Where are all the writers that write from the gut?? My writing always happens this way, but I’m noticing it less and less now — both in student work and scholarship. Are we growing into a generation of anorexic writers now? I’m not talking about word counts either; I’m talking about work that comes from belly of the soul. What happened to that?

Reading Judith Butler’s newest book, Frames of War, in pieces right now. Here’s a taste from her chapter on “Torture and the Ethics of Photography”:

On the one hand, it appears that the US soldiers exploit the Muslim prohibition against nudity, homosexuality, and masturbation in order to tear down the cultural fabric that keeps the integrity of these people intact. On the other hand, the soldiers have their own feelings of erotic shame and fear, mixed with aggression in some very distinct ways. Why, for instance in both the first and second Gulf War were missiles launched against Iraq on which American soldiers had written, “up your ass”? In this scenario, the bombing, maiming, and killing of Iraqis is figured through sodomy, one that is supposed to inflict the ostensible shame of sodomy on those who are bombed. But what does it inadvertently say about the bombers, those who “ejaculate” the missiles? After all, it takes two to commit an act of sodomy, which suggests that the soldiers secure their place in the fantasized scene in the active and penetrating position, a position that makes them no less homosexual for being on top. (89-90)

The scene of torture that includes coerced homosexual acts, and seeks to decimate personhood through that coercion, presumes that for both torturer and tortured, homosexuality represents the destruction of one’s being. (90)

Further, the torturer, though debasing homosexuality, can only act by becoming implicated in a version of homosexuality in which the torturer acts as the “top” who only penetrates and who coercively requires that penetrability be located in the body of the tortured. In fact, forced penetration is a mode of “assigning” that penetrability elsewhere. (90-1)

This video’s clearly for teenie boppers but it’s still pretty cool. I like the sentiment here anyway.

I’m about to drench myself in literary teen culture [groan]. Co-authoring a chapter on Twilight, which is decidedly NOT my area of expertise but I have been schooled on all things vampiric and queer so, I figure, why not? Many of my female students that love love love Twilight hate — nay, detest — the idea of doing anything queer with that text. For the most part I think they’re just resistant to all things queer; their dear heteronormative I’m-in-love-with-Edward-Cullen minds just can’t take a different reading of this character that embodies a teenage girl’s male fantasy. *sigh* And, the epic battle against heteronormativity rails on….

Some scholarly thoughts on Le Tigre. Actually, this is an excerpt from a longer piece on queer trauma (*all* copyright rules apply here). What ever happened to Le Tigre anyway?? I miss them.

From the Desk of Mr. Lady, an album recorded in 2000 by the feminist techno punk band Le Tigre, includes a piece entitled “They Want Us to Make a Symphony Out of the Sound of Women Swallowing Their Own Tongues.” Comprised almost entirely of ums, ands, as well as other hesitancies that similarly hinder or delay speech, Le Tigre’s song captures the ways in which uncertainty entangles the ability to speak and author inside a series of stutterances. This compilation of words and phrases repeated by a female voice respond directly to questions naively posed by a male interviewer at the beginning of the piece. Stumbling over his own words a bit himself, the radio interviewer imperiously asks:

What is it that they’re, that younger women are pushing up against? [sic] They
would seem to have a list of options to choose on, uh, choose from — a set of ways to construct their own identity that takes in everything; it’s just a vast smorgasbord. The options are not as narrow as they might have been thirty years from now. So where does the problem lie now?

Issues that surround gendered identities as well as those shaped by sexual desire must be understood as multiple: beginning with the vexing assumption that feminism fixed everything; that we’re all equal now; everything’s square. Le Tigre’s song demonstrates that one of the most debilitating problems lies in the inability to articulate what one has to say.

While the commentator sets up his question the woman being interviewed listens, emitting sounds that signal her recognition and understanding. Amongst all the stuttering in her response a few broken phrases get communicated, which indicate that what impedes her speech does not likely come from a lack of intellectual engagement or any shortage of things to say. Since she can neither describe what “younger women are pushing up against” nor define the third wave of feminism, we must do so for ourselves. The question, then, inquired of the woman, later referred to in the song as a “third wave girl,” ultimately turns out to be a query Le Tigre presents to their listeners. The commentator’s question, of course, still remains part of the piece, but the performance of those stutterances confronts listeners with the more critical issues pertaining to female authorship and finding the authority to speak. The uncertainty that stifles voices of “third wave girls” in Le Tigre’s song establishes feminism’s continued relevancy in a so-called post-feminist age.

