round-up: 4/26
what i'm reading, buying, & listening to, and some quotations <3
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m buying
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
I upgraded some plain old shirts this week. Highly recommend.
I also updated my website for the first time in a year.
As a reminder, I do make zines and sell them. I also write poems.
As a reminder, I am also a Leo, in case you forgot.
What I’m listening to:
What I’m buying:
Gas (so expensive right now; sob)
What I’m reading:
Five Novels About Coming of Age When You’re Old Enough to Know Better
Here's where Gen Zers and millennials still live with their parents
Quotations:
Consider that “having” the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things.
-Judith Butler
I had to give up the idea of linear recovery before I could really understand it, though, because in order to recognize suicidal ideation as something functional, as a habit that provides me some level of comfort, I had to accept that I was returning to it continuously. It was a different animal.
Capitalism touches basically every aspect of despair. I think anyone who makes any kind of art is probably experiencing profound hopelessness these days, or at the very least disillusionment.
It’s one thing to grapple with the fact that an artist most likely can’t support themselves through their art, but it’s another to face the growing sense that so many people seem to think art itself is unnecessary. So it’s impossible for me not to feel some level of existential panic, not to mention a disorienting disconnect from so much of humanity, when I think about the state of writing and media and the arts.
Where I’ve landed is that I understand that my ambition, and all of the good and bad that comes with it, isn’t going away, so what’s vital is having checks and balances in place to keep me from getting mired in it. Cultivating community with people who aren’t writers, or who aren’t chronically online like I am, has been a big part of that. I need those reality checks with people I admire for reasons that have nothing to do with critical acclaim, people who don’t even recognize the names of the writers and critics whose approval I’ve agonized over. I do think parenting helps, too—nothing destroys the ego like a child.
My aim is fundamentally body neutrality. Discovering that concept was a huge turning point for me, because everything that came before was just a shifting of guilt and shame—I went from trying and failing to lose weight to trying and failing to see myself as beautiful. Why do I have to arrive at beauty? Why can’t I just have a body? I will say, this is an area where I’m constantly, desperately seeking insights to sustain me because I know I’m still so susceptible to diet culture.
Now there’s something even more precious about the book. To me, there’s something more dear about the book in this day and age. For me, it serves as a firewall of collective memory against erasure. And it reminds us all of a time when things were different. It reminds us that there’s always the possibility to change. I’ve been thinking so much about photography not only as collective memory, but as a time capsule, as an emotional layer of memory, because clearly photos don’t just document events; they evoke emotions and textures and personal narratives. I feel like the universe was conspiring to put it out at a time when I think a lot of people needed it.
I [also] tend to organize information visually. When I have a camera in my hand and if I’m feeling anxious at all, or not understanding how I feel at all, the camera really helps me clarify and contextualize the world around me. So for example, on 9/11, I was in New York, and despite my intuition telling me to bring all my cameras to New York, I did not. I said to my husband that morning, “I am walking to B&H photo. I am going to rent a camera and I am going to walk as far south as I possibly can and photograph.” I realized that it was my way of organizing how I felt about what was going around me at the time. Photography is a way for me to contextualize my world, but it also helps me fall in love with the world over and over and over and over and over again. Anything, any object, any piece of nature, any human being, anything; the world is miraculous. Even on its worst day, the world is miraculous.
But it was also important for me not to be a total chump, too — not to be seen as a square, and as bourgeois as I am, I think. But that’s the beauty of acting. It’s leaping into the unknown and some kind of archetypal knowledge, I guess. Because here’s the crazy thing, is that we all silo ourselves. Foundationally, all those relationships — everybody’s relationships in their deepest, deepest place — are founded in love. And love can travel through all of those, and past all those boundaries.
Cynthia Nixon became a lesbian because she preferred it to being straight. In 2012, she gave a speech at a gay event where she announced, “I’ve been straight, and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” a statement for which she received massive backlash from straights, bisexuals, and gays alike. This was during the peak era of the marriage equality movement in the US, after all, and Nixon’s perspective was a threat to the narrative of homosexuality as immutable (and therefore protectable by law) identity championed by groups like the HRC. You know, born this way. Anyway, wasn’t Nixon really just looking for the word “bisexual?” In a profile in the New York Times soon after, she expounded: “For me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me…Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate?”³
There seems to be a cultural pendulum that swings back and forth between understandings of sexuality rooted in choice and understandings rooted in essentialism (biological or otherwise). In any given moment, a diversity of these narratives will exist, just as there exists a diversity of ways in which people categorize sexualities.
