Performance of Narcissism

I like to write about myself. I think this is because I often do it fairly casually as most do, not giving it the real introspection it deserves. I like to write about myself because it is something I know fairly well and something I am always privy to. While I may like to write my thoughts and opinions and reflections on things, I rarely write about my body and my body as a source of knowledge. I tend to disregard my body as it has been a site of immense physical and emotional pain-really feeling all of those things is a pain I tend to dislocate from myself in hopes I won't have to really feel them, really deal with them.

Then tonight I read a friends blog about memory especially in regards to love, pain, trauma and memory. This made me think of my own memories of these things. One memory (and yes it is academic in nature but it still changed my life was reading Anne Cvetkovich's book, "An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures." This book offered me a way to view my own life and deal with my own pain regarding my sexuality (and I use this term broadly not only to refer to my sexual orientation.) This book made me uncomfortable and at the same time felt comfort I had never felt anywhere else.

I do not want to go to much into the theory of the book as I am still trying to figure that but what I took from it was that we archive memories into our bodies (or the unconscious) and we act on those memories. While it seems extremely psychoanalytic it isn't just that, it is more complex and sophisticated. What it helped me to learn about myself is that my queerness is inextricably attached to my previous experiences with traumatic events and that that is O.K. While I have heard the argument made that it isn't because women who love women do so because of bad experiences with men, why should this not be a valid reason to be a lesbian? Why do we dismiss this premise as naive or lacking reflexivity regarding one's view of their sexuality. I get wrapped up in this point because as a social-constructionist and one who is committed to the idea that identities are negotiated and performed on a daily basis it makes sense to me that someone who has been sexually abused or assaulted has a valid reason for choosing alternative forms of sexuality, and trauma doesn't even have to occur to choose these alternative approaches to sexuality (such as queerness, s&m, bondage, humiliation, voyeurism, etc...) but that it makes sense that this might be the case. Someone who has experienced immense trauma and felt immense shame in regards to their sexuality may need alternative and safe ways to access their sexuality.

This book also critiques traditional notions of feminist cultures that are in contention with alternative forms of sexual expression. Not lesbian expression, but queer expressions of sexuality like butch/femme which seems to replicate a normative system but does not have to, bondage or s&m or bringing violence (that is completely consensual into a sexual scenario), strap-ons (which may seem to re-center a phallus at the center of sexual desire), role-play and role-play specifically of abuse and incest situations. Feminists (and I use the term broadly as I actually think that most feminists these days are fairly open sexually) critique these practices as being un-feminist. Patriarchy, sexism, heterosexism, violence-that is what alternative forms of sexuality elicit. And they don't have to, which is what Cvetkovich is advocating. Instead Cvetkovich offers that queering sexuality and sexual practice is a necessary tool for working through trauma and pain from the past-that enacting an incest scene from someone's past in a consensual s&m situation can actually be healthy. For example she sights Dorthy Allison, one of my all time favorite writers, and her experience dealing with incest. Allison writes that she received a certain amount of taboo pleasure from the sexual abuse she endured from her father or step-father, and that as an adult she did not know how to reconcile these feelings of pain, shame, horror, and pleasure with one another. For traditionally in feminist thought pain and trauma should not be reconciled, one should only find joy in sex as it is removed from pain and shame. It is extremely queer to link these complex emotions together. But I was relieved...I thought my own pain was solitary and isolated and my feelings were strange and taboo. It was't the feeling of community I needed but simply someone saying your being queer because of you mother and your own sexual abuse is ok. I feel like I shouldn't have been looking so hard for this assurance-but I was and I found it...in an academic book...

But as one who is dire need of a way to reconcile her body with pleasure, pain, queerness, horror, sorrow, and joy, I feel that Cvetkovich's trauma theory as well as performance theory can be ways to help myself to maybe find some peace in these places that I usually try to forget. Letting my body remember may be a helpful way to begin...