writing from weakness

I find myself in class again, seated adjacent to Alhena, a few other colleagues separate us, including her friend, a Moroccan woman, Hafeza, and my white female colleague and close friend, Anna Maria. The woman leading class today asks us to do an exercise inspired in part by the book that we are reading, Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances. She lights candles and turns off the fluorescent lights in a supposed attempt to create intimacy, although I am not at all convinced. In a room full of hostility I do not think candles, and dim lighting are going to bring us all closer together. She then asks us to place the sacred object we brought to class with us on the table in the center of the room and take someone else’s object.

I walk towards the table and immediately am drawn to the ring that sits among the small statues of Buddha, photos, and other trinkets. I personally have forgotten to bring an object—so in a desperate attempt to produce something, I grab my laptop and put it onto the table and take the ring. It is small in my hands, a tarnished metal with a small diamond set into it. I hate rings. They scare me on all fronts. Rings not only symbolize commitment, but ownership, and loss of one’s agency. I am drawn to this object because of the repulsion it stirs up in my soul—my lack of desire to ever be possessed by such an object. And I am wondering who is compelled to hold an item with such high regard that they would place it on the table as a sacred object.

We have made it through the entire circle and Alhena and I are the only ones with objects left, it becomes completely clear to me that we are in possession of one another’s objects. The entire time I feel Alhena’s eyes on her ring, never letting it out of her sight. I feel her connection to it as though there is an imaginary, but all too real, string between it and where it once lived on her finger. I do not want to touch it for fear that either she or the metal of the ring itself will burn my skin for transmitting my energy upon it. Although the flesh is removed from this ring, I can feel it imprinted on my body. I take a deep breath, as it becomes my turn to speak. Quickly, I blurt out, “Rings are really scary to me but I am interested to know its significance to someone else.”

Alhena’s dark eyes appearing ferocious focus on her ring. I shift uncomfortably, maybe because she does not even recognize my physical body as present in this space. The intensity of this moment is palpable to my skin, I feel it pulsing through my veins, and I turn away. The ring becomes the object that draws us together—the string is now tied to the ring on my desk—to me. She never looks at my face, yet she speaks to address my question, “The ring was my mother’s. Fitting that you are the one to get it,” she says with a slight smile, “because it’s the only part of me that I consider to be white.” I do not understand what she means but I know that Alhena is accentuating that she has not forgotten my past actions, nor has she forgotten the past of her mixed race body—Arab and white. She knows. Her present and past are interwoven because of this ring and they have been extended to me so that I too become intertwined with it. He face shows that she senses and is equally disgusted by this.

Alhena wants to make sure I know that my performance of whiteness does not go unmarked. If anyone sees me—Alhena does. She has been attentively watching, waiting for the right moment, the opening for her to let me know that what I had done was as offensive to her. I don’t really understand what she means by calling the ring “white”—I don’t even think it is what she has said anymore that matters. It is the fact that she made a point to say it—to perform it publically—and to make sure I know that my actions do not— and will not go unchallenged in the future. I am left to read my own meaning into the incident—a strategic move on her part. My mind is racing to deduce her meaning and my body feels fully implicated in this moment. My whiteness cannot hide me. I do not speak, although maybe I should have been more inquisitive as to her purpose for this public calling attention to. But I don’t speak, this is her moment to assure both of us that she has agency to assert her body’s authority over mine. And I let her. She is deserving of this moment and I recognize this. Alhena turns to my object, my laptop, “I chose this because it was the last thing left,” she says, nonchalantly. She turns it ever so slightly in her hands examining the places in the metal that have been dented, scratched, dirtied by my fingers touching it.

I am hurt, but I get it. How can something so technical be so sacred? I don’t want to explain the trials and tribulations this machine has put me through, showing the impressions we have made on one another. Nor do I want to confess that it was indeed a last minute effort. I don’t feel that she, or anyone deserves the explanation from me. I move on, giving a half-hearted description of why the computer is my sacred thing. I feel dismissed anyway, it doesn’t matter what else I have to say. At the end of the class Alhena runs to my desk and grabs her ring, ripping the string that connects us. She tells Hafeza, she is glad to have the ring back that she had a really hard time letting it go. “I am so glad she didn’t handle it too much, that could really have destroyed its psychic powers.” Hafeza looks very seriously at her and they nod intently. They walk out of the room whispering prayers ever so quietly.