This history is that identification, as a paradigm, maps more readily onto non-normative genders and sexualities than it does onto hegemonic ones. It seems much more natural to say “I identify as gay” or “I identify as trans” than “I identify as straight” or “I identify as cis.” The latter statements are not incorrect, and they are certainly things that people sometimes say, but they bring to mind a person self-consciously and perhaps awkwardly performing awareness of their social position rather than naturally expressing an understanding of selfhood.¹⁰ In the realms of gender and sexuality, identity has become socially coded as something that explains non-normative ways of being to a greater extent than hegemonic ones.¹¹ This may be in part because the act of identification is one that many people are really only forced to explicitly engage in when they are seeking out a self-description or life that departs from the hegemonic.¹²
We often employ identity categories as if they are in fact merely descriptive of pre-existing, essential facts of the self, but indeed our existing categories also act upon our understandings of self, both describing what is socially constructed and taking part in the process of social construction.¹³ I identify as “lesbian” because it it maps onto desires and affiliations that I experience in a bodily and primal way. But through calling myself lesbian, allowing myself to be socially shaped by lesbians, renouncing or minimizing my heterosexuality, reading lesbian writings, and saying “I’m like these people, and not like those people,” those very desires (which feel so primal, so pure, so immutable!) have evolved radically since I was my Oberlin sophomore self. Identification follows desire, but it also leads it.
Queer people asserting political authority often make a rhetorical gesture to the tune of “we’ve always been here.” There is a certain truth to this: people whose self-conception or behavior defies the gendered and sexualized norms of their societies have indeed always existed so far as we know, and also societies have existed (and currently exist) that include normative genders and sexualities that go beyond Western cisgender and heterosexual roles. But I think that the “we’ve always been here” gesture obscures something important too: the truth that we fundamentally exist always and only in the unending present. We would seem quite strange indeed to many people of the past who we mark today as queer, and vice versa. It bears noting that modern heterosexual cis people’s genders and sexualities would also seem strange to their many, diverse past analogs, and vice versa. Our gendered and sexual ways of being are marked by the moment as they mark the moment; in that sense, none of us have “always been here.”
Since I was fat, I also understand why anyone might do anything to not be fat anymore. It’s not that the desire for a not-fat body is necessarily healthy, morally upstanding, politically correct, ideologically pure, whatever. Perhaps it is none of those things. But fat acceptance, fat justice, fat liberation et al. movements exist explicitly because the world is hostile to and deeply uncomfortable for a lot of fat people. Pretending this is not the case invalidates their lived experiences and the work of these movements.
Most fat people, I believe, are deeply wounded by what they’ve experienced in their bodies, and any fat person who is a public figure is subject to a level of scrutiny, judgement, and shaming inconceivable to most people.
I think it’s likely that some of Remi’s self-love moments were a kind of “fake it ‘til you make it” effort — that’s not a criticism or an accusation that she’s a phony; I mean that she was trying on a way of feeling better in her body that was available to her at the time and was optimistic about it, so she shared the good word with her audience. I’m sure she did feel good about herself and her body sometimes, but clearly the moments of struggle were more profound than the moments of joy, so she’s coping how she can now. Why does this piss people off so much?
Conneely-Nolan wrote in the Chronicle article linked above that, “No one cares that she lost weight; it’s about the lack of transparency.” I beg your pardon, but be so fucking for real right now. Caring when celebrities lose weight is practically our national pastime. People went nuts when Adele lost 100 pounds and she never positioned herself as a body-positive icon and didn’t speak about her weight. She was just a big woman in public, which apparently means she represented and upheld the interests and ethics of entire cultural movements whether she liked it or not. Oprah was transparent and people still got pissed. Be real about why you’re mad.
