doi: https://doi.org/10.26262/gramma.v25i0.6587

An Introduction to “‘The Politics of Location’: Feminist and Queer Spaces

within Global Contexts”

Margaret Sönser Breen and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou

his special issue of Gramma aims to explore the politics of location by laying specific emphasis on the complex interactions between space, temporality, gender, and movement. T It addresses questions related, on the one hand, with the ways our locatedness constructs our identities, and, on the other hand, with ways gendered subjects may queer or challenge the fixity of local or global spaces and invent new modes of relating with them. If space, as the leading human geographer Tim Creswell has argued, cannot be reduced to a mere dot on a map, but is always associated with a set of ideas, then space and mobility are two concepts inextricably linked. Space, as social scientist Doreen Massey contends in a similar vein, is not static but dynamic, as it carries narratives (for example, stories related with who has lived or lives there, what past or present events took or take place there, how it relates with other spaces, what its borders are, etc.) that are open to interpretation and can therefore vary. Temporality should be regarded similarly. So postcolonial and transnational feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty speaks of a “temporality of struggle,” which “suggests an insistent, simultaneous, nonsynchronous process characterized by multiple locations, rather than a search for origins and endings” (120). The essays in our issue will attempt to throw light to some of the narratives that real or virtual spaces incorporate and unravel the power threads entangled in these stories. While gender is a point of departure in the analyses all essays undertake, its intersections with power structures pertaining to race, age, class, sexuality, and ethnicity also play a crucial part, as they enable more insightful understandings of the politics of location. The title of our issue borrows from Adrienne Rich’s 1984 essay “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” wherein she renounces the idea of universal sisterhood upon which a large part of first- and second-wave feminist thought relied. Drawing from personal experience, and acknowledging the fact that her own subject position as a white, North-American, Jewish, lesbian, female poet shaped her mode of perception, Rich points towards the necessity of establishing a feminist discourse that resists white circumscribing and accommodates women’s experience in all its diversity. Although Rich finds the idea of contesting locality fascinating, she insists on its importance and challenges Virginia Woolf’s celebrated declaration in her anti-war book-length essay Three Guineas: “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (125). For Rich, the tendency to adopt the generic identity of “a woman,” or to use phrases like “we, women” instead of the “I” pronoun, or dictums that begin

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Introduction 3 with “women have always …,” is based on the false assertion that all women’s cultures are identical and rooted in some western tradition. When Woolf’s phrase is read within the whole context of Three Guineas, however, it becomes clear that it does not exactly undermine the politics of location. Woolf never loses track of her place of belonging, which is the very specific class of “the daughters of educated men,” as she terms it, that is, white middle-class women who had the benefit of indirect education through their erudite fathers but were never granted equal rights with their brothers. Woolf never divests herself of her white, middle-class, intellectually elite identity, and her seemingly oversimplified announcement “As a woman my country is the whole world” is less a denial of her Englishness than a realization that the English law has treated her as an outsider and deprived her of a number of rights bestowed on men. In the solutions to stopping war she proposes in Three Guineas (the building of women’s colleges and the open access to women in all professions), it is evident that Woolf sees an urgent need not to abolish, but to revise Englishness. Following Rich, the limitation of Woolf’s argument is that her call for revision is linked to the women of her class first and to all other women subsequently. What motivated Rich and a number of later feminists to interpret Woolf’s quote as an a- political cry for global sisterhood was perhaps a pressing concern to warn late twentieth-century feminism against generalizations that efface the rare specificities of womanhood and its tricky crossing with a variety of other dominant discourses, especially since Woolf’s influence on second- and third-wave feminism has been pivotal. In 1994, a decade after “Notes” and in line with Rich, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti saw the publication of her book Nomadic Subjects. In it Braidotti is very critical towards the trust in utopian no-places that Woolf spawned, referring specifically to multilocated feminists, like Hélène Cixous, Lucy Irigaray and Seyla Benhabib, who adopted and reinforced this stance of “planetary exile,” as she calls it (Braidotti 55). Furthermore, in her 2013 study on British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary, Jane Garrity goes as far as to characterize Woolf’s statement as an “exuberant embrace of the rhetoric of territorial expansionism” (15). Although this may sound like an extreme reading of Woolf’s epigram, given her indisputable anti-fascist, anti-imperialist standpoint in Three Guineas, Garrity offers a thought-provoking perspective, since the ease with which Woolf proclaims herself a global citizen is indeed a luxury conferred on her precisely because she is already a British citizen. If as a woman Woolf was barred from male demarcated locations, as a member of the “kinetic elite”1 she had the freedom to imagine herself a global inhabitant. Moreover, when read within the context of our own time, the second decade of the twenty-first century, so profoundly shaped and shaken by the world refugee crisis, Woolf’s plea for homelessness, rings with insensitivity, to say the least. When millions of people worldwide are displaced by force because of wars, persecution,

