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This takes me back to the late 90s and going to what were called “bush doofs” — that rhymes in an Australian accent and the ease of its phrasing makes dancing under blacklight the only right thing to do in the woods. In warm months we would take tents, tank tops, army pants, glitter, afore-mentioned plastic rain jackets, acid or E, food, the aluminum espresso maker to make coffee over the fire in the morning, and ourselves to some valley outside the city. The trees would be decorated with neon fabric and giant puppets. There would be bean bags and smelly carpet on the ground in the “chill out zone”. There was always a chai tent, chai being warming and sweet on cool nights, and Food Not Bombs would make vegan lentil slops to be eaten in mismatched cups, no charge. “Making mad love on the heath, tearing off tights with my teeth, but there’s no relief.” I always loved the hours just before dawn the best. When the dancefloor cleared of all the tweakers and only those who really needed to dance all night were left. Maybe five or ten people, not moving much in the sunrise. Maybe just a shoulder twitching, a foot doing a small stomp. DJs would play something like this to eke out the last big dreams of the night, the last time our hands went in the air, maybe get a few people up who’d been smart and slept and were coming back fresh. Sun exploding over the wet green grass. All the colors bold suddenly. People’s faces a little white but euphoric. No-one could coax me away from a dance floor like this; the only times I ever actively wanted to leave were the few times I took acid and then wandering off to giggle at grass stems and leaf buds felt good too. 

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and this, because i just want to

“Dirty,” published in Bound to Struggle #3, 2011 CW: sexual assault

When did you first know you were dirty?

I knelt on the floor of my parents’ bedroom next to their bookshelves. On the lowest shelf, the sex books. The Joy of Sex. The Kama Sutra. I stole Nancy Friday’s compilations of women’s sexual fantasies. Lying on the carpet in my bedroom I skim read the pages, straining for the noise of the car in the driveway. In the one I remember most vividly a woman fantasizes about her Alsatian licking her cunt.

Gross.

Then the ropes and crotchless panties in the dresser drawer. The mail order catalogs. The vibrators. I borrowed one. I turned it on leaning against my bed with my knees up. I stuck it inside me. It didn’t make me come. Later I cleaned it carefully and put it back in the drawer.

In Judy Blume’s teen novel Deenie, Deenie masturbates in the bath with a wash cloth. In the bath I folded a blue washcloth into a rectangle. Through the rainbow curtain across the arch of the doorway, the sound of the television and my mother washing the dishes. The wash cloth on me felt warm and like nothing. I wondered if I should put the wash cloth back on the lip of the bath or put it in the washing basket.

Eventually my father burnt my Judy Blume books. He didn’t say it was because they were dirty. He didn’t have to.

Foul.

His body was gross but at eight I liked it. Thin and older, blue flannel shirtsleeves doubled over sunburnt forearms. We all played on the lawn outside the apartment block with a hose until grass rash scored our bodies. Then upstairs for a bath. Pants off. T-shirt off. Everyone together naked. That day it was just him. I kept my underpants on. At the other end of the bath he eyed me. The faucet roared hot water. He splashed some on my face. Look at my dick, he said. His dick swayed in the water like a buoy. He touched it. Then he bent over fast so his head was on my thigh. What are you doing I said. I want to lick you. Grass clippings were floating on the bath water behind the curve of his back. Why I said. I just do. No way, I said. Saying this felt triumphant. Then his mouth was on me. A warm tongue. Alex stop. I pushed his face up. I got out of the bath and left my clothes on the floor, dripping water down the stairs to my own front door. Now my body was gross.

Disgusting.

I imagined breaking my leg and being in traction. Hospital gowns and flowers on the bedside table. Suspended, I would become magically more popular. A tall handsome basketball player would visit me. I wouldn’t have to move for a long time. In bed at night I stuck my leg in the air. I hung a rope from the top of the cupboard and looped it around my knee. Someone came before I worked out a pulley system.

Gross.

