The Ethnographic I, by Carolyn Ellis

This book is a fictionalized version of Ellis teaching a class about autoethnographic methods. Most of the characters are real (well, fictional versions of themselves), and two are composite characters. This book made me realize how diverse autoethnography can be, that it’s easier in some ways and harder in other ways than I thought, and that counterstory seems to be a kind of autoethnography with a particular theoretical framework (CRT). That answers the main question I had from counterstory— whether it can be done about oppressions other than race. The answer seems to be no, but you can use similar methods with similar “outcome” creations for other oppressions.. But counterstory is a word that belongs to CRT writing and research.

I liked it a lot! It answered a bunch of questions I had and taught me a lot. I like that she used the method she was writing about in order to write about it. I like the hard conversations depicted, and I like the syllabus and other supplementary materials at the back. Another thing I enjoyed was the chapters that are based on her interviews with her students after she had them read an earlier draft of the book, and they discussed her construction of the book and her portrayals of each of them.

Ellis frequently co-writes with her husband Art, a communications professor. They’ve written autoethnographic pieces about some very personal things— such as an abortion that took place early in their relationship. This seems very very hard to do and I’m impressed. I wonder if their dynamic is accurately represented in the book or if they have more fights and hard times related to their shared work than depicted. Although if they did, I guess they wouldn’t keep co-writing together. It’s also wild to me that they each teach the story of their own abortion in their classes. I could never.

I particularly valued the discussions over ethics in autoethnography, particularly with getting permission from people in your life that you wish to write about. Your story is always also their story, and vice versa. I disagree with some of the choices the characters made. I’ve hurt people in the past by writing about them without taking proper ethical measures (like asking and discussing in advance), and I regret it a lot. Ellis talks about how she published a piece about caring for her mom in the hospital. The story includes some very intimate details/moments between them. She didn’t ask her mom in advance if it would be okay to write that, although years later she did share the piece with her mom and her mom was okay with it. What if she wasn’t? There’s another story in which Penny, a student who wrote about her abusive relationship, gave a performance of her piece for volunteers at a domestic violence support shelter. The event did not go well— the volunteers were super uncomfortable by what they saw as her blaming herself for the abuse and Ellis encouraging it/not supporting her. The fascinating and hard part is, afterwards, the researchers and the volunteers had a series of meetings and conversations together in which they unpacked what went wrong and why it went wrong, so Ellis is able to present a nuanced view of many different perspectives in her book, based on the conversations.

I was also left feeling very frustrated, though. We never learned anything about autoethnography during my anthropology degree! And it turns out there’s a whole ton of scholarship about issues of writing anthropology, and I didn’t know about it! I struggled with finding ways to straddle English and anthropology, my two majors, and it felt like none of the faculty knew what to do with me. But all of this was here all along! If someone had known about it, they could have told me. My whole research trajectory could have been very different. I probably would have done something different for my BA thesis. And definitely might have ended up doing something different for my PhD— going for a different discipline or a different school, maybe. It’s hard to say.

Stuff I Marked

p.22- “for evocation in addition to representation as a goal for social science research, for generalization through the resonance of readers, and for opening up rather than closing down conversation.”

p.30 - paragraph on key features of autoethnography

p.39- examples of anthropologists and publishing venues that do autoethnography/anthroliterary things. Stanley Diamond, Sapir and Benedict (published poetry), Anthropology and Humanism (journal), Laurel Richardson

p.39- discussion of factors that affect whether something is called autoethnography or ethnography, autoethnography of memoir

p.64-66- note about interactive interviewing and how it’s a good strategy when everyone involved has personal experience with the topic at hand (good for me and bi research!)

p.89- Ellis’s advice on what to do if you’re anxious about biasing your data/if people will accuse you of biasing your data

p.116— on truth vs. accuracy and the unreliability of field notes

p.117— difference between field notes and a first draft of a story

p.122- one character lists the different genres she used to write up interviews— she was just experimenting to see which ones worked best for her

p.123-126 more on truth vs. accuracy and the issue of validity in autoethnography

p.125- discussion of guy who wrote fiction based on his fieldwork bc his participants were part of an especially vulnerable population and he wanted to protect their identities extra well

p.240- Hector’s project on bicultural identity is kinda similar to my project! Reference this!

p.252- discussion of how to evaluate autoethnographic projects

p.309- how a student’s experience of pain in her body affects her writing

Sources To Look Up

Geertz, Clifford and Marcus, Marcus and Fischer (p.17) - mentioned as anthropologists dealing with issues on the intersections of anthropology and literature

Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer

“Assessing Alternative Modes of Qualitative and Ethnographic Research: How Do We Judge? Who Judges?” special section in Qualitative Inquiry (journal)

50 Song Memoir by The Magnetic Fields

These posts have always really just been notes for me and I’m assuming nobody else will do more than skim them, but this one’s really gonna be written just as notes and not for someone else. Merritt says he doesn’t want anyone to have favorites off of this album or listen to songs individually. They are supposed to be listened to in order, all the way through. I like this, and even before I knew he thought that, it’s always how I’ve listened to it. Although that’s partially because I’ve most often listened to it as background music while working or cleaning.

‘66 Wonder Where I’m From- He moved around so much when he was little he has a complex sense of “home”

‘67 Come Back as a Cockroach- About reincarnation and karma, also about veganism. Makes me think of children’s bright imaginations

‘68 A Cat Called Dionysus— I love this one and want a cat named Dionysus

‘69 Judy Garland— Some of the stuff in this one is made up, and Merritt was too young at the time to actually be aware of the Stonewall riots, but this is about that and its a lovely fantasy version

‘70 They’re Killing Children Over There— Merritt goes to a concert when he’s little where the singer sings about how they’re killing children over there (meaning Vietnam) but he thinks they mean on the other side of the building. So, it’s humorous but deeply embedded in global events from the perspective of a 4 year old.

‘71 I Think I’ll Make Another World— this is just a lovely piece about children’s imagination

‘72 Eye Contact— this is about Merritt hating eye contact and how he would prefer to connect with people while…not doing that. This made me wonder if Merritt is autistic, and it seems that while he hasn’t been formally diagnosed, he thinks he probably is, and his friends who have been diagnosed agree. I also learned that he always has his concerts be very muted in sound, which is not actually due to his autism but due to a separate hearing condition that makes loud noises feedback loop in his left ear. I would very much like to go to a quiet concert by a band I love.

‘73 It Could Have Been Paradise— about all the different places Merritt and his mom lived when he was little, as his mom tried to find spiritual fulfillment in a lot of different ways and Merritt just either hung out with local kids or read books by himself. The places seem like paradise, and his mom thought they might be, but they weren’t.

‘74 No- This is about Merritt’s young (8 year old?) self (and his present self) making fun of other people’s faith-based beliefs that they don’t have any evidence for. As someone who became an annoying, angry, and immature atheist at around the same age, I feel this.

‘75 My Mama Ain’t— this one is also about Merritt’s mom’s search for spiritual fulfillment. She tried a lot of things, and Merritt lovingly (I think) pokes fun at the lines she draws (at crystal healing) while also emphasizing that while she has silly beliefs, she’s also a smart lady

‘76 Hustle 76— This is a fun song about Merritt seeing a commercial for a bad quality disco record on TV and wanting it, and dancing and having a good time

‘77 Life Ain’t All Bad— this might be my favorite diss track ever, about one of Merritt’s mom’s ex boyfriends, who was particularly horrible. It’s just so eviscerating while being deliberately vague in order to punish him by not even giving him the satisfaction of being discussed. He also explicitly meta-discusses his memoirs (“When I write my memoirs…”) in this song.

‘78 Blizzard of ‘78— While the blizzard raged outside, Merritt just played music with his friends and started his first (very bad) band and read a lot of science fiction. This made me think about my parents’ stories of the blizzard of ‘77 (which hit their part of NY, which the blizzard of ‘78 did not.) My parents’ did not have a fun time, though. Some people they knew died and my dad nearly got trapped in a car in a snowbank.

‘79 Rock ‘N Roll Will Ruin Your Life— this song is about Merritt and his mom arguing about him wanting to be a musician. She says that it may seem glamorous and fun, but it sucks, just like it ruined his biological father’s life (who Merritt did not meet until his 40s). But he says he’s not interested in the groupies anyway, because he’s shy and gay, and he has hypercausis (his ear disorder) anyway, so he can’t do loud noises. The threat is that it will “make you sad, and I mean sad,” but the joke’s on her, because Merritt is already sad. (I read somewhere an interview with one of his friends, where someone asked if another musician was the most depressed musician ever, and he said, something like ‘Well I guess you’ve never met Stephin Merritt”)

‘80 London By Jetpack— this is about the New Romantic music scene in London and very 80s fantasies of the future (jetpacks). “It's not the going up
It's not the coming down
It's the zooming 'round"
Yep this is what it feels like to be a teenager and immersed in something you love. There’s a verse about him living in London once more and “declar(ing) it’s 1980” and they’ll all fly around in their jetpacks and it will be perfect

‘81 How to Play the Synthesizer— this is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. It’s weird and sounds weird and I like it.

‘82 Happy Beeping— this is about a rude note another one of his mom’s boyfriends left him after he got annoyed that Merritt was just listening to music and playing the synthesizer all the time instead of doing his homework. He said “Happy Beeping.”

‘83 Foxx and I— this is about one of his musical role models and their shared interests, a fantasy of them hanging out and exploring the world and becoming machines together (something Foxx said in an interview he would like to do)

‘84 Danceteria! - this is about Merritt hanging out with his friends at the club Danceteria and all of the music they experienced there, and how Danceteria was definitely more important than school and helped them learn more things that felt meaningful to them

‘85 Why I Am Not a Teenager - He is a teenager during this time, and this song is about how much he rejects being one, because nobody listens to you and you’re horny all the time but there’s AIDS so you can’t have sex and you have no money, but he has dreams for when he’s older

‘86 How I Failed Ethics— a humorous story about Merritt being too disagreeable the first time he took ethics, so he failed and had to take it again. The second time, he was just as precocious but didn’t give the professor an excuse to fail him because he did all the work (and created his own ethical system). Later, he dropped out to be a musician.

‘87 At the Pyramid— another song about a disco club, this time about a specific memory that stuck with Merritt about a guy he thought was hot but didn’t talk to. He says he doesn’t know why this memory stuck with him, of all the times he went there, but it did.

‘88 Ethan Frome— this is just a song about how much Stephin Merritt likes the book Ethan Frome. I love that so many of the songs on this album are just about seemingly mundane things from each year of his life that just happen to be what’s salient for him about that time.