1 This is a term coined by the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells and adopted by Cresswell in his article “Citizenship in Worlds of Mobility” (115). It refers to privileged people granted smooth and protected transitions from place to place or lodging in secure and isolated enclaves at the expense of non-elite citizens who are subject to a smothering system of constant surveillance. The term is used anachronistically here, since Woolf belonged to an analogous early twentieth-century elite class that was allowed guarded and comfortable stay and mobility. 4 Margaret Sönser Breen and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou or human right violations, when they are denied entry into other countries, or deprived of the right to belong to one, proclaiming to “want no country” as an expression of opposition to patriarchy is admittedly a callously privileged rhetorical posture. Recognizing the intricate connections between gender and other modes of classification, Braidotti maintains that “generalizations about women should be replaced by cartographic accuracy, attention to and accountability for differences among women” (56). In lieu of what she interprets as an evasive and elitist trend of cosmopolitanism, which is very class- and race-specific, Braidotti counterposes the idea of active nomadism. Instead of defying boundaries, Braidotti’s nomad is conscious of the instability and permeability of boundaries, embraces change, and aspires for a shifting identity. Like Giles Deleuze’s “rhizome,” Braidotti’s nomad grows silently and imperceptibly underground and sideways in a counter-hegemonic non-phallogocentric way; moreover, like Donna Haraway’s “cyborg,” the nomad resists “fixed, unitary, and exclusionary views of subjectivity” (Braidotti 58). In the new global capitalist cities around the world, which accommodate a conglomerate of traditional and hypermodern cultures, the nomad’s lack of nostalgia for the past and openness to transition offers a viable solution to the menacing threats of xenophobia and racial, ethnic, or sexual intolerance. The power of roots then lies not in their steadiness but in their capacity to flow, which is an impossible, imagined, and oxymoronic condition that one would think can apply only to water plants. It is interesting to observe that Braidotti’s opening quote in the first chapter of Nomadic Subjects is from Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves and her deeply rooted, fully embodied socialite, albeit mobile character, Jinny. “I am rooted, but I flow,” Jinny announces, while discovering in her fluttering, rippling, and streaming mobility “a thousand capacities spring[ing] up in [her]” (102). It is exactly upon this astonishing process of roots converting into routes that not only Braidotti’s nomadic subject, but also modern theories of mobility rely. Location is not refuted by sociologists or human geographers, but examined in its complexity and open-endedness, and consequently its interminable ability to signify. When perceived both as a geopolitical and temporal notion and as something imagined through language, it becomes evident that location generates narratives which call for cautious interpretation. Feminist theory has long been focusing on how space is gendered, how women (and men and transgender people) are allocated restricted positions, and how women’s mobility may enable dislocations or relocations and so endow them with agency. Unless we consider, however, questions related with how, when, where, at what speed, how often, or why one moves in contemporary globalized localities, we will always have only a fraction of the stories we’re trying to salvage. In order to politicize location today we need to approach it as a fluid signifier related to both roots and uprooting, and explore the intricate ways in which the spaces we occupy (our bodies included, as they are the first and foremost spaces we belong to) build our subjectivities and the ways subjects engineer spaces. It is also crucial to bear in mind, while investigating space in its binding relation to mobility, that movement is not always identical with resistance, but may reproduce gender, racial, sexual or other hierarchies. Global and local patterns of power may intersect in multiple, contradictory, and ambiguous manners, and the birth of new global societies Introduction 5 may produce new forms of domination, which can be fought only when women acknowledge and bring together their diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and historical backgrounds. For Mohanty, the development of transnational solidarity among women proves crucial to reasserting women as agents of feminist politics. The future of an effective feminist politics depends upon alliances rooted in and flowing across heterogeneous gender positionalities. Such an understanding of feminism informs the eight essays that comprise “‘The Politics of Location’: Feminist and Queer Spaces within Global Contexts.” Apart from feminist studies, these pieces cross various fields and subfields, including the following: American studies, comparative cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, geography, Holocaust studies, literary and film studies, media studies, musicology, Palestine studies, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, rhetoric studies, sociology, and South Asian studies. All of the essays, albeit from different cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, are concerned with questions of boundaries, boundedness, regulation, and restriction and, accordingly, with issues of agency and resistance, as well as ethical evasion and failure. The special issue begins with Margaret Sönser Breen’s “The Locations of Politics: Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Todd Haynes’ Carol, and American Post-War and Contemporary Cultural Landscapes.” Paying special attention to both the spatial and temporal dimensions of a “politics of location,” this essay offers a comparative analysis of Patricia Highsmith’s landmark mid-century lesbian novel and its recent film counterpart, Todd Haynes’s Carol. Breen analyzes the queerness of these two works not only within the context of their particular genres and genre histories but also in relation to a twenty-first-century audience’s engagement with them. Of special interest here is the issue of mobility. Both novel and film remind readers that mid-century lesbian bodies, especially when they travel, are always already under cultural surveillance. How does such policing of lesbian mobility foreground various kinds of interrogations of other potentially suspect bodies within both the mid-century setting for the story that both Highsmith and Haynes tell and the cultural context that an early twenty-first-century readership inhabits? Stated in slightly different terms, to what extent does a celebration of the lesbian love story at the center of these works depend on oppositions to and/or alliances with other marginalized figures (be these figures characters within the texts themselves or within the larger aesthetic histories of the texts)? Relatedly, what are the lessons of inclusion and exclusion that the novel and film offer a contemporary readership? How queer are The Price of Salt and Carol, after all? Similar questions are taken up by the next four essays, which focus on how individuals and groups negotiate personal and collective understandings of gender and sexuality within political contexts that threaten war, unrest, and violence. So, for example, questions of locatedness are simultaneously intensified and circumscribed in Yael Pilowsky Bankirer’s “The Posterity of Hiding: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Diary of Anne Frank.” In this essay Bankirer explores different registers of violence: the inhumanity that delimited (concentrated?) Anne Frank’s self- expressions as she comes of age in hiding; and the editorial eradications that characterizes her diary’s publication history. With regard to the latter, despite its worldwide circulation in various editions and formats, the diary has, as Bankirer observes, been subject to numerous deletions and 6 Margaret Sönser Breen and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou revisions, many of which de-contextualize and de-politicize the diary. This publication history and more generally the history of the circulation of Anne’s story as a diary keeper have had the effect of flattening out her story and overlooking the specificity of her maturation, especially her psychic development, within the context of hiding. Bankirer asserts the significance of the specificity of Anne’s locatedness: in particular, Anne’s position as a Jew in hiding during the Holocaust and, even more so, as a Jew growing into an understanding of herself as a young woman within the constricted physical space and limited social relations that the secret annex afforded. Drawing on psychoanalytic discussions, Bankirer argues that precisely by “peeping at the world through a key hole,” Anne engages in “a different process of growing into womanhood, whereby she reclaims the legitimacy of her voice and challenges basic conceptions of gender and sexuality.” Violence and erasure are also central to Tara Atluri’s discussion of gender and sexual diversity in India. In “Trans/itory Belongings: At the Borders of Skin and Citizenship,” Atluri begins by considering the case of Shivi, whose parents tried to force their child, a transgender South-Asian American, to live as a cisgender person in India. Atluri argues that the ensuing legal battle, which Shivi ultimately won, discloses the reductive understanding of gender and sexuality held by the Indian diasporas—a perspective that erases not only the vitality of feminist and queer activism in Southeast Asia but also the rich history of India’s gender and sexual diversity. As Atluri points out, Western LGBTQI groups, too, are limited in their understanding of “genealogies of gendered transgression and queer activism in non-Western contexts,” and as such become implicated in sustaining the legacy of colonial violence. The next essay turns attention to the possibilities for activist coalition-building. In “The Politics of (Dis-)location: Queer Migration, Activism, and Coalitional Possibilities,” Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem discuss the work of three different activist groups working at the intersection of queer and undocumented bodies: the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP)/United We Dream and the UndocuQueer Movement, both located in the United States; and Queer Refugees for Pride, established in Germany. Paying particular attention to the nexus of temporality and location, Fellner and Nossem argue that these groups’ “strategies …, which situate the constructions of sexual and queer identities within global processes of globalization, capitalism, and nationalism,” have the ability “to shift the politics of dislocation to a politics of relocation.” Such activist organizations expose and disrupt anti-immigration policies; they also attest to the importance of solidarity, understood in terms of the “simultaneity of coalitional moments in multiple locations of the world.” Whereas Fellner and Nossem examine queer agency on the level of coalitional activism, Alex Karaman, in “Going Out, Not Coming Out: Queer Affects, Secluded Publics, and Palestinian Hip-Hop,” analyzes how, for young, queer Palestinians, the practice of going out and supporting (that is, creating and frequenting) secluded hip-hop establishments in Haifa manifests resistance to social as well as political surveillance and oppression. For Karaman, despite the genre’s history of sexism and homophobia, hip-hop dance practices do not simply sustain “hetero-/gender- normative mobility-visibility regimes.” Instead, such practices also allow queer participants to claim hip-hop spaces as sites of “re-vision,” which Rich, in her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Introduction 7

Writing as Re-vision,” defines in terms of disruption, renewal, and transformation. Queer Palestinians’ engagement with these spaces affords them the possibility “to reformulate and embody hip-hop practices in progressive, counter-cultural, or anti-normative ways,” and moreover for Karaman, “gesture[s] towards new directions for a body of Middle Eastern queer theory that militates against cultural imperialism, orientalism, racism, and homonormativity.” Similar to Karaman’s study of queer Palestinians’ negotiated movement both across the cityscape and on the hip-hop dance floor is Rebecca S. Richards’ essay, “Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames.” Here, Richards examines the virtual spaces of videogames, and, in particular, the feminist lessons that three games—République, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Alien: Isolation—proffer regarding women’s vulnerability and surveillance within globalized capitalism. She explicates how the games “creat[e] virtual spaces that simulate” the ways in which “a transnational politics of location plays out on women’s bodies.” In so doing, these videogames, particularly their procedural limits, disclose how women are compelled to “‘sneak’ around national identities and rules.” Such games, she concludes, offer audiences an object lesson in empathy. The thematic linkage of corporeal precarity and feminist responsiveness is also at work in the next essay, which takes up Victorian novelist George Eliot’s literary engagement with that often overlooked social figure, the kept mistress. In “At Home in Narrative: The Kept Mistress in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda” Katie R. Peel argues that, on the level of both the novel’s form and content, Eliot accords Lydia Glasher a dignity and respect rarely experienced by her real-life counterparts. In so doing, the novelist, who herself, in her long-time relationship with George Henry Lewes, occupied the marginalized space of the non-married woman partner, enacts a feminist intervention. With her characterization of Lydia, Eliot not only counters “conventional Victorian ideology” but also offers “a new narrative for kept mistresses, who had previously been invisible in both nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction.” Shalmalee Palekar’s “Out! and New Queer Indian Literature” rounds out “‘The Politics of Location’: Feminist and Queer Spaces within Global Contexts.” Like Breen in her essay, Palekar takes up the issue of queerness in literature. In so doing, she brings it to bear on Indian literary texts, specifically through her analysis of two short stories from Minal Hajratwala’s 2012 anthology Out! Stories from the New Queer India: Sunny Singh’s “A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil” and Ashish Sawhny’s “Nimbooda, Nimbooda, Nimbooda.” Mixing close reading and literary overview, Palekar’s essay seeks to delineate “the contradictory, complex, time-and-place-specific discourses that construct queer Indian subjects across diverse religious, gender, and community contexts” and, above all, across literary contexts. The eight essays comprising this special issue provide suggestive and provocative ways for (re)thinking the politics of location. Whether concerned with transformative possibilities afforded by art or activism, and whether explicitly focused on twenty-first-century texts and issues or those of an earlier time, all of these essays recognize the vulnerability of marginalized bodies. How is it that feminist and queer work can engender spaces—epistemological, geographical, somatic, and 8 Margaret Sönser Breen and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou temporal—to dignify and protect those bodies? That is perhaps the most pressing question with which this collection leaves us.

