Puppies and Babies is a terrific antidote to such sneering, with its joy-swirl of sodomitical parenthood, caretaking of all kinds, and interspecies love. In one photo, a naked woman spoons two dogs at once. In another, artist Celeste Dupuy-Spencer squats with her dog at the edge of a lake, as if both are contemplating a long journey. Babies get born, cry, goof around, ride small tractors, pinch nipples, get held. Often, they nurse. One nurses — incredibly — while the nursing mother does a handstand. Another nurses at the beach. Alex Auder, pregnant and in leather dom gear, pretends to give birth to an inflatable turtle. A dog mounts a stuffed tiger. Another dog is festooned with orange flowers. Two pregnant women hold up their sundresses to rub their naked bellies together, a friendly frottage.
Baby-lovers may gravitate to the baby photos, dog-lovers to the dogs, but the roughly equal wall space given to each places interspecies love firmly on par with human-human love. (Some photos feature both puppies and babies, in which case there’s no need to choose.) And while there are a lot of pregnant bodies here, this orgy of adoration is clearly open to anyone who wants to play. Indeed, one of the gifts of genderqueer family making— and animal loving — is the revelation of caretaking as detachable from — and attachable to — any gender, any sentient being.
Beholding this celebration, I wonder if Fraiman’s sodomitical maternity needs revision. It has been politically important for feminists to underplay the erotics of childbearing in order to make space for erotics elsewhere (i.e., “I fuck to come, not to conceive”), but Puppies and Babies eschews such cleavage. Instead we get all the messy, raucous perversities to be found in both pregnant and nonpregnant bodies, in nursing, in skinny-dipping in a waterfall with one’s dog, in cavorting in crumpled bedsheets, in the daily work of caretaking and witness — including the erotic witness of Steiner’s camera. (If you share Koestenbaum’s happily prurient sentiment, “If I attend a photo show that lacks nudes, I consider the visit a waste,” then you’ve come to the right place.)
Some of the subjects of Puppies and Babies may not identify as queer, but it doesn’t matter: the installation queers them. By which I mean to say that it partakes in a long history of queers constructing their own families — be they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals — and that it presents queer family making as an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset, rather than the other way around. It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.
Homonormativity seems to me a natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality: once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way. That’s why nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far as to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality, or why outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson seek homosexual adventures in countries such as Romania, where one can still be imprisoned for merely hitting on someone of the same sex. “I still see homosexuality as a narrative of urban adventure, a chance to cross not only sex barriers but class and age barriers, while breaking a few laws in the process — and all for the sake of pleasure. If not, I might as well be straight,” Benderson says.
In the face of such narrative, it’s a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade, or to hear Chaz Bono cluck-clucking with David Letterman about how T has made him kind of an asshole to his girlfriend, who still annoyingly wants him to “process” for hours in that dreaded lesbian/womanly way. I respect Chaz for many things, not the least of which is his willingness to speak his truth to an audience ready to revile him. But his eager (if strategic) identification with some of the worst stereotypes of straight men and lesbians is disappointing. (“Mission accomplished,” Letterman declared sardonically in response.)
People are different from each other. Unfortunately, the dynamic of becoming a spokesperson almost always threatens to bury this fact. You may keep saying that you only speak for yourself but your very presence in the public sphere begins to congeal difference into a single figure, and pressure begins to bear down hard upon it. Think of how freaked some people got when activist/actress Cynthia Nixon described her experience of her sexuality as “a choice.” But while I can’t change, even if I tried, may be a true and moving anthem for some, it’s a piss-poor one for others. At a certain point, the tent may need to give way to field.
Here is Catherine Opie, talking to Vice magazine:
Interviewer: Well, I think you going from the SM scene to being a mom, and all your new photos are these blissful domestic scenes — that’s shocking in a way, because people want to keep those kind of separate.
Opie: They do want to keep it separate. So basically, becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me. Ha. That’s a very funny idea.
Funny to her, maybe, but to those who are freaked out about the rise of homonormativity and its threat to queerness, not so much. But as Opie here implies, it’s the binary of normative/transgressive that’s unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.
The other day I heard a guy on the radio talking about prehistoric homes, and the particular way humans make home as opposed to, say, birds. It isn’t a penchant for decoration that differentiates us — birds really have a corner on that — it’s the compartmentalization of space. The way we cook and shit and work in different areas. We’ve done this forever, apparently.
This simple fact, gleaned from a radio program, suddenly put me at home in my species.
I’ve heard that, back in the day, Rita Mae Brown once tried to convince fellow lesbians to abandon their children in order to join the movement. But generally speaking, even in the most radical feminist and/or lesbian separatist circles, there have always been children around (Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Karen Finley, Pussy Riot … the list could go on and on). Yet rather than fade away with the rise of queer parenthood of all stripes, the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other has lately reached a kind of apotheosis, often posing as a last, desperate stand against homo- and heteronormativity, both. In his polemic No Future, Lee Edelman argues that “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.” Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Is and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. Or, to use a queer artist friend’s more succinct slogan, Don’t produce and don’t reproduce.