He hadn’t kissed anyone before. I took him to my dorm room. It was early morning and our hangovers were already here. Thick coated tongue, damp heat up the spine. What do you want to do I said. He didn’t say anything. On the bed I rolled a condom onto his dick. Inside me he went limp. The lights were off and he said Um, I’m, uh, uhmm. I sucked him off and got on top of him. Jerked him off. He got hard. Another condom. His penis shriveled. We’ll do other stuff I said. It’s fine. In the dark he sucked me off and his hands found my ankles. They felt snug in his grip. His tongue found a current that looped jolting to my ankles and through his hands and back on through my body as if he had lit a fuse. Do that again I said. Do that again it feels good. With slender hands he held my ankles down and I made myself come.

Days later I was reading in my room. Outside I could hear boys passing. Loud voices. Ankles I heard. My name. Laughter. Ankles. Ankles ankles ankles.

Ew.

My boyfriend said some things.  

Why do you want to have sex so much? he said.

And later Let me gaffer tape you to the easel. 

You’re so obsessed with fucking. Can’t you give it a rest? he said.

Then If it hurts too much could I tape you to the bed?

I don’t want to fuck because you intimidate me he said.

And later Can’t you go on the Pill? I hate condoms.

Maybe you’re like a nympho or something he said.

And one morning when I woke to a burning:

I thought if you were asleep you’d be relaxed my dick would go in your ass easier.

They said I’d fucked half my hometown. I fucking wished.

Dirty.

…He’s pulling the chain tighter sitting on my chest feeding me his cock while he jerks off mine. So many hands, where are they. How did he get to have so many. It’s early summer. The streetlight dapples an orangey glow through the trees onto the grass beside us and the blanket rucks up under my neck. His pale chest looms over me in the dark. You’re a fucking slut he tells me. I believe it. Look at how wide open your mouth is he says taunting. If I come too fast he’ll take his cock out of my mouth and I don’t I try not to I don’t. I don’t think about the noise I am making or the people walking past on the other side of the fence. And then I do. Scent of jasmine on the breeze. You’re so dirty he says. You’re disgusting. Look how badly you want this. You’d do anything I bet. Anything. And I would.

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posting this just to remember “pasted to the armpit of a dry hill”

July 4th 2009, the East Bay The story? Okay. A picnic rug laid on long grass, shallow lake stretching to the right and left. Woods rising to the horizon across the lake. Blue heron and white egret shadowing each other in the weeds. Cherry plum trees. Talk of bird books. Lying on the rug I read to him from a book about lakes and queer boyhoods and sissies. Sour cherry plums on our tongues. Pits versus pips. Salami, refrigerator pickles, bread. Barely any people and no smell of July 4th barbeque or crackers going off. We fuck on a wooden bench placed to look out onto the lake. I put my hands in his pants while I read aloud his head in my lap and when someone shouts "Have you seen a dog? A dog come by here?" he zips up guiltily but my hand is back there and he is yelping soon enough. Loud enough to hear across the lake. In the car driving there I was nervous and couldn't decide what to put on the iPod. Fumbling. Then Steve Earle was singing "The Mountain," one of my favorite songs, and he was humming along. Which made it okay. Turning to face me with blue eyes and golden hair and my hand on his thigh. Walking up a hill he starts hitting me. Slaps my face over and over. Steadies me with one hand tightened at my adam’s apple and undoes my belt with the other hand, grazes my belly, my nipples. Punches my chest. Or maybe it's that I'm bent over and he's pushing into my ass from behind. And I want it, push back, give it to me, yes please give it. Something, all of these things. He turns me to face the trail and takes his hand away and doesn't speak. We keep walking. A few paces later I am running at him, head lowered, butting into his hip again and again and he laughs and shakes his head and tells me I am a colt. Giddy with springtime. Yes I say. Or a bull calf. Later I remember the right name for a bull calf. A steer. At the top of the hill is a fence and below it some green suburb pasted to the armpit of a dry hill. Teenagers on bikes winding slow up the silver grey streets. Calling out. He leans me against the gate. Anyone could see us. He is unzipping my fly and kneeling and pressing my wrists to the metal bar of the gate at the top of the hill and sucking my cock. And I'm coming. That night we are running to the waterfront with Micah and James to watch fireworks explode over the Bay. When the fireworks are over we sit on the lip of the water. An invisible band plays Sousa marches then swing and a gangly man and woman count out swing dance steps along the pavement. Micah finds a folded blow-up beach ball. I blow it up despite everyone's disgust that I would touch my mouth to such a thing. All I can think is, this beachball is dirty? My mouth is dirtier has been more places. I kick it to James on a patch of grass and in the dim light we play soccer. I am competitive. A colt. Running circles around him. I want to run circles around everyone. Run for miles. Watching the ball dribbling it back and forth to myself head lowered focused. Maybe he is watching me. I try not to look. It is only when we are home and I realize I just wanted him all along again in my arms that I know what will make the colt stop tossing its head sigh out its electric shock and settle into restless sleep.