Works Cited

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed., New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. ---. “The Production of Mobilities,” New Formations, no. 43, 2001, pp. 3-25. ---. “Citizenship in Worlds of Mobility.” Critical Mobilities, edited by Ola Soderstrom, Didier Ruedin, Shalini Randeria, Gianni D’Amato, and Francesco Panese, London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 105-124. ---. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 28, 2010, pp. 17-31. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity P, 1994. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke UP Books, 2003. Garrity, Jane. Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985, New York: Norton, 1994, pp. 210-231. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.” College English, vol. 34, no. 1, Oct. 1972, pp. 18-30. Uteng, Tanu Priya and Tim Cresswell, editors. Gendered Mobilities. London: Routledge, 2016. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

The Locations of Politics: Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Todd Haynes’ Carol,

and American Post-War and Contemporary Cultural Landscapes

Margaret Sönser Breen

University of Connecticut, USA

Abstract

This essay examines Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian novel The Price of Salt (1952) and its recent film adaptation Carol (2015). Reading the novel and film together and against each other, as well as against other mid-century artistic productions, allows one to recognize both texts’ affirmation of queer desires and, with that affirmation, a revision of conventional narrative structures to accommodate that affirmation. Such readings, however, also expose the lapses and ambivalences in both the novel and film: discontinuities that at least qualify and perhaps undermine a definition of the works as queer. How queer are these texts after all, and in so far as “queer” gestures toward social inclusion, how queer are these texts in their vision of America? Finally, how can a reading that focuses on the novel’s and film’s aesthetic and social politics of location facilitate a queer understanding of our own cultural moment?

Keywords: Patricia Highsmith (Claire Morgan), Carol, The Price of Salt, lesbian narrative, queer aesthetics, queer politics, intertextuality

his essay examines Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian novel The Price of Salt (1952) and its recent film adaptation Carol (2015). Considered a lesbian classic, the former is one of T the few works of pre-Stonewall fiction to offer its protagonists a happy ending. The latter, directed by Todd Haynes and with a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, is a love letter as much to Highsmith’s protagonists, Therese and Carol, as to postwar cinema, in particular that cinema’s explorations of and coded tributes to illicit sexuality and gender nonconformity. Reading the novel and film together and against each other, as well as against other mid-century artistic productions, allows one to recognize both texts’ affirmation of queer desires and, with that affirmation, a revision of conventional narrative structures to accommodate that affirmation. Such readings, however, also expose the lapses and ambivalences in both the novel and film: discontinuities that at least qualify and perhaps undermine a definition of the works as queer. How queer, then, are these texts after all, and in so far as “queer” gestures toward social inclusion, how queer are these texts in their vision of America? Finally, how can a reading that focuses on the novel’s and film’s aesthetic and social politics of location facilitate a queer understanding of our own cultural moment? These are the primary issues that a combined analysis of The Price of Salt and Carol engenders.

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 10 Margaret Sönser Breen

The Price of Salt and Lesbian Literature The Price of Salt tells the love story of Therese and Carol. Therese, a young woman, a near orphan, and an aspiring stage designer (in the film, a photographer), encounters Carol, a wealthy suburban married woman with a young daughter. Therese has a boyfriend, but she is not invested in either him or their “strange relationship” (24). 1 While temping at a New York department store during the holiday rush, Therese serves Carol, and her attraction to and idolization of the woman some fifteen years her senior are instantaneous. The two begin to see each other, and when Carol, in the process of divorcing her husband, decides to take a trip across the country, she invites Therese along. During the journey their romance blooms. Unbeknownst them, however, Carol’s husband, Harge, has had a detective follow them, and he records them making love. The tapes become evidence against Carol in the divorce proceedings, and she hurries home to deal with the legal repercussions while Therese stays behind. Weeks pass during which time the women’s contact is limited largely to letters. In one of them Carol tells Therese that she releases her from their relationship. Therese is stunned. She asks herself, “How would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?” (250). “Salt” here, as in the title, stands for flavor and, more resonantly, vitality and self-preservation.2 For Therese a life without Carol would seem to be a life without salt. Yet the price of loving Carol might well be emotional devastation. More time goes by, and it is unclear whether Therese still loves Carol. Therese gets a job working in an office. She no longer idolizes Carol. Eventually Therese makes her way back to New York to begin her professional career. Shortly thereafter, the two women arrange to meet, and Carol tells Therese she loves her. She explains that she is now divorced and that she has lost custody of her daughter. This is the price that she has had to pay for the love affair. She has taken an apartment in the city, and she invites Therese to come live with her. Therese declines. Carol has a dinner appointment later and, after letting Therese know that she is welcome to join her, leaves. Therese heads to an engagement of her own, a party with various theater people. She only stays a short time. While there she realizes that she still loves Carol and wants to be with her. Therese rushes to the restaurant where Carol is dining, and the novel ends with Carol silently welcoming her. Inspired by her own experience of encountering a striking older woman in New York’s Bloomingdale’s department store and then quasi-stalking her, Highsmith sketched the story of The Price of Salt, told from Therese’s perspective, in a matter of days. The novel appeared some two years later. Ambivalent about the work and not wanting to be known or pigeonholed as a lesbian writer, Highsmith used the pseudonym Claire Morgan for publication. The Price of Salt,

1 “Strange” is itself in 1950s and 1960s lesbian and gay fiction an adjective that suggests characters’ queerness. See, for example, James Colton’s 1965 novel Strange Marriage. 2 While the novel’s title refers primarily to the emotional and social costs that are exacted of Therese and Carol for falling in love with each other, there is also possibly a secondary meaning at work. Some readers are reminded of the biblical story of Lot’s wife, who is turned into a pillar of salt when she looks back at the burning city of Sodom, typically (if not perhaps accurately) understood as a site of sexual transgression. From this perspective, the title encodes the risk of destruction that Carol and Therese because of their affair face. The Locations of Politics 11 which she later renamed Carol, became a paperback sensation. Nagy’s powerful screenplay remains faithful to the novel; the film’s notable additions include a framing narrative and flashback sequence and the extension of narrative viewpoint to include Carol’s. The above summary begins to address the questions regarding both the novel’s and the film’s textual queerness. When, in turn, the novel is read within the context of lesbian literature and the film analyzed in terms of a cinematic history of melodrama and film noir, one recognizes how both Highsmith and Haynes have reworked conventional plot and genre structures in order to expand the possibilities for affirming lesbian representation. The accomplishment, particularly in Highsmith’s case, needs to be underscored. The pulp fiction of the era typically offered storylines that ended with lesbians dying, being imprisoned, going insane, or discovering their own heterosexuality.3 Such plots in effect protected authors and publishers from censorship and prosecution. The Price of Salt, by comparison, grants its heroines the prospect of a happy life together. Such an outcome, proffered rather than fully realized, is possible because of Highsmith’s innovation on the level of genre. Hers is a hybrid text that, mixing elements of romance and thriller, presents love as desire, an unstable, potentially unsafe and dangerous condition: whether between a parent and child or between adults and whether normative or not, desire troubles. In effect, Highsmith disrupts the conventional equation of homosexuality with social destruction and realigns the latter with desire broadly defined. Like Radclyffe Hall at the end of The Well of Loneliness (1928), Highsmith here employs a strategy of negativity, wherein, as Terry Castle observes of the earlier landmark lesbian novel, “lies the possibility of recovery— a way of conjuring up, or bringing back into view, that which has been denied” (7-8). Even as one may be left feeling uneasy about the human condition, Highsmith humanizes lesbianism. Highsmith’s infusion of a romance narrative with suspicion and surveillance did not simply constitute an effective defense against censorship. It also offered readers and writers alike a groundbreaking text whose reconfiguration of literary genres and conventional social definitions yielded a lesbian love story with a happy ending. Even the protagonist of The Price of Salt, Therese, seems aware that, together with Carol, the woman with whom she is falling in love, she is living out a storyline at once familiar and new. So, one-third of the way through the novel, the narrator records Therese’s growing realization: “Was it love or wasn’t it that she felt for Carol? … She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions” (91). Despite the mid-century identification of lesbianism with butch-femme stylings and the broader equation of homosexuality with degeneracy, Therese recognizes that her relationship with Carol, neither conventionally heterosexual nor stereotypically lesbian, is nonetheless, classic. “A classic,” she tells Carol a bit later in the novel, “is something with a basic human situation” (152). By comparison, Carol, older and more experienced, is wary. For her, the “classic” lines of romance can be as punitive as they are welcoming. They can sanction pettiness, jealousy, and even violence. Insofar as they regulate, they can manipulate and exclude. After all, “It’s the

