Poor Queer Studies, by Matt Brim

I reviewed this book for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics (review still in the middle of the editorial process), so I don’t want to write too much about it here. I originally didn’t have this on my orals lists. I bought it near the beginning of the pandemic because Duke UP was having a sale and I wanted to stress-buy books, basically. Then I signed up to review it just because it was one of the two books on the call for reviewers that I already owned. It was only after I started reading that I discovered that it’s not only BY someone at CUNY, but it’s ABOUT CUNY (in part). And that one of my own classmates is in the acknowledgements.

I think it’s a pretty mixed-methods book. There’s university case study, there’s some archival work, there’s some auto-ethnography, there’s some classroom case study, there’s examples from student statements. Some of his own descriptions of his methods include “queer narrative case study” and “queer archival practice,” as well as “making poor queer studies imaginable” as a methodological intervention

One thing I really like is Brim’s deliberate choice to include a partial bibliography within the main text of the chapter, to really put front and center the queer scholarship taking place at the College of Staten Island. I thought that was really effective.

The book also surprised me in how Brim frames the Graduate Center as largely separate from the CUNY undergraduate colleges (GC is “rich queer studies” and CSI is “poor queer studies”), since my experience of CUNY is that there’s so much overlap between campuses, given how we’re farmed out to the other colleges as part of our teaching fellowships and how a large number of GC students work part time at other colleges to pay the bills. And how lots (idk if most) GC faculty are primarily appointed at other colleges, their “home campuses.” So it was interesting to me that Brim feels quite differently from me. Since he received his own GC appointment not very long before the book was published, I assume he wrote those sections before he joined the GC faculty, and I wonder if his feelings about the relationship between the schools have changed at all.

When he started out saying how he was going to talk about how rich queer studies schools ought to collaborate with and give resources to and learn from poor queer studies schools, I automatically assumed the rich queer studies school in question was going to be Columbia, not my own school. My friend whose wife is a Columbia medical student says that lots of Columbia students apparently view the GC as romantic since we’re teaching the working class or something.

But anyway, I found the book really helpful in terms of learning about the field of queer studies and the tensions within it, and it helped me think about CUNY through new eyes (I certainly never would have thought of CSI as a queer school), and it’s compositionally interesting re: the mixed methods stuff I talked about above. I also like that he starts the book with a Virginia Woolf quote. Because I love her.

Some Quotes I Marked

(p.9) [Discussing the notion of queer studies faculty as subversive rebels in the academy] “The problem with our story is that when Robin Hood stole, he gave to the poor. And he didn’t get paid to do it.” This is like the whole paradox of being a Marxist (me, not Brim) queer academic. It’s impossible to not contribute to all the ways the academy upholds capitalism and oppression in all of its forms, if you’re going to be working in the academy. As one of my MA teachers told us, “Once you have a PhD, you are part of The System. And you have to deal with that.”

(p.10) “….the undervalued queer methodology of critical compromise— that we both are and are not our institutions. Critical compromise both isolates and dramatizes a problem and promotes a mode of relative questioning.” I don’t know what I think about this but it’s something I need to think about more

(p.10) “Kristen A. Renn discerns a key tension created by the incorporation of queer methods in higher education research, namely, that ‘colleges and universities have evolved to tolerate the generation of queer theory from within but have stalwartly resisted the queering of higher education itself.’ ‘What is more nonqueer,’ she asks, ‘than traditional doctoral education or the tenure stream?’” I really don’t know how you could queer higher ed without making it just…something entirely different than what it is. Which is probably a good thing that needs to happen, but I’m resistant to it for the obvious reasons of how I’m already invested in it.

