Authors: Lynne Segal
It was an important question for Carter when
Wise Children
was published in 1991, as she had only months to live, and a young son who would need to be raised without his mother. It was an important issue for me too, having lived and raised my son in a collective household where we had shared domestic arrangements for almost two decades. However, attempting to create new and lasting forms of domesticity outside traditional families has never proved easy. Notions of shared housework, childcare and commitments to the wellbeing of all existed in obvious tension with ideas of personal independence, sexual autonomy and flexibility of lifestyle, not to mention the unpredictable dynamics of jealousy, resentment, competitiveness and envy.
As I explored in my last book,
Making Trouble
, and Michèle Roberts addressed in her memoir,
Paper Houses
, in the early years of women’s liberation collective living was viewed by many feminists as a lifestyle that was not only more economical, but would also encourage the supportive companionship, domesticity and childcare arrangements that seemed most compatible with the community engagement and other forms of activism many of us pursued.
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Such households usually tried to embody the type of egalitarian and nurturing communities
we wanted to help to build, in what we hoped might prove a long march through all existing institutions to transform them along similar lines. Thus the majority of the young women and men I worked with politically in the 1970s and early 1980s lived in some form of shared housing. For many, including me, it seemed to work; at least this arrangement flourished during those years in which we were still young, and could all feel connected to efforts for promoting change in the world at large. It also lasted for me because I owned the large house I shared with others, and was never planning to leave it. Others lived there for only a few years, as alternative choices became more attractive, or as distressing forms of jealousy emerged between the women who predominated in that household in the 1970s.
However, no living arrangement ever escapes those inchoate needs and deep vulnerabilities emerging from our childhoods and shadowing any form of intimacy, and these are bound to multiply in confusing ways when living in more open and collective households, as new alliances are formed, or friendships fade. Moreover, it is obviously hard to introduce one’s own distinct personal and aesthetic style in more collective spaces, except if or when some one person or intensely like-minded clique manages to dominate them.
Fascinatingly, the British historian Matt Cook, researching the complex history of ‘queer domesticities’ in twentieth-century London, reveals that family life was often far more makeshift, diverse and alternative than is usually assumed. Indeed, long before the legal changes legitimizing same-sex unions and parenting rights, some gay men, for instance, had already managed to negotiate complex household arrangements, involving not just shifting sexual partners but sometimes even informal
parenting or other nurturing relationships. Nevertheless, in collecting accounts of the determined political attempts to establish collective living spaces among gay squatters in Brixton in the 1970s, Cook found that most of them were relatively short lived. Decades later, his informants reflected ‘on their experiences in the squats with sadness, anger, humour, and sometimes a little embarrassment’, even though many of these ex-squatters remained in contact and a few were still sharing homes with other gay men ‘in a muted echo of earlier times’.
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Lacking the sanctioned expectations and juridical obligations of marriage, alternative living arrangements are intrinsically unstable, unlikely to survive shifting personal relationships or changing times. Like the Brixton squats, most of the collective households I knew declined rapidly in the 1980s. It was not just that careers, and ageing generally, tend to refocus and limit our objectives with the passing years, but also that youthful dreams of community usually encounter increasing obstacles – never more suddenly and dramatically than with the triumph of Thatcher’s monetarist regime and the rising inequality of the 1980s. Obstacles, however, seem to come as much from within as from without.
By the close of the 1980s, with my son in his late teens and about to leave home, my shared household folded and I began living in a more tightly bonded heterosexual coupledom from my early forties. Fourteen years later, this cradle of intimacy collapsed, leaving me with the wounding shards of our broken romance. With the deepest expression of pain and regret, my partner of a decade and a half moved on. Being fifteen years younger than I was, he could all too easily imagine life without me, before long creating a brand new existence for himself, settling down and having children in his late forties. In my late
fifties I was left aching and grieving for him, and the life we had shared.
For some years I became one of that ever-growing number of middle-aged women facing life ‘on our own’. As another, highly successful, acquaintance of mine commented to her women friends soon after the departure of her own longtime partner for a younger woman: ‘I went to the theatre the other night and saw in the queue ahead of me so many women I knew, all now single, and I said to myself “this is a group I never wanted to join” ’. Definitely, a group she never wanted to join, but one many find it very hard to leave. Only a few older women seem to choose to join this group, but demographics suggest that the odds on most of them coupling up again could hardly be less favourable, despite, and I suspect partly because of, their status, charms and, by all standards other than youth and physical attractiveness. As I have mentioned often enough, many of the cultural stereotypes of old age remain distinct, and more damaging, when the focus is on women as compared with men.
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A further twist of the knife for many older women who find themselves abandoned is that it can be hard to stifle a certain sense of shame at their situation. Sharon Olds captures this exquisitely in her poem ‘Known to Be Left’, from her recent collection
Stag’s Leap
, recalling the end of her marriage after her husband of thirty years left her for another woman:
If I pass a mirror, I turn away,
I do not want to look at her, and she does not want to be seen.
Sometimes
I don’t see how I’m going to go on doing this … I am so ashamed
before my friends – to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.
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Recent surveys of households in twenty-first-century Britain show that the majority, 56 per cent, still consist of married couples. The rest are made up of cohabiting couples and a tiny minority of civil partnerships (legalized in 2005), but it is single people who constitute the second largest and fastest growing domestic unit, with women accounting for 70 per cent of those living alone over the age of sixty-five.