3 See my discussion of lesbian pulp author Ann Bannon 45-55. 12 Margaret Sönser Breen clichés that cause the trouble,” as Jeanette Winterson’s narrator-protagonist remarks in Written on the Body (1992), published some forty years after Highsmith’s novel. Carol can readily imagine that when Therese’s boyfriend Richard says he “c[a]n’t compete” with Carol (149, 152), he is implicitly threatening her and Therese. Carol’s discernment proves prescient. Richard’s resentment anticipates the mixture of possessiveness and voyeurism that characterize the reaction of her own husband, whom she is divorcing: Harge hires a detective to tail her and Therese as they take their cross-country road trip. Carol, in effect, recognizes that they inhabit “an America that alienates, threatens, and suffocates” (Hesford 129). It is a location that reflects the cultural context in which Highsmith was herself writing. The Price of Salt, observes Victoria Hesford, “captures through its construction as much as its subject, the paranoia of early fifties America” (118): a world that culturally and aesthetically confounds the boundaries between thriller and romance. Therese, for her part, decides to set aside her sense of foreboding. The younger woman may recognize in her boyfriend’s jealous anger a capacity for violence and surveillance: “He stared at her,” she thinks, with “fixed curiosity… as if he were watching a spectacle through a keyhole” (150). Even more so he seems “never so determined not to give her up” (150). Richard’s reaction gives her pause; in the moment it even frightens; she remains, however, undeterred, the affective bond with Carol unassailable. When, eventually, she and Carol make love, Therese knows, “she didn’t have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect” (180). In contrast to Carol, who can foresee the damage that will be done to her and to her relationship with Therese, Therese’s certainty about the rightness of her love resonates with metafictional significance, underscoring the novel’s canonical status within lesbian literature. Cultural prescriptions not only in the 1950s but also well into the twenty-first century have licensed the reading of same-gender desire as pathological, perverse, and shameful—as “an abomination,” as Carol reminds Therese (189). Even so, The Price of Salt, together with Todd Haynes’s film adaptation Carol, powerfully renders lesbian romance “a basic human situation.” Indeed, even as Highsmith’s novel has received relatively little scholarly attention, one cannot overlook its importance for lesbian literature.4 The very hybridity of The Price of Salt, its mixture of romance and thriller genres, which has made it difficult to classify, has meant that the novel has been able to leave its mark on a wide range of lesbian works—from pulp to suspense

4 The lack of material on The Price of Salt is particularly striking when one considers the substantial body of criticism devoted to Highsmith’s other works, especially the Tom Ripley series. Of course, this inattention to the lesbian novel may be understood in terms of the general inattention with which pre-liberation lesbian fiction has been met. (Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness [1928] is one exception to this rule.) Highsmith’s own ambivalence about her novel is also well known. Yet, these explanations only go so far. It is also important to question why critics continue to pass over the novel, even when doing so requires inaccurate and distorted representations of Highsmith’s artistic production. So, for example, Scott Dill in a recent article aligns a note Highsmith wrote about finishing her second novel, The Price of Salt with her first, Strangers on a Train. Dill terms the years she worked on that Strangers and her fourth novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, “formative” (373), but he fails to provide any mention of The Price of Salt, her second. The Locations of Politics 13 to experimental fiction. Winterson and Sarah Waters come to mind as two very different contemporary writers influenced by Highsmith. There are also earlier examples, most obviously, Jane Rule. It’s hard not to recognize how consequential The Price of Salt proved for Rule’s Desert of the Heart. Published in 1964 and itself one of the few pre-liberation lesbian novels with a happy ending, the later text, like the earlier one, pairs a younger woman with an older one,5 takes on and dismantles the incest trope (so admirably deconstructed in Todd Haynes’ Carol, in which Therese closely resembles Carol’s young daughter),6 explores the possibility for intimacy within impersonal and temporary domestic spaces, and, relatedly, both engages and subverts the conventions of the progress novel. Yet, with regard to narrative construction, it would seem that Highsmith’s (much more so than Rule’s) should be understood as not only a lesbian but also a queer novel. So, for example, while Therese can love and be loved, she shares with Highsmith’s later protagonist Tom Ripley an urge not simply to question but to discard customary social and familial bonds—to leave friends, work, and places behind and to distance herself from blood relations. Although The Price of Salt is, as Joan Shenkar points out, “the only novel Patricia Highsmith wrote in which murder is not committed” (217, emphasis in original), its protagonist is not simply unsettled. Discernable in Therese is what Shenkar terms “the Big Chill at the center of [all of Highsmith’s] work: the one she defined so aptly as ‘the presence of the absence of guilt’” (30). Michael Trask, writing of Highsmith in relation to her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, offers a slightly different assessment that holds for Therese in The Price of Salt: “Prioritizing the self’s instrumentality, [she] forfeits a claim to the self’s authenticity” (608). That is, when she fears betrayal, Therese detaches, and her disappearances and reinventions, particularly in their psychological and aesthetic dimensions, disclose how nearly for her acts of self-preservation can come to resemble those of self-shattering. She can live on an emotional edge. So, too, can Carol. On the level of genre, elements of the psychological thriller complicate the story of their mutual attraction. Theirs is no straightforward romance. Individually and together, they resist teleological narratives of happiness rooted in accumulation and conformity; they refuse entrapment in what Edelman has termed “reproductive futurism,” which within the novel and in Todd Haynes’ moving film finds its objective correlatives in the train and the dolls sold at Frankenberg’s department store. For Therese, the train is “like something gone mad in imprisonment, something already dead that would never wear out…” (8). Her work as a stage designer signals her

5 Admittedly, this pairing of a younger and an older woman pre-dates The Price of Salt. We see it of already in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Where Hall differs from Highsmith, as well as Rule, is in the figuring of lesbian desire across a series differences (age and class, most notably) that work to structure a fundamental inequality between the two lovers. Both Hall and Rule, even as they acknowledge differences between their lovers and suggest the vulnerability of the younger woman, underscore that the lovers are well matched in terms of intellect and emotional strength. 6 The comparison between Therese and Carol’s daughter, Rindy, is initiated in the scene in which Carol and Therese first meet and Carol shows Therese a picture of Rindy. The comparison recurs again when, Carol, visiting Therese’s apartment sees a picture of Therese as a young girl about Rindy’s age. The one picture recalls the other. 14 Margaret Sönser Breen fascination with imagining, configuring, and transforming spatial relations and so suggests an ability to envision and redraw the boundaries of the livable. Carol, in turn, after a show-down with divorce lawyers, offers Therese the most sustained and clearly articulated indictment of a life story whose markers of pleasure are limited to marriage and heterosexual reproduction:

I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use debating…pleasure.…But the most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone—that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect.… It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true…to live against one’s grain, that is degeneration by definition. (246, emphasis added)

Carol and Therese’s own relationship emphasizes pleasure and sex apart from reproduction, privileges the now rather than the future, and imagines intimacy in terms of flux rather than fixity. Defying conventional social narratives, their “course,” much like Therese herself according to Carol, is “flung out of space” (45, 181).

Carol: Locating Lesbian Romance within a Queer Film History Like Highsmith’s novel, director Todd Haynes’s film invites discussion of its status as a queer text. A period piece with exquisite costumes and soundtrack, and starring Cate Blanchett in the title role and Rooney Mara as the ingénue Therese, Carol pays homage to both lesbian and film history. As Patricia White explains, Carol “uses the allure and potency of contemporary star images to explore lesbian historical agency and to sketch a dream-image of the mid-century movie that might have been” (8). In so doing, the film enacts, as White points out, “what queer theorist Heather Love has termed ‘the backward turn’ in queer culture… [It offers] an attention to and affective investment in negativity and heartbreak that honors queer history’s losses” (10). More might be said here. Not simply a history of loss but, more comprehensively, a historiographical method of accessing, encountering, and writing loss—that crucial aspect of queer critical engagement—characterizes the film. So Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of “temporal drag” comes to mind. That is to say, both in the explicit contrast in gender performances that the film (like the novel) draws between Therese and Carol, on the one hand, and the butch-femme couple whom Therese encounters, as Haynes explains symbolic stand-ins for “a different story” of 1950s lesbianism (Bale); on the other hand, and in its evocation and recovery of a particular queer history of film, Haynes’s Carol manifests “a counter-genealogical practice of archiving culture’s throwaway objects, including the outmoded masculinities and femininities from which usable pasts may be extracted” (Freeman xxiii). The Locations of Politics 15