(p.12) “Less often, queer scholars have navigated class issues methodologically by finding ways to subvert the researcher/researched divide through, for instance, participatory action research in which knowledge making becomes a shared, cross-class endeavor of coinvestigators from inside and outside institutions of higher ed”

(p.13) [In Inside the Ivory Closet], the author “posited a split between the post-Stonewall scholars who increasingly enjoyed and industriously courted institutional status within the academy and pre-Stonewall writers and activists whose primary commitments were to their communities and to making scholarship accessible beyond the academy”

(p.14) (quoting someone else’s quote of another quote from a listserv) “Much of queer theory seems radical only as long as we ignore the class-base of its production and dissemination” YEP

(p.15) “One of the key functions of disciplinarity is to distinguish between the expert and the novice…We need to ask why the rise of interdisciplinarity, so critical of knowledge silos, did not de-stratify higher education in class terms, especially as the supposedly class-attuned framework of intersectionality has been the methodological byword for much interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences”

(p.15) “Attempts at queer-class disordering of the academy often look like relatively enfranchised LGBTQ scholars studying disenfranchised queer people or cultural forms extrinsic to the academy but with whom and which we feel personal/political connections and intellectual attractions”

(p.15) [again quoting from someone else] “As we descend deeper into the ivory tower we must ask ourselves at what cost. To what degree does incorporation challenge our relevance to the same communities who find themselves at the heart of our research?

(p.19) “socioaffective histories of arrival” (this is accompanied by an endnote referencing Queer Phenomenology)

(p.23) “the ‘problem of impossible evidence’ that attends queer scholarship, which is characteristically concerned with elucidating the ‘vagaries of embodied life’”

(p. 71) “higher education might be more closely aligned with class relations and racial capitalism (including the political economies of slavery) than with democracy (its governing political logic).”

(p.77) “…in other words, class analysis might well produce a critical cul de sac. This is one of the dangers of criticality, our prized method of exposing a problem: that we create a critical space to dwell in. But what if criticality prolongs the problem? What if queer criticality loves a hierarchy?”

(p.78) “What would it mean to stop dwelling in criticality, without merely withdrawing from it, thereby untroubling ourselves and entrenching upper-class white silence as the norm?”

(p.79) “Why pick on ourselves, why investigate our own status-based divisions, when others so passionately underplay our queer contributions? Why not just keep shouting ‘neoliberalism’ into the strongest winds blowing against us?”

(p.80-81) “…how do Queer Studies status agents avoid the contradictions that surely arise between being afforded the most elite education in the world and, at best, making unproblematized claims to white middle-class identity, or at worst, not? My guess is that, compared to their rich students, many White Queer Studies status agents actually feel middle class. Does such a comparison measure in miles differences that scale down to inches when the entire racialized hierarchy of the academy is surveyed? How are we to gauge class status in the academy?” I don’t have a good answer to this but I think it’s important

This quote is actually from Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” but it’s on page 98 of Brim: “If one’s desire lines up with the normative compulsion to heterosexuality, how does one ever separate that desire from that compulsion?”

(p.102) “mainstream Queer Studies likes to pretend that its job is not to prepare students to be workers or part of the working class”

(p.103) “Jobs in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union became queer because they were union jobs. In other words, queers were protected, together, by a solidarity that exceeded their sexual and gender identity but that was inseparable from it.”

(p.116) “Queer Studies can reorient itself to the intellectual work of making better employees in the very real sense that it can enable people to recognize and confront the conditions of their employment that undermine them as queer, of color, gender nonconforming, women workers, and people.”

Sources To Look Up

Kristen A. Renn, “LGBT and Queer Research in Higher Education”

Jeffrey Escoffier, “Inside the Ivory Closet: The Challenge Facing Lesbian and Gay Studies”

Resilience: Queer Professors from the Working Class

“The Racialized Erotics of Participatory Research” Jessica Fields

Tilting the Tower: Lesbians, Teaching, Queer Subjects, by Linda Garber

“Queering the Profession, or Just Professionalizing Queers?” by Sarah Chinn

Coming Out Under Fire, by Allan Berube

The Universities and the Gay Experience (intro is by John D’Emilio, idk if the whole thing is by him)

The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, by Kevin Floyd

Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (Anne Balay)

Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steel Workers (Anne Balay)

Irresistible Revolution, by Urvashi Vaid

Our in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America, by Miriam Frank

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, by tz karakashian

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.

Queer Literacies, by Mark McBeth, Intro and Chapter 1

I have a horrible habit of taking lots of notes and annotating and then rarely looking back at them, and so I feel like lots of the thoughts I’m having while I read end up stuck on the page instead of staying in my head. For Mark’s book, I’m going to try to write about every chapter, and do it in the form of going back over all the passages I marked and compiling them here. We’ll see if that strategy is helpful.

