In Huston’s film, Annie’s desire to find her birth parents propels her into real physical peril. Daddy Warbucks is on the verge of adopting her. He has blackmailed the alcoholic and abusive orphanage matron, Miss Hannigan, to get her to sign the necessary papers. He is willing to make the empathetic leap necessary to take in this precocious ‘cheeky’ child who disrupts his vision of himself and the orderliness of his world, even as Annie is also a source of light and affection and joy. Her fixation on the birth family persuades Warbucks to help her search for that couple, offering a reward that invites the attention of Hannigan’s brother, the escaped convict Rooster, and his girlfriend Lily, who pursue Annie almost to her death.
The film’s message for adopters and for the adopted is clear: do not go looking for the past. Do not venture in search of biological origins. Even if the birth parents are already dead, as in Annie’s case, you may find much worse aspirant parents, pretenders who are in it only for their own enrichment. This message neatly (if uncomfortably) reflects the anxiety of so many adopters, that in the case of a closed adoption the birth parents might one day emerge to wreak havoc on the carefully constructed adoptive home.
Faced with a real child, with real biological parents and real biological siblings, I suspect these fears might not seem unfounded. We would have to accept the possibility of spending the rest of our lives entangled with people whose very presence could be difficult and painful for us to manage. We would have to trust in ourselves to find ways of negotiating future life events, the child wanting to know his or her biological parents, perhaps wishing them present for milestones like graduations and holidays and marriage and even the birth of their own children, who, I start reminding myself, would be our grandchildren only in name but truly the grandchildren of those biological parents who I don’t really want to know in the first place. All of this requires faith that any attenuation of family connection would never threaten whatever bonds we might be able to forge over the course of our daughter’s or our son’s childhood and adolescence. It demands a bravery I will have to learn to cultivate.
YOU
When you arrive at the home of your foster parents you are just over twelve months old. It is after dark, late evening, or perhaps even later, the middle of the night.
I can imagine how terrifying it must have been – even if the transition was calm, even if your mother and father agreed in that moment that they could not look after you.
I know that being placed in a strange car, driven in the night, arriving at a strange house, passed to the arms of strangers, however loving and warm they might have been, however hard they would have worked to make you comfortable, to reassure you, to wash you and dress you in clean pyjamas, when you were eventually put in a strange crib in a strange room, with the smell of the sea coming in through the open window on a warm spring night, I am sure you must have been terrified. Your siblings, who had done their best to fill in the gaps of your parents’ care, were suddenly gone. Your parents, who I want to imagine showed you love, had vanished. The rooms that you had come to know as your own were lost.
In this new house, in this new place, everything would have been different, sounds different, the quality of darkness in a village different from the lights of the town you had come from. Silence would have magnified the difference. It might have been the first night in your life that you slept in a room alone, with no other children to wake you or prod you or coo to you when you woke in the night and cried out.
ENVY
In the midst of this process of searching that seems increasingly thwarted, I feel anxiety and paranoia and a sort of despoiled hope. Hope stripped of its anticipatory happiness or the pleasure that should accompany it. Hope that is closer to desperate longing, undercut by a certainty that what I hope for will inevitably be disappointed. I feel envy towards friends who already have children, continue to have children, may yet have children. I feel envious of strangers with children. I feel envy when I see a young father parenting well, on his own, parenting warmly and closely in a way that my own father did not. I feel envious of pregnant women. I feel envious of trans men who are able to become pregnant and give birth and then, miraculously, carry on being men. I feel envious of people I know or meet with biological children who are smart, funny, well adjusted, healthy, laughing, or who, when sad or injured or ill, can be comforted with comparative ease, people who look like one another and are able to inhabit their lives in such apparently uncomplicated ways. I am envious of that security and stability, that sense of uninterrogated connection.
Literary critic and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai explains in her book Ugly Feelings that envy has historically been seen both as a feminine and a working-class feeling. In Freudian psychology, for instance, women have been constructed (problematically) as envying the penis, and in any number of classist descriptions of the proletariat, we see (problematically) those with fewer material resources envying the objects and luxuries that the bourgeoisie and the rich enjoy. However troubling these examples are, Ngai notes that envy is ‘the only negative emotion’ that is ‘defined specifically by… forms of inequality’, and this is the spur to her important intervention in thinking through the implications of how envy operates, and how our sense of it might be revised.
What Ngai suggests is that envy becomes the mark of a given person’s ‘polemical response’ to relations that are characterized by their sense of having less than some other person. The problem arises when, as is so often the case, society begins to think of envy as a characteristic of the envying individual, as being integral to who they are, so that envying people are seen as ‘lacking’ or ‘deficient’, marked by their envy in ways that become essentializing: I envy therefore I am lack, I am deficiency.
