Tag Archives: the body

counting, calories, and self-worth

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

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I don’t know how many calories were in this breakfast.
For me, that is a sign of better health than when I did.
As always, your mileage may vary.

I woke up this morning to a story on NPR about new FDA rules that will require restaurants with more than twenty locations to provide “calorie information” on their menus. Unsurprisingly, the story was factual-to-positive about the change; National Public Radio has a history of uncritically reproducing narratives about fatness, health, and the supposed “obesity epidemic” around which much moral panic has been generated in recent years. Public health workers gushed about the “terrific” new labeling and we were treated to clips of (young, female) customers giggling self-deprecatingly about their food choices and how calorie counts might encourage them to change their orders — always to something with fewer calories.

Given NPR’s glowing coverage, I feel the need to intervene in this self-congratulatory narrative and share a few thoughts on what effect providing calorie counts on menus has on me, as a consumer, and why I believe the practice is neutral at best and actively harmful at worst.

Why are we, as a society, obsessed with calories? A dietary calorie is a way of measuring energy, equal to the amount of energy required to raise the heat of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Humans require fuel (measured in calories) to function; we consume energy in order to expend energy through physical movement, cognitive thought, to keep ourselves warm, to keep ourselves alive.

Fuel comes in many delicious forms, some more efficient than others; we can consume relatively “empty” fuel that is a poor source of energy, or energy-rich foods that supply us with nutrients we need to grow, repair, and function.

Therefore, to learn that the sandwich I ate for lunch on Monday contained 500 calories worth of fuel provides strikingly little information with which to guide my dietary selections. That sandwich could contain just what I need to help me function for the rest of the day; it could be superfluous energy that nevertheless served a social or emotional function; it could be fuel that actively worked against me in terms of an allergy or other physical reaction. The calorie count provides none of that information. Displayed by itself, alongside a series of menu options, the calorie units of each option is a set of supremely useless data.

But I would go further than that. I would argue that displaying calorie counts alongside menu options is actively harmful when considered in the context of our social dysfunction around food and our culture of fatphobia. Because in the public mind calories aren’t just a neutral way of measuring energy; calories are bad. Calories are shameful. And I’m betting that the 30% of consumers who, NPR reports, will actually read those calorie counts on the Starbucks menu are individuals who are already hyper-aware of their energy intake, who are already struggling with a disordered relationship with their bodies.

I’m betting this because, as I’ve described before, I used to be one of those people. One of those women. Between the ages of roughly sixteen and twenty-four I tracked my energy intake by counting calories. I still own cookbooks in which I once penciled in the calories for things like three cloves of garlic (24) and a tablespoon of lemon juice (10).

Yes, I learned a lot of nutritional information during this period, learned how to seek out a wide variety of foods to fuel my body, learned to pay attention to my body’s energy ups and downs.

But mostly, my sense of self of self worth rose and fell with the end-of-the-day tally of calories. (And to a lesser extent quantified exercise.) It didn’t matter what else I’d accomplished that day: acts of kindness toward others, ideas articulated in writing, conversations, explorations, creations.

It all came down to the numbers:

1540 (victory).

1860 (shame).

2300 (guaranteed to send me to bed weeping).

To this day, seeing calorie counts listed beside my fuel options prompts stress reactions, visceral reminders of a time when what counted about my personhood was how much fuel I did (or didn’t) consume.

A time when less fuel equaled more worth.

So forgive me, NPR, if I don’t view these new FDA regulations as an unalloyed good. As an act of self care, I’ll likely be avoiding — as much as possible — those restaurants affected by the new rules. Because rather than a tool for making informed fueling decisions, I see calorie counts as mostly promoting a simplistic less-is-better, fatphobic and deeply disordered, alienated relationship to our bodies and the way we care for them.

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on gaining weight

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in life writing

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Photograph by Laura Wulf

I had my annual physical last week, and for the first time in a couple of years I actually looked at the reading on the scale when they did all the usual readings. Typically, I stand on the scale facing away from the screen and the nurses at our awesome community health center don’t offer the information unless I ask.

I’d gained about ten pounds since the last time I’d bothered to check.

I was (surprising even myself) pretty unconcerned about this state of affairs.

I’m not going to share the exact number or the number(s) I’m comparing it to. The minute I did so virtually every woman reading this post would do the calculation and contrast and compare. Either I’d be smaller, and some part of them would feel jealous, or I’d be larger, and some part of them would feel virtuous. They might judge themselves for feeling that way (I do when I catch myself doing it), but for most of us it’s an involuntary reflex.

There’s a reason I don’t own a scale, and weigh myself at the doctor’s office blind.

As photographs on this blog demonstrate, I’m a 5′ 10″ woman who falls within the median weight range for American women — which is to say that my clothing sizes are usually available in many styles in most stores. This is a form of privilege, one I’ve become even more acutely aware of married to a woman whose body is actively marginalized by our fatphobic, sizest culture.

But, like virtually every women and many a man will tell you, being a body of normative size in a culture “at war” against fat (and people we judge for their size) is no proof against a disordered relationship with one’s physical self. While never diagnosed with a formal eating disorder, I spent most of my teens obsessing over food and weight, counting calories, bingeing, eating until my stomach hurt and falling asleep each night (yes: every night for nearly a decade) wishing I could just purge and have done with it.

I ended every day — every day — from age sixteen to twenty-four feeling some measure of failure for what I had eaten, and what I had done, with my body.

My own struggle with disordered eating was complicated by the fact that my thyroid condition, managed with medication until age twenty-five, meant I was almost always hungry. My appetite was not a reliable measure of what my body actually needed as fuel — my hormones were telling me I was hungry. I could (and did) eat gallons of ice cream at a sitting and my body would still tell me I was hungry.

When I finally received medical treatment that treated my condition more effectively, I got my libido back and learned what it was like to have an appetite: to eat and feel full. And not think about food every waking moment of every day.

While I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, I was at my thinnest — received the most praise from acquaintances for having “lost weight!” — when my hyperactive thyroid was raging out of control. Did I glow with “pride” at the praise? Some part of me did. The other part of me recognized how fucked up our culture is congratulating a young woman for thinness — as if body size is some sort of merit metric. When instead, in my case, it was actually a pathological symptom.

One I knew even at the time part of me would miss, because being “effortlessly” thin (while, as I said above, obsessing about my weight and food intake on an hourly basis) was something society rewarded me for.

I was scared, when I chose the treatment that would help me heal — that would give me my sex drive back (though no doctors thought to mention this as a perk) — that would allow me to experience appetites and satisfaction — when I chose the treatment that would give me these things, I was scared that I’d just become “fat.”

