In 2008, Susan Stryker brought out her Transgender History. Yet trans issues remained widely unacknowledged until Laverne Cox, herself a trans woman, was cast as a trans woman on the television show Orange Is the New Black in 2013. Jill Soloway’s Transparent debuted in 2014, Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman in 2015, and Pose, a television series about trans ballroom culture during the AIDS epidemic, as well as Gentleman Jack, based on the coded diaries of the swashbuckling Victorian Anne Lister, began appearing on television in 2018 and 2019, respectively. As Stryker has explained, numerous terms surfaced as the word transgender started to replace the older word transsexual.51 The population that resists both female and male classifications is growing, a fact reflected in the discussions in a growing number of state legislatures about adding to the “F” for female and the “M” for male on drivers’ licenses an “X” for nonbinary people.
Like nonbinary identities, transgender identifications may involve sexual orientation but they also and more fundamentally engage gender. “Simply put,” the trans woman of color Janet Mock explains in her memoir Redefining Realness (2014), “our sexual orientation has to do with whom we get into bed with, while our gender identity has to do with whom we get into bed as.” She was recycling the words of the trans New York Times columnist Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (2003), argued that “being gay or lesbian is about sexual orientation. Being trans is about identity.”52 Explaining that “a trans person can be straight, gay, bisexual, etc.,” Janet Mock goes on to state “that the world can be a brutal place for a girl with a penis.”53
Before and after transitioning surgically, Mock was repeatedly told “that I am not ‘real,’ meaning that I am not, nor will I ever be, a cis woman; therefore, I am fake.” But “if a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn’t she just being herself? She isn’t passing; she is merely being.”54 Seeking to clarify their sexual politics, trans advocates like Mock—who helped direct, write, and produce the TV show Pose—frequently employ ideas about gender, sex, and sexual orientation that feminist theorists had developed in the nineties.
One youthful writer, who calls herself “a gay trans girl,” has turned to an unlikely figure in feminism’s lineage to fortify her sense of self. Andrea Long Chu learned about trans women as “some kind of feminist vanguard” when she read Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto in her junior year of college.55 Chu enjoyed the fact that Solanas rejected men on aesthetic grounds. One passage in SCUM especially fascinates Chu: “If men were wise they would seek to become really female, would do intensive biological research that would lead to men, by means of operations on the brain and nervous system, being able to be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.”56 Chu believes that Solanas here provides a vision of “how male-to-female gender transition might express not just disidentification with maleness but disaffiliation with men.” From this perspective, “transsexual women decided to transition not to ‘confirm’ some kind of innate gender identity, but because being a man is stupid and boring.”
Needless to say, Chu is fully aware that Solanas’s emphasis on eliminating babies with Y chromosomes has led to her being labeled essentialist and transphobic. Chu understands both the strangeness of excavating the SCUM Manifesto to legitimize the trans community and the conflicts certain to continue between that community and some cis feminists, or so her references to Germaine Greer indicate. In 2015, when the editors of Glamour decided to give their Woman of the Year award to Caitlyn Jenner, Germaine Greer released what Chu rightly calls a “gem of a statement”: “Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman,” Greer declared. “I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a fucking cocker spaniel.”57 Yet it remains a “supreme irony of feminist history,” Chu concludes, “that there is no woman more woman-identified than a gay trans girl like me.” And because of other trans women, “there are literally fewer men on the planet. Valerie, at least, would be proud. The Society for Cutting Up Men is a rather fabulous name for a transsexual book club.”
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, extended the feminist/trans conversation with none of Greer’s or Solanas’s vitriol. Instead, Nelson redirected the lyricism she had brought to poetry into poetic prose about her feminist education. The title of her genre-bending memoir alludes to a passage by the French thinker Roland Barthes that associates reiterated declarations of love with “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.”58 In a form Nelson calls autotheory—a mix of autobiography and theory—she provides a succession of quotations to round up the tribe of fellow travelers who patch the vessel that keeps her and her beloved safely sailing, buoyed by their commitment to gender fluidity.
Nelson’s argonauts are the “sappy crones” who constitute “ ‘the many gendered-mothers of my heart,’ ” her teachers and sages.59 They consist of the queer theorists Wayne Koestenbaum, Judith Butler, and especially Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; the artists Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Alison Bechdel, Maya Angelou, Alice Munro, Catherine Opie, Annie Sprinkle, and especially Eileen Myles; and the feminist thinkers Susan Fraiman, Denise Riley, Sara Ahmed, Susan Sontag, and Mary Ann Caws. Nelson assembles these “good witches” to bless the queer family she seeks to preserve in a book that implicitly questions the attack on the nuclear family launched by many radical feminists back in the early seventies.
