Roberta Smith, in her review of Colored sculpture in the New York Times, wrote that she believed this speech was ‘clearly directed at a woman’, that the puppet is ‘a prisoner of love, tormented by his own emotions or perhaps an abusive woman’.40 But surely the point is that whomever is being addressed might be anyone at all, man or woman or child. This is what makes the work so distressing. We should not assume, either, that the voice is necessarily meant to be that of the puppet itself, himself, although his eyes flash with an array of animations and found footage as the voiceover plays. We could even think of the puppet, or the child figure he stands for, as a screen onto which we project our own responses: our disgust and empathy, our revulsion and horror.
Wolfson has described the sculpture as ‘a cartoony, life-size figure that’s almost like a piece of sports equipment… Formally, it’s extremely glossy, reflective.’ Ajay Kurian, writing about the piece in Artspace, claims that it’s ‘stupid to feel for the puppet’, but equally that ‘it’s impossible not to’.41 As disturbing as I find Colored sculpture, I cannot agree that it’s stupid to feel something for this strange mechanical creature. The violence might seem inconsequential because the figure is so toy-like, so stylized in its imitation of the human, but inconsequential it is not. Wolfson has created an object that insists we engage with the duelling forces of empathy and revulsion it engenders.
The question is, what do we do with those feelings?
As so often happens when we are faced – in public for instance – with an adult mistreating a child, do we choose to inhabit our disgust and discomfort and so look away, refusing our natural feelings of empathy for the vulnerable? Or do we watch and live the feelings concurrently, conscious of the fact that it is our own shame at our helplessness, our social inability or incapacity to intervene, that creates a sense of disgust when the subject himself – the abused puppet child – is doing nothing objectively disgusting? He is acted upon. He is without agency. He is pulled and dragged and held aloft by invisible hands.
Kurian argues that the figure is a symptom and sign of a moment in which white men in America feel themselves victimized by greater racial equality. This seems plausible enough. But to call Wolfson’s puppet a ‘petulant child’, ‘freckled, sneering, bucktoothed’, who ‘distills something deeply unsettling about our moment and potentially our foreseeable future’, fails to see the figure as at once passive, victimized, resilient, and potentially still enraged by his mistreatment, and by the ways in which he has been rendered object rather than subject.
Kurian published his article a week after the 2016 presidential election, a week after those awful three days of our failed Introductions. While I cannot agree with all of his conclusions, it is nonetheless helpful to see him locate Wolfson’s work in its larger context, and reading the article more than a year later, looking at the photograph of Donald Trump alongside the image of the red-haired Colored sculpture, I am struck by something else: Trump, too, was once a ginger child.
This is not to suggest that I feel sympathy for Trump. But I realize that I have come to see this period of our lives as the season of the ginger child, the child we realized we could not take, the mechanical child of art that suggests both victim and villain, the queer and sensitive child I was myself.
Even the Dutch king, at some point in his life, vaguely strawberry blonde as he is now, might once have been called a ginger child.
But then isn’t every child ultimately a ginger child, even if not red-haired, even if not, as ginger suggests in Cockney rhyming slang, queer (ginger beer, queer)? At some point in childhood are we not all ‘cautious, careful; gentle’, as well as ‘easily hurt or broken’, ‘sensitive’ or ‘fragile’?
And each of us – depending on our own particular experience, that series of events, triggers, situations, acts, opportunities, and constraints that constitutes a childhood – has the possibility of growing up to be a killer or a king, or any of the countless identities in between.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Interior: Monkeyboy’ originally appeared in Granta 136: Legacies of Love, Summer 2016.
Portions of the chapter ‘The Ginger Child’ appeared in slightly different form on the Times Literary Supplement website in June 2018 under the title ‘Punch and Injury’.
Thanks to Kate Gottgens, Zoë Wicomb, Sigrid Rausing, Gail Flanery, Nan van der Vlies, Clare Drysdale, Tamsin Shelton, Sarah Chalfant, Alba Ziegler-Bailey, Rebecca Nagel, and everyone at Atlantic Books and the Wylie Agency.
Thanks as always to Andrew, who survives it with me.
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NOTES
1 See, for instance: Olivia Rudgard, ‘Surrogate mother who changed her mind must hand baby to gay couple, court rules’, The Daily Telegraph, 17 November 2017, online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/17/surrogate-mother-changed-mind-givingbaby-must-hand-child-gay/. See also: Damien Gayle and Press Association, ‘High court orders surrogate mother to hand baby to gay couple’, The Guardian, 6 May 2015, online: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/may/06/high-court-orders-surrogatemother-baby-gay-couple. As of 2018, there is a movement to reform British surrogacy law and the Law Commission is undertaking a three-year review. For further information, see: Monidipa Fouzer, ‘Commission begins work on “not fit for purpose” surrogacy laws’, The Law Gazette, 4 May 2018, online: https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/commission-begins-work-on-not-fit-for-purposesurrogacy-laws/5065988.article. The government has also issued advice on surrogacy for the first time; see: Olivia Rudgard, ‘Tell children created through surrogacy how they were born, says first-ever Government guidance’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2018, online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/28/tell-children-created-surrogacy-born-says-first-ever-government/
2 Elsewhere, Edelman makes such polemical assertions (though these are part of a more nuanced argument) as ‘Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis’. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 75, 29.