The consequence is that when a person’s envy – my envy of people with children, for instance – becomes visible to a wider public, it will, Ngai says, ‘always seem unjustified and critically effete’, even and perhaps especially when the inequality that is the foundation of such envy is objectively real.13 This is where things get tricky, or sticky, because Ngai suggests that while a person might envy a specific thing – a wealthy friend’s sports car, a colleague’s large and beautiful home, a neighbour’s lavish lifestyle – that person’s envy develops into a desire to destroy the car, the home, the lifestyle that the envying person wishes she or he possessed. We wish for that which we see others enjoying, and the unfulfillment of those desires pushes us to want to destroy the thing in order to ruin the enjoyment of the person we envy and so neutralize the ugly feeling we find ourselves experiencing.
Envy is what I feel, and I know it is a bad feeling, an ugly feeling, but it is one I can never seem to escape. To reveal this envy publicly is to open myself to the derision of those people – perhaps friends among them – who may see it as unjustified and, given the queer valence of my envy’s spin, unquestionably effete. Look at that queer man longing for a baby, envious of straight couples, longing as if having children were a fundamental human right, longing in a way that makes it seem as though he is aping the maternal impulse.
What is it to be effete? Ngai is not clear whether she means effete as in ‘ineffectual’ and ‘affected’ or ‘over-refined’ (although that last seems unlikely), or whether she means effete as in ‘weak’ or ‘effeminate’.14 In revealing my envy publicly, displaying my envy of those with children, I am marking myself as effeminate and weak, signalling my incapacity and deficiency, the fact that as a couple, my husband and I lack the physiology, the capital, and the social relationships to procure for ourselves what so many of our friends produce or acquire with what appears to be relative ease.
Voicing this envy, including in these pages, marks the absolute entry of that bad feeling into ‘a public domain of signification’ as Ngai puts it, in ways that may appear both unjustified and effete. Why should he feel envy when he has chosen not to have a relationship with a woman? Why should he feel envy when he and his husband have not chosen more lucrative career
s that would provide the income necessary to hire a surrogate abroad? Why should he feel envy when he does not open himself to more radical social relations that might grant him what he desires? This is what I imagine those who judge me may think.
The word effete appears in the seventeenth century, derived from ‘effetus’ in Latin, meaning ‘worn out by bearing’.15 Does this mean that men who are called effete are comparable to a woman who is no longer fertile from having had too many children? Must Andrew and I be regarded as weak (worn out) and feminine in our situational infertility? Is being seen as weak or feminine necessarily a bad thing for two white cisgendered men at this particular moment in history?
I am reading Ngai’s book on a London train at rush hour one October evening, surrounded by commuters crammed together and bound for their suburban homes. Whatever their class affiliation, most of the people around me look potentially… enviable. They are well dressed. They have expensive mobile phones and tablets. They wear noise-cancelling headphones that cost hundreds of pounds, smartwatches that are just as pricey, designer shoes and clothes, everything branded and broadcasting a certain cultural or market value that is supposed to arouse desire in others, even to inspire envy.
But here I get caught in a passage in which Ngai is not thinking about material tokens of envy, at least not directly, but instead about Freud’s formulation of penis envy and those feminist critiques of his ideas that focus on the construction of femininity in terms of ‘lack’. While Ngai agrees with such arguments she is also critical of them for conceiving of envy as the characteristic of a person marked by their deficiency, by what they lack, instead of thinking about how the envying person feels in the face of what they see as an unfair distribution of things.
I trip over Ngai’s discussion of Freudian penis envy not because I disagree with her analysis, but because my mind gets stuck thinking about it. I assume that no woman around me on the train, no woman I know, could have ever felt penis envy because the idea of such a feeling strikes me as risible. In the same instant that I think how absurd the idea of penis envy is, I think also of the spectrum of trans experience and realize there must be trans men who were not born with a penis but might wish to have one, and while this phenomenon is distinct from anything Freud theorized, distinct also from the ways his ideas have been challenged by feminist and queer critics, it is still envy of a kind, or if not envy then an active desire for that other set of genitalia, and there is nothing risible about that, nor would it be an envy that seeks ultimately to destroy the envied object.
Thinking along these lines, reading Ngai in this sweaty train, I am able to articulate for myself for the first time a feeling of womb envy and to understand this not as a quality that marks my own deficiency, or my desire to have a sex change and be a woman (which is absent from this thinking), or my desire to destroy women or their reproductive capacities, but my consciousness of the possibilities – and benefits – that having a vagina and uterus and ovaries and fallopian tubes would afford me, imagining what it would mean to be a man with female genitalia.16
In Gus Van Sant’s biopic about Harvey Milk, when the homophobic city supervisor who will later assassinate Milk sarcastically asks him if it is possible for two men to reproduce, Milk laughs and says, ‘No, but God knows we keep trying.’
A while ago I came across a 1968 article on myths of male pregnancy published in The Journal of Sex Research. John Money and Geoffrey Hosta describe what they characterize as a widespread belief in the possibility of male rectal pregnancy discovered in the course of interviews conducted with gay black adolescents and young men in the American South.17 They situate this folklore in a longer cultural tradition, suggesting that in Greek mythology, Pallas Athena’s ‘birth’ from Zeus’s head ‘is an example of a mythological allusion to a semblance of pregnancy in the male’ comparable to ‘the Biblical account of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib’. And, in a more ordinary form, they point to traditions of the ‘couvade’ across cultures.
