I spent the weekend at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference in Pasadena, which featured an incredible reading by Jonathan Lethem and Maggie Nelson. Like all of us, both were thinking about the election (curiously and understandably, no one in the room would say Trump’s name – we all seemed to be leery of giving him any more power, as if naming him would legitimize him further, as if he truly is Voldemort). Lethem teared up and had to pause at multiple points in his reading, as he discussed community and belonging and how we hold onto those ideals now. At one point in his reading, as he began a sentence, choked up, and then paused to collect himself, he interjected, “You know how there are potholes now in every thought?” It seemed to me the most apt description of life after 11/9. For those of us who are paying attention (not everyone in my life is), for those of us who see Trump stacking his transition team with the most reprehensible bigots (some people still don’t see it or don’t care about it) and talking about legislation that will make life miserable for everyone who is not a white cis hetero male* (I can’t believe there are people who can’t see this), no thought is disconnected from our daily nightmare. Potholes everywhere.
[*Pothole: I’ve talked to a few women who are romantically involved with white cis hetero men at the moment, and we have bonded over the feeling that, no matter how well-intentioned or politically aware these men are, it is difficult to be with them right now. They will never understand, on a visceral level, what it is like to live in a body under siege. The need for solidarity and community with people who understand what it is to be under attack every minute of every day for inhabiting the body you inhabit, for choosing to do things with it that the religious right and fascist right don’t want you to do, makes it difficult to inhabit daily reality with someone who doesn’t know that feeling, who isn’t fighting against it every single second. Nelson: “whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.” This feeling is why some part of me has always supported places on colleges campuses that cater specifically to one group. Why shouldn’t black students have a place to escape the crushing violence of whiteness for just a few precious minutes? Let queer students take shelter from the assault of heteronormative assumptions for a second. Those places of rest matter.]
Maggie Nelson’s reading had an entirely different but no less affecting tone than Lethem’s. She read from The Argonauts, including this section about the artist/sex educator Annie Sprinkle:
In Annie Sprinkle’s perfromance piece 100 Blow Jobs, Sprinkle – who worked for many years as a prostitute – kneels down on the ground and gives head to several dildos nailed to a board in front of her, while recorded male voices yell degrading things like ‘Suck it, bitch.’ (Sprinkle has said that out of the approximately 3,500 customers she had as a sex worker, there were about 100 bad ones; the sound track to 100 Blow Jobs derives from the bad ones.) She sucks and sucks, she chokes and gags. But just when someone might be thinking, This is exactly what I imagined sex work to be like – haunting, woman-hating, traumatizing – Sprinkle gets up, pulls herself together, gives herself an Aphrodite Award fro sexual service to the community, and performs a cleansing masturbatory ritual.
Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies does not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.
During the Q+A, an audience member asked Nelson and Lethem to speak about our belief in the reparative abilities of rhetoric and language – they are, after all, also our enemies right now. Nelson responded that her line about many-gendered mothers of the heart metabolizing everything was, of course, “utterly false,” and yet that the idea was “a tremendous source of strength.”
I came home and reattached to my computer to find Facebook updates from friends at Standing Rock, who were being assaulted with tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons (it is literally freezing there – as many have pointed out, this amounts to attempted murder) for exercising their first amendment right to peacefully protest against unjust and immoral government and corporate actions. I saw all the events I missed while I was away to protest against further atrocities proposed by our president elect. I got overwhelmed by how many fronts we have to fight on from now on* (*pothole: they were always there, I wasn’t aware enough, I could have done so much more before now, I am complicit, I have to keep reminding myself that I remain complicit unless I am acting).
This is where I find myself today – swerving around potholes, believing in our power to resist a fascist regime, terrified that it won’t be enough, knowing already that the price we pay* for this mistake is going to be enormous.
[*Pothole: I’ve heard more than one person talk about how we
survived the Reagan era, so we can survive this. But of course not everyone did
survive the Reagan era (the war on brown bodies drugs, AIDS, continued mass incarceration, etc., etc., etc.). We have to resist not only Trumpian fascism but also
our own tendencies to speak about a “we” that excludes the people who are going
to be hardest hit by the Trump era. I hope I am wrong, but I do not think that
all of us will survive.]