‘89 The 1989 Musical Marching Zoo— I can’t seem to find anything online about an actual 1989 Musical Marching Zoo or anyone talking about something by that name, so this might just be a fantasy band that Merritt would like to have/would have liked to have (“they’re coming to play inside of your mind”) (“and this is the band that I wanted to be”) It seems like his least favorite part about being a musician is being seen as his individual self (his face, name, distinguishing features) and would like to be anonymous (like wearing an animal head) and really just play his music

‘90 Dreaming in Tetris— this is about Merritt’s brain being totally filled with music at all times (like how when you play a lot of Tetris your brain can’t stop picturing Tetris) and also the existential despair of the AIDS crisis and the Cold War/feeling of impending nuclear doom

‘91 The Day I Finally… — (Snap) — in the lyric notes, Merritt says ‘91 is when he started feeling seriously depressed and so this song expresses how he felt at that time. He plays the whole thing in one go (all instruments at once, instead of recording each track separately)

‘92 Weird Diseases — a weirdly fun song that just lists the various ailments he’s had over the course of his life. He does list “Maybe Asperger’s” here. The next line is “if that exists” but one annotation online suggests that this isn’t doubting autism as a real thing, but due to the fact that Asperger’s got removed from the DSM and reclassified as autism instead of as a separate thing. Also says “from the time I was a young boy, I could feel neither anger nor joy” because he was on powerful tranquilizers since strong feelings triggered seizures. He also mentions Krishna here, which made me reflect on how he really does reference Hindu gods a lot in his songs, and that must be because of his exposure via his mom’s spiritual journeying. Until now I figured he was just informed and liked to have diverse religious references in his music

‘93 Me and Fred and Dave and Ted— this is about Merritt living in a very small home with three other men, pets, and bugs. It seems that they were all mutually in love with each other. The verses about each man suggest some problems/distance from them in retrospect, but Merritt does seem to have place in his heart for this time.

‘94 Haven’t Got a Penny— this is about being poor and depressed because you’re poor. Lyrics Genius notes that The Magnetic Fields were pretty unsuccessful until 1999, when 69 Love Songs came out (and was very popular). I didn’t know 69 Love Songs was so old until just now (I started listening to the album in 2011ish and was the first time I’d heard of the band).

‘95 A Serious Mistake— (obligated to mention this is the year I was born in order to make my professors feel old, especially since now my students say things that make me feel old) This song is about getting into a romantic relationship you know will be a bad idea but doing it anyway because love!

‘96 I’m Sad— the beginning of this song is literally “I’m sad/You made me sad” It’s directed at a person (although it’s vague enough that you can’t really infer much else about them), but I sing this to myself whenever I’m sad for any reason. The instrumentation/music is very dramatic in a way that feels both real and funny at the same time.

‘97 Eurodisco Trio- this song is about being very sad and lonely, while making music as the Future Bible Heroes, which Merritt referred to as a Eurodisco Trio. The chorus is just “We’re a Eurodisco Trio” repeated in 4 languages. The versus are about Merritt contemplating suicide, crying, and feeling lonely.

‘98 Lovers’ Lies — the lyric booklet says this is about an ex who was a pathological liar and told everyone he was HIV-positive even though he wasn’t (among other lies)

‘99 Fathers in the Clouds— this is about how Merritt wants neither his biological father nor his “father in the clouds” (God), and how he has nothing to say to his bio father if he did meet him. Yet he admits their lives do have some odd similarities.

‘00 Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers— marathon dances were 19th and early 20th century events where you would literally try to dance as long as possible (and maybe do drugs). This song is about how even when people stop dancing (and singing), the dances and music always continue in a mystical way and echo around in the spaces they used to be in.

‘01 Have You Seen it In the Snow? — Lyrics Genius website says this song is placed as the ‘01 song because it’s about NYC and ‘01 is 9/11. But it’s about how people say New York is dirty and ugly and there’s no natural beauty (and that’s sometimes true) but sometimes it’s so beautiful, especially in the snow. I wish I’d remembered this song on our good snow days this month! Lots of people have told me that winters in NYC used to be like this a lot, but we haven’t had one like this in years. And I think we probably won’t get any more snow this winter.

‘02 Be True To Your Bar— this is exactly what it sounds like, about being loyal to the bars that you call your own, and being grateful to the role they play in your social life (and in Merritt’s case, his professional life— he almost always writes songs in bars)

‘03 The Ex and I— about becoming fuck buddies with your ex!

‘04 Cold-Blooded Man- I’m not sure if he’s saying his ex (I assume a different ex than the previous song) is the Cold-Blooded Man or if he’s saying his ex wants a Cold-Blooded Man even though that seems to make no sense at all. The note from the lyrics booklet does not clarify this for me.

‘05 Never Again— a very sad breakup song, made sadder by a lyric that suggests that despite his joy at NYC in the snow, he can’t even enjoy that anymore

‘06 Quotes- about some negative press coverage he got that he says was taking his words out of context (he said a song from a racist movie was catchy, people took that as saying the song and movie are good/unproblematic. Also he apparently published a “best music” list that was only music by white people.)

‘07 In the Snow White Cottages— about a time in his life when he lived in a particular set of houses in/near LA

‘08 Surfin’ — about how stupid he thinks surfing is as an activity. He lived in LA during this time too

‘09 Till You Come Back To Me- another breakup song about being sad

‘10 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea— apparently Merritt wrote a score to a silent film about the novel, and when he went to San Francisco to perform it at a festival, he had a very nice romantic time

‘11 Stupid Tears— another sad breakup song, in which he’s mad at himself for crying

‘12 You Can Never Go Back to New York— this is the year he moved back to New York after living in LA, and the song is about how the New York you left will never still be there when you get back, even if you only leave for a short time. But there are good sides (new potential lovers!) and bad sides (the things you loved aren’t there anymore)

‘13 Big Enough For Both of Us— this is about Merritt pining (and lusting) for someone who is far away. The thing that is big enough for both of them is both his heart and his penis, both of which he would like to share with the person.

‘14 I Wish I Had Pictures— he wishes this because his memories are fading and there are so many things he wishes he could hang on to

‘15 Somebody’s Fetish— this is about how no matter your quirks or oddities, someone somewhere will be attracted to you, and he, a very lonely person, wants to write this song to make other lonely people feel a little bit better that someone is out there who will love them

The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward, edited by Jeremy Mulderig

Samuel Steward was born in 1909 and was a very unusual man. I had never heard of him before until reading this book. He went by lots of different pseudonyms in his different professions— he was a columnist, an erotica writer, an English professor, and a tattoo artist. He lived alone for most of his life, and was never interested in committed romantic relationships. He was an alcoholic. He was an extremely thorough record-keeper, which included keeping a “Stud File” of every sexual encounter he ever had (and there were a lot—more than 2,000 encounters with more than 800 people). In reading just the introduction of the book, I was left wondering, how can one person literally fit all of that into one life? The partial answer is that professor and tattoo artist were not simultaneous careers, and he happened to live in a variety of different situations that lent themselves to a lot of potential for sex (for example, growing up in a boarding house— he slept with many of the tenants, and many of his classmates in high school, some of his students, many of his tattoo clients, and had a relationship with a porn studio where they would send him hustlers and in return he would give them discounted tattoos). He was also the go-to artist for Hell’s Angels for awhile, and assisted Kinsey in his research. Kinsey couldn’t officially have out gay co-researchers, for fear of being accused of biasing the results, but Steward was an unofficial collaborator. They talked often, and Steward agreed to engage in some S&M sessions while being observed, since Kinsey was interested in that. Kinsey was also interested in why people get tattoos, so Steward kept a detailed log of all of his clients and the tattoos he gave them, and passed along the info to Kinsey.

He wrote an autobiography, but it was published in a highly abridged form. This book is a combination of text from the original longer draft, the final shorter published version, and text from his diaries and letters.

The only part that pissed me off is how easily Steward just traipsed around getting academic jobs. At one point he literally walked into someone’s office and asked if there were openings. The idea of doing that now is just laughable. But I feel this way about any academic talking about their job market experience if that experience happened more than 30 years ago.

Stuff I Marked

p.8- quote from a sociologist studying Chicago gay culture in the 30s who found that in most of his interviews, the people emphasized their discovery of gay culture over their private realization of attraction, and how joining the gay world in Chicago also meant joining a new community of living, working, and socializing in different places/with different people. Participating in gay culture and adopting a gay identity as part of one’s sense of self (separately from one’s actual previous sexual activity) were often concurrent. This is similar to in Look Both Ways— being where it’s okay/cool to be gay makes it more likely you’ll feel comfortable/want to be part of it!

p.10- autobiography as rhetorical rather than “strictly factual” accounts

p.193— Kinsey absolutely rejected the words “normal” and “usual.” Instead, he said “majority practice.”

p.194— Steward’s memories are that Kinsey was either straight or very good at keeping his non-straightness a secret. He certainly had no indication Kinsey was straight. But a different book I read recently (maybe Baumgartner?) said very casually that Kinsey had male lovers in addition to loving his wife.

p.195- apparently the Vatican has a huge collection of porn

p.202— “generalizations about tattoos are extremely dangerous and unreliable. Your reaction to a tattoo is established only be the fashion in which your own emotions and observations, your backgrounds and personality, are fused together.” He also notes 32 different motivations for why people get tattoos, 25 of which were sexual in some way, and the most common of which was to assert your masculinity.

p.210— accounts of some of the strangest and/or most overtly homosexual tattoos he gave

Look Both Ways, by Jennifer Baumgartner

Baumgartner is a journalist who worked for Ms. in the early 90s and has covered bisexuality in her writing across her career. This book is partially history/analysis and partially memoir from her own experiences talking to people, going to events, and working in feminist and queer spaces.

Lots of good reflections/personal experiences relating to the things I’m interested in— fashion and sexual identity, conversational sign posts and bisexual identity, etc. It’s also a little more recent than books like Vice Versa (about 10 years later), so while Ms. and Ani DiFranco were still The Big Thing before “my time” (I do listen to Ani DiFranco though), the cultural references feel a bit closer to me, or I can at least point to memories in my own childhood and recognize how 3rd wave feminism, which I was unaware of, impacted me. Like “girl power" as a slogan to aspire to.

I think it’s an interesting place to be, say, in middle school or in high school, and so to be aware of a cultural phenomenon but not REALLY be able to participate in it, since you’re still too young to do a lot of things by yourself and have no money. That doesn’t directly apply to me in this respect, since I was too young even for that, but I am reflecting on the things that I DID feel that youth-induced FOMO and angst and longing about, and simultaneously thinking about how young teens have felt the same way forever. It makes me think about everyone who was too young in the 60s/70s to participate in all of the activism going on (or at least participate in the ways they may have wanted to), but old enough to know about it and want to be a part of it. I also wonder how this phenomenon works differently for people like me, who needed to ask their parents to drive them to any given thing, vs. people growing up in cities where you’re able to go places without your parents from a much younger age via public transit.