3 Ibid., 17, 31.
4 The in-joke is that the character played by Lady Gaga, whose fans in real life are known as ‘Little Monsters’, gives birth to a little monster.
5 For a suggestive exploration of the ghostly gay child, whom The Countess’s vampire children in some ways recall, see Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009). I am grateful to Theresa Geller for this suggestion.
6 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, trans. James Strachey, in Joseph Sandler, Ethel Spector Person and Peter Fonagy, eds., Freud’s On Narcissism: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2018), 21. This passage is also cited by Edelman in No Future.
7 Let us not forget, however, that Alex’s husband (Bentley’s character, John Lowe) is the biological father from hell: a serial killer so normatively retrogressive that he murders those who violate the Ten Commandments – surely every queer adoptive parent’s worst nightmare. It is he who ultimately kills Elizabeth.
8 Later in the season, Alex will lure them back to the hotel and sacrifice them to bisexual vampire Ramona Royale (Angela Bassett).
9 See Emily Nussbaum’s article ‘How Ryan Murphy Became the Most Powerful Man in TV’, The New Yorker, 14 May 2018, online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-ryanmurphy-became-the-most-powerful-man-in-tv. For an illuminating analysis of The New Normal, see Lynne Joyrich, ‘Queer Television Studies: Currents, Flows, and (Main)streams’, in Cinema Journal 53:2, Winter 2014: 133–9.
10 Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims, trans. Michael Lucey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013): 72–73; my emphasis.
11 In a discussion that reveals the connections between pro-choice and LGBTQ rights movements in the United States, American lawyer and legal scholar Ruth Colker describes clients in Louisiana who were active in the struggle for access to abortion services, noting that ‘many… were committed to working with gay and lesbian people to defend abortion clinics’ as they regarded ‘pro-choice efforts as closely linked to the political rights of lesbian and gay people’. She notes that in their work as clinic defenders, such clients and ‘their supporters wore nontraditional clothing, with many of the women wearing combat boots and many of the men wearing earrings and other “effeminate” items of clothing’ that marked them in the ‘conservative Baton Rouge community’ where the protests were taking place, as ‘quite radical and… visibly lesbian or gay’. Ruth Colker, Pregnant Men: Practice, Theory, and the Law (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 33.
12 See ‘Munby slates “sloppy practice” in adoption: President of Family Division concerned about recurrent inadequacy of analysis & reasoning put forward in support of the case of adoption’, New Law Journal, 20 September 2013, online: www.newlawjournal.co.uk/content/munby-slates-sloppy-practice-adoption. See also Patrick Butler, ‘Adoption numbers drop steeply as government’s flagship policy falters’, The Guardian, 29 September 2016, online: www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/29/adoption-numbersdrop-steeply-as-governments-flagship-policy-falters.
13 All quotations from Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) are from the Introduction (21) or from the chapter ‘Envy’, 126–43.
14 Ngai does not elaborate on her marshalling of ‘effete’ (nor, when she uses ‘effete’ elsewhere in the book to describe other feelings and subjects, does she unpack its freighted etymology). This seems a strange lacuna in the argument, which is founded on thinking through envy’s calibration in contemporary discourse as an affect that is inherently gendered, although she does discuss the ‘feminization’ of envy historically and the way that the ‘envious subject is so frequently suspected of being hysterical’ alongside, in the twentieth century, ‘intensified social prohibition against [the] expression’ of envy. Ibid., 129.
15 “effete, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, July 2018. Web. 18 September 2018.
16 In Miranda July’s story ‘The Share
d Patio’, there is a wry commentary on the ‘New Men’ who ‘want to have children’ and ‘long to give birth’ to such an extent that ‘sometimes when they cry, it is because they can’t do this; there is just nowhere for a baby to come out’. Miranda July, ‘The Shared Patio’, in No one belongs here more than you (Edinburgh and London: Canongate: 2015; 2007), 3–4. For an anthropoligical consideration of womb envy, see Margaret Mead, Male and Female (New York: HarperCollins, 2001; 1949), 72–02/.
17 John Money and Geoffrey Hosta, ‘Negro Folklore of Male Pregnancy’, The Journal of Sex Research 4.1, February 1968: 34–
18 Diana Semmelhack, Larry Ende, Karen Farrell, Julieanne Pojas, ‘Womb envy and Western society: On the devaluation of nurturing in psychotherapy and society’, Europe’s Journal of Psychology 7.1, February 2011: 164–86.
19 Rosalind Minsky, ‘“Too Much of a Good Thing”: control of containment in coping with change?’, Psychoanalytic Studies 1.4, 1999: 391–405, 403.
20 In his excellent analysis of modernist tropes of male pregnancy, poet and critic Michael Davidson notes that in many cases ‘male pregnancy is linked to the conflation of material wealth and biological dystopia’. Michael Davidson, ‘Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in Djuna Barnes’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 43.2, Summer 2010: 207–26, 214. Davidson also reminds us of the Nighttown chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom cries, ‘O, I so want to be a mother’ and gives birth to ‘eight male yellow and white children’, while Buck Mulligan describes Bloom in this nightmare as ‘a finished example of the new womanly man’.
21 Dave Trumbore, ‘WonderCon 2012: Prometheus Panel Recap Featuring Sir Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof’, 17 March 2012, Collider.com, online: collider.com/prometheus-wondercon.
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