Inaugural Scene

And I am drawn back into a memory of my mother. We are in the communal shower at an old YMCA gymnasium. I have just gotten out of the pool and run into the shower to wash the smelly chlorine off of my body. My mother tells me to take off my suit and rinse it out. I am embarrassed to remove my dripping wet suit, although no one else is in the shower with us. I do not like to be naked. Ever. But the water is running warm from the old rusting faucet, and so I shimmy out of the tight Lycra with the pink and purple butterfly pattern tossing them to the grimy tile floor.

My mother is also showering, completely naked and I am staring at her, fascinated by her female body, ashamed at my lack. I look to the spot between her legs and I wonder when my own “down there” will grow together like my mother’s? I look “down there” and imagine that one day it will no longer have an opening allowing things to penetrate, but that maturity will seal it shut and it will be grown over with light brown curly hairs. My down there is so open, raw, and exposed and I am ashamed that anyone who walks in will see the openness that my “down there” invites. I figure I need to touch it as long as I can because one day it will be contained and I won’t be able to access it anymore. I cannot wait for the day that mine will close, no longer available for the world’s consumption.

As I turn around I am faced with the incredible repulsion of an erection that is simultaneously present and absent. A bulge in her pants where one should not be. It appears to be dragging her pelvis across the stage towards a woman in a short plaid skirt, high white stockings, and heels. She is so alluring, tall, with short brown hair, a tight white shirt pulling across her breasts. I am drawn to this woman, although I do not desire her sexually, I desire more fully to identify with her. I have high hopes for the reclamation of my femme lesbian gender identity as something beautiful, subversive, and resistant.

Yet, I am dismayed by the erection, standing pointedly, attentively, not caring about the feminine woman’s needs for pleasure. This erection is self-interested wanting only to penetrate the “down there” of the feminine performer. Her back is turned as the protrusion moves closer and closer. A sanctioned performance of queer sexuality is taking place in front of me; yet I am disgusted by its vulgar demonstration of oppressive force. While the erection is most likely a representation of a sock in the plaid shorts of this drag king’s pants, it has very real material consequences for those of us witnessing it drive the entirety of the performance.

continuing the CW tradition

This piece stems from an exercise, The Dream of the Other:

She sat thinking where will I put on my white dress?

She walks to a window looking out on tall mountains. They are impossible to see through the thick fog of snow descending from the skies. Everything is the depressing color of whiteness. She thinks, even these white walls are oppressive as she gazes out hoping to see something more beautiful, more colorful, more full of life. Although this is supposed to be the happiest day of her life, she cannot help but think that a part of her is also dying.

She stares intently at her hands, the burning flesh under her engagement ring, stands out to her. She turns it around on her finger, rubs it up and down. She rubs the diamond into the fleshy base of her finger, imagining a time when she was happier, clearer headed. The times of riding in the car with Diane, parking on the road by the reservoir, and shot-gunning weed, from mouth to mouth finishing each breath with the lightest pressing suction of a kiss. Riding in cars with girls—or one girl specifically, she thinks. She is caught on the image of Diane’s teeth and their crooked, darkened imperfection that she found so devastatingly sexy. She remembers the feeling of those teeth on her body, sliding from her neck to her stomach, and finally to the place her fiancée tells her is sickening to look at. Her own deformity a perfect match for Diane’s teeth, the flesh gliding into her mouth between the incisors to a place of utter perfection.

She continues to push the diamond into her hand, thinking maybe eventually it will push through the skin and that maybe she will feel the terrible pain that resides in her heart. Then she laughs a little to herself about the platitudinous nature such a statement invokes. As she looks down at her hand she realizes there is not the slightest hint of a cut. Her hand lifted with two fingers curled into the palm and two pointing towards the newly flashing sun. Her diamond, like a prism, shines rainbows around the room. She observes that the snow has stopped. There is not the slightest hint of a storm.