Passages I’ve Marked

p.5- story about how news reported that a study that found bi men don’t exist, but the actual study found that the real results were basically the opposite— almost all the men in the study sexually responded to both men and women in some way, just the extent of the arousal varied (and was small in many participants)

p.26- “AC/DC” as slang for bi, feminist atmosphere of Ms. creating the necessary conditions for JB to experiment with women, song “I Kissed a Girl” by Jill Sobule

p.50 - paragraph on the problems with the word “bisexual” and problems with its alternatives. “As a label, bisexual sounds pathological, academic, and a little embarrassed —- like the identities ‘stay at home mom’ and ‘runner up.’” “Or, as writer Jenny Weiss put it in Girlfriends magazine, “Of all the words for bisexual, the worst is probably bisexual.” This is a big mood.

p.51- “The word bisexual makes me cringe at times, but saying I’m heterosexual or a lesbian feels inaccurate- regardless of who I am in a relationship with. So, cringing all the while, I use the label. Because of my relationship with the word feminist, I have learned that cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business: the label bi sounds bad because, at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible, and disparaged social group.”

p.52- references Garber’s section on Tiresias, notes that the importance of this story is that it shows that the WHOLE STORY/whole picture is what makes a bisexual, not any snapshot in time.

p.78- “The fact is, second-wave women thought about looking both ways a lot, even though they rarely described their lives or insights as bisexual. Instead, they were woman-identified women or political lesbians (gay in the streets if not in the sheets, to paraphrase rock critic Ann Powers)”

p.100 - description of the outfits of Ani DiFranco fans as emblematic of third wave feminism and bisexuality

p.105- Baumgartner and Gloria Steinem both date “when it was okay for women to be bi” as starting in the early 90s

p.108- extended quote reflecting on Liza Featherstone’s own sense of fashion and gender/sexuality presentation as a bisexual

p.123-126- different examples of bi women talking about the loss/exclusion they felt when they got into long term relationships with men

p.141- some thoughts about how dating women changes how women approach dating men and expectations for being in a relationship

p.156-157- some thoughts about bisexuality and the objectification of women and the male gaze, coming to see yourself as a sexual agent instead of perpetually as a sexual object, and how dating women changed Baumgartner’s relationship with porn

p.170- more about p.141, but also pointing out that just because dating a woman may help you clarify what you want when dating a man, sexism/internalized sexism means you might still not be good at actually COMMUNICATING those things to/with men

p.175— “stereotype threat”- the presence of someone from a dominant group diminishes the performance of a non-dominant group, subconsciously. Can make people from non-dominant groups feel less confident, less smart, like they have less agency, and so act that way.

p.189- describes the “feeling out if someone is gay and implicitly communicating to them that you are also gay” as “embroidery” and notes that her own go-to embroidery is finding ways to work in the phrase, “my ex-girlfriend”

p.194— same as above, mentions the difficulties of having “to constantly crowd every conversation with sign posts (“ex-girlfriend,” “ex-boyfriend,” “baby’s father”) to indicate the whole person I am”

p.220- more about the relationship between sexuality and gender presentation for bi women (shift in it becoming more okay in 3rd wave feminism to be lipstick/femme than it was in the 2nd wave)

Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men, Edited by Robyn Ochs and H. Sharif Williams

This anthology is similar to Getting Bi, but its content is more focused (just on bi men), and the section themes are different: identity, challenging labels, liminality, institutions, “anger, angst, and critique,” bodies and embodiment, religion and spirituality, traveling, and relationships. Each chapter is also longer, on average, than the ones in Getting Bi.

I’m really glad they made this book. Many of the men say they thought they were the only bi men in the world, or at least were the only bi men they knew. One chapter is an exploration of phallagocentrism and bi visibility— how if a man is even a little bit interested in another man, or a penis, he is Gay. Women have more leeway. Bi women are more visible. I can name a handful of bi women characters from television (usually ethnically ambiguous side characters who serve as love interests to a more important white male character), even if the representation is not very good. But I can only name two bi men from TV off the top of my head, and that’s only because my partner reminded me of one of them (Blaine, on Glee) today. (The other one is Wolf from Future Man, who I actually really adore as a character.) Another difference is that bi women are seen as “secretly straight,” while bi men are seen as secretly gay.

I don’t know if this is true, but I think I’m also left with the impression that bi men are more likely to stay closeted for longer.

I also wonder if there’s any patterns between bi people (across genders) who start out being very sure they have same sex attractions and take longer to accept/embrace their different-sex attractions, vs. people who start out being very sure they are straight and have to realize they also have same-sex feelings.

I marked three places in this book to come back to:

p.27 - notes that closeted bi men married to women might be the biggest bisexual demographic and/or the one most in need of outreach and community.

p.96-97- the author’s bisexual literacy journey (from expository nonfiction to memoirs to Tumblr) and notes that sometimes being bisexual IS confusing and you ARE confused about your sexuality while still being bisexual. Sometimes the activism around “bisexuals aren’t just confused” (which is important) swings too far the other way, such as in his case— he felt like it was not okay for him to be confused.

p.105- talking about how activities through his union helped him feel comfortable with his sexual identity. Haven’t seen this before!

An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, by Paul B. Preciado

This is a collection of columns written by Preciado over the course of several years, mostly about European politics (focusing on France, Spain, and Greece), trans and queer issues, and reproductive rights. Preciado is a philosopher, professor, and museum curator who has lived a fairly nomadic life. He identified as a lesbian for most of his life, then began taking testosterone but was uninterested in being pinned down by a gender label, and then ultimately conceded to getting legally recognized as a man in order to avoid some practical challenges (like people always getting confused and questioning him/getting him patted down when he showed his passport that identified him as a woman). His parents are/we conservative Catholics, but they have been working on their relationship and his parents have since voted for more progressive gender/sexuality causes.

One thing I distinctly remember is that in Spain, when someone gets a gender marker and name change, they are announced in the newspaper alongside all of the other births for the day, and their birth certificate is destroyed. They become legally newborn, in some ways, even though they are already existing. I know in at least some parts of the U.S., you have to “publicly declare your intention to change your name,” but my friends say that in their experience, that just means putting up a note on a bulletin board in the county courthouse. So, it’s technically public but not really.

An excerpt:

“The first person to learn it [the name change going through], before my lawyer, was my mother. She read the paper, as she does every morning, and saw this name mentioned in the birth announcements. She panicked….She called me up: ‘What’s this all about?’ My mother was witnessing my birth, once again. In a way, she brought me back into the world, this time as a reader. She gave birth to her son, born outside her body, as printed text.”

I also think the introduction to the book is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. I think it does all of the things The Argonauts does that people praise it for, but written from a trans perspective instead of being a cis woman exploiting a trans person’s story and identity. (Even though Nelson’s partner offered extensive comments on early drafts and even contributes writing to the book, he also describes Nelson writing about him as akin to subjecting an epileptic to a strobe light. So, I think the lines of consent are problematic at best, given the enormous pressure he must have been under to be okay with her writing a book about their lives together, given that she is a professional memoirist.)

The introduction interweaves personal narrative, dreams, theory, philosophy, history, and poetry. The first sentence is, “As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life.” If we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, why not? He then describes a dream that stuck with him about having apartments on all of the planets, but not being able to afford it. The person he was talking to recommended he give up the apartment on Uranus. Upon waking, he researched the planet, and discovered the term Uranism, a term coined by Ulrichs to mean “being of the third sex” or being gay. Uranians were conceived of as feminine souls in masculine bodies drawn to masculine souls. As a Roman god, Uranus’s gender and sexuality are complex— Venus arises directly from his castrated genitals. Preciado says he cannot give up the apartment on Uranus. He sees his trans identity as a new form of Uranism. He “brings news from Uranus,” which is not, as the West originally thought, the ceiling of the world (a la Dante’s Paradiso).

He says he did not start taking testosterone to become a man. He did not view it as “treating” a medical condition of “gender dysphoria.” He rejects what he calls the pharmacopornographic system. He says he took testosterone to “become unrecognizable” by that system, to begin adventuring beyond gender. Only the material constraints of a gender-binary world eventually forced him to shape himself (in part) to masculinity.

I would like to read Testo Junkie, his autotheory book about his use of testosterone.

Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley

This book was published in 2009 and contains chapters on What is Bisexuality, Coming Out, Why “Bi"?, Life Stories, Crossing Lines, Relationships, The Language of Desire, Bisexual Community, Bisexual Politics, and Bisexual Worlds. Some contributions are very short (only one paragraph), and some are several pages. The contributors seem highly educated overall, and are from 49 different countries.

I was especially interested in the “Why Bi” chapter and the “Bisexual Worlds” chapter. Why Bi is all about why people choose this label over (or in addition to) other labels. Several people say they feel pansexual is more accurate, but they choose bi in public because people understand it better or because it has a longer political history. The Bisexual Worlds chapter is about how bisexuality is conceived of differently in non-U.S. cultures. It addresses myths (like all Arab men are bisexual) and the variance in prejudices against bi people vs. gay people in different places, variance in what is tolerated vs. not, variance in what behaviors are considered normal vs. abnormal, and more.

I marked for myself the passage by Jenny Kangasvuo, a Finnish bisexuality researcher, who is also Finnish and bisexual herself. She describes how she didn’t relate to descriptions of bisexuality in the U.S. and UK and felt those cultures differed meaningfully than what it means to be bi in Finland. So, she made that the focus of her research as an anthropologist. I want to reach out to her to see if we can talk about research methods. But she also writes about how researching bisexuality has made her feel disconnected from her own identity, since she now views identity categories as constructed and abstract and objects of study. I don’t know if my research will end up making me feel the same way, but I think it is important to be aware that researching something about yourself professionally does change your relationship with that thing.

Getting Personal, by Nancy K. Miller

This book is primarily a collection of revised versions of talks/other presentations Nancy gave at various events in the 70s and 80s, along with her reflections on the “occasion-ness” of each piece of writing (since each one was written for a specific context at a specific event) and the nature of personal writing. She talks about “narrative criticism” and what counts as “personal” or “too personal,” and whether this changes based on the gender of the author and/or reader. She spends a lot of time puzzling over what it means to speak “as a ___” (as a feminist, as a woman, as a feminist critic, as a feminist professor, etc.), about her positionality (a word I think she doesn’t like) as a feminist teacher and what that means for how she conducts herself in the classroom.

I forget if it was in another essay I read by her or at a presentation of hers that I saw (maybe a panel?), but I have a vague memory of Nancy talking about her anxieties as a teacher when it comes to talking about illness and teaching a class on illness. I took her graduate seminar on illness, and I knew beforehand, because someone told me, that she is ill herself. But she didn’t talk about her own experiences with illness basically at all in class, even as we read tons of very personal accounts of illness, and even though she does write very personally in some of her work (she had a new memoir come out the year I took the class, for example). The passage I wrote out in the Quotes list below about being unsure how to teach a feminist painting class reminded me a lot of our class. She says there she felt a lot of anxiety about how to present the content and the language with which to talk about it, and her solution was to project the paintings on the wall and talk about them collectively. We did the same thing with panels from the graphic memoirs and photos from the photo memoirs, about illness. And it was great! I remember feeling such appreciation, both on a personal and critical level (what’s the difference?). It was satisfying just to dig in together to get a deeper appreciation for all the layers of the books we read. But with her not speaking personally about material that we knew as students was very personal to her (which is totally her right!), there was a perhaps inevitable effect of distancing. Which I don’t want to say was either bad or good, but it did happen. Which feels particularly odd (distancing) given that she writes so candidly about her illness on her website, which is public. But I can’t say I don’t empathize. I’m very hesitant to explicitly come out to my students verbally, but in my comments to them on their writing, especially if they’ve come out to me in that writing, I think I’m very giving of myself in my own writing back to them. I always try to say to them, disguised as suggestions, “Me too.”

