After a while, when the big cervical brace came off, I could gingerly lift my head off the pillow. I could move my arms back and forth a little. I could not, however, pick anything up, a home truth I learned when Patty, my well-trained and gracefully intuitive occupational therapist, put a Kleenex on the tray in front of me and instructed me to pick it up and move it to the side. She had recently graduated from the University of Hartford, where she had played Division I soccer while studying in the university’s strong program for occupational and physical therapies. We developed a good relationship, based in part on my regard for her athletic achievements. When I couldn’t even pick up the tissue, I was in despair, crying and saying, “I used to be so strong, I used to be so strong.” Saying it again and again. I spoke the truth. I wept and mourned the muscles that had disappeared.
Phenomenologists speak of a body image that is part of our mental equipment, a way of picturing our bodies in space. It’s possible, of course, to have a profoundly distorted sense of your body’s shape, as do young women afflicted with anorexia, who look at themselves and see fat where others see a skeletal body wrapped in skin. I can’t remember not thinking of my body as strong. I grew up in a small town in the 1950s, in rural, mountainous central Pennsylvania. Huntingdon is a largely white working-class town with an Owens Corning fiberglass plant just a couple blocks down Washington Street from my home on Mifflin Street. The main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad runs through Huntingdon, passing just three and a half blocks to the west of Mifflin. There’s a handsome railroad station building downtown, but it stands empty and unused—these days only one passenger train a day going east stops at Huntingdon, and one going west. I guess you pay for your ticket when you get on board. A small number of black people were concentrated through the default segregation of real estate in a neighborhood at the very edge of the town, between Stone Creek and Route 22, so my world was very white. The immediate neighborhood of my childhood mixed economic classes together pretty indiscriminately, though, and all the kids played together. My brother, Jeff, and I were told only that we lived a very privileged life, and that it was our responsibility to be considerate of the “underprivileged,” a category that remained compelling, but vague.
In our neighborhood, I always played games with the boys, and my brother and I would roughhouse all the day long. Being a “tomboy” brought with it various confusions and insults, but the truth is that I couldn’t imagine playing girls’ games, and was skilled enough, strong enough, and fast enough to play with the boys. One summer my father taught both Jeff and me how to throw a baseball, pivoting so that the torque of the whole body goes into the pitch. We were playing pitch and catch in the dirt road by our campsite in a state park when Jeff’s hard-thrown baseball smacked into the webbing of my glove. I stepped into my return, and the trajectory of my pitch was flat, too. “That’s it,” Dad shouted. So I never “threw like a girl,” nor did I ever run with my elbows out, hands held up and away from my body, as so many girls somehow learned to do.
I was proud of my strength and my coordination, and played hard. Huntingdon was surrounded by fields in the valley bottoms and woods running up the long mountain ridges, and was truly rural just beyond the town borders. The Juniata River had carved through rock over many millennia, creating “the cliffs,” rocks jutting out into empty space with a sheer drop-off down to the railroad tracks and river. When we were kids, Mother would some evenings pack a picnic supper into a wicker basket, and get us into the car. Dad would drive up Taylor Highlands. Jeff and I, always competing, would “horsengoggle” to see who got to be “the pathfinder,” and with either him or me in the vanguard, we would walk out to the flat-topped cliffs and the spectacular view. To get there, you had to pass under huge power lines that hummed and crackled as the wires on their high towers ran off into the distance, the ground beneath filled with brambles and bushes—mountain laurel, and sometimes thickets of blueberries and blackberries entangled with other greenery. Heat shimmered over the brush and rocks, and it smelled like summer. The pathfinder got to choose which rock we would picnic on, and while Mother unpacked our food and drink, Jeff and I would vie to be the first to “I spy” a freight train coming around the bend in the distance, hauling a mile of coal cars—and get too close to the edge for parental comfort. So Dad looped two ropes around his hand, the other ends of which were passed through the belt buckles of our shorts.
When I was older, I climbed all over the cliffs, and hiked up the power line with my army surplus canteen strapped on my belt. I rode my bicycle for miles, in town when I was young, and out into the country when I got older. I climbed trees, lots of trees, hanging upside down by my knees, then scrambling higher and higher. One sunny and breezy June day when I was ten or eleven years old, I got far up in a tall evergreen tree near the edge of a small woods overlooking the college science center. The sap on the trunk was sweet and dark, and my hands got more and more sticky as I went from limb to limb, repeatedly catching my T-shirt on small branches as I continued to climb. I got as high as I could, until the tree bowed under my weight and swayed in the wind. Leaning far into the air under a blazingly blue sky, I heard the breeze soughing through the stand of pines, and breathed in the hot summer smell of pine tar. When I was a teenager, my friends and I would drive out of town a couple miles, park by the side of the road and walk through the woods to Stone Creek, where we knew about a small swimming hole. Jeans and work shirts piled up next to sneakers and boots. Up on Taylor Highlands there was an old water tower hidden away at the end of a road that petered off into gravel ruts overrun with weeds. Around the tower ran a chain-link fence with a rusty padlock on the gate. I would go by myself, climb over the fence, taking care not to catch myself on the top, and drop down to the other side. Then up the skinny metal ladder that turned sharply vertical at the top, making me feel as if I were somehow climbing upside down for that last section, just below the little metal grate of the runway platform that went around the tank. Up there you could see out over the town to the mountain ridges running off into the distance. Up there you could feel the wind pick up as a storm was coming in. Up there I was trespassing, and I loved it.
