The Argonauts (10 page)

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
.

I know that Edelman is talking about the Child, not children per se, and that my artist friend is likely more concerned with jamming the capitalist status quo than with prohibiting the act of childbirth. And I too feel like jamming a stick in someone’s eye every time I hear “protecting the children” as a rationale for all kinds of nefarious agendas, from arming kindergarten teachers to dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran to gutting all social safety nets to extracting and burning through what’s left of the world’s fossil fuel supply. But why bother fucking this Child when we could be fucking the specific forces that mobilize and crouch behind its image? Reproductive futurism needs no more disciples. But basking in the punk allure of “no future” won’t suffice, either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet, crowing all the while about how lucky the jealous roaches are to get the crumbs that fall from their banquet. Fuck
them
, I say.

Perhaps due to my own issues with reproductive futurism, I’ve always been a little spooked by texts addressed to or dedicated to babies, be they unborn or infant. Such gestures are undoubtedly born from love, I know. But the illiteracy of the addressee—not to mention the temporal gap between the moment of the address and that at which the child will have grown into enough of an adult to receive it (presuming one ever becomes an adult, in relation to one’s parents)—underscores the discomfiting fact that relation can never be achieved in a simple fashion through writing, if it can be achieved at all. It frightens me to involve a tiny human being in this difficulty, this misfiring, from the start. And yet certain instances have undeniably moved me, such as André Breton’s letter to his infant daughter in
Mad Love
. Breton’s hetero romanticism is, as always, hard to take. But I like the sweet assurance he offers his daughter, that she was “thought of as possible, as certain, in the very moment when, in a love deeply sure of itself, a man and a woman wanted you to be.”

Insemination after insemination, wanting our baby to be. Climbing up on the cold exam table, abiding the sting of the catheter threaded through the opal slit of my cervix, feeling the familiar cramp of rinsed, thawed seminal fluid pooling directly into my uterus. You holding my hand month after month, in devotion, in perseverance.
They’re probably shooting egg whites
, I said, tears sprouting.
Shhh
, you whispered.
Shhh
.

The first few times we did the procedure, I brought a satchel of good luck charms. Sometimes, after the nurse dimmed the lights and left the room, you would hold me as I made myself come. The point wasn’t romance as much as it was to suck the specimen upward (even though we knew it was already about as far up as it could go). As the months went by, however, I started leaving the charms at home. Eventually I felt lucky if I made it to the class I was teaching with the right book in my hand, so scrambled had I become by all the early-morning temperature taking, impossible-to-read ovulation predictor kits, the tortuous examination of every “spin-like” excretion that exited my body, the sharp despair wrought by the first smudge of menstrual blood.

Frustrated with our costly, ineffective approach, we off-roaded for a few months with a noble friend who generously agreed to be our donor, trading the cold metal table for the comfort of our bed, and pricey vials for our friend’s free specimen, which he would leave in our bathroom in a squat glass jar that used to hold Paul Newman salsa.

One month our donor friend tells us that he has to go out of town for a college reunion. Not wanting to lose the month’s egg, we trudge back to the bank. We track the egg’s progress via ultrasound: it looks bulbous and beautiful and ready to burst out of its follicle in the late afternoon, but by the next morning there is no sign of it, not even a trace of fluid from its ruptured sac. I am beyond frustrated, beyond hope. But Harry—always the optimist!—insists it might not be too late. The nurse concurs. Knowing that I have a bad habit of deeming myself lost and getting off the freeway one exit before I would have found my way, I decide, once again, to join them.

[Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic … as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power—all of which cannot help but trouble an entire legal and moral order without, however, proposing an alternative to it
.

Given that one-third of American families are currently headed by single mothers (the census doesn’t even ask about two mothers or any other forms of kinship—if there is anyone in the house called mother and no father, then your household counts as single mother), you’d think the symbolic order would be showing a few more dents by now. But Kristeva is not alone in her hyperbole. For a more disorienting take on the topic, I recommend Jean Baudrillard’s “The Final Solution,” in which Baudrillard argues that assisted forms of reproduction (donor insemination, surrogacy, IVF, etc.), along with the use of contraception, herald the suicide of our species, insofar as they detach reproduction from sex, thus turning us from “mortal, sexed beings” into clone-like messengers of an impossible immortality. So-called artificial insemination, Baudrillard argues, is linked with “the abolition of everything within us that is human, all too human: our desires, our deficiencies, our neuroses, our dreams, our disabilities, our viruses, our lunacies, our unconscious and even our sexuality—all the features which make us specific living beings.”