Identifying yourself “as a” ___ is important, but also limiting. “The Epistemology of Ethnography,” which I read last night, talks about this too. Even if you’re organically part of the group you’re studying (one author the article analyzes is a Surimese woman writing about Surimese women, another is a gay person from the rural South writing about gay people in the rural South), your role as a participant-observer always shapes the context you’re trying to participate in and observe. Both roles are compromised by each other. The article also talks about how “as a __” statements have become a genre feature of ethnography, but only in particular sections, bracketing off the positionality of the researcher to only some aspects of the conversation. The research you are able to do, the data you are able to collect, how you interpret and present it, and how it is received, are all affected by how you situate yourself and how you are situated. Data/theory as a binary is both “real” but also constantly undermined by itself. The data you’re able to get is determined by your approach, and what you’re able to theorize from the data is determined by the data you have.

Quotes I Marked

p.xii- “Perhaps what seems most ‘feminist’ to me about the uses of both metaphor and narrative criticism is the self-consciousness these modes of analysis tend to display about their own processes of theorization; a self-consciousness that points to the fictional strategies inherent in all theory.”

p.xiii- quote from Adrienne Rich about stopping saying “the body” (abstract) and always saying “my body”

p.xiii - “one’s own body can constitute an internal limit on discursive irresponsibility, a brake on rhetorical spinning. The autobiographical act— however self-fictional, can like the detail of one’s (aging) body, produce this sense of limit as well: the resistance particularity offers to the grandiosity of abstraction that inhabits what I’ve been calling the crisis of representativity. (Perhaps we also need a moratorium on reciting the litany of RaceClassGender and instead a rush into doing positive things with those words.)” (in the notes, she adds to this that radical language is easy, radical action is hard)

p.xiv- contradictions between autobiography as individualistic and inward, vs. the political (collective) demands of feminism

p.5- “The case for personal writing entails the reclaiming of theory: turning theory back on itself….Do you have to turn your back on theory in order to speak with a non-academic voice?…Being embarrassed. And then being angry about feeling embarrassed. When you write in a personal voice ‘in a professional context’ about what is embarrassing, who is embarrassed? The writer or the reader?”

p.8- idea of “critical plausibility,” discussion of how while mentions of the personal, the writer sitting at her desk looking out her window, are pleasurable to many readers, because they make them feel close with the writer as another real human being, including some personal things (like going to the bathroom) might harm our ethos, our critical plausibility.

p.8- block quote from Barthes- “To read is to desire the work, to want to be the work…To go from reading to criticism is to change desires, it is no longer to desire the work but to desire one’s own language. But by that very process it is to send the work back to the desire to write from which it arose. And so discourse circulates around the book: reading, writing.”

p.9- idea of a “biographized rhetorical personality", “what gives a reader and a critic pleasure in reading other writers and critics? What produces a kinship of desire to write?”

p.10- idea that “Have you read this? I love it! Here’s why!” and other embodied reactions like excitement are considered critically inappropriate. But why?

p.12- Use of “we” (used to create identification between writer and reader) can be either engaging or alienating to a reader. “It feels good, for a little while, until it starts to feel coercive, until ‘we’ are subscribing to things that ‘I’ don’t believe. There is no specific reference to the author’s self, no attempt to specify himself” (this is a quote from another source)

p.14-15- discussion of how feminist academics (that is, white mainstream academic feminists) still write like everybody else with a PhD for publications. But they did more experimental, political, personal writing in “occasional writing” (for conferences, for newsletters, etc.)

p.16- Nancy says the personal and the positional are different.

p.17- rhetorical paradox of writing a personal reply to another person, but with the intention of publication. You’re writing for that person, but also, for an abstract generalized audience

p.19- “What’s personal? Who decides?…Is it personal only if it’s embarrassing? If not, is it just a rhetorical ploy? Do I wind up saying that ‘bad’ politics aren’t personal? Or am I saying, if I like it, it’s personal, it caresses me; otherwise, it’s just positional, it aggresses me.” She says this about how she feels an essay by MacLean, while discussing himself, isn’t really personal, but positional— one instantiation of the position of white man professor. But then she isn’t quite sure where she makes that distinction and whether it is fair.

p.24- quote from Mary Ann Caws- “Personal criticism as I intend it has to do with a willing, knowledgeable, outspoken involvement on the part of the critic with the subject matter, and an invitation extended to the potential reader to participate in this interweaving and construction of the ongoing conversation this criticism can be, even as it remains a text.” “somewhere in the self-fiction of the personal voice is a belief that the writing is worth the risk. In this sense, by turning its authorial voice into a spectacle, personal writing theorizes the stakes of its own performance: a personal materialism.”

p.25- “At its worst, the autobiographical act in criticism can seem to belong to a scene of rhizomatic, networked, privileged selves who get to call each other (and themselves) by their first names in print…But at its best, I would argue, the personal in these texts is at odds with the hierarchies of the positional—working more like a relay between positions to create critical fluency. Constituted finally in a social performance, these autobiographical acts may produce a new repertory for an enlivening cultural criticism.” Maybe this is why I’ve reacted so negatively to some of the memoirs I’ve read and positively to some of the others, and I haven’t been able to figure out the distinguishing factor. There’s a difference in vibe between that “referring to each other by first name in print” (an in group— several memoirs I read include the authors mentioning authors of other memoirs I read, they have the privilege of getting published writing about each other, in a semi self-contained group) and people who write about themselves but feel like they’re giving something to the reader— like Lillian Faderman, whose book I finished last night.

p.34- distinction between feminist critique (unpacking gender shit in texts by men) and feminist criticism (writing about texts by women)

p.35- burden of the professional feminist critic is it’s not enough to just say if you like the work and why. You have to justify the choice of that work in the first place but also “for political and intellectual reasons be prepared to say something about the writing qua women’s writing”

p.35-36- Nancy gives a metaphor to illustrate the difference between feminist critique and feminist criticism. Doing feminist critique of a man’s text is like an artichoke, and you peel it layer by layer to reveal “the overdetermined discovery of the core” (you set out to find sexism, you find some sexism). Feminist criticism is more like an “onion”- layers with no clear core/center/purpose (that is pre-determined by the project. you have to find it.)

p.36- cites a term from Honor Moore— “the male approval desire filter (M-A-D).” It’s the pressure to do criticism in the traditional way, to receive approval and professional accolades. Nancy envisions resisting the M-A-D as taking down the divider in her bedroom between her bed/TV area and her desk/work area— letting the personal and the critical come together. But for now, she keeps it up.

p.40-41- story about how when she was preparing to teach a class about 18th century French paintings and fiction, she was faced with “two pedagogic anxieties”: how to present the material and how to articulate the findings. She says the second was the bigger anxiety since she was trying to teach a feminist class to people who might not already be feminist. Her solution was to use the same technique that she used in the Memoir class I took with her— displaying images using a projector, and doing group-criticism of what the images are saying and what we can find there. She calls this “the most persuasive tool I have ever used in teaching” because it brought the bodies under discussion directly into the classroom, and “identified all of us in the room as gendered and sexual beings—whether we wanted to be identified that way or not.”

p.48- note about the uncommon genre of writing about the personal (“real”) reasons you got into a field (like Stacey Waite talks about). Nancy instead decides to write about why she got out of French as a field— and the answer is, the anxiety about making mistakes, particularly about the genders of words, was horrible.

p.125-127- discussion of the false assumption that all women readers will identify with women’s autobiographies along the lines of shared womanhood, a universal Female experience. Nancy says that she later discovered that most of the books she chose for an essay on French women’s autobiography all featured a strong demarcation between the authors’ identities as writers and their relationship with motherhood (as a reality or as a possibility). She wonders how, if her scholarship during that time was really happening out of a need to find a path for herself as a woman without motherhood, what is she looking for now (at the time of the writing of this essay) as she engages with contemporary American texts?

p.128-129- talking about teaching at CUNY instead of at Columbia, being an upper middle class teacher of working class students, and how to deal with class as a teacher and reader. The students in the particular class she’s discussing hated a Room of One’s Own, but loved a different essay about being a Woolf scholar, and loved Jane Eyre.

Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, Edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane

You could republish this book as “Chicken Soup for the Non-binary Soul” and it would fit in just fine. I mean this in the sense that it’s a collection of many very short memoir-essays arranged by theme and primarily (it seems) with the intended audience of people in the same group as the authors (in this case, nonbinary people). Just like all of the Chicken Soup books are.

Some of the stories are sad. Some are about different experiences of nonbinary pain. Some are about pain not directly related to gender (one takes place during an actual coup). But some are not sad. Many of them are full of joy and peace (one is about someone who literally studies the path of Zen). One— and only one— is by someone who is not non-binary— a mother of an agender teenager, speaking from her perspective about her child’s gender journey and the choices she made as a parent along the way. I enjoyed reading that one, but I’m not really sure why it was in this book. It seemed to have a totally different audience than the rest of the pieces/didn’t seem to belong. I hope the mom wrote it with her child’s permission. There’s also a lot of loneliness in the pages— I think specifically of one person in their 50s who said they’ve never met another nonbinary person older than 25, and don’t know any other amab nonbinary people at all.

Several of the writers say they didn’t discover the term genderqueer until the 1990s on online message boards, and one of the editors of the book (who is one of many people who independently invented the term around the same time) said that while they first used it about themselves around that time, they didn’t see the word catch on until much later. So, it makes sense that most genderqueer people are young— the term was just beginning to be used when we were born.

Another word I think of in relation to this book is “gender diversity.” I think it’s easy for this word to feel empty for cis people, for us to take it as really just meaning “men and women and binary trans people and nonbinary people” — 4 categories. But this collection really illustrates just how much diversity there can be within “non-binary.” Particularly, as several of the writers note, the word “non-binary” says nothing about what people are, only what they are not.

Some people use he/him or she/her. Some people use they/them or ze/hir. Some people use gender neutral pronouns but still like terms like Mommy and Daddy and being “one of the girls” or “one of the boys.” Some people do not. One person, whose story is unlike any other that I’ve heard before, says he still feels male internally even though he has been happily living as a woman for several years. He says this is because he transitioned later in life, after decades of being a father and husband. He also says that unlike the trans women he knows, he’s never felt like he IS a woman on the inside, only that he WISHES he could be a woman. So he describes himself as a male who lives as a woman, even though such a description would be incredibly offensive to other people.

I also learned about the many different ways that nonbinary people may and do choose to transition. I knew already that some nonbinary people take low doses of HRT to achieve some changes but not others. But there’s so many (basically infinite) combinations of things people may want to do. Some people change their names, some don’t. Some people use new pronouns, some don’t. Some people get top surgery or bottom surgery (and this is already misleading, because there are lots of DIFFERENT top surgeries and bottom surgeries people can get!). Some people use hormones, or low doses, or only sometimes, or they do for awhile and then don’t, or not at all. One author has a friend who they say describes herself as “female to male to female” transgender, not because she regretted transitioning, but because her gender identity changed over time. Like, I knew that there can be as many genders as there are people in the world. But this collection really helped me understand exactly what that means, or can mean.