Because of course, that’s what we’re taught to fear most of all.

So it was remarkable to me, last week, when I walked into the doctor’s office and discovered that I now weigh about thirty pounds more than I weighed at the point when I was the sickest (and most obsessive — and most frequently praised). It was remarkable that I didn’t much care.

I’m growing into myself. That’s what I thought. I’m growing older. And my mind meant that in a positive way. I’m thirty-three now; nearly ten years older than I was then. Bodies change. As I grow into my middle age, I may continue to gain weight slowly, incrementally. If family size and shape is any guide, I’ve likely settled more or less at the point where I will probably stay as I grow older.

And even if I grow larger, become more, I resist the notion that this is something I should categorically fear, manically avoid, judge myself in relation to. I’ve got other things to focus on, thank you very much. I refuse to spend my energy struggling to control my body size when there’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that such efforts are both futile and unrelated to one’s overall health outcomes.

I refuse to fear in myself what I embrace in others: embodiment in the selves we have.

I’m grateful for how little the number mattered. It’s been a long journey to this point, but well worth the climb.

cfp: religion and fat

31 Friday Jan 2014

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This call for papers came across my desk this morning and sounds fascinating! Please, someone who reads my blog be doing research in this area (or know someone who is!). Because SO VERY COOL.

~Anna

CFP—Special Issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society on Religion and Fat, guest edited by Lynne Gerber, Susan Hill and LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant. 

This special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society explores the relationship between religion and fat. The editors invite papers on a variety of topics that address, for example, how particular religious traditions engage the fat body, or how religions define, circumscribe and/or understand fatness. We seek to answer questions such as: How is the fat body read in religious ways? What kinds of socio-cultural spaces do religions offer fat people? 

Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Fat bodies as religious bodies
  • The use of fat or fatness in religious texts
  • Use of fat in theological discourse
  • Fat in world religions
  • Religious and/or moral dimensions of fat or fatness in popular culture
  • Fat bodies and lived religion
  • Religion and weight loss/weight gain
  • The fat body as moral or immoral body in religious texts or objects

To be considered for inclusion in this special issue, please send a 200-250 word abstract and a current c.v. to Susan Hill (susan.hill@uni.edu) by March 31, 2014. 

Any questions about the topic can be directed to this e-mail, as well. Final submissions should be between 3000-6000 words, including all notes and references. If you wish to include reproductions of visual images with your essay, you will need to receive permission to do so from the artists/copyright holders of the image(s). All authors will need to sign a form that transfers copyright of their article to the publisher, Taylor & Francis/Routledge. 

Fat Studies is the first academic journal in the field of scholarship that critically examines theory, research, practices, and programs related to body weight and appearance. Content includes original research and overviews exploring the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, and socioeconomic status. Articles critically examine representations of fat in health and medical sciences, the Health at Every Size model, the pharmaceutical industry, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, legal issues, literature, pedagogy, art, theater, popular culture, media studies, and activism. 

Fat Studies is an interdisciplinary, international field of scholarship that critically examines societal attitudes and practices about body weight and appearance. Fat Studies advocates equality for all people regardless of body size. It explores the way fat people are oppressed, the reasons why, who benefits from that oppression and how to liberate fat people from oppression. Fat Studies seeks to challenge and remove the negative associations that society has about fat and the fat body. It regards weight, like height, as a human characteristic that varies widely across any population. Fat Studies is similar to academic disciplines that focus on race, ethnicity, gender, or age.

why do I write (and read) fan fiction? [part three]

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in fandom

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See part one and part two for the context of this post.

So having explored fan fiction generally (and why I’m drawn to it) and erotic fan fiction as a sub-genre of fic, and why I think it’s important, I thought I’d round this little series out with some thoughts on what draws me to the particular fandoms and pairings (relationships) I write … and what I’m trying to do when I write them. Besides, you know, enjoy the smut. I’m also going to address, below, a couple of questions I’ve fielded lately about the ethics of fic-writing practice.

Donna Noble (Doctor Who)*

Why write the pairings I write?

Well, so, it’s tempting to say that I write the things I write because I find them compelling and I just do, okay? On a certain level, trying to explain why you find the the fiction you like compelling is like trying to explain why you love your partner. It’s not really reducible to a bullet point list.

But on the other hand, I’m me. So of course I have some Thoughts on the subject. And it starts with the fact that I consumed a lot of erotic fan fiction at a point where I was beginning to actively think about relational sexuality and how sexual identity and desire worked in peoples’ lives (see post two). And I really enjoyed a lot of fan fic I was reading, mostly gay male pairings ’cause those were the fandoms Hanna and I were reading, but I struggled to find sexually-explicit lesbian pairings. And the femslash I did come across was frustratingly in-explicit about sex, or written by people who didn’t seem to fully grasp the possibilities of what two female-bodied people might do together, sexual-intimacy wise. Hetero and gay male sex scenes in fic (and, to be fair, in a lot of regular porn) work on a fairly standard narrative arc that culminates in penetrative sex — penis-in-vagina or anal sex — as The Most Bestest Form of Sexual Intimacy. It’s pretty much always orgasm-producing for both partners and sometimes it’s clear the authors (and the characters they’re writing) don’t consider sex to have happened until there’s been a penis inside a vagina or an anus.

Without a penis, what do you do?! Okay, yes, there are dildos and vibrators, but honestly not a lot of fics wade into the territory of sex toys very skillfully, and dildos in a lesbian sex scene too often just cue the author to assume sex with a dildo is about role playing het sex. Which it can be, but certainly doesn’t have to be. In my opinion, it’s much more fun to start without that penetrative-sex-as-goal model in mind and think about all the ways two bodies might come together (double entendre very much intended).

So I developed a (Queer, Feminist) Agenda. Which was to inject the world with realistic smut about ladybits. Smut that was tactile, visceral, about real bodies coming together and people making meaning out of the sex they were engaged in. And I’m an historian, so I started out pilfering from Downton Abbey, writing an eight-story arc about Sybil Crawley and Gwen. And I went on from there to other female pairings and eventually stuck my toe into the waters of m/m slash. It was kind of terrifying at first, pushing out into writing about men having sex — something I don’t have hands-on experience with. But I discovered that, at least the way I go about it, the characters take hold of the narrative regardless of gender and help me feel my way through giving them positive (and I hope realistic) sexual experiences! And in part, I was motivated by the same (Queer, Feminist) Agenda as I had been with writing female-bodied sex scenes: the be-all and end-all of sex for guys doesn’t have to be penetration.