Passages I Marked For Quotes

(p.2) “We can be sure that acts of literacy remained a key component of how Queer people would identify themselves, name themselves, and rediscover what they could be on their own literate terms.” I feel the truth of this in my bones and could probably tell you the story of my entire identity formation through things i’ve read.

(p.2) “From the Queer exegetical perspective, this hetero-discourse resounded at every turn. It permeated every location, person, and text that one say, heard, or read on a daily basis.” I think a lot of straight people think we’re crazy when we say this or that is obviously gay, or painfully heteronormative. I don’t think they realize. Later in the chapter he talks about how academic discourse forces queer rhetors to take on a straight subject position, and I think part of that is how I feel like I need to over-justify saying….”this is gay!” And how often does “gay” not mean “homosexual” but “disruptive to heteronormativity in some way”? Probably a lot.

(p.3) “Queer literates constantly needed to hone their literacy capabilities to reread how these hetero-literate platforms morphed and then how Queer literates needed to regroup and reword their rhetorical counter-literacy measures”

(p.9) “I write an auto-archival account, similar to auto-ethnography yet through document-driven memories of my own Queer literacy development….Recounting my own benchmarks of Queer literate discovery as a point of narrative departure within a broader historical framework….” Part of Mark’s statement of methods. I marked a lot of these as examples of 1) methods you can use 2) ways you can state them 3) things I’m “allowed” to do

(p.12) “In most cases in composition/rhetoric (comp/rhet) studies, ethnography and/or oral histories have acted as the primary methodology by which researchers have collected information that then illustrated the socio-political action that emerged from the rhetorical competence that can ‘make sense of lives and conditions that to them do not make sense’”(citing Royster, Traces of a Stream)

(p.21) Long quote from Butler (in Gender Trouble) about the straight mind and academic assumption of straightmindedness

(p.22) “Queer literates reread texts and reinterpreted them beyond some prescribed heterosexist existentialism. This tenacity to read counter to what they were told resulted frequently in a collective voice of sociopolitical pliability that spoke the diverse terms of many different Queer intentions.” I’m not totally sure what the second sentence means but the first sentence is important

(p.24)— another methods statement/justification

Sources I Marked To Look Up

• “Out in the Academy: Heterosexism, Invisibility, and Double Consciousness” by David Wallace

• Eric Darnell Pritchard, Fashioning Lives

• “Archive This!: Queering the Archive” by K. J. Rawson

• Stacy Waite, “Queer Literacies Survival Guide”

• Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner, Ellen Louise Hart

• “Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities” by Harriet Malinowitz

• Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse by Candace Spiegelman

• Memoir: An Introduction, by G Thomas Couser

• Lauren Berlant, “personal as general” (similar to “personal is political”) — not title, but idea, need to find source

• “Critical Experimental Writing” by Marianna Torgovnick

• An Archive of Feelings by Ann Cvetkovich

• Footnote 37 says to look at the writing of Garret Nicholas, Aneil Rallin, Jessica Shumake, and Stacey Waite, accessed through Comp-Pile and searching “queer”

• Nancy Miller, “Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts”

• Carolyn Ellis, “The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel”

• Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

• Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit —this and the ones above it up through Nancy are referenced as different examples/discussions of similar kinds of writing labeled personal criticism, auto/ethnography, auto-theory, co-performative research, and intimate ethnography

That’s not quite enough to be a list of its own, but I think some of them can be added to my Methods list and others can be added to my Memoir list. Certainly need to at least look up them all to see which ones I should skim through or read.

Counterstory, by Aja Martinez

This was the first (and so far, only) book I’ve read for my Methods in Rhet/Comp reading list— you know, the only list that is actually in my subfield of English. At first, I was avoiding this list because pandemic-brain made this kind of content feel impossible. Then, it was because memoirs and sexuality studies just felt more interesting/fun. But this list is the most important one for me, I feel.

Counterstory was my first introduction to both Critical Race Theory and counterstory as a method. Well, sort of. I had a general sense of what CRT is but hadn’t read anything in the field, and it was only through reading this book that I realized I’d already read a counterstory-like piece in Betweener Talk, which is written as a dialogue.