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Queer theory is convulsing; enemies are lining up; chickens are coming home to roost. 

Tonight I was telling Kit the bedtime story in which she climbs into Glinda’s Magic Pink Bubble, cat purr powered of course, to float up into the stars wrapped in blankets as soft as rabbit/kitten fur with a pink/purple pulsing light and Glinda (that is, me) singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” somewhere over the rainbow. Glinda’s Magic Pink Bubble has endless permutations. Sometimes it contains a bed, sometimes the floor opens into podlike tufts you can enfold yourself in. Sometimes it is purple, sometimes pink. Sometimes it goes to the Arctic, sometimes into space. But tonight I finally got it. That is, the womb metaphor. Don’t laugh at me for not getting it before. 

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chestfeeding

[I am writing, it is more helpful to post it somewhere, I am writing. Publicly now.] 

Chestfeeding. Autocorrect doesn’t know this word and changes it to chested. Chestfeeding was what Kit and I did for six weeks. I could call it nursing, but chestfeeding disturbs people more.

In the first six weeks of Kit’s life I didn’t want to see anyone, really. Or yes I did, but only queers and people I knew would understand.

It was Thanksgiving. We’d just arrived at Jeannie and Larry’s house, Emmett’s aunt and uncle. We were in the kitchen. Jeannie said something about Emmett. “She….” something. I did not permit the rushing rage flooding through my chest to pour out of my mouth. Maybe I don’t even remember the rage. Maybe I just remember the hard constriction of my ribs holding it in. “You know that Emmett uses ‘he’, don’t you?” I said to Jeannie. As if she did not. “Oh yes,” she said. I’m reconstructing here: I can’t remember the words, just the generic lines of the exchange, which felt  old and wearing in their familiarity. “Oh yes,” said Jeannie. “But it’s only been a little while, it’s so hard to remember.” “It’s been over ten years,” I said. Or did I say anything at all? Maybe I was so shocked that Jeannie’s memory of ten years is “just a little while” I didn’t speak.

For Jeannie I imagine that it really did feel like a tiny chunk of time: she had known Emmett from when he was small, after all. And she has her own life; her nephew’s transition must seem insignificant compared to the important events of her own life. Sometimes cisgender people take trans and non binary people’s demand for them to use the right pronoun as something narcissistic: are we so self-involved that we don’t realize everyone else has a life? Well, no — from the trans person’s perspective, the pronoun forgetter is the narcissist. If you can’t pay attention to such a change in the person’s mode of address, you look self-involved. But this impasse in accusations of narcissism itself reveals the normativity of what personal events merit “attention” or “notice”: getting married, having children, graduating, all of these things merit attention and gifts from extended family. But pronouns: well!

When Kit was born Emmett’s aunt visited. This was one life event she knew, and her grandchildren were in California. A long way. She brought us chicken soup and she asked to hold Kit. Emmett had forgiven her; he processes family fuckups with equanimity. I had forgotten, but I did not  want her to hold Kit. In our house while Kit was days old I felt like a protective and predatory animal, maybe a bear or a wolf or a large dog. People smelt right or they didn’t: no gray area. Jeannie didn’t smell right. Or rather, she smelled like she got Emmett’s pronoun wrong, which was exactly right, and in my wild animal state made her an enemy. Jeannie came inside, as far as the armchair nearest the door, and sat down. I sat on the couch with the baby. Emmett sent me significant glances. I gave her a couple of minutes. I watched them. Then I invented an excuse to take Kit back.