I’m hardly the first person to observe this, but for people who are queer in some way, writing slash fiction can be a way to revise the heteronormative narratives of mainstream media. And, I’d add as a feminist, it can be a way to revise sexism and other isms as well. Watching a television show with primarily straight relationships and re-writing or filling in those stories to imagine queer relationships injects our experience into the cultural discourse. Characters on television, in film, in books, are assumed straight until explicitly identified as queer; fan fiction more often assumes that everyone is a little bit queer unless they’re proven to be straight. It’s a re-visioning of the world in which sexual variety is the norm — one part reflection of our actual experiences in queer subcultures, and one part wishful “what if…” thinking. Looking at my small repertoire of fic pairings, I’d argue I tend to choose characters who have the potential to — when queered in some way — disrupt the normative expectations about sex and relationships that we see in a lot of porn, erotica, and mainstream media — television shows, movies, etc., the original material from which fan fiction is born. Perhaps starting out as a critique of the original material, I often find my acts of fanfic subversion increases my pleasure as a consumer of the original material.

I enjoy writing stories about women unabashedly enjoying sex and knowing their bodies. I enjoy writing stories about elder folk, late-in-life lesbianism, about people having sex when their bodies don’t always work the way they want them to. I like writing fic in which it’s taken for granted (by me, the author, at least) that men can, and do, enjoy a full range of emotional intimacy, body insecurities, carry baggage from damaging relationships, enjoy sex that isn’t always fucking. (In fact, I have yet to write a fic that includes men having anal sex.) I like writing the vulnerability of desire, about what it means to expose to another person just how much you want, and (often even more frightening) what you want. I like writing sex that includes awkward conversations and misunderstandings and bodies that frustrate and fears that overwhelm — but that all ultimately circle around that moment of knowing and being known that can come when people get naked together, in every sense of the word.

The ethics of slash: a few final thoughts.

Aside from the ethics of porn, which is a topic about which much ink (and internet bile) has been spilled, the ethics of fan fiction (or, more generally, “transformative works”) is itself a topic for discussion on the internet and beyond. Hanna and I belong to the Organization of Transformative Works, a non-profit organization that advocates for the practice of fan works and also runs the Archive of Our Own project, which seeks to collect and preserve fan works online. They publish a peer-reviewed journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, that explores fandom in its infinite varieties. So if you’re interest is piqued and you’d like to delve into the politics and culture of fan creation — or poke around and read some fic or whatever variety! — I really can’t recommend them highly enough.

What I wanted to do here is touch on a couple of ethical issues that have come up recently in conversation with friends — namely the ethics of “m/m erotica” written by women, and the practice of writing RPF or “real person” fic.

Can, or should, women write erotica about gay men?

Periodically, there are internet-based wrangles over whether or not “m/m erotica” — which in the world of published romance/erotica generally means “gay porn for girls,” or (usually) women-authored fiction about gay male relationships marketed to a (presumed straight) female readership — is ethical (see for example here and here). The question is whether the m/m genre is exploitative, a hetero appropriation of gay male culture. The practice of writing erotic fan fiction is overwhelmingly a female one, and male/male pairings — as I write above — generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm, from both writers and readers (who appear to be, again, overwhelmingly female).

As an aside: fan-fiction writing as a feminized activity is something that deserves attention, and I have no doubt someone somewhere is doing incredible work on it. I think there’s a lot to explore in that dynamic — and I’m looking forward to being a part of the conversation, along with people who’ve done way more research than I into the phenomenon.

But back to the ethics of being a woman writing/reading porn involving men having sex with other men. Which is something I, a cis woman, do on a near-daily basis (see above). I admit that, when the articles about m/m erotica appeared, I did some soul-searching about it. When people suggest an activity might be exploitative it’s pretty much always a good idea to take their position seriously and listen to what they have to say. But. Here’s my thing about the case against m/m erotica: it basically comes down to an argument that if people of sexual identity A create or consume erotica about (fictional) people of sexual identity B, particularly if there’s a dynamic of social privilege in the mix, that’s per se a problem.

But sexual identity isn’t some sort of siloed, static thing — or at least I don’t experience it that way. Our sexual identities, desires, practices — they’re messy and complicated and shift over time. Preferred sex and/or gender of one’s actual partners aside, we can have fantasies and enjoy porn about practices we would never want to actually engage in. And, I would argue, we can find porn about bodies and practices we don’t per se find arousing, arousing because so much of sex isn’t the geometry of bodies coming together but (see post two) the narrative surrounding that context. Recent research is beginning to support this notion, particularly for female-bodied persons. As J. Jack Halberstam points out in the recent book Gaga Feminism (Beacon Press, 2012):

People are not asking why it is that gay men do not, generally speaking, produce any [sexual] fantasies around femininity, while lesbians produce lots of fantasy environments that include men or masculinity. When, in The Kids Are All Right, the lesbian couple watches gay male pornography to spice up their sex life, the scene was met with incredulity, especially from gay men. Indeed, a gay magazine journalist called me and asked me to comment on this bizarre (to him) scene. I responded that lots of lesbians watch and like gay male porn, straight male porn, and everything in between … [According to sexual response studies] while men, gay and straight, tend to respond in inflexible ways to erotic images of men and women (straight men want to see female bodies, gay men want to see male bodies), women, gay and straight, tend to respond in flexible ways to images of men, women, and animals. (p. 87-88).

So my point is that what sounds like a fairly reasonable call for non-appropriation (“what do these straight women think they’re doing, fantasizing about gay men!”) becomes tangled really quickly.

To use my own example: I’m a bisexual woman in a same-sex relationship with another woman. Does that mean I’m only “allowed” to be involved in reading/writing porn featuring two women? Are threesomes okay — or not, because I’m not in an open or poly relationship? If I write about sex involving male bodies, is it okay because as a bi woman I’m sexually attracted to men? But then it would be okay for straight women to write gay porn also, so maybe I’m only allowed to write porn about hetero pairings? But I’ve never been in a straight relationship, and identify as part of the queer community — so maybe that’s off-limits as well. But if I’m part of the queer community then we’re back where we started: maybe I get to create and consume porn about same-sex couples because I’m part of a same-sex couple?