An initial list of things that blew my mind in this book:

1. How many jobs Derrick Bell either resigned from out of protest or was fired from due to protest. Badass. And somehow he was still able to be incredibly successful in his career???

2. That CRT scholars agree that Brown v Board of Education probably only passed because it was the Cold War and they wanted Communists to stop trying to recruit Black people by pointing out how racist and fucked up America is/had to maintain the U.S.’s image as being the Land of the Free

3. The idea of composite characters/narratives as a way of integrating research and personal experience and interview data into an argument that is also fun to read!

4. That even though there is plenty of prejudice against counterstories, this is a real method that you can use to write about stuff!

An initial list of questions I still have:

1. If one of the tenets of CRT is that racism is permanent, but CRT theorists also argue that that permanence shouldn’t dissuade anybody from fighting for justice, what are the goals if not getting rid of racism/what do they think are the limits of what is achievable?

2. Could you use a counterstory method to write about axes of oppression other than race? Or would it be called something else, if counterstory is intimately bound up with CRT? Can the tenets be adapted to other axes of oppression also? What would be the ethical way to do that?

3. So, tenet 3 (interest convergence) is the idea that those in power will only let steps toward racial justice happen if they also benefit white people. But one way that racism is used is to prevent mass solidarity— if white workers blame undocumented immigrants for stealing their jobs, then they aren’t angry at the bosses who are more than happy to pay immigrants less than they would pay someone with papers. Et cetera. And that keeps wages low/causes infighting,etc. which hurts everyone, including working class white people. How can we reconcile the fact that all white people benefit from white privilege/white supremacy, while also acknowledging that tenet 3 (interest convergence) applies predominantly to bougeoise white people and is very much bound up with capitalism, rather than applying to all white people equally?

Bisexuality: A Critical Reader, Edited by Merl Storr

I finished this book several months ago but decided I would input all of my notes/highlighted quotes into Zotero before I was allowed to blog about it. I got….bored with that very quickly but kept my word to myself and so never blogged about it.

This is an anthology that “does not aim to be comprehensive, or even to offer a representative sample of published work on bisexuality. It does aim, however, to introduce its readings to the concepts of bisexuality, and to some of the key areas of debate about what bisexuality means and how the concept(s) might be used” (Storr 1). It is also intended to encourage the reader “to interrogate the concept of bisexuality: to think critically about where it has come from and how its origins continue to shape it in contemporary debates” (Storr 1).

The first section of selections is “Genealogy of the Concept of Bisexuality,” beginning with Ellis and Freud and ending with Udis-Kessler in 1992. The second section is about “Bisexual Identity and Bisexual Behavior” (and how these two sometimes overlap but often don’t). Part 3 is on “Bisexual Epistemologies,” or how we can use bisexuality as a framework for thinking about or organizing other things. Part 4 is on “Differences,” both within bisexuality and between bisexuals and other kinds of people.

Thinking back on this book a few months out and just glancing through the table of contents again, there’s a lot I don’t remember, and I will definitely need to go back through and create an index card for each selection. But I do remember that Part 1 made me regret/wish to revise my formulation of bisexuality in my article in the Journal of Bisexuality, and that Part 2 was very thought-provoking in terms of research methods. It also gave me insight into the role of what I would consider bisexual women in the political lesbian movement, which is discussed more in “Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics,” a book I am still at the beginning of. Some women who slept with both women and men identified as lesbians, others identified as bisexual, and others didn’t want either label.

This book definitely requires another skim-read, since pandemic-brain wiped a lot of it from my head, but I’m very glad to have read it.

The Politics of Everybody, by Holly Lewis

This book attempts to synthesize Marxist theory with feminist and queer theory— or rather, to argue for a Marxist perspective while addressing the many criticisms of Marxist thought that feminists and queer theorists have made over the years and integrating their concerns into a materialist framework.

Chapter 1 is nearly 90 pages on “Terms of the Debate,” intended to get everyone on the same page about the different sets of theory, regardless of which school of thought the reader comes from. Chapter 2 is on “Marxism and Gender,” and 3 is on “From Queer Nationalism to Queer Marxism.” Chapter 4 is conclusions, ending with “10 axioms toward a queer marxist future.”

