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.

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Intentions for this Blog

No posts yet! I intend to use this space for writing about rhetoric, cultural studies, gender and sexuality, issues in higher education, etc. in cases when I feel a blog will be a better home for my ideas than an academic journal. I will also re-post my writing from other publications when possible.