So you end up on this merry-go-round of factors that could be used to determine who is or isn’t “qualified” or ethically able to create certain types of sexual fictions. And I think that that sort of policing ultimately impoverishes us all. If we started saying that straight people could only write or enjoy porn about straight folks, and gay men and lesbians could only write or enjoy porn about gay men and lesbians … not only would we miss out exploring the sexual diversity of humanity through the imaginative act of writing and reading, but we’d also be ignoring that there are people who don’t fit into these neat and tidy categories of the self.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for critique. Hell, in my book, there’s nothing in the world so sacrosanct as to be beyond critique. And I absolutely believe that there is porn out there that fetishizes queerness for the straight gaze. I mean, I wouldn’t be writing porn in the first place if I hadn’t gotten frustrated with the conventions and stereotypes I saw being recapitulated over and over in the porn I was reading. So I think anyone involved in writing erotica should be open to conversation about their work, open to hearing people say, “Hey, that thing you did there in that story rubbed me the wrong way, and here’s why.” It’s not a requirement to engage, but I would hope the resulting conversation could be an opportunity for growth for all involved.

What are my feelings on “real person” erotic fan fiction?

Yup, it’s a thing in the world, people writing (often erotic) fan fiction featuring real-life celebrities. Often, though not always, these celebrities are the actors portraying the characters that these same authors write other fan fiction pieces about. But there are also people who write erotic fan fiction about politicians, musicians, and other people in the public eye.

I had a follower on Twitter ask me last week what I think about the practice:

I responded:

 

And I’m not sure I have a whole lot more to add to this “short answer” response. Characters (whether portrayed by actors or written about in a text) are characters not human beings. We joke about how they take over our brains and insist their own version of events, but at the end of the day they are human creations — not humans themselves. They have no independent bodily autonomy or agency. They have no legal or social standing as persons. Real people do.

Real people can create erotica or pornography that involves themselves and offer it to others (friends or strangers) to enjoy consuming — as long as everyone’s staying safe and is able to consent without coercion I’m down with that. I even think teenagers technically under the age of consent should have the protected right to create erotica materials involving themselves and share those materials with their peers as part of their own sexual exploration. Obviously this raises questions about how to give them a safe space to explore their sexuality without being exploited, and I agree that’s a conversation to be had. But the general principle is: we should all have the creative license to explore our sexuality in textual and visual ways and share it as we desire.

However: consent is key here. I imagine human beings have always developed fantasies around other actual people prior to full and enthusiastic consent being given — in the case of those we later become sexually intimate with — or in situations where those relationships will never flower, but we’re crushing hard anyway. This isn’t about policing personal imagination — have all the damn fantasies you want about whomever and whatever you find turns you on.

I’d argue, though, that in the case of fantasies about real live actual people who aren’t involved in the spinning out of those fantasies? Those stories or images are best left in private spaces: your computer hard-drive, your journal, whatever. I’m not thinking so much of regulation here — I’m not arguing we pull RPF from the Archive and ban people from publishing more — but I’m arguing that as a matter of common courtesy it’s kinda, well, rude, to put your fantasies about actual people who you have no relationship with and who aren’t consenting to have these sexualized stories or images created around them out into the world of the ‘net where those same people could presumably come across said stories by Googling their names.

If someone wrote an erotica story — even a really sweet hot one! — about me as me and posted it online and I stumbled across it, it would feel really stalkery and invasive to me. Like, my wife is the only one at this point in time who has my permission to spin out stories about my bits that way.

So yes, I do think there are boundaries and ethical considerations where fan-creation is concerned. And I appreciate that there are people within fandom who are willing and interested in engaging in ongoing conversations about those difficult aspects of the genre. What I do hope is that those outside of the genre will think twice before dismissing the practice wholesale as facile or perverted (in the not-cool way). Because I think fan engagement with (mainstream) creative works has a lot of potential to change and complicate the (mainstream) conversation about human sexuality.

*One of the pieces of fan fiction I’m most proud of is a Donna Noble/Idris fic completed for last year’s International Day of Femslash.

mobility in the city [a few thoughts]

28 Sunday Oct 2012

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Warning: This is a rambling post full of thoughts in progress.

My friend Molly is in the process of writing a book about parenting-while-feminist and in our little writing group, #firstthedraft, we’ve been talking about the politics of “babywearing” (carrying your infant and/or small child in a backpack or sling, etc.) versus strollers. My parents generally used packs — front and back — in the mid-80s when I was small, as well as wagons, tricycles, car seats, and various bike attachments, to tote us around. I don’t remember that we ever had a stroller per-se, but then we also lived in a small enough town that for daily getting around a car was essential and strollers were thus less so. But I do remember using strollers as a childcare provider in my teens, as a way to move toddlers I physically couldn’t carry over distances of more than a city block or two (about the distance they had the stamina to walk on their own). I never thought of child transport options as very political in nature.

Here in the city, though, I’ve learned, strollers are a Big Deal. Everyone has Feelings about them: how big they should (or shouldn’t) be, where they should (and shouldn’t) be allowed to travel, when (if ever) they are reasonable to be on public transportation. Parents and non-parents alike take all sides and sometimes blood is shed (or at the very least ill-will is fostered).

Last week, I suggested on Twitter that the whole problem might be solved if only we could create little steampunk baby carriers that were balloon or propeller-powered and could hover at about 7-8 feet from the ground. The caregiver could then walk along tugging the carrier along on a tether and strollers would take up the sidewalks and/or precious room on the T no more!

still from The Red Balloon (via)

(Though I suppose then we’d be arguing about low-hanging trees and awnings on storefronts. Sigh.)

I actually think identifying this social rough-and-tumble as one about strollers and parenting choices  says something about how we, as a society, compartmentalize parents and their (especially wee) children into the category of Other, a group of people who enter the public realm on sufferance from the rest of us — those of us who, we like to believe, only take up an “appropriate” amount of space on the T, on the sidewalk, who move at the right speed from point A to point B, and are able to time our inconvenient errands for those times when, even if we do take up more space then usual, we will somehow magically not slow down, crowd out, or inadvertently invade the personal space of our fellow city dwellers.

Those of us, in other words, who assume we have a right to be in public space when and how we need to … as opposed to those Other folks whose right to the public square only extend as far as their ability to imitate the space-taking habits of the default citizen (Us).

So what I want to talk a little bit about in this post is how, in an urban environment, especially if you do not own a car and/or are trying to get by using it a little as possible, you’re just going to get in peoples’ way. Even if you don’t have dependents to transport. Even if you don’t have serious mobility issues that require extra gear (walker, cane, chairAnd errands are going to take a lot of effort to complete. And chances are you’re going to need some sort of wheeled conveyance to get them done — unless you’re lucky enough that you don’t have a bad back or a bum wrist or weak ankle and can afford a gym membership and the time to bench press on a regular basis.