The first paragraph of The Argonauts—a collection of sometimes fragmentary and nonchronological paragraphs—sets out to shock. Beginning with an I-love-you spoken “in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass,” it upends readers with its reference to anal eroticism and with its ambiguous use of “you,” a pronoun benignly ungendered. Both celebrate the nonnormative partnership of Maggie Nelson with the neither male nor female artist Harry Dodge. By various onlookers at various moments, they are greeted as a butch with a femme, a heterosexual couple, and two female friends.
The Argonauts goes on to narrate the love affair of Maggie and Harry and then the metamorphoses of Maggie’s pregnancy (through a sperm donor) and Harry’s transitioning (through testosterone and top surgery), two profoundly physical conversions. “On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.” 60
Suspicious not only of gender-specific pronouns but of any identities that are inflicted rather than adopted, Nelson returns repeatedly to conventional stereotypes that confine women in uncongenial boxes. Her pregnant body at a lecture podium elicits “the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks”: “But I was enough of a feminist to refuse any kneejerk quarantining of the feminine or the maternal from the realm of intellectual profundity.” 61
Exploring the paranoia that accompanies parenting, Nelson describes the terror ensuing from the realization that our children make us hostages to fortune. And in a moving sequence toward the end of The Argonauts, Nelson counterpoints the labor of childbearing—the counting up toward the effacement of her cervix—with the labor of dying, the counting down toward the last breath of Harry’s mother. Recalling that Rita Mae Brown purportedly “once tried to convince fellow lesbians to abandon their children in order to join the movement,” she observes that “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)” (ellipsis hers). And in any case, she has h
ad it with “the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other.” Instead, she broods on “the rise of homonormativity and its threat to queerness.” 62
Like Alison Bechdel, Nelson writes comically about her feminist education: in Nelson’s case, the eccentric pedagogy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who got to know her graduate students by asking about their totem animals. “I burped out otter,” Nelson admits. She was thinking about the need to be quick and dexterous, and then more generally about wanting to flee or refuse “the menacing pressure to take sides.” But she knows “that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations,” so she ends up embracing what we have been calling lifelong learning: “the pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.” 63
11
Resurgence
BY THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, quite a few of those who ushered in the second wave were encountering the losses that accompany aging. Before Audre Lorde died of liver cancer in 1992, she adopted the name Gamba Adisa, which means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known.”1 Both Gloria Anzaldúa and Susan Sontag received public accolades after their deaths in 2004. Andrea Dworkin died in 2005, Betty Friedan in 2006, Grace Paley in 2007, Marilyn French and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in 2009, Joanna Russ in 2011. Adrienne Rich died of complications related to rheumatoid arthritis in 2012. Kate Millett died in 2017 in her beloved Paris. After Ursula K. Le Guin’s death in 2018, a documentary film appeared that recorded her fear that she had failed to subvert the masculinist assumptions of science fiction.2
The literary critic Nancy K. Miller gravitated toward elegy. In My Brilliant Friends (2019), she paid tribute to the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante (the author of My Brilliant Friend) as she mourned the deaths of her and our mentor Carolyn Heilbrun, the feminist theorist Naomi Schor, and the feminist biographer Diane Middlebrook. To our great sorrow, Toni Morrison died while we were finishing a draft of this book in the summer of 2019. Like Carolyn Heilbrun, she had been a friend and a source of inspiration to us both.
The rest of us kept on working, for feminist studies continued to proliferate. Yet deteriorating conditions in the humanities demoralized those within the academy. As enrollments shifted out of the liberal arts, traditional departments shrank. When women integrate a profession, we began to worry, does it inevitably become devalued?
Inside and outside the academy, feminists had cause for alarm. There were few advances in affordable childcare or flexible work/family arrangements, even though working women were spending more time with housework, children, and elder care than men did.3 While female students took their rightful share of places in law, medical, and business schools, Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 The Second Shift was reissued in 2012 and remained all too relevant in its analysis of the doubled burdens of employed mothers. Despite a number of protests, African American, Chicana, and Native American women continued to receive substandard medical attention. “In the wealthiest nation in the world,” the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom noted in 2019, “black women are dying in childbirth at rates comparable to those in poorer, colonized nations.”4
Abortion rights were seriously weakened—especially for rural and economically disadvantaged women—with many states passing restrictive laws and others trying to outlaw abortion altogether.5 The conservative pundit Ann Coulter went on talk shows to argue that single mothers should give their babies up for adoption and that the feminists who supported them were “angry, man-hating lesbians.”6 The fervor of the right-to-life movement mounted, even as biotechnologies gave parents more control over their families with such developments as the morning-after pill, in vitro fertilization, and sperm and egg freezing. As white supremacists rallied, hate crimes, drug overdose deaths, and cyberattacks escalated, as did the “fake news” circulated on social media by those who followed the lead of President Trump in libeling mainstream journalists. And, of course, many began to realize that melting glaciers, wildfires, and floods signaled serious climate change.