Separately, all of the mentions of discovering terms (like genderqueer) and learning about gender diversity online through forums and YouTube videos made me think about the importance of Tumblr to the LGBTQ+ community during the first part of the 2010s. This was the place to go to learn about identity and history. And there was a lot of misinformation too. Now, millennials on Twitter often bemoan the Gen Zers on the platform who are rehashing the same fights and “discourse” (I put this in quotes because in this context it means something slightly different than in the academic sense) on Twitter as we did on Tumblr 10 years ago. Now, people don’t need to go to the library to get information about their identities, but getting information is a lot messier, even if the information is more plentiful.

Tumblr is also, maybe not the origin but certainly the place of proliferation, of “microlabels” that people make fun of a lot. Like “poly pangender biromantic demiheterosexual” (I’m only kind of exaggerating). When I was younger, I was dismissive of people who identified themselves like this. Now, I think it’s a bit more complicated. First, people can identify however they want. Second, just like Sedgwick says in Epistemology of the Closet, defining sexuality primarily around hetero/homo doesn’t have to be the way to do it. She lists many other dimensions of sexuality that we could use for our social categorizing. So, words like these are attempts at describing/categorizing those other things, and they seem silly because as a society we aren’t used to that. On the other hand, LGBT and queer identities are sociopolitical categories that have been in part imposed upon us (by the medical establishment, for example) but are also embraced for political and community purposes. One of the reasons “queer” caught on was because it’s one umbrella term (and anti-normative)— the more people you organize under one banner, the more power you have. So, microlabels diffuse political power instead of collect it. And laws/prejudices/discrimination don’t happen along those hyperspecific lines. They happen along the lines of “this category, that category, or can’t categorize.” But then again, it also seems good for young people to have such a specific awareness of their desires and feelings, even if those feelings change over time. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the book.

But it does remind me of one author who said they don’t consider themselves binary but also don’t consider themselves non-binary, and they reject the term non-binary because to them it connotes upper middle class, white, urban, afab people who present masculine. And that is not them, and they don’t want to be lumped in with them. So, even while “non-binary” is meant to have lots of space as a term, there’s certainly very specific images that come to mind for it, and non-binary folks who don’t match those expectations are unseen/more frequently misgendered (although all nonbinary folks get misgendered a lot).

"Sorted" by Jackson Bird

I bought this book after reading this article about JK Rowling’s public descent into transphobia and bourgeois detachment. Jackson Bird is a trans man for whom Harry Potter has played a big role in both his life and career (he used to work full time for the charity Harry Potter Alliance). He was interviewed for the article and expressed his sadness about JKR’s transphobia and how his relationship to the series has changed since all of that became public knowledge. A memoir by a trans person about his gender and also Harry Potter? I had to get it. Both personally and for my orals reading, since Harry Potter plays a HUGE role in literacy development among millennials, and many people have stories of how their relationship with HP relates to their relationship with their own gender and/or sexuality.

Bird says this book grew from a pamphlet he put together when he was coming out to friends and family to inform and educate them, without having to have the same difficult conversation over and over again. People liked it and asked for more. His YouTube channel, which originally didn’t have a particular content focus, eventually became centered around trans education. At one point in the book, he says he saw a lot of YouTube content designed for other trans people (like people documenting their transitions), but not a lot designed to inform cis people about trans issues. So, he wanted to contribute to this area.

I think this book does the same thing— naturally, given the situation of its origins. The book reads like it’s intended primarily for cis people and/or trans people who are just beginning to learn about trans-related topics. I can’t help but compare it to Sissy, since Jacob Tobia specifically says in their book that they DON’T want it to be a book for cis people. They want to do a bare minimum of educating on the basics in their book, and mostly just tell their story. In contrast, Bird has many pullboxes throughout the book with deeper explanations of topics and referrals to other educational resources.

It was surprising to me that Bird felt there was very little trans content designed for cis people, since I feel like most criticism of trans media is saying that too much of it is meant for cis people’s consumption and we ought to have more trans media created with a trans audience in mind. But maybe that just wasn’t the case on YouTube in the 2010s?

Sorted and Sissy are similar in other ways, namely that both authors come from similar backgrounds— Southern middle class suburbs, conservative religious communities, film and theatre experience both as children and professionally. While Tobia is from my same hometown, Bird spent the early 2010s living basically my dream life— being 5 years older than me, he was able to actually go to the Harry Potter conferences and actually make friends with his favorite YouTubers, who were also my favorite YouTubers, whereas I was still a young teen and couldn’t do those things. So, these memoirs also feel similar to me just based on my personal connections with the authors.

One thing I think Bird does really well in Sorted is showing how dysphoria can grow over time as your awareness of your gender changes. Not everyone knows from when they are very young that they are trans, but Bird’s story makes it very clear how even if you make it through 20 years of your life without realizing it, that doesn’t make your dysphoria any less painful. In high school, Bird was able to dress and act as a feminine woman regularly, without being particularly conscious of any psychic pain this caused him. As he grew more and more in touch with his gender and identity as a trans man, this became progressively more impossible. Once he started wearing a binder, not wearing one felt all the more horrible, even though he’d never liked his chest to begin with. At one point, he was able to stomach wearing a dress for formal events and just “flip the switch” in his brain for a few hours as long as he had time to emotionally recover afterwards, but then one year, the switch disappeared entirely.

In Trans: A Memoir, Juliet Jacques does describe how originally she didn’t think she would be interested in hormone therapy or gender affirmation surgery, even after she knew she was trans, but later changed her mind about each one. However, she doensn’t go into as much detail about her internal process of how/why her feelings evolved over time as Bird does.

That’s not to say I think any of these three books are better or worse than the others, but they do different things. Both Sissy and Trans: A Memoir say they want to stay away from stereotypical features of “the trans memoir” (like a focus on physical changes and ending with The Surgery), but Trans: A Memoir both begins and nearly ends with Jacques’s surgery (there’s a bit more about other things at the end), and Sorted definitely does build to Bird’s top surgery as the climax, even though he also discusses how no surgery ever just Gets Rid of All Of Your Difficulties, and he still has body image issues— but, as he happily realizes, body image issues common to many men, both trans and cis! However, I don’t know how much of this is a structural choice and how much is just….I’m pretty sure he got his top surgery fairly recently, so between the time it took to write the book and then have it go through the publishing process (it came out in September 2019), I imagine just not that much time has passed in order for more stuff for him to write about in the book to happen.

I do wish, and this isn’t his fault at all, that the timing had worked out that he could have written about JKR’s transphobia and how that impacted his relationship with the series and fandom (if he wanted to talk about it in the book, that is). He talks about it in the interview for the article linked to above, but it’s just a couple quotes and, having gotten to know him through 300 pages of his writerly voice, I’d like to read his thoughts on it!

Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe

Genderqueer is a comic/graphic memoir by Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir). E is 5ish years older than me, and we had a lot of the same interests growing up. I feel our differences primarily in how that age gap shaped our different relationships to the same things (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fandoms, John Green, Tumblr and fanfiction, queer YA). On a personal level, while I do identify as a cis woman, I certainly still related to some of eir experiences with and feelings about feminine pressures, and eir relationship with eir sister reminded me strongly enough of my relationship with my own sister that I texted her about it while reading and loaned her the book immediately after.

Aside from the many personal connections I felt with Kobabe while reading, I mainly thought about this book in relation to Queer Literacies (McBeth), which I was reading at the same time. Kobabe falls in love with reading through Harry Potter, tracks and documents eir reading extensively through eir teen years, and includes multiple panels that show the titles of some of the many books e read during eir formative years. Most of the books are not directly commented on in the text or story of the memoir, or mentioned in general terms— reading YA, reading fantasy, seeking queer representation.

As a “Queer literate” myself, to use Mark’s phrase, I recognized many of these titles, and many of them are close to my own heart for the same reasons. Several titles by David Levithan appear, and many by Tamora Pierce (although only The Song of the Lioness series in general is mentioned by name in the text). Tamora Pierce has since said on Twitter that if she had been aware of genderqueerness when writing the books, she would have written Alanna as non-binary.

Kobabe’s participation in different fandom communities (and how that relates to eir own gender and sexual identities) is also an example of queer literacy. Eir Queer-Straight-Alliance in middle school rapidly turns into a Lord of the Rings fanclub, with an emphasis on slash fics (fanfiction centered around characters having gay romances and/or sexual relationships with each other). While I wasn’t interested in fanfiction myself growing up, I cannot overstate how big of a deal slash fic was for many queer teens and preteens during the ‘aughts and the first part of the 2010s. Reading and writing slashfic gave young people opportunities to explore their sexualities in a safe, contained way before they became physically involved with others in real life, while bonding with others around a shared interest, and developing writing skills that they will also use in other areas of their lives. While slash fic and shipping more generally is definitely still a thing, I think its popularity has waned as LGBTQ+ representation in YA novels has increased.

Another thought on queer literacies and Kobabe’s book— I was delightfully surprised to notice how e re-drew (I think) a particular panel from Fun Home (maybe e got Bechdel’s permission to reprint instead?) as a visual citation of the comic. How else can you accurately quote from a visual medium? The visuals matter! References to Fun Home and other books are accompanied by page numbers drawn into the background of the panels. It’s such a wonderful and creative form of citation, in my opinion.

After finishing the book, I messaged Kobabe on Instagram to say thank you and let em know I was reading eir book for my PhD exams. In eir reply, e said one thing e kept in mind while writing/drawing was how the book might be used in schools in the future, especially cite-ability.

Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicolson (and also Vita Sackville-West)

This was one of the books I read during my one-text-per-day period and didn’t finish, but I loved it so much I took the time to finish it anyway, later on. This book is partially the text of Vita Sackville-West’s autobiography, which she seems to have never shared with anyone before she died, partially her son Nigel’s narration of his parents’ lives, via his own memories but primarily through their diaries and letters, and partially extended quotes from those same diaries and letters.

I first heard of VSW through Virginia Woolf, as I expect many people do. I knew she was the subject of Orlando, I knew they had exchanged what I would call love letters, I thought VSW was a lesbian and Harold Nicolson was gay and they were each other’s beards/consensually-non-monogamous. I knew VSW had an alter ego named Julian, who took her lovers out in public. I didn’t know that VSW and HN had a deep love between them as well, that they really were primary partners, not just a marriage out of social expectation. Yet they still also had their own separate bedrooms, and lived apart for long stretches of time. Yet it also clearly pained them to be separated. It seems contradictory, but it seems to have worked.

( VSW and VW are part of my own queer literacy story (see post about Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth). I also had a lot of envy I had to work through while reading, since VSW was able to just cavort around Europe with her girlfriend for months at a time while her mother and husband sent her money. Must be nice. )

Quotes I Marked

(p.3) “Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth….Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it” [then she basically says except for Harold, although I do not think she ever gave it to him? At the same time, Nigel says he is fairly sure his mother meant for him to find it after she died.] I think there is no better way of putting the dilemma of the memoirist than this. There is really no fully ethical way to do it, but you are compelled to do it anyway. I think The Argonauts really highlights this too, and Are You My Mother? Both books include talking about how the author shared drafts with a loved one, who was varying levels of uncomfortable with it. But how can you tell someone you love not to do something that their career is based around? There’s so much pressure — probably external, but certainly internal — to press down your feelings.