Errands in the city take much more time and planning, in my experience, than they did in the car-dependent town where I grew up (or perhaps, I should clarify, much more than they did for me and my car-owning family; for the folks in my hometown too poor to own a car, life was further complicated by a crappy-to-nonexistent public transit system). It’s something I’ve had to get used to, as a former smaller-town dweller turned urbanite. And I think perhaps this helps me see more clearly the similarities across types of transport-aides that some other people don’t — because we’re so used to tuning our brainwaves to “judge” when parents-and-children come into view.

Hanna and I finally bought this shopping cart this year

I’m going to use, as an example, the errand I ran earlier this week to pick up our first monthly allotment of winter veggies from Stillman’s farm where we are CSA subscribers. Stillman’s is out near Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and drives the produce into the city to various pre-scheduled pick-up locations. The closest pick-up point for us was in downtown Boston about two miles from where I work at the MHS. The pick-up time was 2-4pm.

Setting aside, for a moment, the privilege of having a job with a) an hour-long lunch break, and b) the ability to leave on an errand and not worry about getting in trouble if the subway is delayed and I get back a bit late, this sounds like a relatively easy transaction. Take a late lunch, go down, pick up veggies, return to work, take veggies home at the end of the day. If I were living in my home town, this errand would have taken about twenty minutes, maybe, leaving 40 minutes at either end to actually eat lunch.

In Boston, this errand means the following:

1. Remember to take the wheelie-cart with me to work (which means dragging it along on our morning walk of approximately three miles) so that I will be able to transport the heavy winter vegetables on my own.

2. At 2pm, walk to the closest T stop and wait for a train that will take me the right number of stops from Hynes Convention Center to Haymarket (approx. 10 minutes)

3. Maneuver the empty cart into the T, off the T, and up the escalator at Haymarket, and two blocks to the drop point (approx. 15 minutes).

4. Transfer the vegetables from the back of the delivery truck into the cart (approx. 5 minutes).

5. Stop at a nearby sandwich shop for a sandwich and iced tea — admittedly an “optional” step, though to go without would have meant foregoing a midday meal; as it was, I didn’t have time to actually eat the sandwich until I was walking home that evening (approx 10-15 minutes).

6. Carry the cart, maybe 45 pounds fully loaded, down the stairs to Haymarket station; they have an elevator but I didn’t have time to locate it; the elevators to below-ground stops are often poorly marked. The escalators go up, but not down.

7. The first T to pull into the station was headed in the right direction, but not to the appropriate stop. I got on anyway, since I was now starting to feel anxious about getting back to work roughly on time. In order to board the train, I had to lift the cart up the stairs and maneuver it around the other passengers to a quasi-secure “parking” spot midway down the car.

8. At Copley Square I had to transfer trains, meaning I needed to maneuver around standing passengers carrying the laden cart down to the platform, and then repeat the process boarding the train again. All of these situations were made comparatively easy by a) the fact I’m physically able to lift the loaded cart for short bursts of time, b) I was traveling mid-afternoon instead of rush hour, c) I wasn’t getting hate-stares from people who automatically resent the presence of strollers in the subway. (steps 6-8 took maybe 20 minutes).

9. At Hynes, I had to disembark and haul the cart up three flights of stairs (only one of which is equipped with an up escalator) to street level, and then wheel the cart from the station to the MHS. (5 minutes)

10. At the end of the work day, I knew that rush hour on the T precluded trying to get my shopping cart on the T unless I wanted to wait for 45 minutes to an hour for any train empty enough to accommodate me. Since I am able to walk, and didn’t have to rush home for any reason, I walked home — a distance of about 3 miles — pushing the cart ahead of me.

This is the labor it takes to do one errand in the city when you’re relying on public transportation and your own two feet. I’m not writing this post in a bid for folks to pity me — we made the decision to subscribe to the CSA this winter, after all, knowing the time and effort it would take to get our fresh veggies. But I do hope that focusing in on the logistics of one errand this way points out how most of us, at one time or another, even if we are able-bodied adults sans children moving around our environment, are awkward to accommodate. And also point out how the environment is as much “at fault” as the awkward human being in question.

Rather than bitching about those of us who crowd the sidewalk with shopping carts, strollers, or walkers, we might think about the assumptions that led to sidewalks being a certain width (i.e. that all those who use the sidewalk are people who can walk unaided and unburdened with goods). While some of us might be able to carry our children (or our groceries) in wraps or packs or tote bags, others may not be strong enough to carry 45 pounds of produce (or exhausted toddler) for three miles — or time our outings before/after rush hour in order to actually fit on the T without the other passengers complaining or resenting you.

More and more, I find myself thinking about how the ideal citizen-worker in our world these days is the perfectly-able young adult without any dependents, who never gets ill, and is somehow (magically) perfectly self-sufficient. Not only do they never behave awkwardly in public, take up more space than we think they should, turn up their music louder than we’d like, lose their train of thought in the grocery aisle, or fumble with their wallet at the cash register … they manage their bodies (and those of their children) and personal belongings so that the rest of us can imagine they are not there.

Oh, I’ve been there. I’ve been annoyed and judgy and exhausted and angry and in the headspace where I just want to get home and not deal with one more stranger ever anywhere. But that’s just not the way the world works. We’re all awkward, noisy, thoughtless, slow. We all take up more space, sometimes, than others think we should.

And it seems like an important exercise or practice for each of us to — regardless of how we feel and what we think of others’ choices and presence —  realize that they’re probably just trying to get around the city like we are, and that sometimes getting from point A to B is an awkward, clumsy process. One that does, in fact, take up space in the world.

And that we all, in fact, equally entitled to be mobile, and to move around the city when and how we need to in order to live our lives.

so now we’re tattoo-married [wedding post the seventh]

30 Thursday Aug 2012

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by Mark Cook

Last week we suffered a minor crisis in wedding plans when we discovered that our tattoo artist, Ellen Murphy — who has worked at Chameleon, in Harvard Square, for the past eight years — would be relocating to New York City at the end of August to work at Red Rocket Tattoo. Suddenly, she was not going to be available on September 14th to ink our wedding tattoos!

Thankfully, my dad had just completed the calligraphy design for us a few days previously (see above), and so I phoned up Chameleon and booked us for this past Monday evening. Here are some photos we took of the process.

Ellen works on Hanna’s ink
first the stencil gets applied
and then the ink, which on one’s wrist is pretty intense!
I had mine done vertically; here it is moments after completion

Hanna told me afterwards that I turn some pretty exciting colors while I’m breathing through the pain; while I never felt nauseated or in true danger of passing out, I did feel a little lightheaded at times and Hanna reports my skin turned some exciting shades of white, yellow, and green. At moments like these, I’m grateful for all those adolescent menstrual cramps that hurt like a motherfucker and taught me how to breathe through the worst until it was all over. (Also kudos to Ellen for being in tune with how I was doing — we got the work done efficiently, without me ever having to ask her to break.)