Carol’s intertextual richness is particularly effective in Haynes’s exploration of a mid- century lesbian love story. Haynes explicitly engages David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and in so doing pays tribute not only to these films but also more broadly to the genres whose elements they intermix, melodrama and film noir. Melodrama, as E. Ann Kaplan has explained, exposes the “ideological contradictions” at work within familial structures particularly with regard to gender and sexuality; film noir, in turn, “stresses the ordering of sexuality and patriarchal right” (18). Haynes’s evocation of Lean’s and Wilder’s films, as well as of Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), thus allows him to examine Therese and Carol’s love story in terms of genres that conventionally, for all the sympathy and attractiveness that they may accord their heroines, align women’s desires with heterosexuality and subordinate them to male authority. In the process of locating that love story within the context of post-war film, Haynes recovers a film history of queer desire or more accurately a counter-history of queer desire broadly defined, whereby mid-century directors, screenwriters, and actors, through their own personal lives and the films that they made, laid bare dominant norms regarding gender, sexuality, and race. a. Mildred Pierce With its blend of noir and melodrama, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), starring Joan Crawford in the title role, is one of those films against which Carol may be productively analyzed. Haynes remade the former as an HBO miniseries in 2011. Curtiz’s version may not be explicitly referenced in Carol; nevertheless, given its infusion of melodrama with standard noir elements, including flashback, expressionistic camera work, the figure of the femme fatale, and crime, the 1945 film proves a useful point of comparison for considering Haynes’s treatment of gender and genre in his adaptation of Highsmith’s novel. As Pam Cook has argued, in Mildred Pierce the heroine’s narrative, inaugurated by her flashback and voiceover, contrasts with and is ultimately subdued by the patriarchal narrative of surveillance. The detective’s point of view, structuring the film’s “Truth,” contains and corrects Mildred’s mistaken desire for autonomy, as well as her excessive investment in same-gender relationships. Mildred Pierce affirms “the need to reconstruct a failing patriarchal order” (Cook 69). Along the way, the film provides a cautionary glimpse of other failed gender performances. The action (or inaction) of the men in Mildred’s life calls their masculinity and sexuality into question. They are either unable or unwilling to earn a living (first husband Bert and second husband Monty, respectively); physically diminutive (Monty); promiscuous (possibly Bert; certainly Monty); or vaguely homosexual (sometime friend Wally Fay [emphasis added]). Mildred’s best friend and business associate Ida is herself coded as bisexual (Cook 77), while maid Lottie is foolish and ignorant. For spectators and characters alike, the most threatening character proves to be Mildred’s daughter Veda. An allegorical affront to “a war-time economy of lack or scarcity,” she is a “consumer vampire” (Doane 81). In this and other ways, she proves to be a femme fatale—that essential noir figure of danger and desire and seduction—and the film pulses with the multiple threats that she poses not only for movie-goers but also for Monty, 16 Margaret Sönser Breen whom she kills, and her mother, who is unable to discipline her love for her daughter. Within the context of noir, Veda exposes Mildred’s desires for intimacy, agency, and authority as troubling gender fantasies. The film’s last shot of two kneeling women who are scrubbing the floors of the halls of justice speaks back to those fantasies and acts as a gender corrective. By contrast, Haynes’s mixture of noir and melodrama produces a very different ideological effect. In Carol, Therese’s flashback inaugurates the love story that in turn confronts and eventually subsumes the surveillance narrative configured by Carol’s husband Harge, his lawyers, and the hired detective. In Haynes’s film as in Highsmith’s novel, questions of romance meet with suspicion, danger, and violence; however, both texts dismiss the conventional mid- century moral, legal, and social alignment of lesbianism itself with crime. Carol overturns the gender and genre power relations at work in Mildred Pierce. Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy’s decisions to make Therese a photographer rather than a stage designer and, within the developing romance, to complement Therese’s point of view with Carol’s own further underscore the authority of the women’s perspective. Further, as much as Carol is recognizable as a femme fatale in the noir tradition, the romance narrative reworks that role as well, transforming it into a femme vitale. In Carol lesbian vision directs the love story, and the film’s final image, a close-up of Carol’s welcoming gaze shot from Therese’s point of view, enacts a visual blazon, signaling the possibility of a happy ending predicated upon the women’s shared investment in erotic agency. b. Sunset Boulevard The question of Carol’s significance for Therese—the anticipation of the older woman’s transformation from generic femme fatale into particular romantic heroine—is one that Carol signals through its explicit homage to yet another mid-century classic combining noir and melodrama, Sunset Boulevard. A clip from Billy Wilder’s film—the tango scene between Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson) and Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) —appears early in Carol. Directly after the flashback’s opening scene, when Therese and Carol first encounter each other, we see Therese along with boyfriend Richard and friends Phil and Dannie watching the tango moment on their own projector and small screen in a small room. The claustrophobic setting is telling. It enacts a spatial metaphor for a Hollywood culture besieged by “the antitrust laws, the coming of TV and the communist witch-hunts” (Hutchinson).7 Even more powerfully, the setting choreographs one of Desmond’s most famous lines—”I am big. It’s the pictures that got small!”—and in so doing delineates the issues of agency, desire, and gender that shape women’s lives, whether onscreen or off. This scene, in which the young characters watch and react to the Sunset Boulevard clip, as well as the narrative sequence that it forms with the

7 Hutchinson argues, “While Sunset Boulevard appears to attack the pretentions and excesses of the silent era, in fact its argument about the bad old days of Hollywood is more complicated than that. The horror at the heart of the film is that, as the studio system was starting to crumble, the beginnings of the industry were coming back to haunt it. Desmond’s pride mocks the fall of Hollywood just as it was teetering, rocked by the antitrust laws, the coming of TV and the communist witch-hunts.” The Locations of Politics 17 scene of the women’s initial meeting, thus serves to highlight these issues not only for the characters, especially Therese and Carol, but also for a tradition of movie making. In Carol the tango clip exposes Therese’s romantic vulnerability, particularly with regard to the tailored and enigmatic Carol, whom Therese has assisted in the department store where she works. In that earlier encounter scene, a suggestion of flirtation accompanies their discussion of possible gifts for Carol’s daughter, but they have had no substantive conversation, and the hint of mutual attraction, the nuance of flirtation, proceeds primarily via gesture and gaze, as well as emphases and pauses in speech. In the subsequent scene, Sunset Boulevard does not provide Therese with a language as much as a rhetorical mode of suggestiveness and indirection for conveying her emotions. Indeed, Dannie, who is taking notes on the film, comments that he is marking the disjunctures between what the characters say and actually mean. The disconnection speaks back to Therese’s own situation, which is also a mid-century predicament: how does one identify, name, and articulate lesbian romantic attraction; can that attraction even properly be marked as a subject or must it be figured as an absence? Yet, insofar as Carol is at this point in the film more image than person, indicative of fantasy rather than relationship, Therese can find in Sunset Boulevard a primer on the dangers and delights of falling in love (or, for that matter, failing to fall in love) with an older woman, particularly with one whom she feels compelled to see (and watch) through the mediating lens of her camera. Sunset Boulevard’s protagonist, Norma Desmond, is, like Carol “an older woman… seeking companionship, relevancy, and acknowledgement that she’s worth something” (Formo). It is then unsurprising that, whereas Richard has no interest in the film, Therese would want to watch it. Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond is a femme fatale, but, in a reworking of type, she is dangerous in both her excess and her lack of sex appeal. That excess is signaled by her queer relationship with Max, her one-time husband and director, who has become her butler in order to remain close to her. In Max (played by Erich von Stroheim, who himself directed Swanson in Queen Kelly [1929]), the silent-screen-era actress finds a faithful companion enthralled by her star quality. Together, they enact a “sadomasochistic domestic equilibrium” (Brown 1220), disrupted only by arrival of Joe. For Max, Norma engenders a timeless appeal; for Joe, however, she is a mad, middle-aged Hollywood has-been. Out of self-interest, he moves in with her. (In this “black comedy” [Hutchinson], the diva’s age, as well as Joe’s “kept-man” relationship with her, signals her grotesqueness and perversion.) Ultimately, because he is not attracted to her as either woman or star, Norma proves lethal to him. Joe, in the hopes of furthering his own career interests, has fed her illusion that she will make a Hollywood comeback, and he has promised to help her. Eventually, though, he tells her that he neither loves her nor believes in the possibility of her triumphant return to the screen. She responds by killing him. “Stars are ageless, aren’t they?” she whispers. The tango scene captures the moment that Joe realizes that Norma is in love with him. In order to break with her he must dispel her fantasies. Within the context of Haynes’s film, the tango clip sheds light on Therese’s own romantic possibilities and the narrative guidance that watching Sunset Boulevard can afford her. For her, it is the older woman and not the young man who sexually appeals and whose picture is 18 Margaret Sönser Breen worth watching. On the one hand, there is boyfriend Richard, whom she does not love, and, on the other hand, Carol, Therese’s own potential femme fatale to whom she is powerfully attracted. Sunset Boulevard offers Therese a lesson in reading images and, significantly, reading them against convention. c. Brief Encounter Something similar might be said of Haynes as well, when one considers Carol’s indebtedness to Brief Encounter—an indebtedness at once explicit and substantial. Carol’s framing narrative recalls and reconfigures Lean’s film of impossible heterosexual romance in order to challenge the gender conventions that regulated the representation of female desire in mid-century women’s films.8 Based on gay writer Noël Coward’s one-act play Still Life (1936) and also co-written by him (though not officially credited as such), Brief Encounter manifests, as Richard Dyer and Andy Medhurst have argued, “a gay sensibility” (Dyer 10),9 even as critics well into the twenty-first century have been nervous about acknowledging as much.10 In both films, the touch on the beloved’s shoulder registers the desire that cannot be articulated in a public space. In the earlier film this subtle gesture of intimacy brackets the extended flashback sequence that, repeatedly cast in dimly lit spaces typical of film noir and guided by protagonist Laura’s voiceover tells the story of forbidden love. In Brief Encounter, the framing narrative’s repetition of the lovers’ final moments together works to underscore that their romance has no future. These moments in which Alec (played by Trevor Howard) and Laura (played by Celia Johnson) sit together in a train station refreshment room appear at the start of the film in an approximately three-minute segment. They are then repeated and extended at the end of the film, over five of the last six minutes. In between, most of the story consists of a long flashback cast as a reverie: Laura, sitting opposite her husband in their parlor, recalls and recounts for the audience her affair with Alec. Protagonist voice-overs generally raise questions of authority, autonomy, and self-authorship: to what extent is the heroine’s position as narrator a sign of agency? In Brief Encounter, Laura’s narration