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There are many reasons why older people, but in vastly greater numbers, older women, and also gay men, live without partners or intimate friends from mid-life onwards.
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The question is, can they do so without feeling diminished, without that feeling of shame described by Olds, when any sense of lack the single person might experience without another to hold, or to quarrel with, is made all the harder by a sense of failure at being identified as alone?
Shortly before she died Eve Sedgwick described herself as ‘an essential, central member of a queer family’.
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Was she fooling herself? Sedgwick also wrote about what love meant to her, speaking of the sort of intimate connection one can sometimes share with another, without which ‘both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment’.
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Sedgwick, however,
was a much-acclaimed literary scholar and queer theorist, with a large and significant band of admirers, who are still mourning her years after her premature death at fifty-eight. I am sure she was indeed able to feel secure in her deep and distinctive attachments to her closest friends, such as her gay friend Michael Moon, in whose company she delighted, while also retaining the life-long commitment of her husband, Hal. In her middle age she lived in domestic harmony, sharing a house with Michael and his partner, which was only sometimes the space where Hal joined her from his house elsewhere.
However, household demographics tell us that Sedgwick’s experience is far from typical, and I fear that forms of ‘onto-logical impoverishment’ are exactly what many old people do experience, although they might not put it quite like that. Personally, I do still live with a few other people, often eating together and sharing household tasks. But it is not the collective living of my youth, which is no doubt just as well. Moreover, it is not just my own experience of the insecurities of collective living that tells me it can be very difficult to establish and maintain queer families of choice. Such households rarely last for more than a few years, and barely register in surveys of household forms such as that mentioned above (being a mere 1 per cent of living arrangements in the official statistics on households in the UK over the last decade, 2001–10). The comfort of marriage, or long-term partnerships, in so far as they remain monogamous, is precisely that they usually remove us from the intense jealousies that always shadow desire, even if they inevitably moderate or dramatically decrease desire in the process. Disruption always threatens when other adults enter the space of coupledom, which is indeed a standard plot in domestic fiction.
In her latest book,
The Queer Art of Failure
, the American gender critic Judith (now Jack) Halberstam urges her readers to embrace failure. After all, as she summarizes at the close of her book: ‘To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die, rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy.’
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That sounds promising in relation to reflections on the experiences of ageing, for which Beckett’s ‘Fail again. Fail better’, can often serve as a mantra.
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In this text, Halberstam explores the magical whimsies of kids’ films, teen comedies and other ‘queer fairy tales’ of and for the young. She uses them to further her well-known probing of the inventive failures at the heart of all gender dissidence (quoting Quentin Crisp’s axiom: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style’, not just once, but four times).
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She also discusses the ‘radical passivity’ of female masochism, on display in literature, such as Elfriede Jelinek’s
The Piano Teacher
, or in performance art, referencing Yoko Ono’s classic
Cut Piece
.
Drawing upon the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, among others, she suggests that the female masochist’s apparent obedience here is also a failure to conform, concealing a criticism and provocation of women’s situation within and outside language.
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This is all interesting. However, there is a thunderous silence in Halberstam’s celebration of failure, which is the complete absence of any interest in the queer dreams and refusals of the old, especially those who fail most flagrantly to age ‘successfully’. This failure might entail the defiant rejection of all blandishments to camouflage or soften signs of old age, on the one hand; or the refusal to dress and behave according to what is considered appropriate for one’s age, on the other.
Halberstam could, for instance, have looked at the old age of Brigitte Bardot, who has provoked intense scorn and derision by brazenly ageing ‘disgracefully’. She is seen as ‘letting herself go’, refusing cosmetic surgery, while at the same time retaining the ‘sexy’ hair-style, make-up, and outspoken insolence of her youth. Irritating almost all of her potential supporters, she is passionately committed to animal welfare, yet so fervently anti-Muslim she voted for the Front National in 2012. In this, Bardot is at odds with the customary political conformity, clandestine face-lifts, and careful cosmetic enhancements of most of her contemporary sex icons, such as Sophia Loren.
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Halberstam does point out that gay and lesbian groups and queer scholars generally have searched for different ways of relating to and caring for one another outside the ‘disciplinary matrix’ of the traditional family, yet even here, this does not take her to any thoughts on ageing. Nor does her writing on the uses of forgetfulness, seen as a tool for interfering with the smooth operations of the normal, take her there, despite those most troubled by their increasing forgetfulness being old people.
There has always been a political point in applauding certain forms of ‘failure’. It is not so new to attempt to respect the multiple diversities and deficiencies of most people’s lives, as the frail but forceful voice of one of Halberstam’s earlier compatriots of the left, Malvina Reynolds, used to sing: ‘I don’t mind failing in this world … Somebody else’s definition / Isn’t going to measure my soul’s condition.’
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Despite certain social mobilities at different historical moments, which have never reached most of those at the bottom of entrenched social hierarchies – least of all in recent decades around the world – power, prestige and moral authority, not to mention wealth, have always been stubbornly reserved for the few: or ‘the sons of bitches’ who
succeed by ‘stepping on you’, as Reynolds referred to them, long before political correctness would have tempered her language.