The five subjects Money and Hosta interview, ranging in age from fourteen to thirty, are fairly consistent in their descriptions of what they each call a ‘blood baby’. Their youngest source, Dan, explains that conception occurs through the contact of semen with an internal organ, not with an egg, and ‘the semen itself… develops into the baby’. Conception is followed by bleeding from the rectum, accompanied by feelings of illness and swelling of the abdomen. Gestation lasts for six weeks to three months before delivery, ‘attended by labor pains’. The baby, which some of their sources say is stillborn, others that it may live for several hours, is said to resemble a smaller, ‘gelatinous’ version of an actual infant, but with ‘no ears, eyes, or hair’. Such a baby, Dan says, ‘may be kept for… up to five days’ before it ‘evaporates or dissolves’.
Money and Hosta do not speculate on the origins of the myth but frame it as a symptom of pregnancy envy. One of their subjects believed that men may contain one or more of their mother’s eggs, which become ‘trapped in the rectum’ during their own gestation and are later fertilized during anal sex, while another subject believed that men – perhaps implicitly only gay men – may contain female organs susceptible to fertilization by the sperm of a partner.
Although it is difficult to give much credence to Money’s and Hosta’s report – on account of the small size of their sample group and lack of transparency about the ways in which they expressed their questions – it is suggestive nonetheless to think not only of the ‘blood baby’ myth, but also those much older myths (of Adam’s production of Eve and Zeus’s of Pallas Athena) as symptoms of the envy some men feel for women’s reproductive capacity.
In an article on womb envy, Diana Semmelhack, Larry Ende, Karen Farrell and Julieanne Pojas assert that ‘in a culture that… devalues nurturing’, such a concept remains difficult even to understand.18 Despite the fact that there is longstanding and substantial evidence for the phenomenon being widespread, ‘mainstream psychological literature’ has ignored it, they say, because the very idea undermines ‘basic assumptions of our culture’, which is to say that western culture has tended both to assume and insist on power dynamics privileging men over women and that the idea of men envying women has to be suppressed or denied. Where Semmelhack and her fellow authors fall short for me is in their failure to imagine that womb envy might be a feeling that can be lived positively by the man who experiences it, that envy itself does not necessarily have to be a negative or ugly feeling. They insist that womb envy, which they see present across Abrahamic religious traditions, is itself intrinsic to the marginal positioning of the act of raising and caring for children, and view such envy as instrumental in the creation of ‘a male-dominated, authoritarian society’. The psychoanalyst Rosalind Minsky writes about the phenomenon with much greater subtlety, identifying the repression and denial of womb envy in men as the source or driver of male misogyny in multiple forms, but also recognizing that if men could ‘gain access to their unconscious envy of women’, this would have a transformative effect not just on those men, but also on society more broadly.19
Womb envy, when acknowledged in the mind of the man who experiences this feeling, when made a conscious facet of his psychology, can be mobilized as a positive feeling of admiration that neither essentializes women as (potential) mothers, nor seeks to venerate them at the cost of their full liberty, their agency and participation in cultural or professional life. For the queer man in whom physical attraction to women is largely or even entirely absent and for whom dependence on women for emotional and material support in the face of rejection by heterosexual men is often both necessary and sustaining, this process (and processing) is, I suspect, easier to accomplish.
A significant part of the problem, I begin to believe, is how we understand envy itself.
PROMETHEUS
During a summer spent in upstate New York before we embark on our adoption journey, Andrew and I take ourselves off to see Prometheus. It is the first 3-D movie I have watch
ed since I was a child and Creature from the Black Lagoon was on television at an election-night party for a candidate my parents were supporting. I find myself instantly spellbound, although less by the gore and action than by Michael Fassbender’s performance as the android David 8. Also by the way the 3-D technology has evolved since the last time I experienced it, but instead of the images of spaceships and sublime landscapes I was expecting to mesmerize me, it is the way those three-dimensional illusions accentuate Fassbender’s mechanical thinness. I cannot look away from him, nor do I want to.
Over the coming years I will watch the movie over and over, viewing it on flights back and forth to America and South Africa and on television at home in London until the fantastic locations of the film become a space in my own mind, the occupation of which – placing myself mentally in the ship Prometheus, alongside Fassbender’s David, imagining myself as another android, as one of his human victims, sometimes even envisioning myself in his own place – is, when all else fails, the surest way of falling asleep.
It is only in 2017, when we see the sequel, Alien: Covenant, that I start to understand the precise nature of my obsession with David, who appears in both films. It is not only a matter of Fassbender’s beauty, or the particular aesthetics and affects of the sinister queer character he plays; I find myself in a state of surprising and strange identification, wrapped in a cocoon of repulsion and desire. Critics and reviewers of Alien: Covenant were keen to identify David with Milton’s Satan (at one point, David quotes from Paradise Lost), and in both films references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein abound, but what is more interesting for me, and what I suspect explains my fascination, is David’s framing in the second film as a queer father.
The Ginger Child Page 9