--

Her mother busted through the door demanding to know what happened to the georgette dress bathed in gasoline? Again she is at the window looking wistfully at the black mountains whose ravines were runneled with streaks of white snow. She thinks to herself, there is no way they could have found Dane’s torched body deep in the woods, the fragments of her designer silk dress wrapped around his body.

Diane had changed since the early days, of hitchhiking from small mountain town to mountain town. She was no longer carefree, gently strumming cords of guitar in the hopeless plight of making music. Diane had physically altered his body to become Dane and with that everything had changed. The Testosterone made him a completely different person, taking away the sweet light in Diane’s eyes. Now he was all blue pinstripe power suits, and facial hair. She had always been supportive, even as Diane decided to transition into a Dane. Although she considered herself to be a lesbian, Diane, now Dane was worth changing her identity for. She wished that maybe she would not have been so willing to give herself up. Since their marriage Dane had become violent and obsessed with making sure she knew he was a man. That he was THE man in this relationship. Something they had never been concerned with before.

He had all of his teeth replaced with implants, and oral the admiration of her had ceased. “Disgusting,” he would chide her. And he never bit anymore—would no longer show her that simple but powerful sense of desire. The incessant pleasure she received from the sort of pain that only comes when flesh gets stuck someplace it shouldn’t. She had only wanted Diane to come back, to end the suffering of her longing of spirit. She looks towards the streams hoping that a stone will gleam and redirect her attention away from this. She feels sutured at her center—the thick stitches stretching to contain the entrails waiting to explode from the casing of her body.

--

“How are you?”

She stares into the abyss that is this white room—a new white room that has no sympathy for her. She ignores the question she has been asked. “How am I,” she thinks? She has no use for a question like this. She isn’t crazy, she isn’t like Agnes down the hall that believes there are alligators and doves nestled in the thick egg noodles they are having for dinner this evening. She doesn’t see or hear inexplicable things—rarely feels anything anymore. Her only crime is being passionate beyond repair. She had dreamed that through the flames, Dane would be re-born Diane again. The dream had been so visceral that she had lost herself in liminality, not asleep, not awake, and not even dreaming. She still feels stuck there.

Yet this doctor continues to ask her these impractical questions.

“What are you doing?”

She glares at the doctor. What is she doing about what? About being locked up in here? She thinks about last night when she tried to bite herself hard enough to see if she can feel again. Digging her teeth into the flesh of her arm she sometimes breaks the skin but more often she gets frustrated that she cannot make the blood appear. She stares at so sweet a throat as the doctor’s. The doctor’s neck elongated by the turtleneck she is wearing, she wonders if the doc ever hurts? If the doc ever desires to feel pushed and pulled in the way she does—stretching her flesh to its limits. She has never wanted to inflict pain before, always preferring her own body to be the receptacle of waste.

She thinks about some places where swords hang from the walls, like the words she longs to say but cannot. She stares at the doctor’s teeth, they are pearly, shiny, and white. She is disgusted by their perfection. They stand at attention like a little white army, waiting to ask questions that deserve to be answered. She does not answer but instead rubs the line of plaque between her blackened gums of what is left of her now-rotting teeth.

Performing Creative Writer...

So the next few pieces I post stem from the creative writing workshop I am taking in the English Department. I now have much more sympathy and compassion for folks who take classes in my department who are from the outside...

So the first piece is my K Etymology:

K-sometimes silent other times sharp cutting through space with sharp angles like a Knife. Yet K may also be visually rounded. Paradoxically K is multiple things simultaneously, always relational to who may be using it and for what purpose. K travels across cultures, through different languages, through different bodies—always different, yet sharing similarities.

K is always shifting, often substituted with c, q, or g. But the aesthetic of these letters, these sounds, are not the same. Coming from deep inside the mouth rolling from the back of the tongue, over the lips, as the corners stretch outwards, K. K, Ka, Kay.