The finished pieces, well-greased with antibiotic salve.
(Anna on the left, Hanna on the right)

We figure this puts us well on the way to a long life of marital commitment.

"in their graves because of false modesty"? [neha spring 2012]

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

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This past Saturday, I presented a paper at the spring meeting of the New England Historical Association (NEHA) at Rivier College in Nashua, New Hampshire. You can check out the full text of the presentation here: “In Their Graves Because of False Modesty?”: An Allegation of Sexual Assault in Boston, 1914-1915 (PDF, via DropBox).

The paper was my first attempt to pull together a research project I’m working on into a coherent narrative. The research concerns a mysterious deposition I stumbled upon in the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. As I write in the opening paragraphs:

Mediated, it is true, by the framework of legal testimony, the narrative voice of the deposition is nevertheless an active one. [Nellie] Keefe [the deposed] describes herself purposefully seeking medical treatment and intervening in that treatment when it goes contrary to her expectations. She positions herself as a consumer of medical services, with the ability to select a treatment plan with which she feels comfortable, rather than the passive recipient of medical care with which she is uncomfortable — from a medical professional whose authority she should not, or cannot, challenge. She evokes the spectre of sexual aggression by describing how Dr. Underhill “turned the light out [and] inserted his finger in my vagina,” yet ultimately circumscribes Underhill’s actions by indicating that she successfully ordered him to stop.

To the modern reader, the deposition feels both remarkably contemporary, yet also deeply embedded in an historically-specific set of social and medical expectations surrounding patient-doctor interactions. While Keefe’s self-reported actions make clear that she was dissatisfied with Underhill’s professionalism, she also indicates that Dr. Underhill was similarly dissatisfied with her performance of the role as patient. “During the treatments he would pull the blanket off me and I would pull it on again and he would pull it off again leaving me stark naked,” she testified, vividly illustrating the battle between patient and doctor over the circumstances under which Keefe’s treatment should proceed. Keefe was clearly unhappy with Dr. Underhill’s methods, yet returned to his office multiple times to try and negotiate a more satisfactory interaction. What appears at first to be a straightforward account of a doctor’s unprofessional conduct is, I would argue, a more complicated document containing multiple and uncertain meanings.

You can download the full paper from DropBox.

Like my past appearances at NEHA, it was great to spend a morning talking history with a diverse and encouraging group of practicing historians from all over New England. I particularly enjoyed the presentation of my co-panelist Allison Hepler (University of Maine, Farmington), whose research into the life of “Communist hussy librarian” Mary Knowles not only paralleled my own project in unexpected ways, but also gave me a certain amount of professional pride (who wouldn’t want to be known as a “Community hussy librarian”?!).

While we had very little time for Q & A at the session, I had warm words of encouragement from folks for the continuation of my research. What questions and reflections I did field helped clarify how I might move forward from here. I’m particularly motivated to explore the network of female friendships and associations that seem to be such a central part of the Keefe-Underhill case. Time to roll up my sleeves and get to work exercising my reference and historical research skills!

I (heart) dahlia lithwick (again) + rant re: healthcare oral arguments

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

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via @eskenosen

On the way to work this morning, Hanna and I were discussing how utterly nonsensical and frustrating the anti-healthcare folks are. First they didn’t want government-supported, single-payer healthcare. So the Obama administration patched together something using private insurers. And now they’re pissed about that. Dahlia Lithwick, as usual, highlights the inanity:

It’s always a bit strange to hear people with government-funded single-payer health plans describe the need for other Americans to be free from health insurance. But after the aggressive battery of questions from the court’s conservatives this morning, it’s clear that we can only be truly free when the young are released from the obligation to subsidize the old and the ailing. Justice Samuel Alito appears to be particularly concerned about the young, healthy person who “on average consumes about $854 in health services each year” being saddled with helping pay for the sick or infirm—even though, one day that will describe all of us. Or as Justice Antonin Scalia later puts it: “These people are not stupid. They’re going to buy insurance later. They’re young and need the money now.” (Does this mean that if you are young and you pay for insurance, Scalia finds you “stupid”?)

Read the whole thing over at Slate. Emphasis mine.

Apart from everything else that’s angry-making about the healthcare “debate,” I’m particularly appalled by the endemic ageism and ableism embedded in these arguments about how we shouldn’t have to pay for what other people need. As if those “others” (the sick, the infirm) aren’t actually us. And will never be us. Or, once we become the other we’ll be left out in the cold to cope with our ill-health all on our own.

Say what?

The argument that young people don’t need healthcare services implies that youth per se = healthy. This is an idealization of youth that runs rampant in our culture, and it’s poisoning our collective consciousness by encouraging us to imagine that to be young is in itself a protection against ill-health. This is nonsense. I know plenty of young people, myself and my partner included, who need not only preventative care (so we hopefully won’t need more expensive care later), but also actual expensive care. Being young doesn’t protect you from physical infirmity, both organic and accidental. Young people get cancer. Young people have thyroid disorders. Young people get infections. Young people break bones, are involved in traffic accidents, must cope with sports injuries. Young people need dental work done, require eye care, need regular reproductive health check-ups (I just made my annual pelvic exam appointment last week).

This Friday I’ll be celebrating my 31st birthday. I know very few of my peers who haven’t already, in their relatively youthful lives, had need of medical services for all of these things. And who haven’t avoided desperately-needed medical care because they were temporarily un- or under-insured and couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket for that care.

As Lithwick points out, even if we experience a relatively healthful youth, we will all one day age and become infirm of body. There is a stunning arrogance and lack of self-awareness to the suggestion that those “others” who get sick and need medical care are the ones who much bear the burden of procuring those services. Seriously: Do certain Supreme Court Justices / conservative lawmakers actually believe they will never become ill/sustain an injury/need end-of-life care?

Once again, I am reminded of historian Gerda Lerner’s observation that “All of us, ultimately, will join one of the most despised and abused groups in our society–the old and the sick.”

There’s a conversation to be had about the financial burden of healthcare services, and whether the cost should be as high as it is. But that conversation should be separate from the conversation about individual healthcare needs, because when it comes to health, like our environment, we’re all in this together. There is no way to escape sickness, there is no way to prevent death. We will all experience physical suffering. We will all need medical care. And there is absolutely no way to reliably predict who will need what services and when.

It frightens me that the supposedly wise persons on the Supreme Court seem to have forgotten their own mortality.

booknotes: straight

27 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Until I fell in love with my partner, Hanna, I generally conceptualized myself as “mostly straight.” This was because, despite the passionate friendships I formed with female friends and the way lesbian sexual fantasies made me go all squishy with excitement, I didn’t feel I was queer enough to be considered authentically out of bounds of straightness. And I passively imagined that, given the statistical odds, chances were I’d fall in love with a person who was a cisgendered man (although I wouldn’t have used the term “cisgendered” back then).

Then Hanna came along, and I realized I was falling for her, and then we were together, a couple in the world, and I had to develop a whole new vocabulary for talking about myself: “mostly straight” no longer felt accurate. But was I lesbian? bisexual? fluid? queer? Should I articulate my sexuality in terms of my kinky fantasies? The gender identity and sexual orientation of my partner? The aggregate attractions I’ve felt but never acted upon for people across the gender and sexuality spectrum? If I’m a person who’s felt squishy feelings for people who identify as male, female, trans, gay, bi, straight, and numerous combinations of the above … how meaningful is it to try and identify something inherently personal (one’s subjective sense of self) in terms of the objects of my affection (which are multivarient, ever-changing). In a strange way, the language I choose to speak of myself has an effect on the identities of anyone I’ve ever felt the thrill of sexual excitement over.

It’s a social dilemma that, three years later, I’ve yet to resolve. These days, when filling out forms I go for the string-of-words approach. The form asks Sexual Orientation? I respond: “lesbian/bisexual/fluid” or the like. Check boxes be damned. In a pinch, “bisexual” is probably the best catch-all (I register attraction to people of multiple gender expressions and sex identities). In biomedical terms, “lesbian” is probably the most accurate in that I’m in a monogamous relationship with a cisgendered woman — so our medical needs will be those of women who have sex exclusively with women. But that isn’t all of who I am — or who my partner is, for that matter, since she identifies as bisexual. “Fluid” helps capture some of the contextual nature of my sexual desires, and my sense of personal change over time. But will provide little information to my primary care provider that “lesbian” doesn’t already communicate — with much less room for confusion.

When blogging or speaking informally, I’ll use lesbian, dyke, bi, gay, queer, fluid, or sometimes opt for phrasing that’s less about who I am and more about what I do: “As someone in a lesbian relationship…,” “As someone who’s partnered with another woman …”

Hanne Blank, in her recently-published (long anticipated!) Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon Press, 2012) recounts similar dilemmas of self-identification as the partner of a male-identified person whose markers of sex and gender are, nonetheless, all over the biological map due to having been born with XXY chromosomes. The author of Virgin: An Untouched History returns to historical and cultural notions of human sexuality in an effort to illuminate what we mean when we talk about “heterosexual” or “straight” identity. As with “virgin,” the answer turns out to be murky at best. The concept of an individual whose identity or nature was built, at least in part, around an exclusive attraction to “opposite”-sexed partners and activities, only came into being in relation to the study of non-normative or “deviant” sexual behavior during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even after the term came into common usage, virtually no research has been done — scientific or otherwise — on heterosexual sexuality. We don’t know how the bodies of heterosexuals differ from those of non-heterosexuals, for example. Research on homosexuality suggests there is no marker of sexual orientation on the body, but no one has ever asked the question “How are heterosexual bodies composed?” Scientists studying non-heterosexuality always assume they know the normal against which they are measuring the non-normal. Yet this assumption is never spelled out, and its markers are never articulated. As Blank writes:

Scientists often look for evidence of non-heterosexuality, what we consider the exception to the rule, while assuming that the heterosexual rule itself requires no evidence. Scientifically speaking, this is precisely backwards. In science, it should technically not be possible to even begin considering whether there might be exceptions to a rule until you have proven that the rule exists (42-43).

The reason why we’ve never inquired into the existence of heterosexuality is that, culturally speaking, it is a category of being that has become commonsensical, so self-evident in our minds that we measure every other sexuality in relation to it. There is power in a category so constructed as simultaneously normative and empty of actual definition. Blank compares heterosexuality to the concept of being not a person of color or not a slut. “Nameless and characterless, the space we can loosely categorize as ‘normal’ is almost completely undefined,” she writes (32):

This is why ‘slut’ and ‘prude, ‘pervert’ and ‘deviant’ all work so well as insults and as ways to police the boundaries of sex doxa [an anthropological term meaning “what everyone knows to be true”]. The labels are effortless to deploy, and hard, even impossible, to defend against … The opposite of ‘slut’ is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa (32).

If there is a weakness in Straight it is the emphasis on marriage and reproduction as signs of heterosexual identity. I understand why Blank draws upon these cultural examples of heterosexual life — both marriage and parenting are more social activities than, typically, sexual behavior. People are far more likely to record instances of the former rather than the latter. So from an historical perspective, research on heterosexuality will end up documenting those outward signs with much more confidence than it will what people actually did with their bits (and how they felt about doing it). Unless people talk about their sexual self-identities, it’s hard to do more than catalog instances in which sexual acts were recorded — and those acts were usually the ones considered deviant, exceptional, worthy or note or censure.

Still, other books have been written in recent years on the history of marriage, and I felt myself starting to skim in hopes of more discussion of sexological research and taxonomy, a more inventive backward reading from those instances of “deviance” toward what people considered not-deviant. Some of that does appear in the pages of Straight, but I found myself wishing Blank’s editor had pushed her to include less of the well-trodden history of marital practice and more of the specifically sexual practices that fell within the bounds of the acceptable. She does argue, at one point, that “penis-in-vagina intercourse is the only source of sexual pleasure that has never, so far as we can tell from the historical record, has never been challenged … the fortunes of all other sex acts and all other sources of sexual pleasure, have varied widely” (124). I would have liked to see that assertion expanded on, to have these boundaries of sexual activity discussed in relation to the notion of sexual identity in historical understanding. In the 1890s, for example, would a husband and wife who practiced cunnilingus and fellatio with one another been categorized as “normal-sexual” in the eyes of the early sexologists? Blank leaves much of that open to further discussion — which may, I admit, have been her intent.

In the end, Blank has written yet another accessible survey of a sexual concept we think we all know and instead, it turns out, we know little about. I hope the liveliness of her prose and the concrete examples she provides of individuals who defy our binary sex, gender, and sexual categories (man/woman, gay/straight, cis/trans) will encourage people who may not have thought human sexuality in such complex terms to revisit their assumptions and look at their own identities and behaviors with new, and perhaps more forgiving and expansive, eyes.

booknotes: the trouble with nature

14 Tuesday Feb 2012

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This week’s adventures in queer theory came in the form of anthropologist Roger N. Lancaster’s The Trouble With Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2003), which caught my eye on the shelves of Raven Books on Newbury Street. Yes, it really is the sort of thing I buy myself as a weekend treat.