I’m trying to keep this exam list focused on history of sexuality/sexual historiography rather than queer theory, but my tentative exception is for books that provide histories of sexual theory— like this one, and like an anthology I finished several months ago but haven’t blogged about yet.

There’s relatively little work on queer Marxism, since the American Communist Party was Stalinist and therefore pretty homophobic, so I found it useful to read an overview of the various debates between the two. I knew Foucault broke from the CP in part due to homophobia, and that impacted his writing, but I didn’t know most of the other stuff.

However, I was frustrated with this book at times since I think it gives a bad-faith reading of postmodernism and queer theory. Or at least, whatever works Lewis is referring to when she critiques “postmodernism” and “queer theorists” are making pretty different arguments than the works I’m familiar with, and she often doesn’t refer to specific authors or titles. I think there are super valid materialist criticisms to be made of postmodernism and queer theory, but this book alternately either doesn’t make them or obscures and undermines them in the eyes of anyone who is somewhat familiar with them via what I feel are disingenuous (or maybe just mistaken?) readings of their arguments. For example, Lewis criticizes the idea that gender/other things are “discursively constructed” but then argues that they are “socially constructed.” I still don’t understand how those are meaningfully different. But then again, because my education has definitely been a mix of postmodern-influenced theory and Marxist-influenced theory, maybe my understanding of various postmodern/poststructuralist concepts is “wrong” because they were taught to me with Marxist components already integrated.

When I got to Chapter 3, which includes a similar critique of postcolonial thought, I really wasn’t sure how to react, because I’m much less familiar with those theories. I just don’t know if this had an accurate portrayal of po-co theory or if it was similarly strawmanning.

In other parts of the book, though, I do think Lewis does a good job of being sympathetic to why political movements developed in the directions that they did (like queer nationalism) and how they led to positive developments in comparison to what came before. Part of what took me so long to finish this book is that I was reading it alongside a reading group that was discussing similar issues, and I was spending a lot of time arguing with other people in the reading group about queer theory and doing background research to see which of us was actually correct. (I still think I’m correct but bought some other books to read to make sure.)

This is one of those books that made me think about how everyone says you should read for main ideas and connections with other texts, you don’t necessarily have to closely read the whole book, but….I definitely did read the whole book, and I think that’s part of why it went so slowly for me. Need to go through all the pages I marked and compile a doc of my notes/things I thought were important.

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).

History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Foucault)

I put this on my list because it’s the foundation of so much of modern sexuality studies that I thought it was important to actually read the text instead of just others’ citations and interpretations of key parts (mostly the scientia sexualis part). Unfortunately, I feel like the parts I already knew through quotations were the only parts (with only minimal hyperbole) that are going to be useful to me.

For a “history of ____” book, I definitely expected there to be more historical examples and evidence cited. There’s the Jouy case (highly contentious in its own right), but not much else. Since the “we inherited sexual repression from the Victorians” idea is so commonly agreed upon, I don’t mind there not being evidence for that, because the whole point is that it’s an idea NOT grounded in evidence, but Foucault makes pretty sweeping claims about all of Western civilization after the 18th century that I would like more examples of.

I wondered if perhaps I ought to have added additional Volumes to my list— maybe what I was looking for was simply in those volumes! But it seems that the other volumes are about antiquity, not the modern era that Volume 1 mostly deals with.

Other ideas that stuck with me/seem useful:

• Sex is a topic that happens to be particularly discursively dense/able to be manipulated in lots of different ways

• Movements of power always have a purpose, even if no individual person or group consciously planned it. There is always something GAINED from a particular mobilization of discourse. Like water flowing downwards. This seems vaguely materialist to me (and Foucault was a former Communist so that makes sense), but he doesn’t really talk about what factors might shape the path— this kinda makes it sound like the flows of power are more or less evenly distributed, which is ofc not the case.

I highlighted and then re-read Foucault’s definition of Power several times and I still don’t understand what he is actually saying power is.