But I would not, could not, bring myself to nurse Kit while Jeannie was there.

On the other hand, during the first weeks of Kit’s life, our queer family visits: Kelley, Mo, Nastalie, Alyssa, others. Dinners and timeless hours on the living room couch. Tickling the baby. Talking. Drinking tea. This familial presence settled in protectively around me, around us, like a blanket. This was what allowed me to feel, which as it turns out is a pretty big part of having just given birth: I cried all the time; I spent at least half the days furious at Emmett for nothing; I was grumpy and radiantly ecstatic by turns. I couldn’t take my eyes or my fists off Kit, who was still basically  an extension of myself but it was a pleasure to let the queers hold her and murmur about their special uncle names: Captain Alyssa, Uncle Kelley.

During these first days I pulled up my shirt in the heat and dim lighting of the different rooms we occupied, the sleepy bed or bedlike spaces, and offered Kit my nipples to suck on. I offered her my nipples, each side, before we gave her a bottle so she would get the touch and sucking first and maybe stimulate more milk production. There was definitely some milk in there; probably not much. I never pumped, my chest never swelled more than a little, so we never discovered exactly how much. These physical capacities and amounts of bodily fluid are governed by qualifying adverbs: definitely, probably, maybe. Never. Kit sucked. She sucked noisily. It felt best to me when we were alone, even without Emmett present. It felt like stealing. No-one had asked me to do this. For his part, Emmett had said many times that he would never want to chestfeed, and part of my interpretation of our understanding was that chestfeeding emphasized my status as the  gestational parent, which must necessarily belie our compact that we each did equal amounts of the labor. (I will return to the irrelevancy of the 50/50 rule.) So I mainly did it alone, or wanted to do it alone, or felt observed in different kinds of company for ill or better, and nursing was consistent with the private words I murmured to Kit and the knowledge I had that I knew her already, loved her to the depth of her tiny limbs, that she was for all her self-contained qualities a piece of me now moving around in the world,  fondled indiscriminately by others. These propertarian sentiments were my secret.

When Kit was six weeks old, my mother flew to Minneapolis from Melbourne. Kit was crying for an hour or two every night around 7pm, something she only stopped doing when we put her in the carrier and stomped pretend-angrily around the house. She was waking up every two hours. Some nights she would sleep for four or five hours at a time, but it happened rarely. Emmett and I were fucked up. I wrote originally, we were feeling  fucked up, but we were fucked up and it was no longer pretty. And then my mother arrived. She was so happy to see us she cried, volubly, at length, in the airport. I hugged her and and I was glad she was there. We drove her home. Into the bedlike space.

Then, that first night: Mum was holding Kit in the dining-room. She handed Kit to me. “There you go, sweetheart. Go to mummy,” she said.

This time the rage and containment were so immediate that I had to walk out of the room. I took Kit from her and stalked into the kitchen. Emmett was cooking. He had heard. We made eye contact in the way we always do in these moments. Silent telegraphing. The O of our mouths. OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!!!!!!! I didn’t talk about it with her that night. I waited until the next morning to say with constrained hysteria that I wanted to be called Kit’s dad and that we don’t use the word mother or mummy. I said it had hurt my feelings. She already knew this, of course. She apologized. She was jet lagged. She was overcome. She had lost control of her tongue.

I stopped nursing Kit a few days after Mum called me mummy. We did resolve this episode “easily”: we continued as if nothing had happened. But something broke inside me, and what broke was my resolve to persist in the epistemological contradiction of being a “man” and nursing a child. I stopped nursing Kit so often. When we did nurse, I felt anxious that my mother would walk in and see—so I confined nursing even more to our bedroom upstairs, where she rarely came. Kit began to grizzle when she nursed; what little milk was there must have begun drying up. She was hungry. Eventually I gave up offering her my nipples and stuck to the bottle. It was easier. I didn’t have to deal with the “contradiction” that my nursing body presented to the gender normy people among us, one of whom was staying in the house and whom we could not avoid.

