I immediately liked the style and the way each paragraph seems to represents an individual thought. It seemed at once spontaneous and carefully curated, like feelings had been recorded fairly instantaneously while the selection of these reflections or trains of thought had been agonised over lending it a pithy quality. New topics seem to be represented by a double space and continuations of the same topic receive a single. It’s a refreshing change from chapters. Although I did find myself thinking, ‘where’s the end of the first chapter?’ after about 50 pages! I hadn’t, at that stage, noticed the possible significance of the double space. This might have been a good thing as I ended up reading 100 pages on the first sitting. I think a lot of this was to do with the eclectic mixture of material you’re presented with. Like the format, it isn’t rigid, formal and structured. You are presented with a wild assortment of experiences, characters, reflections and recollections, which intrigued me and made me want to build a picture of this person and find out more. They seem open, honest and thoughtful. They seem to be different people in different times, as I think we all are, and the range and quality of their reflection is impressive. In some ways it can be a bit jarring to begin with as you establish who is who, what is, and has been, going on in their life and so on but, on the whole, I thought the partial confusion and lack of distinct boundaries was highly appropriate for what could be considered a reflection on queer identity and it’s own battle against borders. Sometimes it’s nice to have clear chapters or a clear methodology in an article but this also must limited the ways in which the underlying material can be interpreted. Arranging and ordering give things a definitive shape, which is hugely helpful to understanding or learning, but also cement the idea that things have one interpretation or should be seen in one context. This kind of idea, I think, is broadly unhelpful when thinking about and expressing something as slippery as identity. I think the author makes this point too, in a way, in the quote about bad fiction later on. In stylistic terms, I also liked the way quotes are italicized and the original author’s name is put in the, unusually wide, margin. I prefer it to other ways of footnoting I’ve encountered but I found myself wishing the book or article’s title was also included although perhaps this would spoil the currently beautiful and uncluttered aesthetic. The only problems arise when the quotation itself contains italics, at which point we revert to quotation marks. Italics are also used for general emphasis, which isn’t really confusing but might end up in them being a little overused totally.
The text contains, and is steeped in, the author's studies into gender, society, psychotherapy, feminism and identity. As someone not particularly well versed in this area of literature it can feel like quite a lot of what is going on is doing so over your head! It’s a bit like listening people discuss players on a sports team when you don’t know anything about them; the general sense is comprehensible but it’s quite hard to form your own opinion owing to lack of familiarity with the shared source material! These “many-gendered mothers of my heart” could be seen as somewhat pretentious but they have obviously played such a central role in the author’s life and the ideas they bring that are woven into her life and the text are so interesting I can’t interpret it that way. Even if I can’t fully appreciate half the ideas themselves! One example of this, in the extreme, is the mention of a ‘Cordelia’, on p57 and p60. I have no idea who this is. Is it Cordelia from King Lear? Was my only thought. Anyway, she doesn’t get introduced with two names or receive her surname in the margin, nor is she identified as a member of the family so I was a bit lost about who she was although it’s quite possible I missed something! Most of the quotes and references to these mothers were great. For example:
The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it Deleuze / Parnet p103
This represents, to me, an expression of how a prejudice or hierarchy can be so deeply suffused in a society that all questions, perhaps even all language, are an expression and reaffirmation of the offending culture. It’s not a perspective I’ve spent much time considering and certainly not one I’ve encountered in such menacing, suffocating form! Another good example of this could be:
“If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so” Jacques Lacan
But for some reason I find this presentation of what I take to be broadly the same idea, that a society's values and labels only have value within that society and context, less persuasive. Perhaps I feel that there is a non-gendered and non-normative way in which we can say a person is or is not a writer based on whether they write. Certainly, the author’s own expressions on the pervasive nature of prejudice in culture seemed to me less nihilistic while at the same time remaining revelatory, perhaps more so because of it. Nonetheless, it is visibly close to the Deleuze / Parnet quote above and the theme of ‘getting out’ is a powerful one:
“We bantered good-naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needlessly binary. That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction - it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed the narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out” p102
It’s initially a slightly confusing idea, and the use of binary echoes this in an slightly uncomfortable way I like. A bit like the first time I heard McLuhan’s “the message is the medium”. Will anyone ever be able to ‘get out’? My mind immediately says, ‘no’ and I’m inclined, perhaps misguidedly and egotistically, to think this book says the same. In all the pain and struggle to be comfortable with an identity in the face of outside prejudice and internal turmoil, there is the warmth and love of close relationships. Like the author’s with her partner and her son and stepson. We are all also the Argo, weathering good conditions and bad, some parts replaced, some irrevocably changed but still identified as the Argo. The author appears to me in different personas, some exasperated and violent, some overcome with beauty and love. Her ultimate verdict seems contained in her writing about her family.
There were other bits of style I didn’t like, and others which I really loved. An example which contains both aspects is this quotation:
“ Q: If my husband watches me labor, how will he ever find me sexy again, now that he’s seen me involuntarily defecate, and my vagina accommodate a baby’s head?
The question confused me; it’s description of labor did not strike me as exceedingly distinct from what happens during sex, or at least some sex, or at least much of the sex I had heretofore taken to be good.”
For me, this is a bit too far! I don’t care how much anal sex the author is having with her butch lesbian partner with her faced smashed against a concrete floor. It is not the same as having your vagina streched to accomodate a baby’s head and defecating involuntarily, which I can scarce believe anyone would find sexually gratifying. However, matters of fact aside, it does reveal prejudices and assumptions about other people and their sex lives that show me how normative I am.
More stylistically, when asked why she wanted to have a baby, the author relates she had nothing to say and writes “But the muteness of the desire stood in inverse proportion to its size” - to me the desire is VERY mute and therefore should be in proportion to her, presumably VERY large, desire for a child. I found this a bit clumsy.
The process of making children was examined in extreme detail from a multitude of perspectives. Not only what I would describe as the stock scenes such as the actual act of childbirth, the mother cradling the newborn in her arms for the first time or outpourings of love and professions of a life changed. Indeed, the author simultaneously gives a place to these while bitterly critiquing them. However, we also have the process of acquiring semen and the logistics of monitoring eggs. Even her partner’s boob reduction seems to be a part of it but perhaps that’s just because it’s another medical procedure. If I had to justify the connection I’d say Harry was changing his body in response to his new identity in the family and as was the author although this has obvious limitations. It’s not all personally focussed either and some of the most powerful passages addressed society’s attitude to pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood:
“Lee Edelman “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’, the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” p94
I’d never reflected that deeply on the merits of ‘reproductive futurism’ as I suppose that we are all, more or less, hardwired to concur with it, exceptions and extreme circumstantial factors not withstanding. But why bother to examine something so innocuous and universally agreed upon? Because it is this very near universal acceptance that makes it so dangerous as a vehicle for, or supporting actor to, other much more malicious ideas:
And I too feel like jamming a stick in someone’s eye every time I hear “protecting the children” as a rationale for all kinds of nefarious agendas, from arming kindergarden teachers to dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran to gutting all social safety nets to extracting and burning through what’s left of the world’s fossil fuel supply. But why bother fucking this Child when we could be fucking the other specific forces that mobilize and crouch behind its image? Reproductive futurism needs no more disciples. But basking in the punk allure of “no future” won’t suffice, either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet, crowing all the while about how lucky the jealous roaches are to get the crumbs that fall from their banquet. Fuck them, I say” p94/5
Not to mention the fact the prose is just great, visceral, angry, somewhat righteous in its indignation but in a way that makes you want to applaud and encourage its plight rather than view it cynically as ostentation. I really enjoyed this part! The part it plays in the broader tension between the author’s feelings of love toward her child, in some sense a form of futurism, and her, sometimes bitter, rejection of traditional identity or societal models associated with the process.
There’s also the extraordinary cycle of obsession over women getting pregnant and giving birth followed by a total reversal of this obsession whereby returning to ‘normal’ and, presumably in part, becoming physically sexually desirably again become the new societal objectives ascribed to the woman. Again, this was a novel observation for me despite participating in both the obsessions outlined below:
Throughout my postpartum delirium, I found myself lazily clicking on articles on my AOL home page (yes, AOL) about how certain celebrities got back into shape or into being sexual after babies. It’s humdrum but relentless: obsession with who’s pregnant, and who’s showing and who’s life is transforming due to the imminent arrival of the all-miraculous, all-coveted BABY - all of which flips, in the blink of an eye, into an obsession with how soon all signs of bearing the life-transforming BABY can evaporate, how soon the mother’s career, sex life, weight can be restored, as if nothing ever happened here at all” p136
I really enjoyed the book despite not feeling well read enough to appreciate it fully! If I had any complaints they would be that sometimes it is a little self-conscious and the, generally excellent, prose can be interrupted by the odd clanger that is all the more noticeable because of the otherwise incredibly high standard. To me the ending was an example of this and I actually googled it to see if it was the lyrics to a pop song or something! I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song. I thought it a rather trite ending for a book that had contained so many decidedly and avowedly unusual perspectives and structures!
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