The open hands of kappa reach out to others always desiring to be connected. A solid line connected to the ground with one arm reaching high, the other reaching low. Always wide-stretched yet connected to the nexus, the point of intersection, leaving plenty of space for movement between.

Everyday Life

Non-Reductive Conceptions of Difference

“If ‘everyday life’ is going to provide a re-imagining of the study of culture…then it might need to put on hold the automatic explanatory value placed on accepted cultural differences. If cultural differences, such as gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and so on, are going to be useful for the understanding of everyday life (and I assume that they would be) then there usefulness cannot be just presumed or taken for granted”(2). I am drawn to this quotation because of the conversation that occurred in our small group about whether or not Highmore wants to do away with the notion of difference in favor of commonality. From this quotation I take away the idea that Highmore places a high value on differences between people, that differences are “useful for the understanding of everyday life.” In addition Highmore adds that the identity categories normally used to “classify” people should not be assumed to mean the same thing to each person that may characterize or be characterized by these identity categories. In other words these identities black, brown, white, lesbian, upper-class etc should not be essentialized and fixed as having the same meaning in all contexts for all people. However, while writing these words I see myself alluding to a more nuanced version of differences, as opposed to contemplating his idea of commonality. However, on the next page Highmore suggests that it is the “negotiation” between differences and commonalities that is necessary. So that while we may visibly see, and viscerally feel differences, in our selves, and between ourselves and others, that these differences may not have to be divisive. This may indeed sound a bit “cum-by-ah,” but I do think that we often tend to solely focus on differences, without being at all considerate of ways we might be similar (not the same) as someone else. However, I also think that in order to find commonalities people must be willing to see the things that may mark our bodies as different and be self-reflexive in understanding how power and privilege work in everyday interactions. I think this idea touches on much of what Judith Hamera is saying when she states her second thesis: “Reductive conceptions of everyday practices ignore the social, historical, and political realities that enable or constrain communication”(14). I believe Hamera is echoing Highmore’s sentiments that people’s lived realities are more rich and complex then the labeling of differences can account for. While she is not specifically calling for an examination of commonalities, she is also not set on simply identifying differences, but on examining their layers. Like Highmore, Hamera wants to look at the rich complexities of everyday practices, which, reductive accounts of everyday-ness ignore. Hamera definitely wants differences to be a component of analyses of “the everyday”, however, like Highmore; Hamera is interested in a non-reductive view of the everyday but a more generative approach. I think that this can prove to be a useful too for examining the everyday, one that accounts for difference, but doesn’t settle for it to be simply “the way things are” without the potentiality for things to grow, change, and challenge the status quo.

Performance and the Everyday

Performance and the Everyday

I am very interested in making the connection between the “everyday” and “performance.” I feel that performance has the potential to inform the study of everyday life mainly through tactics of resistance to the reiterative practices we perform everyday often without even thinking about them. As Judith Hamera says: “Central to all such readings are aesthetics, the animating principles of art’s social lives. These principles emerge in the objects and events that aesthetic practice leaves behind, and in the routine transactions of those for whom art making is, and happens in, a neighborhood, a set of corporeal possibilities, comforts and constraints linking private self- and object-fashioning to community practice”(47). Hamera is invoking Dwight Conquergood’s notion to “To move [performance] outside of Aesthetics and situate it at the center of lived experience”(Hamera 46). This positions performance as not solely something that occurs on a stage with an audience but as something that happens in the everyday. It also insinuates that these everyday actions can be artful, beautiful, and aesthetically pleasing. Performance then becomes the way in which we enact in our everyday lives. However, performance isn’t simple, we don’t have endless performances available at our disposal, we only have performances that position us within the discourse as negotiated within society, culture, and history. Hamera allows us to see the ballet studio, ritualized Native American performances, and others as aesthetic performances that are grounded in the everyday, mainly through the body. Our bodies do have constraints within the everyday; we position ourselves and are positioned in culture through our bodies. But I have to believe that to some little extent my body in not devoid of agency but can instead choose to enact a very micro, yet resistive performance. This performance may not be as extravagant as some of the cultural performances Hamera shows us, but they are aesthetic performances that occur in the everyday. I am thinking of Tiffany’s example f being a person of color and nodding at another person of color while waiting for public transportation. This may not seem grandiose, but to me this is an aesthetic person. Although it is not performed on a stage there is some ritualistic element to it, one that says, “I may be the only person to offer this to you today, but I see you, I recognize your humanity,” There is an art form to this, something beautiful in that human connection. Of course I have not had this experience, I can never fully understand it, but I can empathize with it and recognize how it can function as a mode of resistance to dominant ideologies. Sometimes these small processes are what are truly resistive and yet aesthetic at the same time. As Highmore suggests, “If the everyday is that which is most recognizable, then what happens when the world is disturbed and disrupted by the unfamiliar”(Figuring the Everyday)? The unfamiliar becomes those performances that disrupt and challenge the everyday-ness of everyday practices. Sometimes these are grand bodily performances like practicing and performing ballet, sometimes it is a more simplistic head, nod but both performances allow us to have agency in the everyday. I am going to post a link to a video that Arianna posted last year that relates somewhat to what I am writing about but is just a really cool understanding of disruption of the everyday. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&hl=en&fs=1&]XX