8 In this foregrounding of gender, my reading of the relationship between Haynes’s and Lean’s films differs markedly from those of some critics who emphasize the “universal story” of Brief Encounter. See, for example, David Sims, “Why Carol Is Misunderstood,” The Atlantic, 15 Jan 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/carols-misunderstood-coldness/424419/ (accessed July 28, 2017). 9 In addition to Dyer, see Medhurst, who argues, “Noel Coward displac[es] his own fears, anxieties and pessimism about the possibility of a fulfilled sexual relationship within an oppressively homophobic culture by transposing them into a heterosexual context” (198). 10 See, for example, Medhurst’s discussion of the erasure of Coward’s credit in the making of the film. See, too, Phillips, who dismisses readings that foreground the ways in which the film points to how Coward’s experience of gay desire shaped the play and screenplay: “The film explores the anguish and frustration caused by having one’s desires thwarted by the pressures of social conventions, something that Coward had experienced. But this does not mean that Coward consciously implanted a homosexual subtext in the present story” (95). The Locations of Politics 19 makes clear her lack of agency, both given the content of the story she has to tell and its location inside the framing narrative, with its repetition of the scene of the lovers’ parting. In both the earlier and later segments of the framing narrative, people interrupt Alex and Laura’s private exchange and so act as a barrier between the main characters, on the one hand, and the film’s audience, on the other hand. Impediments serve as both tenor and vehicle for the film audience’s reception of the lovers’ final interaction. In the initial segment, there are two interruptions: the first is more nearly a variation on the theme of thwarted love; the second consists of an incursion of mundane reality. Regarding the former, the film attends to a conversation between a barmaid and station attendant; as Mrs. Bagot rejects Mr. Godby’s friendly advances, the camera pans with a medium-range shot to Alex and Laura, a middle-aged, middle-class couple, who are talking quietly to each other. This view is immediately followed by a shot of Laura’s acquaintance Dolly entering the room. Her appearance constitutes the second interruption, for it in effect shuts down the inaudible conversation that the couple has been having. The rest of the scene is taken over by Dolly, whose talking would allow one to overlook Alec’s final pressing of his hand to Laura’s shoulder, were it not for the camera, which offers a close-up of the gesture. The last minutes of the film offer the second version of the same scene, an emotional heightening of the first. This second section of the framing narrative consists of more close-range shots of and conversation between the lovers as well as Laura’s voice-over of her own thoughts, as the camera moves in for close-ups of her face. All of these features serve to underscore the inevitability of the parting. Laura and Alec’s intimate exchange, now audible and accompanied by Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, consists of a series of negative expressions: “no”; “I don’t know”; “not for years”; “I want to die.” The final comment of this private dialogue, Alec’s assurance “We’ve still got a few minutes,” is undercut by Dolly’s ironic pronouncement, “Laura, what a lovely surprise!” With her arrival Dolly takes over the conversation. Laura and Alec say little else to each other before he leaves to catch his train. Together with her voice-over, the close-ups of Laura’s face, both within the station, and at home, as she remembers the moment, signal her emotional resignation and closeting. Her reverie ends. In the last minute of the film, she is seated not next to Alec but across from her husband, Fred, in their home. His words, which conclude the film, “Thank you for coming back to me,” are met with her sobbing. Seated in her chair, Laura may have had her reverie, but, in the end, she has nowhere to go and nothing more to say. How very different is the relationship between the framing narrative and flashback in Haynes’s film. The opening sequence of the later film, even as it readily recalls the earlier one, offers slight but suggestive changes. So, for example, while Brief Encounter begins with the sight and sounds of a train speeding past, Carol offers a close-up of a subway grate as the soundtrack mixes the noise of trains arriving and leaving the station below with the film’s musical theme. The camera slowly moves back, drawing attention to the grate’s elegance and grit. This change to the opening is effective, for it allows Haynes to link the theme of mobility, which Carol shares with Brief Encounter, to subterranean activity, itself a rich metaphor for homosexual culture. 20 Margaret Sönser Breen

Haynes’s revision of the refreshment room scene, even as it recalls Lean’s, also heightens its gender implications. The camera moves from the grate, to a crowd exiting the subway station, to a man who enters a hotel and proceeds to its bar area. The man is Therese’s acquaintance Jack, who doubles for both the train station attendant and Dolly in Brief Encounter. The camera captures Jack’s banter with the barman, and then, following Jack’s gaze, settles on a shot of Carol and Therese, who are seated at a table and talking quietly. Jack recognizes Therese, calls out her name, and approaches her and Carol. The women’s conversation curtailed, Carol touches Therese’s shoulder and leaves. Jack does the same: he places his hand on Therese’s shoulder and then departs. Haynes here has complicated this moment, which recurs, like its counterpart in Brief Encounter, in expanded form at the end of the film. Like Dolly, Jack personifies the intrusion and surveillance of the everyday world, but his appropriation of Carol’s action—the touching of Therese—both delineates the issue of male heterosexual authority to which Laura herself submits and raises the issue of how Therese will react to Jack’s proprietary claim. His contact seems less an imitation or mimicry than a habitual marking of territory, a rehearsal of gender dominance; it reflects a self-assured masculinity that, at once casual and possessive (and in this sense reminiscent of Laura’s husband Fred’s), brings into focus the question not only of Therese’s but also of Therese and Carol’s shared agency: indeed, the ability of each one and both together to make space for their desire. Haynes’s engagement with these questions is evident in both the extended flashback and the second, expanded iteration of the contact moment near the end of the framing narrative. With regard to former, the two touches to Therese’s shoulder are shortly followed by a shot of Therese entering a taxi cab. As the taxi begins to move, the camera focuses on her looking out the window. Thus begins the flashback of the lovers’ romance, which, significantly, is not told from Therese’s point of view alone but includes Carol’s. In contrast to both the novel’s sole focus on Therese’s viewpoint and the closeted narrative space of Laura’s reverie in Lean’s film, the doubled perspective in Carol reflects the generative, dynamic quality of the women’s romance. Stated in slightly different terms, the presence of Carol’s point of view may delineate the limits of Therese’s own but it also supplements and strengthens the younger woman’s perspective. Therese idealizes the exquisitely tailored and mannered Carol; the scenes that focus on Carol apart from Therese reflect the older woman’s vulnerability and resolve. In this sense the doubled perspective finds its objective correlative in Carol’s touch, which reawakens in Therese the frisson of desire. The Locations of Politics 21

Fig. 1: Carol’s touch, reawakening Therese’s desire. Image courtesy of Number 9 Films Limited

