick, frosty layer of sarcasm is hiding their envy. They have never loved so purely, they have never been obedient. The narrator has abandoned all of their previous partners. They confess to the reader that they have “always had a wild streak” that “starts with a throbbing in the temple and then a slide into craziness [they] can recognise but can’t control. Can control. Had controlled for years until [they] met Louise.” After Elgin refuses to tell the narrator where Louise is, the narrator punches him, letting this wild streak of theirs run red––the punch is a flash of passion and rebellion, like the narrator’s relationship with Louise. The narrator controlled their wild streak “for years until [they] met Louise,” implying that loving or being infatuated with Louise was a loss of their control. 

Love is obedience. If the narrator loved Louise, they would obey her wish to remain hidden. If Louise loved the narrator, or Elgin for that matter, she would not have run from either of them. She would have let them follow her, and she would have followed them. Love is a sacrifice, a discipline. It is the taming of wild streaks, the desire to have control of and be controlled by the lover.

Written on the Body is a very lonely book. When I finished reading it, I did not feel any satisfaction whatsoever. I think the narrator is despondent, lost, and formless. Maybe that is why they took to the page. They needed some scaffolding for their existential dread. The “queerest” thing about the narrator is not their lack of name or pronouns. It is not their collection of sexual and romantic partners of all genders and sexualities. The queer thing about the narrator is that they are not even obedient to themself. They cannot commit to anything or anyone because they have not learned self-love.