(p.4) “I realize that this confession, autobiography, whatever I may call it, must necessarily have for its outstanding fault a lack of all proportion. I have got to trust to a very uncertain memory, and whereas the present bulks enormous, the past is misty.”’

In all the memoirs I’ve been reading, it always stands out to me when the author writes about the fact that they are writing it and their reflections on that position/act. And you always have to press on through your self-consciousness, or else the book never happens. I wonder what the memoirs look like where the person failed to move past that crisis/conundrum, so they never finished/shared.

I think this way is the most ethical way to do it— write it, and keep it secret until you and most of the relevant people are dead. I don’t feel comfortable saying everyone SHOULD do it this way, because I think memoirs are super important and enjoyable and I want to read them! And people can enjoy and benefit from them, especially queer memoirs, now! I think a lot of young non-binary people will hold on to Jacob Tobia’s book like a liferaft. But that’s another example of an author whose loved ones (in this case, their parents) weren’t totally thrilled by their portrayal, although Tobia writes about this exact concern with a lot of love for them.

Comedian Bo Burnham talks about how a lot of the stories he tells in his comedy are made up, because his family and friends never chose to be loved ones with a comedian, so it doesn’t feel right to him to have people laugh at stories that are theirs, too.

I don’t think there’s a good answer here.

I’m glad this book exists. I’m glad LGBTQ memoirs exist.

Many Love, by Sophie Johnson

Many Love is an illustrated memoir of Johnson’s experiences with love writ-large (including family and friendships) and how exploring polyamory has shaped her views and made her who she is beyond just her sex/dating life. I think it’s just as much about friendship as it is about romance. Johnson is bisexual, and while other memoirs I’ve read (such as TSR/TSB) are written by non-monogamous people, I chose this book for my list because it’s really ~about~ that set of identity and relationship issues.

I really enjoyed it and read it in only two nights. Interspersed throughout Johnson’s memories are also many citations of interviews, data, and other external sources that have informed her understandings, that she includes for the benefit of her readers too. She includes several helpful hand-drawn charts of different terminology, even gender and sexuality words not directly related to the content of the book.

In the beginning, she acknowledges that she is a cisgender bisexual white woman, and isn’t that a perspective that’s fairly well represented as far as LGBTQ memoirs go? Her response to this is to include one such chart that represents information that others she spoke to (particularly trans people, I think) asked her to include for her readers’ edification. This is where she explains things like cis, trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, etc. I think this and the citations to other perspectives are good things to do, but I don’t feel like they fully answer the recurring question of memoirs.

On the one hand, everyone should be allowed to share their experiences! And with memoir, you only have the perspective that is yours. On the other hand, as Juliet Jacques discusses at length in her own book, the publishing markets aren’t infinite. Only so many writers get contracts, and while anyone can self-publish, there are lots and lots of benefits — both writerly and financially— to having a contract.

However, I don’t think Many Love is self-indulgent, even though it is about her self. Each chapter has a very clear broader message that she wants to discuss and impart to her readers via telling about her own experiences. Particularly: how a very close friend who you are not dating or having sex with can still be your Significant Other that you primarily structure your life around, the role of jealousy and how to deal with it with a loved one, etc.

I have already lent my copy to friends.

It’s been awhile since I read a book that is for adult audiences, primarily text, but also illustrated. I think there should be more books like that. The last one I read was To Timbuktu, which was also a memoir, this one co-written by a couple (one who is a writer and one who is an artist).

Times Square Red Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany

TSR/TSB is actually two separate essays on similar topics published in one binding. The first (Times Square Blue, despite the order in the title) is primarily Delany’s reminisces on the many men he met and conversations and experiences he had in the porn theaters in the Times Square neighborhood in the 1960s-1990s. He’s very clear that he does not claim to offer an all-encompassing picture— or even, necessarily, an accurate one— of the happenings in that area at that time, but he will do his best to choose anecdotes that will give the reader a comprehensive sense of his own impressions. He also takes care to note that while he is saddened by the changes to the neighborhood, he doesn’t want to— or think it’s possible to— return to those times. Instead, he wishes for institutions that can serve the same social functions in a more inclusive way— such as providing opportunities for safe, consensual heterosexual and lesbian sex. These notes surprised me.

In my readings about mid 20th century gay culture up to this point (not limited to my exam texts), I’ve gotten a very strong sense of nostalgia and longing, as if the best days of being gay are over, ruined by AIDS and gentrification. Where were the corresponding places and what were the corresponding subcultures for women? i’ve kept asking myself. Has being gay ever been fun for women, in the same way gay men seem to fondly remember the pre-AIDS sexual arena of NYC? Delany is the first writer I’ve read on this topic who is more willing to admit that while he had a lot of fun and misses that scene, it also had a lot of bad parts (crack being by far the worst), and that women of all sexualities were largely left out.

When reading a series of memories about conversations and sexual experiences had in and near porn theaters, it’s easy to imagine Delany’s life as largely centering around the pursuit and acquisition of casual sex. But he regularly reminds us: while casual sex plays a role in his ideal sexual life, and while he had meaningful friendships/acquaintanceships with many of the men he met, just because this essay is about Times Square sex cultures doesn’t mean he wasn’t doing an awful lot of other important, meaningful things at the same time. He writes with fondness without romanticization.

In “Times Square Red,” which is the more “academic” piece of the two, Delany examines the socioeconomic forces working upon Times Square and theorizes the exact nature and value of what has been lost. He presents a dichotomy of contact-relations versus networking-relations. Contact relations are inter-class, casual, and more unpredictable. Networking relations are intra-class, competitive and often formal, and highly planned. Both function as stabilizing influences on class tensions and conflicts, but contact is more socially and personally beneficial, with higher potential rewards. His main examples of networking-relations are at writing conferences, which he uses to explain that the appeal of such conferences comes in many young writers with similar needs hoping for moments that will help them breakthrough and get professional success. This is impossible precisely because there are so many people with the same needs in the same place, and very few people with the ability to grant or facilitate such desires. Additionally, contact relations make things more Pleasant, even if they don’t change underlying material conditions.

I also found his discussions of safety and small town visions of what city life is like to be very compelling. Because most visitors to Times Square are tourists, there is pressure for the neighborhood to conform itself to the tourists’ expected image. But the kinds of things that seem safe to tourists create some of the least safe conditions for city living, at least for those who aren’t familiar with the area. Safe neighborhoods have a lot of contact-relations— many different activities and businesses are all interspersed with one another. There is a lot of local traffic. The space is designed to be used by the public, instead of just to funnel the public from one private space to another. I definitely relate to his analysis on a personal level, as someone who was nervous about and intimidated by not just NYC but my own neighborhood only 2 years ago, and whose parents still have a lot of worry about “their little girl’s safety in the big city,” but now I feel very comfortable in my immediate neighborhood, even late at night, even alone.

Delany and I disagree on the political conclusions of his analysis, however. His argument, if I’m understanding it correctly, is that contact is good in part because it smooths over class relations and makes life better. He is “marxian, not Marxist” (in his words). I agree that some things can make class conflict smoother, but I take the position that while smoothness is more pleasant, it doesn’t change the material conditions, it doesn’t change capitalist oppression, and the solution is not to have more inter-class fraternizing, but to overthrow the system entirely. And then we can have mixed-use zoning. Which probably really will be more pleasant.

I also like his implicitly-proposed method of first observing changes in discourse and then searching for the material changes that they were in response to. It’s a nice blend of poststructuralist and materialist theories/approaches that I feel lets the methods live together.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, by Charles M. Blow

I liked this book a lot until the very end. It begins with a prologue in which Blow, in college, is driving with a gun to his mother’s house with the intention of killing his cousin, who molested him as a child. The prologue ends before he gets there. The rest of the book tells the story of his life from childhood up until that moment, ending with some reflections on his moral and existential crisis in that moment and how his identity and relationship with his bisexuality have evolved since then.

__Spoilers Below__

Blow decides in a split second not to kill his cousin, to take the exit off the highway and go back to college instead. In that moment, he realizes he can’t allow his trauma to affect his life so completely— he is an adult, and he needs to exert adult control over his emotions and not throw away his future with a murder charge.

However, the way the narrative of his decision on the highway flows into more general reflections on Blow’s subsequent emotional growth makes it sound like he had all of those revelations immediately. We don’t get to see the journey from that first moment of self-realization to where he is now— it’s all stuffed into a meditative summary that goes much, much faster than the rest of the book, which takes its time in tracing significant moments in his life. He stops showing and starts telling.

His actual words are very clear that his journey was not over in that moment and he still had decades of figuring stuff out and healing from his traumatic past left to go. However, the way the book is structured makes the arc become, to oversimplify, “Once I decided to get over my molestation, then I was happy and suddenly ok with being attracted to men.” Which is explicitly not the case, but rushing the rest of that development into only a handful of pages after two hundred-ish about how the trauma shaped his life still implicitly carries that message. This book falls into the kind of arc that other memoirs I’ve read, like those by Jacob Tobia and Juliet Jacques, actively tried to resist. The “being lgbtq is terrible, and you will be miserable, until you decide to get over it” implication is dangerous, even though I don’t think that message is his intention, and even though in this case it’s embedded in a relatively unrepresented story of a bisexual man, and a bisexual Black man at that. The only other bi man memoirs I can think of off the top of my head are white celebrity memoirs, of John Barrowman and Alan Cumming.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde

Here is what I knew about Audre Lorde prior to reading this book; famous Black feminist leftist lesbian poet librarian, affiliated with CUNY, died of breast cancer, wrote “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I think that’s all. I thought I knew one of her other poems, one that my grandma had cut out of the newspaper and mailed to me when I was 14, but apparently that was actually by Elizabeth Alexander.

I had read a little of The Cancer Journals in a memoirs of illness seminar, and probably a few other poems across the course of my education. When compiling my reading list, I tried not to include two works by the same author, prioritizing reading as many voices as possible. (I broke this rule once: I’m reading both Fun Home and its sequel, Are You My Mother— I rationalize this because they are both graphic memoirs and therefore faster reads). So, I had to choose between Zami and The Cancer Journals. I chose this one. Partially because I’d read excerpts from The Cancer Journals already, and partially because I hoped Zami would include more lesbian content.

Zami covers Lorde’s life from childhood to around her late twenties/early thirties, and its focus is the many women who were significant in her life up to that point— her mother, her sisters, friends, and lovers. I felt it started slow, but once it got going, it was incredibly gripping. As I remarked to my coworkers recently, I know this is a well-established opinion, but Lorde was a badass.

It’s hard for me to separate my scholarly reading— “reading for exams, reading to understand the history and substance of the genre of queer memoir, reading for criticism” — from my own literary cravings. Like so many of the authors of the books I’ve been reading, I’m a queer woman hungry for role models through books, eager to construct my own canon of intellectual and cultural heritage. Not only in terms of sexuality, but in terms of being a woman, being an academic, living in New York. I’m sure I’d read many books set here before I moved here, but now I’m reading as a resident, trying to make sense of the place I now inhabit and to understand my place in it, and the history of those who were here before me.