Honestly I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard, Žižek, Badiou, and other revered philosophers of the day pontificating on how we might save ourselves from the humanity-annihilating threat of the turkey baster (which no one uses, by the way; the preferred tool is an oral syringe) in order to protect the fate of this endangered “sexed being.” And by sexed, make no mistake: they mean one of two options. Here’s Žižek, describing the type of sexuality that would fit an “evil” world: “In December 2006 the New York City authorities declared that the right to chose one’s gender (and so, if necessary, to have the sex-change operation performed) is one of the inalienable human rights—the ultimate Difference, the ‘transcendental’ difference that grounds the very human identity, thus turns into something open to manipulation…. ‘Masturbathon’ is the ideal form of the sex activity of this trans-gendered subject.”

Fatally estranged from the transcendental difference that grounds human identity, the transgendered subject is barely human, condemned forever to “idiotic masturbatory enjoyment” in lieu of the “true love” that renders us human. For, as Žižek holds—in homage to Badiou—“it is love, the encounter of the Two, which ‘transubstantiates’ the idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper.”

These are the voices that pass for radicality in our times. Let us leave them to their love, their event proper.

2011, the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T. We pitched out, in our inscrutable hormonal soup, for Fort Lauderdale, to stay for a week at the beachside Sheraton in monsoon season, so that you could have top surgery by a good surgeon and recover. Less than twenty-four hours after we arrived, they were snapping a sterile green hat on your head—a “party hat,” the nice nurse said—and wheeling you away. While you were under the knife, I drank gritty hot chocolate in the waiting room and watched Diana Nyad try to swim from Florida to Cuba. She didn’t make it that time, even in her shark cage. But you did. You emerged four hours later, hilariously zonked from the drugs, trying in vain to play the host while slipping in and out of consciousness, your whole torso more tightly bound than you’ve ever managed yourself, a drain hanging off each side, two pouches that filled up over and over again with blood stuff the color of cherry Kool-Aid.

To save money over the week, we cooked our food in the hotel bathroom on a hot plate. One day we drove to a Sport Chalet and bought a little tent to set up on the beach because the beachside cabanas cost too much money to rent. While you slept I ambled down to the beach and set up the tent, then tried to read Sedgwick’s
A Dialogue on Love
inside. But it was like a nylon sweat lodge in there, and neither I nor the four-month-old fetus could tolerate it. I had started showing, which was delightful. Maybe there would be a baby. One night we splurged in our sober way and had eight-dollar virgin strawberry daiquiris at the infinity pool, which was stocked with Europeans on cheap vacation packages. The air was hot and lavender with a night storm coming in. There was always a storm coming in. Frat brothers and sorority sisters thronged every fried fish joint on the boardwalk. The crowds were loud and repulsive and a little scary but we were protected by our force field. On our third day, we drove to the second-largest mall in the world and walked for hours, even though I was dizzy and exhausted from early pregnancy and the suffocating heat and you were just barely over the lip of the Vicodin. At the mall I went into Motherhood Maternity and tried on clothes with one of those gelatin strap-on bellies they have so you can see what you’ll look like as you grow big. Wearing the strap-on belly, I tried on a fuzzy white wool sweater with a bow at the sternum, the kind that makes your baby look like a present. I bought the sweater and ended up wearing it back at home all winter. You bought some loungy Adidas pants that look hot on you. Over and over again we emptied your drains into little Dixie cups and flushed the blood stuff down the hotel toilet. I’ve never loved you more than I did then, with your Kool-Aid drains, your bravery in going under the knife to live a better life, a life of wind on skin, your nodding off while propped up on a throne of hotel pillows, so as not to disturb your stitches. “The king’s sleep,” we called it, in homage to our first pay-per-view purchase of the week,
The King’s Speech
.

Later, from our Sheraton Sweet Sleeper
^®
Bed, we ordered
X-Men: First Class
. Afterward we debated: assimilation vs. revolution. I’m no cheerleader for assimilation per se, but in the movie the assimilationists were advocating nonviolence and identification with the Other in that bastardized Buddhist way that gets me every time. You expressed sympathy for the revolutionaries, who argued,
Stay freaky and blow ’em up before they come for you, because no matter what they say, the truth is they want you dead, and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise
.

We bantered good-naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needless binary. That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to
get
out.

While we talked we said words like
nonviolence, assimilation, threats to survival, preserving the radical
. But when I think about it now I hear only the background buzz of our trying to explain something to each other, to ourselves, about our lived experiences thus far on this peeled, endangered planet. As is so often the case, the intensity of our need to be understood distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage.