The Ginger Child

by Patrick Flanery

  In queer subcultures, even when discussing other adults, gay men often describe one another as boys. All of our queer male friends and many of our female friends – both straight and queer – refer to Andrew and me as ‘boys’ or ‘the boys’ (in fact I can think of only one friend, a woman, who has ever described us as ‘men’ or ‘the men’ or ‘you men’). Privately I have often cringed at being called a boy, since it seems to undermine our adulthood, even to be a way for straight women in particular, perhaps, to occlude the vision of us as two men who fuck, as if the idea of a man is too close to their idea of who their husbands are and the thought of Andrew and me being like their husbands in categorical terms too threatening to their own sense of who they love, to whom they are partnered. From queer (male) friends, ‘boy’ seems to me too close to a cult of youth always susceptible, at best, to critique.

  But in thinking through these questions alongside Ngai’s argument, I begin to feel that construing myself as a boy in order to soften my own masculinity, or owning its already existing softness, might not be such a bad thing – nor require such a great leap.

  I spent all of my adolescence and most of my twenties trying to police the performance of my gender as a way of responding to society’s constructions and perceptions of me as feminine.

  I adjusted the way I walked, conscious not to ‘switch’ my hips.

  I tried to modulate the queerness out of my voice.

  I felt a real sense of outrage when people – family and strangers alike – told me I would make someone a good wife (usually when they noticed that I was a good cook). My indignation was not born of any distaste for the position of a wife, or femininity, or even effeminacy, but because such comments refused the possibility of a domestic man who could embrace or embody, indeed emulate, those qualities at which his mother might have excelled.

  In response I tried to construct a masculine (or masculinized) self who was also adept at the skills traditionally regarded as the preserve of the mother or wife, so that in many ways I performed what Freud theorized, transforming myself into a masculine version of my mother, a mother who herself resisted the gendered expectations of wives and mothers. In her own gender-nonconforming way, my mother adopted and mastered the home maintenance and improvement skills traditionally regarded as the preserve of the husband or father. This meant that my maternal model was always an androgynous, ambiguous one, while my paternal model was in some senses effete, marked in numerous ways by the qualities that he lacked, and was conscious of lacking.

  I return to Ngai and discover her quotation of Melanie Klein, whose Envy and Gratitude I spend a few days reading. Klein argues that ‘envy plays a part’ – for men and women – ‘in the desire to take away the attributes of the other sex, as well as to possess or spoil those of the parent of the same sex’. Surely, I think, Klein’s argument diverges from my own and is not applicable in my exploration of queer male parenthood.

  Or is it?

  If I think of my envy of the birth mother of a child I might adopt, or the surrogate of a child to whom I might be the biological father, would the envied reproductive organs and the envied maternal intimacy with the child not be comparable to Klein’s idea, as Ngai explains it, of ‘the envied breast’ that ‘becomes a “devouring” breast’? Is my envy not, in fact, a very Kleinian envy, an ‘angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable’ that drives ‘the envious impulse… to take it away or to spoil it’?26 I begin to think that I am embodying the exact qualities of envy that Klein elaborates when she writes that

  Excessive envy of the breast is likely to extend to all feminine attributes, in particular to the woman’s capacity to bear children. If development is successful, the man derives compensation for these unfulfilled feminine desires by a good relation to his wife or lover and by becoming the father of the children she bears him. This relation opens up experiences such as identification with his child which in many ways make up for early envy and frustrations; also the feeling that he has created the child counteracts the man’s early envy of the mother’s femininity.27

  But where does that leave me? In the absence of a wife or female lover, in the absence of a successful attempt to adopt or to engage and pay for the services of a surrogate, in the absence of becoming a parent and identifying with the child or children I might have, what happens to my own unfulfilled feminine desires? What do I do with them except experience them as frustrated, and therefore as feelings that only intensify the ugliness, the effeteness, of my envy?28

  There may be a solution in Ngai’s suggestion that I could rethink envy not as a sign of that which I lack, but instead as ‘a motivated affective stance’, an active feeling that positions me in ways that would be productive rather than humiliating or dispiriting, allowing me to see that envy can point to a deficiency which is not indicative of any moral or other shortcoming, but instead as a function of different forms of inequality.

  Here, though, I find myself needing to expand on Ngai’s argument to allow for inequality that is the consequence of biological and gender difference, and, more specifically for me, situational infertility. I can imagine people scoffing that I am just a man who wants to have his cake and eat it, to be a man not only with all the physical biological apparatus of a man but also that of a woman, to contain both.

  But that is not the case.

  I do not actively wish to become something that – barring revolutions in medical science – would be impossible, but I can still envy the pregnant woman on the train for whom I give up my seat, envy her natural capacity to reproduce. Ngai asks why envy for another is by default thought ‘unwarranted or petty’ or, she writes, ‘dismissed as an overreaction, as delusional or even hysterical – a reflection of the ego’s inner workings rather than a polemical mode of engagement with the world’. What, she wonders, if envy were regarded instead as a way of registering social inequalities (‘disparities’ is the word she uses)? I know that she is thinking of economic disparities, but why not include differences of gender that encode social power, as well as personal affective wealth, assuming that having a biological child is, more often than not, emotionally enriching over the longer term?

  This envy is not, I am sure, a feeling only I feel, and yet – as Ngai reminds us – as soon as envy is expressed publicly, it ‘will always seem unjustified, frustrated, and effete’ even if it marks a very real situation of inequality. My own envy’s focus on those whom I envy may well be misconstrued as ‘egocentric’, merely a sign of my histrionic character and psychology. Understood in this way, envy’s transformation of the self (myself) into a subject that might be received by others as excessively theatrical (or histrionic) maps onto the characterization of femme women (whatever their orientation) and of queer men (femmes most of all). My envy of female reproductive capacity is, according to this view, only an effect of my histrionic egocentrism, and not – as I myself have previously understood it – a reassessment of the ways in which reproduction is unevenly distributed.

  For some religious conservatives, my thinking, my very position, is absurd and horrific: queer couples, male couples in particular, should not be allowed anywhere near children.

  For some feminists, my thinking, my very position, is grotesque: white, cisgendered males already have so many social advantages, how could their envy of female reproductive capacity be anything other than selfish and self-regarding?

  For some queer men, my thinking, my very position, is a symptom of internalized homophobia and self-hatred: I want to ‘ape’ opposite-sex couples and coupledom to such an extent that I envy women, that I appear to want to wish away my identity as a ‘gay man’, to obliterate my subjectivity, my own queer selfhood.

  My expression of envy for the female capacity to bear children is, I acknowledge, potentially an antagonistic response to the real inequality I feel, however ridiculous it may seem to many, however ugly that envy may be construed as being.29

  But imagine a world in which the parenth
ood of queer couples was not always already agonistic, a parenthood whose very continuation requires both political vigilance and a willingness to wage legal and social protest battles. What if, in such a hypothetical place and time, envy felt by a man in a same-sex relationship for the reproductive capacity of women opened up new possibilities of social formation? By this I don’t mean anything like a world in which women are exploited or their reproductive choices placed in the hands of men, but instead one in which the male couple’s desire to parent (and on some occasions actively to reproduce) requires neither the enrichment of lawyers and fertility clinics and the medicalization of the process, nor the reliance on social welfare systems that often mismanage the foster care and adoption of many endangered children, and that are also riven with both conscious and unconscious bias against male couples in particular.

  ‘Moralized and uglified to such an extent that it becomes shameful’ for those experiencing it, Ngai says, ‘envy also becomes stripped of its potential critical agency – as an ability to recognize, and antagonistically respond to, potentially real and institutionalized forms of inequality’. In English, the meaning of envy has undergone a significant transformation over time. Its primary sense was initially ‘[m]alignant or hostile feeling; ill-will, malice, enmity’, and secondarily ‘[a]ctive evil, harm, mischief’. Although the third meaning is present as early as (if not earlier than) these others, the idea of envy as a ‘feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another’ is arguably now the primary way in which the word is used and understood.30

  Significantly, the OED also reveals later meanings of envy from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that lack any malevolent associations and instead name the ‘[d]esire to equal another in achievement or excellence’, a ‘longing for the advantages enjoyed by another person’. Envy, of course, comes to us originally from the French envie (which itself derives from Latin invidus); as well as meaning desire ‘mixed with spite and resentment’, the first definition of envie contains the meaning, ‘[d]ésir de connaître le même bonheur qu’autrui, d’être à sa place’, or desire to know the same happiness as another, to be in her place, as well as to wish, without jealousy, to know the same happiness or the same advantages of another (‘souhaiter, sans jalousie, connaître le même bonheur ou les mêmes avantages qu’elle’). As a second definition, envie also means a more or less imperious desire to do or to have something (‘Désir plus ou moins impérieux de faire ou d’avoir quelque chose’).31 Perhaps, then, the envy I feel is simply a very French envy, rather than a Kleinian one, and therefore an envy that I can marshal more easily as part of a ‘motivated affective stance’, in Ngai’s words.

  What if envy, in the particular way I am experiencing it, were understood as a desire, however fruitless, to equal or emulate the achievement of a mother, to long for the advantages enjoyed by a woman who chooses freely to reproduce, and to do so without any more than the usual complications and difficulties and risks (whatever ‘usual’ might mean in such cases)?

  What if it might also mean to think and emotionally inhabit the full spectrum of difficulty and complication and risk that pertains in conception and pregnancy and delivery, and what if it were to understand that, too, as part of what I envy when I contemplate the child or children I might have? I will never be able to be a (biological) mother to those children, and in enacting my own parenthood I will always envy the woman who carried that child or those children, but I will envy without a sense of enmity or hostility or a desire to destroy.

  Yet I know, too, that towards the birth mother of any child I might adopt, the feeling of envy for the time that she has spent with the child will be marked by an inescapable sense of enmity towards her, not because the envy itself will be interwoven with ill-will, but because I would feel certain of her inability to parent and conscious of the way that such failure has inevitably marked the child who will be the only point of connection between us. In a more complicated way, I will also feel envy for the incomparable intimacy she experienced, carrying the child she will have given up voluntarily, or who will have been taken from her through her failure to keep it safe and look after it.

  All of those complex feelings will coalesce around an envy that marks me, too, as being fearful of my own deficiency – fearful even of my own potential for deficiency as a parent.

  ALIEN: COVENANT

  In the analeptic prologue to Alien: Covenant, released five years after Prometheus, Peter Weyland puts David 8 through his aesthetic paces – identifying works of art and design, demonstrating his capacity to play Wagner on a Steinway concert grand, executing his fine valeting skills. The queer energies marking David, as well as his relationship with Weyland, are even clearer than in the first film. Looking to Michelangelo’s David (the work of a man we might now understand as gay, the artwork as surrogate child to its gay father), Weyland’s David himself stands as the technological offspring of the potentially gay man who, in the absence of having a biological son, creates the simulacrum of one.

  While Weyland acknowledges this relationship, saying, ‘I am your father,’ when David asks, ‘Am I… your son?’, Weyland qualifies his initial statement, saying, ‘You are my creation,’ only later again to address David as ‘son’, but just as quickly ordering him to ‘pour the tea’ as if he were a servant. At the beginning of Prometheus, Weyland describes David as ‘the closest thing to a son I will ever have’. For David, this oscillation between filial acceptance and rejection opens up the possibility that Weyland is his father, but that he is not Weyland’s son, because one may be father to something and not just someone. Paternity is acknowledged only moments later to be disavowed, the filial relationship reduced to one of mechanical making and nothing more, the son susceptible to becoming the almost-son who is no more than a thing. However much pride the maker may feel for his creation, the claim of the son upon the father is, for Weyland, seemingly more than he can bear, and this, we might guess, is key to the psychosis that warps the android’s programming. David’s own agency and subjectivity, his son-ness, is denied in the moment of his birth, rendering him only creation and thus object – an object that commits itself thereafter to asserting its agency, and the subjectivity that accompanies it.

  Unlike the Prometheus of the first film, the Covenant is a colonization ship carrying fifteen crew members, most of them married (including a male couple), but also two thousand colonists and 1140 human embryos. This is a vessel of reproduction, sent to populate a habitable planet – Origae-6 – in a far corner of the galaxy. While the human passengers are in hibernation, the android Walter One, David’s successor model (again played by Michael Fassbender), watches over them in co-operation with the ship’s female-voiced computer, MU-TH-UR (‘mother’). Where in the first film David favoured skin-tight unitard jumpsuits and modelled his speech on Peter O’Toole, Walter dresses in baggy clothes, speaks in a gravelly voice with an American accent, and walks less with the gait of a closeted gay Olympian than an unambiguously heterosexual college quarterback, instantly reading as normatively masculine, even ‘butch’.

  As part of his duties, Walter monitors the hibernation chambers and removes an embryo that has spontaneously haemorrhaged. After a neutrino blast damages the ship, resulting in the deaths of forty-seven colonists, sixteen embryos and the captain (James Franco), the crew comes out of hibernation to make repairs. In the process of doing so, they receive a mysterious signal originating from a habitable planet only three weeks’ journey distant, while their intended destination would take a further seven years to reach. The insecure new captain, Chris Oram (Billy Crudup), decides to reroute the Covenant, following the mysterious signal rather than risking a return to hibernation and another potential accident that might result in additional loss of life.

  A Christian, Oram believes he is choosing life over death. Daniels (Katherine Waterston, the film’s female lead), widow of the former captain, is quick to warn Oram he is making a mi
stake. Religious faith, however, is what drives him, even as he confesses to his wife that ‘you can’t be a person of faith and be counted on to make qualified, rational decisions’. When the Covenant arrives at this nameless planet, Oram and most of the crew – including Daniels and Walter – descend in a lander to check it out. Although verdant and mountainous, there is no sign of animal or insect life. But there is a crashed spaceship, recognizable as belonging to that race of alien Engineers first encountered in Prometheus.

  While exploring the crashed alien vessel, Daniels finds Elizabeth Shaw’s Weyland Corp dog tags, as well as a hologram of her (this was the ‘signal’ the crew of the Covenant followed). If we had any doubts about where we might be, those quickly dissipate. This must be the Engineers’ home world, the planet Shaw was determined to find. And just as quickly, everything begins to go to hell.

  Unlike in Prometheus, in this outing of the franchise it is exclusively male crew members – most of them undeveloped characters serving as little more than props for horror gore – who act as hosts for alien life. Security officer Ledward (Benjamin Rigby) is the first to succumb when a cluster of pathogen spores lodges inside his ear and quickly generates a ‘neomorph’ alien that bursts from his back. In attempting to destroy the bloodthirsty alien infant, Pilot Maggie Faris (Amy Seimetz) blows up the lander with herself inside it. When they are victims, women are either collateral damage in the film’s alien–human battles or killed by the creatures without ever being used as reproductive hosts.