The day I read the passage in which Lorde and her sisters walk from Harlem into the Heights to visit a comic book shop, I realized I had climbed that very same hill and walked that very same path earlier in the day, as I came home from running an errand for a friend and visiting another in the same building. I now live only a few blocks north from where Lorde moved as a preteen, in-between the same cross streets. Her New York and her experience of it were both so very very different from mine, yet we have walked along the same streets. As she writes about her visits to the downtown lesbian bars, I know I’ve seen the same buildings she did on my way to my own lesbian bars. Although the socioeconomic makeup and social status of the Village is far, far different now than it was in the 1950s. I treasure her descriptions of her own shitty apartments, her own nights drinking cheap wine with friends, her own commutes to and from various CUNY campuses. I was delighted to learn she lived in Stamford for a little while. A year ago I had never even heard of Stamford, and now I have a friend who regularly visits from there. I was delighted to learn she lived in Mexico City for a little while, studying sociology. I have a friend who used to be a professor of sociology there. My friend is much younger, but I like to imagine she knew some of the same people that Lorde knew there. As I read, I felt the many tiny, tenuous connections between us, and I felt happy.

I also found it valuable to read about Lorde’s experiences of race and racism, since they are somewhat unlike the descriptions of both that I’m more familiar with. I grew up in the South, and mid 20th century NYC racism didn’t always look the same as the racism we learned about in my own community. I also reflected on the differences between Lorde’s description of KyKy dykes (often Black lesbians, lesbians who rejected being either butch or femme, lesbians who were by implication probably prostitutes) with Esther Newton’s description of kiki dykes (spelling and capitalization differences aside, still lesbians who rejected butch and femme roles, but typically upper middle class lesbians who were slumming it downtown or faking attraction to women for attention), and how their respective subject positions inflect their views on the term/the people it applies to.

The parts I’m still pondering are what exactly “biomythography” means, and what, if anything, makes bonds between women special that cross-gender bonds (or same-gender bonds between other genders) cannot have. We’ve moved past political lesbianism and second wave feminism. But what is important for us 21st century women to take with us?

I love the term biomythography. I love how open and ambiguous it is. I love how it makes me think of Lorde’s Significant Women as a pantheon of goddesses who shaped her life. I love how the term implicitly says that not everything in the book might be literally true, but it is how she remembers it, how she tells the story to herself, how she wants to tell the story to her readers, how she wants to pass it along, and that that is Okay, and even Good.

I wanted it to last longer— I wanted the book to cover more of her life, more of her relationships (romantic and not). Particularly, I wanted to read about her marriage, her relationship with her husband and with motherhood and with performing heterosexuality and how they all mixed together for her. In Zami, Lorde thinks Muriel will be her life partner—I want to read about her other life partners. Wikipedia describes two different women as such, and their timelines overlap. What are those stories? Why did she cut off the writing when she did, instead of continuing? I’m left wanting to read so much more of her prose.

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story, by Jacob Tobia

I don’t know what the “best” LGBTQ+ memoir I’ve read (or will read) is, but Sissy is definitely my favorite so far. Tobia is from my hometown, and only a few years older than me, so it was SUCH a delight encountering place after place that I knew, or could picture.

Their Toys R Us was my Toys R Us. Their mall is not “my” mall, because it’s on the other side of town, but it’s certainly a mall I’ve been to many times. The coffeeshop they mention writing the end of the book in? The same coffeeshop I treasure my annual visit to when my cousins and I do homework together over Thanksgiving break. Their church and relationship with church is different from mine, but their church is just down the road from the one I grew up in. They’re also definitely one of the people I would have envy-resented in high school, since they went to the special progressive charter schools that were definitely Better Than My Schools, but that I also hated because Charter Schools Are For Rich Preppy Snobs (sorry Jacob). And also Governor’s School, definitely the dream summer program for every middle class North Carolina nerd and NOT one I was accepted into. And also Duke, the school pretty universally hated by public school kids in the Triangle. (As they say, Duke is Puke, Wake is Fake, the One I Hate is NC State. You can’t go to heaven in a red canoe, ‘cause God’s favorite color is Carolina Blue!) (Except if you’re an engineer you go to State and if you’re a rebel you go to literally any other UNC school besides Chapel Hill.) (I went to UNC-Greensboro, formerly the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, Once a Spartan, Always a Spartan)

As you can see, I have a lot of local feelings. And certainly have never read anything that better represents my exact brand of race-class-regional background.

I laughed and laughed at all of their Cary jokes, their NC jokes, their Duke jokes. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart when they described their campus organizing around Amendment One, our state’s anti-marriage equality amendment that passed right as I was coming out to myself. I vaguely remember hearing about the campaigns for gender neutral housing at nearby universities that they must have been involved with. I spent a little too much time on their Instagram looking for posts tagged with place I knew.

But all of this made me ask: Who is this book written for? Originally, I intended to recommend it to every nonbinary person I knew from Cary. But as I read, that seemed less and less appropriate. Some of Tobia’s goals in the book seems to be demonstrating to others 1) how deeply pervasive and painful gendering is, 2) how everyone, including cis people, has gender trauma, and 3) that “trans” is much more expansive than binary transitions to the “opposite” sex, that sometimes “passing” is both definitionally impossible and not desirable, and how gender nonconformity poses unique everyday risks and struggles.

It seems like a nonbinary person would not need to be told these things, so while many nonbinary people might enjoy reading the book and be happy to see their community represented in memoir, they are not the intended audience. (What would a nonbinary memoir written for nonbinary people look like? I don’t know.)

As I got further into the book, I thought maybe I would recommend it to my parents instead. They understand that some people use they/them pronouns and reject the gender binary, but they don’t really understand why someone would want to do that or what it really means. I thought a memoir that’s otherwise from a very similar cultural position as them could be an easy way in to greater understanding for them. Certainly, in the afterword, Tobia notes that they hope other parents of gender nonconforming children find the book helpful.

But, it’s not really written for cishet people either. Tobia specifically says they were not interested in writing a Trans 101 book, and it’s not. There’s a lot of gay dialect and colloquialisms that might be alienating or at least unfamiliar to a cishet person. They don’t define terms, or even talk about how they first learned about different identity terms— just how they came to embrace the ones they use now. There are casual references to queer history icons and queer theorists (Sedgwick, Butler) that anyone with a little WGS background will know, but anyone without it will not. Tobia doesn’t explain for those who will not. (I might still recommend it to my parents.)

In the end, I kind of ended up thinking it was written for people like me— queer people who are not themselves nonbinary, who walk and talk in similar circles but can still benefit from an inside view + greater understanding of a particular way of experiencing gender. I have already recommended the book to my sister, who also matches this description.

But that doesn’t seem quite right, either. In the footnotes, the last couple chapters, and in the interview included in the back of my paperback edition, Tobia repeatedly talks about how therapeutic the writing process was, how it brought them closer to their family members, how it helped them unpack and process different experiences and gender traumas. They say they tell all of their friends to write a memoir too, because it’s better for you than years of therapy. So maybe it’s just written for themselves. Which, if true, seems like the best intended audience for a memoir.

At the very beginning, they talk about the typical arc of a trans memoir: always knew you were different, trauma trauma trauma, serious serious serious, big coming out, difficult transition, find acceptance. They reject this arc. They want to write a funny trans memoir, they want to be honest about their many privileges while also simultaneously experiencing oppression, they want to express how coming out is a long process, and parental reactions are complex, not Yes or No, and how they haven’t “solved” the “problem” of their gender. It is ever-unfolding, ever-being-discovered, and while they have found significant professional success in the years since they’ve graduated college, and in many ways get to express themselves in comfortable ways, they still experience nagging self-doubt, confusion, pain, and loneliness. They write about how they have to exclusively try to date bi/pan guys, since just straight or just gay guys aren’t interested in their fluidity. (Which is very sad and frustrating, but also, hell yeah bi and pan guys, who don’t get acknowledged enough.) And they do do all of these things! And it’s great! But they also still kinda do follow the traditional arc— most explicitly in the front matter that introduces and frames the book.

So I’m asking myself, what genre features are “quintessential” of the “typical” trans memoir (to the extent that there are enough for anything to be typical)? Does it really matter that the arc is in some ways similar, if so many other features (like the tone, like the “conclusions,” like the emphasis on fluidity and inbetweenness, like the near-total lack of discussion on hormones/surgery/other physical changes that people may do as part of a transition process). Unlike every other memoir I’ve read so far, they also talk very little about books/other media that was important to their gender and sexuality journey. We don’t learn about how Tobia learned about the concept of being gay, or being trans, or being nonbinary. We even get a relatively small amount of discussion of their activism work (other than the run across the Brooklyn Bridge), although it’s clear that they put a lot of time into many different activist projects.

A lot of queer memoir is full of queer trauma. That’s certainly a difficulty of the genre, that the stories are both true but also send harmful messages about the queer experience. (That it’s always traumatic, or just traumatic, or you need enough trauma to be properly queer.) And this book does have some of that. But this book also has a lot of queer joy in it. Parts that are unabashedly HAPPY and made me feel happy as a reader, even though they are also totally upfront about their pain and many struggles.

I think the end message is fully hopeful: that if parents can be more affirming and encouraging of gender nonconformity in their children, that if people can get more comfortable with people who don’t easily fit into boxes, that if we can change social structures so that there is room—and welcoming room— for all genders, then life doesn’t have to be this way.

My Butch Career by Esther Newton

Sophomore year of college, a freshly-declared double major in English and anthropology, I was in a used bookstore and spotted “Margaret Mead Made Me Gay.” I had to buy it, of course. But I didn’t read it— not for several more years, until the summer before I started my PhD program. It was one of three books I wanted to make sure I read before I moved to New York, alongside The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam) and Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed). So in that sense, I loved Esther Newton long before I knew who she was. Certainly, we never studied her in my anthropology department.

Last fall, Newton was a guest speaker at my school as part of the press tour for My Butch Career. I was thrilled. Elderly feminist academics fascinate and enthrall me. I look at them to imagine who I might have been if I was part of another generation, and to imagine who I might be in my future. I crave their approval and their mentorship. I want to adopt all of them as my proverbial scholarly grandmothers. I am terrified of them.

So that’s what was in my head going into the event.

And you know, she really was an important person in the field, and she really is a role model for young queer academics with a social science bent like me, but also— she’s human. I remember feeling uncomfortable when she talked about trans women, briefly. It was clear she knew she ought to be supportive, but was tentative, uncertain, unsure of what to make of the idea. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember feeling disappointed, yet still excited to have gotten to go to the talk.

I felt the same way reading My Butch Career. Partially because of what Newton says about trans issues (basically she says she thinks trans men transition because they are really butch lesbians who feel pushed into socially transitioning and changing their bodies by a patriarchal culture), and partially because of how she treats the issue of academic labor in the book. i have no doubt that it was very difficult to be one of the few women in a graduate program, dominated by strict gender expectations, with the assumption that she would marry a male anthropologist rather than become an anthropologist herself, all while carefully trying to stay closeted. Yet she still easily gets a tenure-track position immediately out of grad school, and even after she is effectively fired by being denied tenure, she gets a new tenure track job at SUNY Purchase seemingly very easily afterwards. She doesn’t even have to relocate. I and everyone else currently in graduate school will be lucky if we get a tenure track job, ever. Anywhere. Period. Newton writes with guarded awareness and sensitivity about many issues, even those she admits she does not fully understand, but seems unaware in this area, and only somewhat aware in terms of her other economic privileges (a generous upper middle class dad and a substantial inheritance from her grandfather), which I feel detracts from the power of the “I did some very cool and very important academic stuff while battling a lot of systemic obstacles” arc, even though the sexism and homophobia she faced are very, very real.