The power dynamics that surround the ability to author, speak, and offer responses to questions such as those in Le Tigre’s song become enmeshed in identity politics. Women, lesbian, gay, bi, transgendered, multi-ethnic-racial-national, believers as well as non-believers — “just a vast smorgasbord” of people — allegedly have “a list of options to choose from — a set of ways to construct their own identities” that did not exist before. The truth of the commentator’s observation, however, varies widely and disproportionally between normative and non-normative identities. The ambiguous location of this “list of options” should also generate a healthy dose of skepticism. While pre-formed (performed) identities do exist, understanding the self as a construction fundamentally entails a rejection of those ready-mades — unless they serve as social commentary on binary oriented categories such as “woman” or “man.” No longer located in the body in an essentialized way, identity, now widely understood to be constructed and performed, often leaves subjects with the task of also creating a place, a platform, from which to speak. The sort of patronizing authority from which the commentator asks his question may very well not be one that the “third wave girl” can access, appropriate, or assume on the spot. She may not even want to. Le Tigre frames their performance as a new platform for inquiry, an alternative to the line of questions the commentator poses.

Uncertainty produces a silencing effect in Le Tigre’s song not because the woman does not know anything about current women’s issues but because she does not know how to speak about them. Similarly derived from what the “third wave girl” finds unrepresentable in language, silence often occurs and reoccurs in cases of insidious trauma that arise from everyday oppressions. Conversations pertaining to the body and sexuality in particular commonly get suppressed because of taboos that surround these subjects in the public sphere. Examining how expressions of physical desire came to represent unspeakable acts, Foucault explains:

Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able to ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence. Censorship. (History of Sexuality 17)

The tacit understanding that discourses on sexuality — especially non-normative ones — should be kept private or, better yet, quiet altogether remains readily applicable to contemporary society. Mechanisms such as censorship seek to make queers mute. Inevitably, the need to self-edit or expunge becomes internalized over time by both the imposer and the imposed upon. Such enforced silences, however, merely serve as symptoms, not the source, of queer trauma.

That which causes one to stutter, stifle, take back, apologize, censor, edit, erase, omit, or mute the self represents manifestations of troubled authorship. While the title of Le Tigre’s song gestures toward the seriousness of “women swallowing their own tongues,” it fails to capture the egregious nature of what lies at stake when certain identities must live in silence. A Jihad for Love, a recent film on the struggles homosexuals face in Muslim communities, more vividly portrays the traumatic effects caused by living in constant silence, shame, and fear — for both themselves and loved ones. The documentary includes a series of testimonies from homosexual women and men living in Muslim communities which treat same sex desire as a crime, punishable by law in many cases, Divine law by all. Arsham, an Iranian refugee in the film describes his experience of living in a nation hostile to his sexual orientation:

It’s very hard to describe the situation for homosexuals in Iran. It’s like a person who wants to speak but when he opens his mouth the words are caught in the throat. His cry has been suppressed. It’s a very heavy silence.

The silence of which Arsham now speaks reflects the trauma he has endured and its unrepresentability in language. What causes him to suppress his own cry seems to share no comparison to the “third wave girl” in Le Tigre’s song. The cultural contexts and degrees of suffering for both Arsham and the “third wave girl” differ vastly, almost too much to approximate their lives. One aspect of their experiences, however, remains constant: despite their desire to speak, neither knows how because neither have found a platform that would afford them the agency to do so.

Although the need to acquire political agency remains vital for progress in favor of legal rights and against discrimination in queer communities, the platform to which I refer primarily constitutes a place for being accepted and valued. It serves as a springboard for existence. Without it human failures, like not knowing enough or being imperfect, shadow the ability to accept the self, to live, and to be. Words, then, get stuck in the throats of Arsham, the “third wave girl,” and many many others similarly afflicted because the voice uttering such desired language would affirm an existence about which they themselves might be uncertain.