Also even though he does clarify that he’s talking about Western society several times instead of just saying “society” and erasing all other traditions, it seems racist to suggest that all other societies have a mystical sexual tradition that’s just about pleasure and technique and cultivation, and that it’s all so uniform that you can just say ars erotica, when he’s so clear that in Western civ, every individual situation must be locally analyzed.

In skimming some summaries of criticism of the book online, it seems like a lot of the positive comments are crediting the book with a) criticizing the repressive hypothesis and b) arguing for how sex and sexuality are not universals but are culturally dependent. I guess it speaks to the ubiquity of that influence that my reaction to the text was “Well, yeah” — my education has taken place entirely post-Foucault, so of course this doesn’t feel new or revolutionary to me. I’m glad to have read it, because it IS a big deal in the field, but I think its utility to me is primarily in the broader effects it’s had on sexuality studies and not any particular argument or theoretical tool. I don’t see myself utilizing his definitions, for example, to make my own arguments.

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.

Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick

I took a detour away from memoirs to read the first book on my History of Sexuality list, Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick. Of course I’ve read many, many things that cite the book, but I had never actually read it myself until now.

When I first saw how long the introduction was, I was overwhelmed and anticipating a difficult slog through dense, pointless theorizing. Just get to the analysis! But I was wrong, and I ended up deeply appreciating the care Sedgwick took to lay out exactly what her argument is and is not, exactly what her project aims to do and does not aim to do, and the assumptions she is operating with/the implications they have for her work. I understand more about the contradictions of constructions of (homo)sexuality in modern Western culture, and I appreciate the value of her intervention with Foucault— that “sodomy” never really went away, that “sexuality” was just layered on top of it, and the “sexual acts/universalizing” construction still permeates and shapes our culture.

I’m also not sure if I’ve ever read a straightforward deconstructive analysis besides some Derrida I didn’t understand. Now I get what the method means. I don’t think I’m interested in using it myself, but I get it. But on that note, other than the fact that she was in an English department, I don’t understand why Sedgwick chose to do the majority of her analysis/case studies on works of literature, rather than popular discourse (legal writing, news, opinion pieces, etc.) from the time. Because literature is art, and fiction, there’s extra layers of interpretation and symbolic structures that go into it. Any representations of sexuality in a novel might be deployed deliberately for literary/artistic purposes, rather than subconsciously/as signifiers of their cultural context. The parts of the case studies I enjoyed the most were when Sedgwick relates the novels to moments in history, either current events at the time of writing or from the past. I feel like a book deconstructing the epistemology(ies) of the closet that deals with direct examples of discourse from life, rather than from art forms representing life, would have been more direct and more useful.

I suppose this is a tension I always have with literary studies. I do enjoy literature and literary criticism, often both reading it and doing it myself. But I often struggle with seeing “the point” in the greater world outside of, some people are like me and enjoy thinking complexly about novels. I don’t think that people shouldn’t do queer deconstructive analyses of novels, but I do think we should start with theorizing the world and then applying those theories to our artistic artifacts, rather than building the theory out from the art. Because then it’s a theory of art, not of culture, and viewing literature as a cultural artifact is often different— and requires different considerations— than viewing literature as art. I think Sedgwick does some of both, but the focus is on art, and the bigger point that she makes is about art— because if her goal was to make a bigger point about society, why choose a handful of novels? Or maybe that’s just my rhetorician/social scientist brain talking.

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.

"Trans: A Memoir" by Juliet Jacques

On January 1st, I began reading for my PhD exams (known in my department as our “orals”). While I’m still meeting with professors to finalize all of my exam list topics, my first list will be on LGBTQ+ memoirs. Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques (2016) is the first book I read, having purchased it during Verso’s year-end sale. I’ve decided that at least for the memoirs, I will blog about each book I read for my exams, partially as a study technique and partially because I enjoy casual writing about books without the pressure of a deadline or any of the other strictures of academic writing that can make it so stressful. These posts will likely not contain arguments, or really even be reviews— but they will be records of what I found interesting and what I thought about while reading.