However, I was OVERJOYED to learn a new term: ki-ki dyke, which was a pejorative at the time but now I love. It was someone who was neither butch nor femme, but somewhere in between, but went to lesbian bars, but was rumored to be bi, and was probably middle class (which would be why she looked obviously out of place in a working class lesbian bar), but went anyway. (Apparently kikis were also suspected of being undercover cops.) Because there’s a subset of lesbians who think bi women cannot use butch/femme as terms, and I don’t really feel like either one is accurate for me anyway, I was very happy to learn a word from the same time period that butch/femme developed that I do feel like applies to me, even if it was negative at the time. (In some circles being bi is still negative in our time, so whatever.)

So, having finished the book, I feel similarly to how I feel after the talk. I learned a lot more about an important person who broke ground in my field, learned more about mid 20th century NYC and academia and feminism, and also have political disagreements.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

I first heard about The Argonauts either shortly before or shortly after I moved to New York, and it seemed like everyone was talking about it. I got it out from the library about a year ago, thinking I would read it over winter break, but never did. I’m glad— I feel like the book talks about questions that are already on my mind now, both personal and scholarly (but of course they are not mutually exclusive), and not so much a year ago.

Some questions/themes:

• What are the limits of language? What can be expressed, what is inexpressible? Should we feel limited or liberated by it?

• How is pregnancy simultaneously extremely (hetero)normative and extremely not normal at all? What does it even mean to be “queer”?

• How do you write about your life when that means writing about other people’s lives too? (When those people might be very private people, or not agree with your representation of them, or be too young to be able to consent to being represented)

• How relationships continue being themselves and growing even when the people and dynamics within them change a lot

It reminds me of a prose-poem by Heidi Priebe that my partner read to me recently: “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.”

Again, with this book I was confronted with what feels like my own puritanism, or maybe just self-consciousness. I was shocked that Nelson would essentially begin the book with anal sex, and later write about BDSM— a book her friends would read, her professors, her family. I know that this is common, I know that many people write scholarly and literary texts in which they talk about their sex lives. I know many of the books I’ve already read for this orals list did it, and I know that many more will. I even enjoy and appreciate it when people do— I just can’t imagine doing it myself. What makes me feel like my sex life ought to be totally separate from my scholarly/writerly/public life, when of course I know that my body and my emotions and my relationships with others shape my thinking about everything all the time, and vice versa?

And how do you know, as a reader/critic or as a writer yourself, when it is gratuitous/for “shock value” or marketing juiciness, and when it is….”important”? Meaningful? I’m not sure what the right word is, because all of the words that come to mind set up a moral dichotomy that I’m not comfortable with. What do “important” and “meaningful” mean, anyway? Why can’t people just write about sex? Surely something that permeates our time, stories, culture, lives, etc. so much is already important and meaningful.

When I was discussing this book with someone close to me, they asked me if I thought the book would be as popular and widely praised as it is if she wasn’t writing about loving and parenting with a trans person. Their implication was no. I agree. I think it’s beautifully written, and I found many parts personally meaningful, and when I briefly met Nelson at an event last year I certainly found her likable and compelling, but I do agree that part of the hype and pull for the book is around the queerness, but specifically Harry’s gender.

On the one hand, Nelson quotes Harry as asking, “Why don’t you ever write about the queer part of your life?” and I read that as, “Why don’t you ever write about me/us?” She also discusses how they revised the first draft together until he felt comfortable with how she represented him. Yet on the other hand, she directly says he was angry and uncomfortable with however she portrayed him in the first draft, and he describes himself as an “epileptic [a very private person] married to a strobe light [a professional memoirist].” I took this as a metaphor for their extreme differences in relation to privacy, but the person I was discussing the book with pointed out that there is a more concerning layer: it’s not just that they are very different, but that the epileptic is directly vulnerable/put at risk in relation to the strobe light. GGG consent seems so gray and foggy when it comes to this issue—when you’re highly emotionally intertwined with someone, and their career is involved, how can you not feel some pressure? When you’re the memoirist, how can you ever know if you really have their full consent, how can you ever know you’re not pressuring them to be okay with how you’re portraying them, or that you’re writing about them at all? I don’t know.

Comedian Bo Burnham has apparently said in interviews that all of the stories he tells about his family are lies, because he feels that only he decided to be a comedian, and none of his family or friends decided it, so it would be unfair to talk about and make fun of them for money. This seems admirable and ethically responsible to me.

But I also love memoir, I think it’s important and meaningful and beautiful. Especially for LGBTQ+ memoirs and memoirs by people from other oppressed groups— as Fun Home and Trans: A Memoir especially show, LGBTQ people need/want/crave/benefit from these stories to help us figure out who we are and how we want to view ourselves and our community/community history and what we want our place in the world to be.

Nelson’s partner also writes parts of the book toward the end himself, parts about being with his mother in hospice. Presumably he wrote them how he wanted to write them and feels comfortable with those sections. But I find that to make the situation even more politically complicated. How did that composing process go? Nelson says they originally talked about writing a book together, but decided the process would be too fraught to be worthwhile. What was this process like? Why did he write those sections and only those sections, why are those sections there at all? Whose idea was it? Even framing it that way is false, since composing is such a recursive process.

And what can we do as critics, if so many of these questions can’t be known from the book itself? Theoretically one of them could talk about it in an interview, or write about it elsewhere, or if I knew them personally I could ask, but that would only resolve the questions for this particular book, and there are many more like it. If so much of the ethics and ethos of a book depend on unknowable things, what to do?

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

I have wanted to read Fun Home for a very long time, and now I finally got to. When I originally tried, my undergrad library didn’t have it in, so I read the sequel, Are You My Mother?, instead. I first learned about it when we read a few pages for a Rhetoric of the Body class I took sophomore year. I don’t remember the content of the excerpt, but almost the entire book felt familiar to me as I read. Maybe because so much of Are You My Mother? includes discussions and visuals of the writing process of Fun Home?

I noticed how in this book, too, like Trans: A Memoir, the texts that the author was reading and encountering and thinking about, both in relation to their identity and not, are absolutely integral to the book. Bechdel does not explicitly discuss all, or even most, of them, but she includes them by sketching in the titles on stacks of books in the panels. Some I recognize (like Orlando ), others I have heard of (Earthly Paradise by Colette), and others I haven’t. Like with the books mentioned in Trans: A Memoir, I’m adding some of them to my list. It also made me decide I need to add Mark’s book, Queer Literacies, to my orals list as secondary source material. All three of the memoirs I’ve read so far are wrapped up in their authors reading. Fitzgerald, Joyce, and whatever the lesbian section of the library looked like in the 1980s swirl through the book.

When I started reading, my partner asked me, “Isn’t there some criticism that she doesn’t hold her father accountable enough for being a pedophile?” I didn’t know, so I paid attention to moments of accountability as I read. There are multiple times she writes about struggling to feel angry with her father, or even feeling much at all, despite that it is easy for her to list his flaws as a person and parent. Yet while she doesn’t directly write about the issue of her father preying on teenage boys very often, Bechdel’s grappling with the issue is evident in the art. Even when the main thrust of the narrative is about something else, she draws moments when in retrospect something untoward might have been happening in front of her eyes, even when as a child, she did not know it. Certainly the verbal and physical abuse is only alluded to in the text, but is made very, very clear in the pictures.

Because the book is less than 15 years old, and I first learned about it even more recently, I have to repeatedly remind myself that Alison is close to my parents’ age—slightly older, actually— and her parents more like my grandparents. Her reflections on her childhood and what was likely happening without her knowledge are not only revising the story of her life after receiving new information, but reflecting from an even greater distance on those initial weeks. How much of the subtle “background” details of the panels depicting her childhood did she insert into her mental story during her twenties, and how much was only added as she was drawing the book?

Part of the difficulty and beauty of Fun Home is the coexistence of both deep pain and deep love Bechdel has in relation to her father. She describes her family as “arctic” in climate, yet still they were a family, and there are multiple moments of profound intimacy between her and her dad in the book despite their simultaneous alienation from each other.

When writing about her childhood visit to NYC in the late 1960s, Bechdel marvels at the trip as a strange interlude between her parents’ young adulthood in Manhattan a decade earlier, and her own young adulthood in Manhattan a decade later. They visited only weeks after Stonewall, although she did not know it at the time. She wishes her dad had been able to live in a more progressive area, and maybe he would have been more at peace and less predatory, yet knows that if he had, she might not even exist. On the same trip, Bechdel’s little brother goes missing and a man tries to pick him up at the piers. Their dad panics more than he might have, because he knows, but he’s also less angry than he would characteristically be, because he knows.

Although Bechdel’s dad and my dad have very little in common, I couldn’t help but feel some feelings anyway. The dream sequence where Bechdel tries to show her dad a beautiful sunset but he reaches the top of the hill too late really hit me, as did their conversation about her dad’s history with men in the car. I came out to my dad while we were driving in a car. There are other moments that sparked my own memories for me, but they’re even less obviously related and hard to put into words. At first, it seems silly to me to identify with moments in Fun Home that really aren’t very much like my life at all, or only in surface ways; Alison’s coming out process was nothing like my own, my conversation in the car with my dad was nothing like hers. We were just both in the car with our dads. Our families and family dynamics have very little in common. Yet that says something, I think— that I was personally moved anyway, and moved to think about things that haven’t really been on my mind in months.

I think it says something about the isolation and yearning for stories like our own that so many LGBTQ+ people experience, even when we think of ourselves as having a community. I don’t think of myself as feeling particularly isolated in this sense, but I guess I must, because I felt kinship and understanding with Alison and treasured that feeling, even as she was finding kinship with Colette and the other queer women she read about.

When reading the parts on Bechdel’s move to NYC and her hopes for finding a lesbian community, and her own reflections on what it must have been like to be butch in New York during the 50s, I thought about how many decades—entire generations— of LGBTQ people have come to NYC for exactly that reason, hoping to find community. And I thought about how I didn’t, and that i’m grateful I’m here for another reason and not that, because it means the world is better now because I didn’t feel that pull. Except I’m wrong. Because I did.

When I was applying to PhD programs, and people asked me why CUNY, I told people I liked the flexibility of the curriculum, the preponderance of archives and other schools and resources that would be available to me, the different certificates available, that I could study rhetoric without having to only study rhetoric, and the fact that New York would also be a good location for my partner, who works in theatre. And all of that is true.

But I made a joke while writing my personal statement that the most accurate way to paraphrase what I wanted to say was, “Please let me come to your school, because you’re gay and I’m gay and I want to study gay things.”

I came here for graduate school, but I came here for graduate school in part because I wanted openly queer teachers doing openly queer scholarship and an environment that would let me do the same.