A video of Joan Baez singing “Mary Hamilton,” a ballad that Virginia Woolf refers to in A Room of One’s Own. Susan Gubar’s notes in the edition she recently edited says —

“The ‘Ballad of the Four Marys,’ also sometimes called ‘Balla of Mary Hamilton,’ has a refrain: ‘Yesterday the queen had four Marys; / This night she’ll have but three; / There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton / Mary Carmichael and me.’ The ‘me’ is Mary Hamilton, a lady-in-waiting about to be hanged (Sometimes by the queen) because of an illicit sexual relationship and resulting pregnancy (sometimes by the king) as well as, in some versions, an infanticide. Assumed to refer to the sixteenth-century court of Mary, Queen of Scots, or to the eighteenth-century court of Russia’s Czar Peter. The names of the ballad recur as subsequent characters in Woolf’s text” (114).

I just really like this song. Enjoy!

“You write — don’t you? — because you’re more alive when you write. You write because in black and white on the page, on a computer screen, in a notebook, in pencil or pen, even on a old-fashioned typewriter, you enter another dimension when you write, you inhabit a different world then, a time-warp perhaps — perhaps one of those cosmic nodes that Einstein meditated on — or perhaps a neural tangle where you find yourself drawn into a different part of your brain. You write because you understand things, you learn things, when you write that you don’t know when you’re not writing. You write because you can master things in words that you can’t master in flesh. You write because when you dream a different self into being when you write. You write because you meet a new you in writing, and you you didn’t know you had. And you write because you’re sometimes happy, sometimes sad, and you can clarify things in unexpected ways on a page, on a screen, in a notebook. [....] But we also write, yes we write too, because writing requires absolutely precise self-examination and absolutely fierce linguistic consciousness so much so that it is not only the most erotic and exotic but also the most serious and difficult thing we can do. And yet if we are writers we must do it, we are driven to do it by guilt and pain as well as by the voluptuous desire Levertov so beautifully describes. We are driven by guilt because we fear we have failed ourselves somewhere, failed to see or comprehend some nuance of our lives, and so we must expiate by putting that truth or even just the half truth, into language.”

~ Sandra M. Gilbert, excerpt from “Why Do We Write” in On Burning Ground.

Since college I’ve kept a book (now books, plural) in which I record passages from poems, novels, theorists, essayists — really anybody that intrigues or inspires me in some meaningful way. As I typed Gilbert’s words from my notebook, I realized how right she is.

In my own work I’ve been focused on the issue of “working through” trauma, which essentially boils down to the problem of moving past, though in a not curative or redemptive way, a crisis of representation. I’ve given a lot of thought to what keeps most of us from writing, trauma or no trauma. Gilbert captures a lot of what surrounds this issue in her short essay. We feel more alive when we write by putting pen to paper or finger to the keyboard, and getting lost there. It validates an existence about which many writers writing are still uncertain. If you’re not sure you exist — if you’re not sure you want to be or are allowed to exist — how can you write yourself into such an existence?? That’s the real problem of the crisis or representation. Plenty of folks push themselves through this crisis of representation but I’ve yet to find a formula for how to do so — despite the fact that the number of autobiographical trauma narratives is multiplying by the hour in a wide variety of literary and artistic forms.

Gilbert, however, reminds me that more often than not we write out of guilt or fear; we write because it is “the most serious and difficult thing we can do.” It’s admirable to write from trauma — to write one’s way out of trauma’s interference with daily life. It is the most difficult thing anyone can do. But to constantly write out of guilt and fear turns into something other than brave. It means making the writing process a perpetual wound. In her essay “Autobiography’s Wounds” Leigh Gilmore asks: “What does it mean for a writing practice to represent a perpetual wound?” That question has become the impetus for a project I’ve been working on. In short, a writing process that keeps a wound open can not be a writing practice that sustains itself through joy. Fear, guilt, and shame which causes authors to “write under the gun” for prolonged periods of time, or consistently, turns the writing process into a hostage-like situation. I can’t predict how these crises all turn out. For me, I imagine that the subject being held or holding herself hostage — with a figurative gun to her head — eventually grows tired and weary of the intense level of stress associated with such events. Eventually, I hope, I pray, the subject realizes that she (or he) doesn’t have to live that way. Writing doesn’t have to always come from a place of fear, doubt, or shame about existence. Eventually, the subject under siege must say to herself or her perpetrator — “Pull the trigger; I’ll survive anyway.” Because you will survive. It’s just a writing process, after all, and that little bit of grounding is crucial to both that which allows us to survive and to then flourish. Most of the writers I know — too many — write “under the gun.” It’s a common colloquialism that we all use from time to time, but the metaphor embedded in that saying has real, albeit invisible, repercussions. What does it mean for a writing practice to represent a perpetual wound? It means turning a practice that’s supposed to confirm human existence into one that denies the reality of the person fighting to live.