In this sense Carol’s touch acts as a narrative switch-point that, at the end of the film, returns to and extends the hotel sequence. Here, as much as Jack’s appropriation of Carol’s gesture suggests the lurking presence of patriarchal and heterosocial (and heterosexual) plots, the women’s love story proves central. The repeated and expanded sequence starting with Therese and Carol’s meeting in the hotel, after months of separation, “subverts the male gaze” (Marcus). With Carol and Jack gone, the camera follows an agitated Therese looking for Carol. When she cannot find her, she enters a cab and heads to a party downtown, only to leave shortly thereafter in order to resume her search. What matters to her is not Jack’s but rather Carol’s contact, and the film’s structure bears out the narrative possibilities that that contact engenders. Carol’s touch does not portend the foreclosing of her and Therese’s love story; it rather indicates the dynamism of that story, as the final moments of the film, with yet another form of contact, bear out. Therese enters a restaurant and spots Carol seated and talking with friends. The camera follows Therese’s gaze. Then Carol’s looks toward her and their eyes lock. Whereas Brief Encounter “begins at the end” (Phillips 92), Carol ends by signaling a new beginning. The women’s earlier romance becomes the ground for the new love story toward which they, at the closing of the film, are moving. d. Carol: Mid-Century Specters of Loss and Twenty-First-Century Erasure With Carol, Haynes invests the genre of women’s film with a gravitas that critics have often denied it. Early on, some termed Brief Encounter a “three-handkerchief movie” (Phillips 99), while fairly recently John Ellis wrote of its “nearly hysterical attempt to control its meanings” (101). In this regard, Brief Encounter, shot over the last months of the war in Europe (Phillips 13) and informed by the naturalism of war-time documentaries (Phillips 86), may be said to mark conflict in yet another way, through the stories of gender it tells both within the film and within 22 Margaret Sönser Breen the context of mid-century cinema. By calling attention to the gender restrictions that govern the stories of mid-century heroines such as Laura, Haynes not only revives awareness of such dismissive assessments, including the disparaging gender overtones attending them, but also provides viewers with the opportunity to recognize and learn from his work’s location within a history of cinema’s own gender war. Stated in slightly different terms, Carol, in its invocation of a corpus of mid-century women’s film, invites spectators to encounter a particular period of British and American cinematic history as an active history of loss with particular ongoing gender and racial effects. Thus, for example, when one considers the indebtedness of Haynes’s film to Brief Encounter, one invariably has to confront the erasure of Noël Coward from various film credits, as well as the subsequent growing disavowal of his importance for British film and theater. His fourth and final collaboration with David Lean, Brief Encounter may have been based on Coward’s play and further informed by his affair with a sailor during the filming of In Which We Serve (1942); he may also have contributed substantially to its screenplay; however, it was the other writers who worked on the script—and not Coward—who were formally listed as the screenplay authors and subsequently nominated for an Oscar (Phillips 88). As Andy Medhurst has pointed out, the year after the film’s release marked “the start of [Coward’s] long postwar decline, [whereby] the writer’s contribution to the … success [of his earlier collaborations with Lean] became progressively marginalized” (200). By the mid-1950s, shifting tastes led to a backlash against the mannered aesthetic favored by Coward; the rise of the hyper-masculine and -heterosexual “Angry Young Men” movement invited critics to dismiss Coward as effeminate and thus inconsequential. Medhurst continues,

This process … reached its peak with the 1974 publication of Masterworks of the British Cinema, a book that included the script of Brief Encounter but zealously forbade its readers to praise the man who wrote it: ‘Brief Encounter, indeed, constitutes almost a declaration of independence on Lean’s part from his fruitful but by 1945 no doubt increasingly constricting association with Coward’s writing.’ (201)

Carol’s engagement with Brief Encounter thus inevitably calls forth and pays homage to the queer specter that is Noël Coward within the context of mid-century film and theater. Haynes arguably draws attention to another kind of erasure enacted by the mid-century film industry: the insignificance accorded black actors and the roles they played. In Carol five black actors (three men and two women) appear as extras playing minor un-credited non- speaking roles, reflecting in at least the first three instances a low social status: a Frankenberg’s employee, a train conductor, a maid, and two passersby. Serving as part of the film’s assemblage of social others, these shadow characters, together with a soundtrack that includes Billie The Locations of Politics 23

Holiday’s love song “Easy Living,”11 help frame, on the level of narrative, the marginal subjects that are the central preoccupation of Carol: Therese and Carol, along with their lesbian love story. Stated slightly differently, the black actors’ performances remind viewers of the disciplining force that both camera lens and social perspective bring to bear on what one sees. Even if in plain sight, people appear virtually invisible when the focus of systems of meaning-making lies elsewhere. This is also the lesson that Mildred Pierce, on the level of film history, provides via the character of Mildred’s black maid Lottie, the uncredited speaking role played by actress Butterfly McQueen. Lottie is not simply a comic character, who ludicrously mimics white servants and Mildred herself. Lottie signals both the outrageousness of Mildred’s desires for female authority and economic independence, on the one hand, and the racial instability that such desires engender, on the other hand. The film in effect corrects Lottie’s hyper-visibility by erasing the role as well the actress from the screen credits. From the vantage point of film history, the silent and uncredited roles of the five black extras in Carol bear witness to McQueen’s ghostly figuration within the making of Mildred Pierce. While black figures also appear at the narrative borders of The Price of Salt, 12 Highsmith’s interest in coding race and ethnicity proves resonant vis-à-vis other characters. For Haynes, however, the striking delineation of silent and subordinate black characters not only reflects his commitment to recording one key aspect of the racial politics of mid-century Hollywood but also functions as a marker of his awareness of the difficulties that attended the making of a lesbian film more than half century later. Indeed, the history of adapting the novel to the screen attests to how strategies of erasure leveled against women, people of color, and queers continue to shape decisions regarding which films are made and which then singled out and awarded prizes. As Patricia White explains, “the project came to Haynes after more than a decade in development, and it is hard not to suspect that at least part of the delay was due to its classification as a ‘woman’s picture’ pitched by women” (9), including screenwriter Phyllis Nagy and producers Elizabeth Karlsen, and Christine Vachon. The resistance to a film in which women and queers—Nagy and Vachon are lesbian; Haynes is gay—occupied central creative roles was in turn borne out at the Academy Awards. While nominated in 2016 in six categories, Carol did not win one award. When a number of members of the academy boycotted the awards ceremony that same year because no black actors or directors were nominated, the overlooking of Haynes in the best director category and Carol’s eventual shut out led some critics to suggest that the campaign of #OscarsSoWhite should be amended to #OscarsSoWhiteAndStraight.13

11 The lyrics of “Easy Living” begin with “Living for you is easy living. It’s easy to live when you’re in love, and I’m so in love, there’s nothing in life but you.” In the film, Therese first sounds out the melody on Carol’s piano. Later, she gives Carol a copy of the Billie Holiday recording. Highsmith’s novel also references the song, but it is Carol who plays the Holiday recording for Therese. 12 I have found two mentions: one of Richard’s art school acquaintances is “a young black man” (48); in a hotel in Waterloo, where she and Carol first make love, Therese looks across the lobby and sees a “black man … shining shoes” (182). Arguably the novel’s mention of “Embraceable You,” which in addition to “Easy Living” Carol plays for Therese, is a reference to Ella Fitzgerald, whose recording of the song is so well known. 13 See, for example, Lee; see, too, Farber. 24 Margaret Sönser Breen

While Carol’s release may be regarded a partial triumph within a film industry historically invested in sexist, racist, and homophobic practices, the limits of that achievement have been further underscored by the fall 2017 news of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. Carol was distributed in the US by the Weinstein Company. In light of that scandal, the film’s status as a feminist work necessarily proves vexed, undermined by the company’s and more broadly the industry’s hypocrisy. From this perspective, it’s not the pictures that have gotten smaller (pace Norma Desmond); it’s rather Hollywood that’s refused to get bigger.