That childhood world is long ago and far away, yet my memory is green, in part, I’m sure, because I took with me into adult life a love of play and pleasure in physical challenges. I would arm wrestle with anybody, and especially loved occasionally besting men. By the time I reached my fiftieth year, I was proud to the point of vanity of the well-defined muscles that had come naturally to me, so to speak, a genetic inheritance from my dad, in part, and the rest the result of all that play, from kick the can in the backyard to varsity sports in high school and college. After I graduated from Swarthmore in the mid-seventies, I took to running when I got home from work, first in my sneakers, and then in the running shoes that had just started being marketed to people like me.
And I always had a bike. My first year out of college, I rode a nine-mile round-trip to my workplace, which solved the problem of gridlock during D.C. rush hour, and as a graduate student in Providence, I bicycled everywhere for years. I started going to New York City in 2000, when Janet began working as the director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Unsurprisingly, I learned that cycling was the fastest way to get around Manhattan, faster even then the subway, unless you got really lucky and caught the express from the 96th Street station. I loved riding up 6th Avenue at night, holding my place in the yellow stream of cabs as traffic surged onto Central Park South, past the horses and carriages lined up waiting for fares, around Columbus Circle, swinging at last onto the relative calm of Central Park West.
I’d always bought used bikes, but when bone spurs put an end to my running at age forty, I purchased my first new one since my childhood. I did so in consultation with my friend John. He was a dear friend of my then lover, Elizabeth, and I discovered in graduate school what a great playmate he was. The three of us often took bicycle rides on the beautiful back roads of Connecticut. He ro
de a German bicycle, built for speed, with narrow tires and clip-in pedals designed to secure cycling shoes with cleats. When he finally persuaded me to buy a really good road bike, he went with me to his bicycle store, where I was fitted for a beautiful Schwinn that was at the low end of the high-tech, high-price machines. I sat on a bicycle in a stand while the sales clerk ran his measuring tape down my legs and over my arms. When I picked up my new machine I was dazzled by its brilliance: silver aluminum, light weight, and it fit me perfectly. I called it the Silver Streak. I had cycling shorts, with the proper padding to ease sitting on the narrow saddle, and loved how tight they were, how they showed off my quads, hamstrings, and glutes.
Phenomenologists talk about a “felt sense” of the body, a schema that emerges from the desire that orients you toward the outer world, and from the projections and introjections that create a sense of self. We speak of being in a body, as though the self were somehow contained inside a bodily exterior. Conversely, we understand the body as materiality held within an encompassing self-consciousness. The margin of your body is also a “social skin,” an exterior meeting the social world that is also interior.1 Inside and outside run imperceptibly into each other, as when you run your finger along the side of a Möbius strip.
Your body has and is a history. I continue to live in my body, which is, after all, the only one I’ll ever have. When I’m teaching now, I gesture extravagantly as I always did, using my hands to shape my argument. I’m not thinking of these gestures, or conscious of the fact that my hands now are those of a quadriplegic, with fingers always bent into loose fists. I lack the strength to hold a pen. The outer part of each hand is innervated by nerves emerging from the spinal column a bit below my injury, which means that it’s hard for me to move the small and ring fingers, which remain bent at the knuckle and can’t really be flattened out. The thumb side of both right and left is stronger. Only with my thumbs can I feel the world pretty much, though not fully, as I used to, for the nerves governing them are the least damaged of all those running to my hands. When I am teaching, it’s only as I drop my notes or fumble to turn a page that I am suddenly conscious of these embodied realities. Years and years of experiencing my hands as strong and capable laid down certain tracks in my mind and body. So I gesture without thinking when I speak, living as a body that no longer works or looks the way it did before the accident.
This is but one of a multitude of embodied realities that are simultaneously fantasies dwelling in my unconscious life. Proprioception, the sense of your body in space that you unconsciously experience all day long, is the medical term for a felt sense of the body that emerges over years of embodied life. You are from birth in deeply intimate relation to all the others who handle you and talk to you, and through their ministrations you begin to distinguish the zones of your body and differentiate among them. Through uncounted repetitions you learn to name your body parts, both feeling and knowing which piggy is going to market, and which cries wee, wee, wee all the way home. Once you learn to ride a bicycle, you don’t have to think about it, you compose your body in relation to the machine and use “muscle memory” to keep your balance. Athletes spend countless hours repeating drills, training their muscles to respond without thinking according to the disciplines specific to their sport. But no one can move through the world without accurate proprioception. Feeling your organs inside, keeping your balance, reaching out to pick something up, sensing the distance to the seat of a chair—it’s all proprioception.