Surveillance and the Black Female Body

From taking this class as well as the “Voices of Women of Color” class I am interested in surveillance of the Black female body both historically and in the present day. While we think of surveillance in terms of technology, I think it is also important to examine surveillance through a historical lens, to not forget the ways we as a culture have come to see the Black female body. I come at this as a white, queer, woman, and thus, not a place of authority, but as a space where, there still remain sites of overlapping and interlocking oppressions that Black women face because of the surveillance of their bodies, and how this does vary from the way white people’s bodies are surveilled and how this surveillance creates a barrier for social justice to prevail. This is an idea I am still working through and I do not have the logic worked out. David Lyon argues that “Surveillance is just one aspect of this mediated world…Surveillance does also raise questions about power, citizenship, and technological development, and about information policy, regulation and resistance”(243). He goes on to say that, “The body has steadily disappeared from these relationships [relations mediated through surveillance methods]”(244). While I do agree that face-to-face interactions have diminished, our culture continues to view Black women’s bodies as commodities on display for all to see, whether through, the slave auction block, Facebook, or MTV music videos. These mediated forms of surveillance are linked to the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and capitalist enterprises. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, “Not only are commodification and exploitation linked, patterns of exploiting Black women’s sexuality have taken many forms…For example, slave auctions brokered the commodified bodies of both Black women and men”(143). Unfortunately surveillance, commodification, and exploitation, all work together to target Black women’s bodies. Lyon suggests, “Surveillance as understood here exists on a long continuum along which data is collected and processed for a range of purposes from policing and security to consumption and entertainment”(250). Although we now think of surveillance in terms of what computer sites we visit, what banks we use, and our discount cards, if we are to believe Lyon, we must recognize the ways in which data has been collected on Black women’s bodies throughout time. Sarah Bartmann’s (the Hottentot Venus’s) body was used for entertainment purposes and watched by upper class white people in order to see the irregularities of Black women’s bodies for entertainment value. Similarly, slave purchases took place on a block where, bodies were surveilled and sold for purchase. Surveillance has played an important role in the commodification and exploitation of Black women’s bodies. In popular culture Black women’s bodies are used for spectatorship, reduced down to “booties,” and are hypersexualized. But while this is happening our culture is using these images, collected through surveillance, to monitor things like the reproductive rights of Black women. Forcing sterilization against the will of a Black woman is not uncommon, and it is no surprise given the way that surveillance has been and is used to condemn and police Black women’s bodies into a white paradigm of behavior. There is not necessarily a specific conclusion to be gained, but it is very interesting to look at the way surveillance intersects with commodification, and exploitation to discipline Black women’s bodies into conformity. This allows the dominant culture to gain and hold privilege while marginalized Black women suffer from this surveillance. I am adding the new Beyonce video in order to sort of demonstrate the ways that we now surveil, commodify, and exploit Black women's bodies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g