In the face of such threats, twenty-first-century literary women cultivated multiple alliances with, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement and environmental activists. As the poet Claudia Rankine, the science fiction writer N. K. Jemisin, and the memoirist Patricia Lockwood brooded on racial injustice, ecological disaster, and patriarchal religious institutions, various celebrities saluted the continuing vitality of the women’s movement. When it became clear that many paths would be needed to find ways through the swamp of the Trump reign, new routes were mapped by younger activists and by veteran politicians.
CLAUDIA RANKINE MAKES BLACK LIVES MATTER
What would it mean to relearn the insights of Black feminism in order to make antiracist interventions in an America that needs them now more than ever, given the severe wealth and health gaps between white and Black families? Contemporary African American activists and artists answer this question in a range of ways.
Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—defining themselves as “three black women, two of whom are queer women and one who is a Nigerian-American”—founded #BlackLivesMatter in 2013 because they wanted to go beyond “the narrow nationalism” that has kept “straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all.”7 Established a year after Trayvon Martin was killed because a hoodie somehow made him look “suspicious” and seven years before George Floyd’s murder was captured on a cellphone video, #BlackLivesMatter generated #SayHerName in 2015 to foreground the violence regularly encountered by girls and women of color in a racist society, even (or perhaps especially) from the police and justice systems meant to protect them.8
Deepening despair about race relations marks the contributions of Black literary women in this decade. And, as is often the case, pain inspires innovative art. While the videos of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland went viral, Claudia Rankine—who featured an empty hoodie on the cover of her book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)—titled many poems and sketches “In the Memory of . . .” so as to mourn those subjected to racist epithets, unprovoked beatings, neglect in the midst of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, and police misconduct.
A year before The Argonauts appeared, Rankine’s mixed genre book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Whereas Maggie Nelson is invested in the gender neutrality of the pronoun “you,” Rankine uses it to examine the self-alienation experienced by Blacks confronting systemic racism. Citizen’s hybrid form—the book contains accounts of micro-aggressions, prose poems, an essay, surrealistic visions, elegies, and reproductions of artworks—contrasts Rankine’s psychological condition with that of her foremost predecessor, Zora Neale Hurston, whose words appear in the text and in reprinted etchings by Glenn Ligon.
Both the quote and the etchings derive from Hurston’s 1928 autobiographical essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in which the Harlem Renaissance author reports that she sometimes feels “cosmic,” belonging to “no race,” although she becomes magnificently colored while listening to jazz and becomes “most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”9 Implying that race, like gender, is a social construct, she also remembers “the very day that I became colored.” In various settings, Hurston insists, “I am not tragically colored.”10 The same assertion can hardly be made by or about Rankine’s speaker.
Many of Citizen’s anecdotes record “you” encountering, against a “sharp white background,”11 a series of seemingly slight but hurtful speech acts. A girl cheats by copying your schoolwork and then thanks you with the explanation that “you smell good and have features more like a white person�
�; a colleague tells you that “his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there”; a friend calls you by the name of her housecleaner; a mother and daughter have to negotiate which one will sit next to you on a plane. “I didn’t know black women could get cancer,” a woman with multiple degrees tells you.12 These micro-aggressions take a toll as they contribute to the speaker’s mounting fatigue, headaches, and numbness.
What is the purpose of this “you”? The speaker, who is female and privileged with an education as well as a profession, has been robbed of personhood, rendered invisible or hypervisible, dissociated from the agency of “I.” Each white speech act chips away at the assumption that she is fully human. Seeing herself through alien eyes, Rankine’s speaker does not embody the schizophrenic “double consciousness” or “two-ness” that W. E. B. Du Bois diagnosed in the hyphenated Afro-American psyche.13 Rather, she suffers a sense of perpetual estrangement and diminishment. “You” is not a self but an alienated Other. As a rhetorical strategy, the pronoun forces Rankine’s white readers to enter her text by identifying with a “you” repeatedly sickened by the racist assumptions of white Americans.
Besides rage, what possible response could such white interlocutors elicit from you? But rage itself has been problematized for Rankine’s speaker. Citizen’s essay on the tennis star Serena Williams, situated against the “sharp white background” of tennis etiquette, meditates on the personal danger of Black anger, a topic that President Obama took up at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when “Luther” (played by the comedian Keegan-Michael Key) reprised his role as Obama’s “anger translator.”14 On the campaign trail, Michelle Obama found that her being “female, black, and strong . . . translated only to ‘angry’ ” for some audiences, and their reaction started to make her feel “a bit angry”: “It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap.”15 Rankine, who associates stereotypically angry figures with “commodified anger,” considers honest anger “really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints.”16
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