People care when celebrities and public-facing people lose weight because they rely on external figures to inform and support their own body image and body-related values. This is a huge mistake, whether we’re talking about famous people, Olympic athletes, or influencers like Remi. There’s nothing wrong with being pleased by representation of bodies that look like yours, or taking cues from others about how to feel better. These things have to be a supplement, though, to the real work of feeling good in and about your body: identifying your own values and acting accordingly.
Relying on someone else’s body and behaviors to help you feel good about yourself will probably break your heart. Other people act upon their bodily autonomy for all kinds of reasons you’ll never understand and aren’t entitled to understand.
For most people the calculation is simple even if it doesn’t strike you as noble: it’s still really hard to be fat and until it gets meaningfully easier culturally and systemically, which might not happen in our lifetime, most people will take the shortest route to relief. That’s not lazy. That’s mostly about trying to lessen emotional and physical pain.
If, like me (and in some cases Remi), you’ve not experienced your health falling apart in your 20s because of your rapid weight gain, you’ve not grappled with the interminable hell of an eating disorder that drives you to annihilate yourself with food, you’ve not had things like “fat bitch” screamed at you on the street while minding your own business, you’ve not been able to visit anywhere from the doctor’s office to holiday dinners with family without the great problem of your body being up for discussion, you’ve never felt your sleep quality, libido, and energy almost entirely sapped after gaining 30 pounds in half a year, and you’ve never felt like you are constantly wearing your greatest insecurity and deepest wound around your neck like a neon sandwich board, you just don’t get it. If you did, maybe you wouldn’t be so fired up. And if you’ve experienced those things and still take issue with someone’s intentional weight loss, you might be feeling kind of left behind and are using righteous rage and projection as coping mechanisms. Been there! They don’t work!
Safety is an illusion, a matter of luck and someone else’s mood.
Working out is a ritualistic body practice. Pilates is part of my healthcare routine. The fact it was invented during a time of war in an internment camp for rehabilitating bodies is a narrative strength to me personally, because it tells me it helped someone in times of crisis with minimal resources. We are in crisis. Why wouldn’t I be training my body accordingly? Hello? Are we reading the same room? The harsher the world gets the more in fact I do want to work out so I do not crumble beneath the cruelty of it.
You can be team “accept your body as it is” and I completely and genuinely support you in that venture towards radical self-acceptance. I do not gladly accept the entropy and trauma locked into my own hip joints, however, and so I am not joining that Congo line of thinking. I am Team Pilates because I am stronger than I was yesterday, and because I would like un petit endorphin boost so I do not hysterically cry at the next Breaking News email I get about the Supreme Court. It would be okay to cry! I will cry anyway! But me, personally? I want to be strong enough to bear the grief, too.
People making art together is an act of resistance.
-Lidia Yuknavitch
JH: I’m thinking of your resistance to elegy, and how I had to resist the conventional rape memoir, that traditional arc of a person living a usual life—then a horrible thing happens!—and then they come out of it. It wasn’t my experience. I could never write that.
LY: It’s quite violent—women stepping into traditional storytelling modes that ask them to be more quiet, more traditional, to mold their narratives to fit. “The Bad Thing happened to me, but I have made a full transformation” … then there’s theme music, “and I am now healthy.”
JH: It demands that you master the rupture, right? Well, I don’t think you can. Going into the book, I was deeply resistant to the thought that it would heal me.
-Jamie Hood and Lidia Yuknavitch
These books we’re writing, they open new neural pathways! Being in the art of storytelling is a—potentially—radically transformational space. We’re lucky to have that; it cuts down the therapy bill.
-Lidia Yuknavitch
It’s the reason—not why I became a writer, but why I choose to keep doing it. Helping even one person—that’s not nothing.
-Lidia Yuknavitch
Art can’t be contained by commodity culture or capitalism. There’s always a residual feistiness or resistance—that’s one thing humans are good at, keeping that uncontainable energy, even if nobody can figure out what it is or how it works.
-Lidia Yuknavitch
I survived. That’s all there is to say
about the trampling.
You will be the archivist of your desires.
-Anne Garreta, tr. Emma Ramadan
Life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don’t love.
-Anne Garreta, tr. Emma Ramadan
Memory of a body: inscribed in a given space, anchored in light.
-Anne Garreta, tr. Emma Ramadan
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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