At the same time, Sedgwick argued that “given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term [queer]’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.”
In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.
Sedgwick once proposed that “what it takes — all it takes — to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person,” and that “anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else.” Annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy talk about a book of his as queer (do you have to own everything?), in the end, it’s probably all for the better. Sedgwick, who was long married to a man with whom she had, by her own description, mostly postshower, vanilla sex, knew about the possibilities of this first-person use of the term perhaps better than anyone else. She took heat for it, just as she took heat for identifying with gay men (not to mention as a gay man), and for giving lesbians not much more than an occasional nod. Some thought it regressive that a “queen of queer theory” kept men or male sexuality at the center of the action (as in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire), even if for the purpose of feminist critique.
Such were Sedgwick’s identifications and interests; she was nothing if not honest. And in person she exuded a sexuality and charisma that was much more powerful, particular, and compelling than the poles of masculinity and femininity could ever allow — one that had to do with being fat, freckled, prone to blushing, bedecked in textiles, generous, uncannily sweet, almost sadistically intelligent, and, by the time I met her, terminally ill.
The more I thought about Biola’s doctrinal statement, the more I realized that I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please. If this particular cluster of adults doesn’t want to have sex outside of “biblical marriage,” then whatever. In the end, it was this sentence that kept me up at night: “Inadequate origin models [of the universe] hold that (a) God never directly intervened in creating nature and/or (b) humans share a common physical ancestry with earlier life forms.” Our shared ancestry with earlier life forms is sacred to me. I declined the invitation. They booked a “story guru” from Hollywood in my place.
Flush with joy in our house on the hill, we were startled by some deep shadows. Your mother, whom I’d met but once, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Your son’s custody remained unsettled, and the specter of a homophobic or transphobic judge deciding his fate, our family’s fate, turned our days tornado green. You knocked yourself out to make him feel happy and held, set up a slide for him in our concrete sliver of a backyard, a baby pool in the front, a Lego station by the wall heater, a swing hanging from the studs in his bedroom. We read books all together before bed, then I would leave to give you two some alone time, listen to your soft voice singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” night after night from behind the closed door. I read in one of my stepparenting guides that one should take stock of the developing bonds in a new family not every day or every month or every year, but every seven years. (Such a time frame struck me then as ludicrous; now, seven years later, as wise and luminous.) Your inability to live in your skin was reaching its peak, your neck and back pulsing with pain all day, all night, from your torso (and hence, your lungs) having been constricted for almost thirty years. You tried to stay wrapped even while sleeping, but by morning the floor was always littered with doctored sports bras, strips of dirty fabric—“smashers,” you called them.
I just want you to feel free, I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger.
Don’t you get it yet? you yelled back. I will never feel as free as you do, I will never feel as at home in the world, I will never feel as at home in my own skin. That’s just the way it is, and always will be.
Well then I feel really sorry for you, I said.
Or maybe, Fine, but don’t take me down with you.
We knew something, maybe everything, was about to give. We hoped it wouldn’t be us.
You showed me an essay about butches and femmes that contained the line “to be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.” You were trying to tell me something, give me information I might need. I don’t think that line is where you meant for me to stick — you may not even have noticed it — but there I stuck. I wanted and still want to give you any life-sustaining gift I have to offer; I beheld and still behold in anger and agony the eagerness of the world to throw piles of shit on those of us who want to savage or simply cannot help but savage the norms that so desperately need savaging. But I also felt mixed up: I had never conceived of myself as femme; I knew I had a habit of giving too much; I was frightened by the word honor. How could I tell you all that and stay inside our bubble, giggling on the red couch?
I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. You said I misunderstood what you meant by honor. We haven’t yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us; perhaps we never will.
You’ve written about all parts of your life except this, except the queer part, you said.
Give me a break, I said back. I haven’t written about it yet.
In the midst of all this, we started to talk about getting pregnant. Whenever anyone asked me why I wanted to have a baby, I had no answer. But the muteness of the desire stood in inverse proportion to its size. I had felt the desire before, but in recent years I had given it up, or rather, I had given it over. And now here we were. Wanting, as so many want, the time to be right. But I was older now and less patient; I could already see that give it over would need to turn into go get it, and soon. When and how would we attempt it, how much mourning would there be if we turned away, what if we called and no baby spirit came.
As concepts such as “good enough” mothering suggest, Winnicott is a fairly sanguine soul. But he also takes pains to remind us what a baby will experience should the holding environment not be good enough:
The primitive agonies
Falling for ever
All kinds of disintegration
Things that disunite the psyche and the body
The fruits of privation
going to pieces
falling for ever
dying and dying and dying
losing all vestige of hope of the renewal of contacts
One could argue that Winnicott is speaking metaphorically here — as Michael Snediker has said in a more adult context: “One doesn’t really shatter when one is fucked, despite Bersani’s accounts of it as such.” But while a baby may not die when its holding environment fails, it may indeed die and die and die. The question of what a psyche or a soul can experience depends, in large part, on what you believe it’s made of. Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!