I didn’t know what to expect going into this book, and I didn’t know quite what I would be looking for as I read. Jacques begins the book with a reprint of her column in The Guardian about the day of her sex reassignment surgery. I took a class with Nancy K. Miller last year on memoirs of illness, and we began the class with discussing different narrative structures of illness, so Jacques’ choice to begin with surgery immediately stuck out to me, and I wondered what would come next. Jacques explicitly discusses in the book her frustration with the structure of many trans narratives, particularly those that climax in surgery, representing the moment the person became a “real” (woman/man). Here, we begin with surgery, and then skip back in time to one of the first times Jacques went to a gay bar with friends, doing what at the time she called “cross-dressing.” The book then traces her life from sixth form college through her thirties with occasional flashbacks and theoretical interludes, ending not with surgery, or even with recovery, but with an ordinary day at the office followed by an interview-style epilogue about the writing of the book itself.

While reading, I found myself highlighting whenever she discussed her changing relationships with different identity labels (drag queen, cross-dresser, gay, transvestite, transsexual, transgender, man, woman), and the different books, essays, films, and songs she mentioned as important (either positively or negatively) to her gender journey. She includes some dialogue around significant moments relating to these labels, but not in every case. For example, over the course of the book, she shifts from rejecting “transsexual” to embracing it. However, we don’t get to see a particular moment, set of moments, or reflection on where she begins to apply “transsexual” to herself in the same way that we get to see other key terminology moments like when a trans mentor tells her that “drag queen” only applies if it feels like a performance, or the time she first encounters the word “transgender.” We do see the first time she finds herself saying she would like to start taking estrogen, but not the first time she realizes she would like to get surgery also.

(On the topic of me highlighting references to media important to Jacques, I don’t have anything to say about that right now, but I would like to go back through and compile a list to publish on this blog at a later time. I think studying collections of what media is significant to LGBTQ+ people and why would be very fruitful.)

Another interesting and complex aspect of the book is Jacques’s discussion around bodies. She is very against the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative of transness, although she understands its use as a shorthand, and specifically says she comes to understand herself not as a person trapped in the wrong body, but as a body trapped in a wrong society. She meets and talks with trans people of various genders and backgrounds who make every possible combination of choices about what to do with their own body/society and body/mind relationships—surgery(ies), no surgery(ies), some surgery(ies) hormones, no hormones, trying to “pass,” not trying to pass, etc. She ends up deciding to pursue laser hair removal, an estrogen prescription, and sex reassignment surgery, but does not always go into great detail about how she came to these decisions. Some of it relates to the desire to pass and escape harassment (a wrong society problem, not a wrong body problem), but some of it does not, and it’s not always clear which is which. I think the absence of a clear, point by point articulation of Jacques’ individual relationship with her body vs. understanding of structural transphobia is important; she refuses to explain such deeply personal information that is going to be different for each person anyway, and in doing so forces cis audiences to do the empathetic and sociological work ourselves.

Jacques also writes extensively about the socioeconomic and political pressures surrounding her role as a trans memoirist and journalist writing about her own life, as well as her goals for her column in The Guardian and for the book (and her imagined audience for each!). She wants to talk about trans issues, but doesn’t only want to write about trans issues. Would rather write about trans issues from a political and social standpoint rather than a personal one, especially since she fears contributing to the stereotype that trans people are self-absorbed, but editors are only interested in confessional journalism (and memoirs!) about trans issues. Doesn’t want to be a “professional trans person,” but also needs to pay the bills, and LGBTQ+ organizations keep asking her to give talks and write pieces. I deeply appreciated and enjoyed her honesty around these issues—and how brave is it to say in your book that it’s actually not the book you want to be writing, but your editor insisted?

I went into this orals list asking myself questions like, “How do you write a memoir that other people find meaningful instead of self-indulgent?” and “What unexpected aspects of LGBTQ+ experiences end up as recurring themes in memoirs?” and “What makes LGBTQ+ people decide to write and/or publish memoirs?” and “How can I use memoirs to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and individual experiences across place and time?”

Fortunately for me, Jacques describes her own thoughts and struggles with many of these questions explicitly in the book. As for the last question, I’m finding this book useful in its depiction of what different sexual and gender terminologies were available in Jacques place/time, what connotations they had, the legal environment trans people had to deal with during those decades in the UK, and what media was available. There’s also some stuff about the role of the internet, which I like from a DH perspective as well.