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“With maternity a woman achieves a moment of deculturalization: she runs through the early stages of life again in an emotional symbiosis with the child. The outside world seems to her like an alien product quite foreign to the primary needs of the life she is reliving. Maternity is her “trip.” Her consciousness turns spontaneously backwards to the origins of life, and she questions herself.” (Carla Lonzi, “Let’s Spit on Hegel”) 

I read this on AA’s fb and I immediately react: as if maternity is a moment of deculturalization! When in fact it is the most intensive enculturation period I have ever experienced — not just enculturation into motherhood but parenthood, which is an extension of motherhood discourse, as if those books are really written to be read by men. So many feelings. So much bubbling up.

(What feelings? I avoid writing them down, they are liquid, unrecoverable.)

I want to explore, then, how to read Lonzi. And this is also the larger problem of how to read womanist writings, how to engage with feminisms that posit the essential and insurgent nature of women based on their reproductive capacities. I mean, that is my problem. I am not a woman, I am a “man” or more accurately, outside either of these terms. A “man” who has been a woman? Who has the same reproductive capacities? Something like that. Womanism felt, still feels, frighteningly stifling to me, even in its more marxist presentations. But there’s a larger structural critique available, maybe, or a form of reading against the grain and out of the biological into the insurgence of emplacement in that social role, female socialization. Which is about connection and empathy and affect, not rationality. And I can see that it is powerful.

(But as D&G teach us, no deterritorialization without reterritorialization. As if the schoolyard bullying of the mean girls was not its own form of empathy.)

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notes on parenting/making a self: i read that becoming a mother breaks you down and remakes you as a different person a thousand times. i thought it was a cliche. then it became clear that it’s true, even if you aren’t becoming a “mother” but appropriating biological gestation for weird purposes. the best and worst of relationality being as usual that the you dissolves. and while, in new relationships, this can be intense and temporary and joyous, while during break-ups after long periods of codependency one “discovers who one is again”, this time it’s permanent and there is no break-up. i don’t wish to indulge parental exceptionalism here; i imagine intensive fulltime caring in any context to be similar. reading doris lessing’s children of violence series this week i remembered that to be a person and not a reproductive vessel women did -- and still do -- leave, effectively break up with their children and not just their husbands, close off the chasm of grief etc in order to get on with life: starting the southern rhodesia communist party or whatever they need to do. martha quest tries never to think about her daughter caroline again. she attends all the meetings. all the fucking meetings. those are high stakes, higher than i can imagine. 

what interests me most are the workarounds we make to become another person through the new permanent temporality of endless unbreakable relation. both the breaking and the becoming have weird everyday consequences. like, e. stopped reading books entirely while i was pregnant and still only reads art forum every month. he  just started reading novels independently a month ago. i stopped reading philosophy and only read novels. yesterday it occurred to me that recovery from tenure file submission/work on a new project could merely involve hours of reading, just fucking reading. what a revelation. like the obscure german frankfurt school philosopher i took a class with in 2004 who said he began his day of reading at 5.30am, and ended it at 9am. during which time his wife brought him breakfast. no-one is bringing me breakfast. but that doesn’t mean i can’t steal time to read. 

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i’ve been a rock, or a lump, and it might continue to be for the longest time. in suspension. if suspension involves weight and density. 

and constant sound. 

e. just booked an art trip to norway and while he booked the flights talked through all the possibilities -- dates, airlines, new york layover, what to do in the new york layover, whether his brother will be mad at the shorter time of the trip -- and during this i listened like a good egg. gave some advice. encouraged. and read a fred moten essay and a review of his new book and tried to recover my old email to recover my old tumblr account, unsuccessfully, and registered this, finally. all these things while listening. this is what it is, this world i live in since kit. divided attention. structural attention deficit. at work it’s students knocking on the door, at home it’s questions/errands or kid time. in fact, kid time is what absorbs me, if i’m well-slept, it is absorbing to watch and improvise with her. 

i don’t take adderall, i don’t drink caffeinated coffee, and i am so fucking unproductive my brain has retracted. 

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facebook is a desert. i’m back.