Early on, Dr. Seetherama, my physiatrist, took hold of my big toe, told me not to look, and instructed me to tell him whether he was bending it up or down. So I did. I reported exactly what I felt. The problem was, I was wrong much of the time. It seemed odd to me then, and continues to seem so today that I could be misinformed by a part of my body I’d taken for granted always. My big toe! How could it be telling me the wrong information? Dr. Seetherama was testing my proprioception, and I failed the test. Now and then I ask Janet to repeat the test, and I fail every time. If the “felt sense” of my body is unreliable, how am I to think about the “bodily ego” that psychoanalysis theorizes is necessary to all of us, an image of the body that emerges internally through the differentiation of bodily parts and zones, and externally through relations with others?2 What becomes of my “self”?
7
Masculine, Feminine,
or Fourth of July
Babe the Dog was a lab and golden retriever mix, born on the Fourth of July, or at least close enough that I could claim the parades and fireworks as a celebration of that auspicious event. At home the dog would get an extra Milk-Bone treat, and the people would get a mint chocolate chip ice cream cake with chocolate fudge icing from Baskin-Robbins. When the local Baskin-Robbins closed, it was replaced by another ice cream franchise. What could we do? Janet called to place the order.
“We don’t have fudge icing.”
“What do you have?”
“Masculine, feminine, or Fourth of July.”
“What? But . . . ,” Janet stumbled, “but, we want fudge. And, and . . . it’s for the dog—we have a dog, and it’s her birthday.”
Janet pressed the point but ended up just saying, “Whatever.” I don’t remember the icing, other than that it was disappointingly not fudge. Nor can I recall ordering again from that particular shop. I have, however, many times used the line “masculine, feminine, or Fourth of July” to teach both the absurdity and the normative power of gender. There in a list of choices are its two wholly naturalized categories and a comically out-of-place national holiday, but the seemingly misplaced Fourth of July serves to remind us that a laughably simple and punishingly binary notion of gender is enforced by the powers that be, including the state. Gender, which is a state of mind and embodied attitude, is a site of volatile power, pleasure, and subtle coercion, often used to discipline our thoughts and bodily affects. Normative gender is certainly wielded as a weapon by children anxious to shore up their own selfhood by challenging someone else’s. Consult your memory and you’ll find that this is true.
Sadly, madly, every birth certificate offers two—and only two—sexes, and only one may be declared. Sex is the first question in every mouth after a birth, and infants are quite ruthlessly assigned to one body or the other, despite the fact that intersex births are far more common than you would think, as the important work of biologist Ann Fausto-Sterling has demonstrated.1 If innate biology offers no firm foundation for a superstructure of twos, neither does the social world. Parents, teachers, siblings, peers, physicians, pastors, psychologists, and those who enforce the law, all solicit a child to shelter itself under one gender or the other, but many kids refuse, sometimes at considerable cost to themselves.
Gender can also afford embodied pleasures, if one is confident in instantiating it and pleased with the results. It’s now possible to modify your body to conform to your felt sense of gender. I’ve taught students who came to Wesleyan sexed and gendered as (more or less) feminine women, but graduated as trans men (FTM) with deepened voices and beards, their bodies modified by top surgeries—the removal of breasts—and shots of testosterone (T). There’s no necessity dictating that a bodymind sexed female at birth will present itself to the world as feminine in adulthood, and no necessary sexuality tied to either sex or gender. “[T]he longer I hang around the various crossroads and deltas of gender, the more I notice that nothing is clear enough to be easy,” writes S. Bear Bergman, a trans man who’s hung around long enough to be well recognized in the queer-trans community as an author of first-person accounts.2 Today young people who transform their official gender may be accepted, even celebrated—more than one transgender girl has been elected homecoming queen—but transgender teenagers have been murdered in school, too. Larry (Latisha) King, a slight, effeminate fifteen-year-old boy relentlessly hounded as a “faggot,” was killed, shot in the head by a high school classmate offended by Latisha’s feminine bearing, flirtatious manner, makeup, and high-heeled boots.
3 Children yoked with a gender they don’t recognize as their own or who are confused can be made to suffer cruelly in a world that naturalizes and links together binary sex and gender. If you make it into young adulthood, you may be able to use the force field of gender for your own pleasure and toward your own ends, but straight is the gate and narrow the way.
Once I got to college, I didn’t give much thought to my gender and devoted lots to my sexuality. Most of the time I wore flannel shirts and jeans, sneakers and boots. The first lesbian activists in the gay liberation movement whom I met in 1972 declared themselves relieved that they now could go to the bars liberated from the felt necessity to identify as either butch or femme. So those gendered sexualities seemed to me and my friends a thing of the past, something to be playfully gestured toward but not seriously taken up. In the spring of my senior year, for instance, I picked up a black tuxedo jacket at a yard sale and stepped out to a big party wearing it with my freshly washed white painter pants. I stopped on the way to pick a white rose from the president’s rose garden for my buttonhole, and joined my friends feeling quite dashing.
A Body, Undone Page 5