You aren’t human.

I’ve got a gun to your head;
you do what I say now.
Don’t speak.
Listen.
Now. Speak!
Say what I want
to hear.
Or else. You’re DEAD.

Just do it already.

You already stopped breathing
if, after the perp has gone
still sitting still,
like a stone;
gun to head.

How do I pull this thing down?
The trigger points:
Keep moving!
Write! Speak!
Answer my questions!
Tell your story!
(It’s imperative, they say.)

Put. down. heavy. warm melty metal.
Makes my hands sweat
With the need to walk
jump, no, leap over
this fence
holding hostage
words that could strike
as violently, but don’t.

There is a net of doubt,
no, shame.
that boxes, duels, fuels
an industry.
Treating humans like fish.
Once caught,
This livestock (lives. tock. ack! lives-to-stack!)
Found –
mouths gaping,
pried open with a hook,
Beginning a cycle of feigned deaths.

I died so many times I forgot
I’m still alive?

Writing is the most serious and often the most difficult thing we can do — Gilbert’s right. It’s brave. And, awesome. But, sometimes, the most serious and difficult thing we can do is also to write from a place that allows us to exist without guns or hooks that pull out our innards for all the world to see. Write to simply be — alone — with two hands on the keyboard, typing, and two feet on the ground. Just jouissance and breathing. Breathing in and out words that bring all that we don’t know — about ourselves, about others, about the human experience — into existence.

This video reminds me of my grandma.

Hope y’all like the new format. Thought the blog could use some change. Change is good.

Reading update:

First, a list of graphic narratives (or, something similar to that). These things are addictive and I’m making myself stop (cold-turkey).

Graphic books:
It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken by Seth
The Fixer by Joe Sacco
A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Against Pain by Ronrege Jr.

The Seth and Sacco books were disappointing. Seth, primarily because it wasn’t what I was looking for — an a/b narrative, in a stricter sense of the genre. Sacco’s book is interesting, but his arrangement of the frames disorients the reader (which might very well be the point) but I also am not drawn to his artistic style. Also, I suspect he, Spiegelman, Pekar, Crum, et al work off of each other in a little comix boys club, which is off-putting to me (not to mention my disgust for what too often seems to be an acceptance/tolerance for anger and violence; these folks might be in need of anger management classes…. But, of course, Maus is a must-read. And, Sacco’s work on the Bosnian war is quite important; I’m just not sure his aesthetics are as well-thought out as say — Bechdel, Satrapi, or Spiegelman’s work.) Tatsumi’s brilliant — this work just wasn’t quite what I was looking for (again, I’ve been seeking out a particular sub-genre in this field). Ronrege’s Against Pain, however, is fantastic. Avant-garde and difficult to read sometimes, but very very interesting artwork there. Though, there’s nothing autobiographical about his cartoons, if that’s something you’re hoping to find.

Other reading (not comprehensive):
–Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
–James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Crazzzy awesome book. I’d only read an excerpted chapter before, which *did not* do justice to the entire book project. Highly recommend!
–Language of Comics
–Felman and Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. An oldie, but goodie. Also, essential for trauma theory.
–Also numerous articles here and there. Too disbursed to list them all, but there are several interesting pieces from the latest PMLA on the topic of war.

There’s a book coming out in November with a chapter that most likely covers what I wrote about in my Master’s Thesis. It makes me sick to my stomach. All the folks published in X book are heavy-hitters so that’s one consolation. Meaning, they probably wouldn’t have wanted my work (seeing how I’m not famous). And, I still am hoping that I can publish what I have on this topic in response to this new work. All the same, there were only two articles on the topic out before (and they sorta blew) so…this new pub kinda makes me want to hurl. [gag]

Publish soon and often, folks.

Dr. Dixon, who has asperger’s syndrome, requires a “hugging machine.” Seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me.