Lancaster’s wide-ranging examination of narratives around sex, gender, sexuality, and nature in both scientific and popular culture can be read as a single monograph or as a series of fairly free-standing topical essays. Grounded in research done largely in the 1980s and 90s, Lancaster charts the various ways in which evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have been deployed across the political spectrum to argue for a stable “human nature” in the face of social and political flux. “What is most obvious about these naturalistic and naturalizing representations [of sex and gender] is that they are so emphatic on matters which recent history has been so equivocal,” he observes (8).

The language of the natural sciences are seen, in contemporary culture, as the voice of authority on the realm of the possible. Queer activists draw on the authority of supposedly innate desires to argue that they were “born this way” and therefore are eligible for equal treatment. Some strains of feminist theory ground their vision in an understanding of women as innately nurturing, pacifist, or cooperative. Religious conservatives, likewise, often utilizes the language of natural science to argue for a particular theological vision of destiny (consider the case made for intelligent design, or the “natural” complementarity of heterosexual relations). Free-market libertarians argue that human beings have a “selfish gene” and to put forward a communitarian alternative to capitalism would be inevitably futile.

In contrast to these fatalistic, mechanistic notions of humanity, Lancaster draws upon his training in cultural studies and anthropology to argue for the irreducable complexity and variety of human sex, gender, and sexual expression across time and space. While acknowledging that we are, indeed, physical bodies, those bodies are in turn never separable from the meaning we make of that matter: “Hormones, odors, and appetites do count — but their effects are always called forth within a cultural context, which is to say, they count in dynamic and non-reductive ways … it matters less that they are biological than that they are creatively articulated within a framework of arbitrary meanings and contingent practices” (204). To put it less jargonistically, “the body is enmeshed in social facts and human acts,” not an ahistorical constant (205).

Lancaster’s book is far from the most articulate or persuasive account of the cultural context in which science around sex and gender is practiced (the works of Anne Fausto-Sterling, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Cordelia Fine, Jeffrey Weeks, Gayle Rubin, and obviously Michel Foucault all come to mind, many of whom he draws upon in this work). If you’re not already at least sympathetic to the notion that scientific research is done in the context of human culture, then you will not likely be convinced by The Trouble With Nature. However, what Lancaster contributes to this field is a thorough survey of the ways in which “bioreductivism” filters into (and draws upon) the language of sex, gender, and sexuality so as to become a feedback loop of “common sense.”  He examines how, over the course of the twentieth century, the languages of sociobiology and evolutionary became the undisputed voices of authority on human behavior — a realm once shared with practitioners in such fields as anthropology, history, and sociology.

Most interesting to me was the way in which Lancaster, himself a gay man, is uncompromising in his criticism of queer activists who use “innatist” arguments to advance the rights of non-straight sexual identity groups. “At best … the new innatist claims carve out a protected niche for homosexual exceptionalism,” he writes. “At worst, they reify the prevailing logic of heterosexual metaphysics and thus actively contribute to the reproduction of an exclusionary homophobic — and sexist — environment. For gays can only be gay ‘by nature’ in a ‘nature’ that already discloses men and women whose deepest instincts and desires are also different ‘by nature” (275). As someone who shares Lancaster’s skepticism that a “born this way” argument is a sound long-term political strategy for ending heteronormative policies and prejudices, I appreciated his articulation of an approach to queer rights activism that doesn’t ground its authority in the notion of a fixed non-straight orientation, but rather the infinite variety of human sexual desires.

With that in mind, I’m closing this review with a lengthy quotation from the introduction to The Trouble With Nature in which Lancaster sketches out the talking points for how one might re-frame the political debate over human sexuality and queer practices. “The long-standing demand, made by religious conservatives, distraught parents, and liberal helping professions alike, is but this: Change your unnatural desires. Time and again, the response is given: I can’t change them — They’re part of my nature,” Lancaster writes. “Would it be as convincing to own one’s sexuality in a volantarist fashion, to say, simply, ‘No, I won’t change them — I’m as queer as I want to be?’ ” (22).  He suggests it might be possible to do just that:

“Desire and identity are inherently ambiguous,” a different kind of contention might begin. “Some of us are more or less exclusively homosexual for most of our lives, many more are exclusively heterosexual,” the argument might continue, rightly acknowledging the salient facts. “But sometimes even straight men find themselves infatuated with their best friends and — as any veteran of feminist consciousness-raising can tell you — women who think of themselves as heterosexual sometimes discover lesbian potential they didn’t know was there. It’s not unheard of for gay ment to fall for women, or lesbians to sleep with men.” 

Now for the theory: “Freud believed that all human beings have bisexual potential. Research by Alfred Kinsey, Laud Humphreys, and others suggests that a lot of people act on that potential at some point in their lives. Anthropological studies of other cultures have shown that human sexual practices are remarkably varied — that there’s more than one way to organize the institutions of family, kinship, and sexual life. Some societies even require every male to engage in same-sex relations for extended periods of time. What all of this means is that nothing in ‘human nature’ gives us a heterosexual norm and a homosexual minority. Sexuality is largely what we make of it.” 

Then, a dash of social context to make sense of how we “make” sexuality: “In modern America, people are very much in the process of making new things out of sex and sexuality. All around us, relationships are in flux: gender roles are changing, sexual practices are changing, all at a dizzying speed. None of this means that people ‘choose’ their sexuality the way a person might choose a pair of socks. But in fact, many individuals do change over time.” Segue into the argument: “So much variation, experimentation, and change makes some people very nervous: they come up with absolutist claims about an unchanging nature, or, they fall back on the premodern idea of divine law as the last recourse in these matters. But ‘nature’ explains nothing here. And nobody really knows very much about why people have the feelings they have.” 

Then, cut to the chase: “None of this is an illness or a disease. None of this means that the end of the world is at hand. There’s nothing wrong with any way that people can express love, make community, or find consensual pleasure. What’s wrong is trying to make people feel sick or evil or perverted about things that are just part of being human. What’s wrong — and dangerous — is trying to narrow the range of pleasures people find in our wondrously human bodies” (23-24).

While I doubt The Trouble With Nature is a great starting place for those interested in the cultural history of human sexuality, I think Lancaster’s book has a lot to offer on the subject and I’m glad I made it an addition to my growing library of sexuality literature.