Highsmith’s Vision of Race and Ethnicity, or How Queer is The Price of Salt After All? Given Nagy’s screenplay and Haynes’s direction, Carol links the lesbian love story to a wider message of social justice and solidarity. Through its rich intertextuality, the film captures and memorializes the erasure of black characters within a history of Hollywood. It is, however, crucial to recognize that Carol does not engage the key problematic ethnic-racial dynamics at work in The Price of Salt, disturbing dynamics that are upheld and validated by the novel’s narrative structure. Ethnically and racially coded, Therese and Carol’s relationship is set against constellations of characters who, marked as Eastern European and/or Jewish, serve to mediate, shape, and even personify the atmosphere of unease and exclusion that surrounds the women’s love story. So we return to the question asked at the outset of this essay: how queer are the novel and film? Haynes and Nagy’s adaptation offers an intertextually mediated vision of social justice, but it has also missed an opportunity, perhaps even an obligation, to address a problematic aspect of Highsmith’s storyline. Perhaps Haynes’s homage to Sunset Boulevard and, with it, Billy Wilder, the Austro-Hungarian-born director who fled Hitler,14 may be understood as a form of encoded resistance to the novel’s tinge of antisemitism. Such an interpretation seems, however, unlikely, for the clip from Sunset Boulevard is so brief and it is unaccompanied by any other suggestion of the film’s engagement with this troubling aspect of the novel. It is probable that, as Haynes and critics have repeatedly stated, 15 the film was intended primarily to capture the emotional experience of falling love. From this perspective Carol foregoes—or even shies away from— acknowledging and responding to the ominous ethnic/racial politics normalized within the novel. As for The Price of Salt, more than sixty-five years on, it continues to be relevant as a landmark work in LGBT fiction. In its hybridity the novel eludes conventional genre definitions, and the erotic salt that Therese and Carol together claim—their narrated desire and their desire for a shared narrative—is at once romantic, sexy, and unapologetic. Yet, Carol and Therese’s love story exists apart from any ethos of inclusion, which is to say, it is a queer love story without a queer politics. The Price of Salt exhibits what Michael Trask, writing of the Ripley novels, has termed her “fluent use of … society’s prejudices” (586). In both film and novel, the

14 Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Galicia (part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Poland), and grew up in Vienna. He began his film career in Berlin. With the rise of Hitler, Wilder fled to Paris and then, shortly thereafter in 1933, to the United States. 15 See, for example, articles by Prose and Virtel. The Locations of Politics 25 setting for Therese and Carol’s story is a post-war economy in recovery, with its threat of McCarthyism and broader culture of surveillance. Only the novel, however, locates that love story within a landscape populated by foreign-sounding, grotesque, and potentially exploitative characters, some of whom have recent immigrant histories. That is, Highsmith positions protagonists and readers uncomfortably close to a viewpoint that, seemingly disregarding the traumas of war, including the near history of the Holocaust, presumes the perils of an immigrant assimilation signaled by outsider groups in general. So many of the novel’s characters have Eastern European and/or Jewish backgrounds. Therese is Czech American; Richard, Russian American; his surname, Semco, has, like hers, been anglicized. Then there are Mr. Nussbaum, the “indifferent” publisher with the German accent who fires her without notice (19); theater producer Ned Bernstein and set designer Harkevy, who eventually hires her; and Mrs. Robichek, who works at Frankenberg’s. These ethnically marked characters occupy very different social spaces from Carol (as well as her husband): disquieting spaces that capture and reflect commonplace prejudices of 1950s America and, quite possibly, a few prejudices particular to Highsmith herself. So, for example, Therese discerns in second-generation, Russian-speaking Richard a capacity not simply for possessiveness but for “hatred and violence” (150); the connection with him comes to represent her likely “imprisonment” in a narrative of lower-middle-class coupledom (147). His tendency to act like an overseer of gender norms, in evidence from the beginning of the novel, takes on a viciousness once she leaves him, and he condemns her relationship with Carol as “sordid and pathological” (239). Widowed Mrs. Robichek, in turn, represents a particularly “hideous” (168) version of a solitary woman’s entrapment in an immigrant and working-class past. Mrs. Robichek is a character whose kindness initially draws Therese to her. Soon, though, the one- time independent dress designer reduced to a Frankenberg’s salesgirl, with her accented English and her slow-moving and “grotesquely” positioned body (12), comes to “haunt” (170) her. One might also wish to take note of Mrs. Robichek’s surname. While Bernstein and Nussbaum are German Jewish surnames, Robichek, like Harkevy [or Harkavy], is Russian Jewish. (“Harkavy” is in fact a Belorussian expression for “Jewish.”) Robichek, taken together with these other names, not only reminds one of the novel’s historical closeness to the Holocaust, but also makes one wonder what role Highsmith’s own well-known antisemitism might have played in fashioning these characters,16 as well as her description of a dreary and stultifying Frankenberg’s, which she modeled on Bloomingdale’s. The novel may turn on lesbian love, but it is also propelled by fears of various racially and ethnically marked others17: some of these characters, like Mr. Nussbaum and Harkevy, wield a professional power over Therese; others, like Richard and Mrs. Robichek, embody social immobility; given the self-possessed and fluent linguistic as well as social grammar that Therese values and identifies with Carol, all of these characters must

16 For discussions of Highsmith’s antisemitism, see Shenkar, Trask, and Meaker. 17 The distance between the novel’s and the film’s engagement with race may arguably be measured in terms of Carol’s homage to Sunset Boulevard, specifically director Billy Wilder. 26 Margaret Sönser Breen be kept at a distance and their overtures of intimacy, if not rejected outright, then certainly only sporadically and then incompletely answered. To varying degrees outsiders, these characters occupy situations that contrast starkly with the life of ease, acquisition, and mobility of Carol, with her “Nordic compactness” (43), and WASP patriarch Harge, whose inability to love her, Carol sardonically suggests, is a form of “racial suicide” (125). Carol, in turn, in refusing “to live against [her] grain,” that is, in affirming her lesbian desire, must surrender something of the racially-inflected upper-middle-class social privilege that also mediates her familial status. Only in the anomalous position of “mother without a child” (a term that appears in Jane Rule’s 1964 lesbian novel, Desert of the Heart) can Carol claim her lesbianism.

Understanding Our Own Cultural Moment through a Queer Analysis of The Price of Salt and Carol What can we learn from Highsmith’s intermingling of ethnic/racial and lesbian otherness and from their latent intersection in Therese herself? Certainly, Highsmith is using ethnic and racial markers in order to figure the cost of same-gender desire for culturally mobile white women such as the artistic Therese and the poised and articulate Carol. Therese reads “Carol’s world” in terms of “Rapallo, Paris, and other places… [that] had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did” (177). At the end of the novel Therese imagines a shared life together, wherein “It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell” (276). How very differently the issue of mobility— social, economic, and geographic—figures in the life of someone like Mrs. Robichek, to whom Therese turns for companionship until she meets Carol. Mrs. Robichek’s non-fluent English suggests an immigrant past in which travel is motivated by survival and need rather than Bildung and leisure. Does the linkage of the lovers to ethnically marginalized characters serve to encode a social ugliness that threatens to taint the lesbian romance? Does the novel reflect Highsmith’s own antisemitism and disregard for marginalized ethnic and racial groups? These questions, whose answer is, I believe, yes, suggest something of the responsibility that we as critics bear not only toward literary texts, whether removed from or proximate to us in time, but also toward our own cultural moment. Insofar as we consider the novel, together with its film adaptation, in terms of the discontinuities, ruptures, and contradictions shaping and/or barring its textual queerness, whether aesthetic or political in scope, we also disclose something of the assumptions that inform own reading strategy: might that strategy be considered a queer reading praxis insofar as it facilitates an awareness and analysis of our own politics of location understood in terms of both temporality and spatiality and the human exigencies that shape or are foreclosed by those politics? If, to paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, where we are going may well be where we have been, might any queer good come out of analyzing a novel that is on questions of social justice not that queer after all? In the case of The Price of Salt, not simply the delight of uncertainty, subtlety, and surprise attends Therese and Carol’s love story; the omnipresent peril of social and legal The Locations of Politics 27 punishment looms over them, a menace perhaps most obviously embodied by the detective who follows them from Chicago to Colorado and “look[s]… like a machine set up and wound on a course” (215). More subtly, that danger of social loss and marginalization is engendered by the unassimilable Mrs. Robichek, who works hard and struggles and does not succeed. It is Mrs. Robichek who “haunt[s]” Therese, whose own yearnings, together with her abandoned, near- orphan status, position her outside of conventional narratives of cultural belonging. Yet Highsmith’s outsiders expose more than the punitive and violent gate-keeping that continues to attend middle-class constructions of the American dream and the myth of the melting pot. Those characters can bring us closer to recognizing the cultural failings of our own time and the price that various social outsiders have had to pay in their own desire for salt. They offer us an opportunity to examine our own cultural moment, when immigrants are once again the targets of US social and political intolerance; when Muslims, Latinos, Jews, African Americans, and queer people face renewed bigotry and violence; and when refugees continue to cross borders in order to flee military action, civil war, violence, and famine. What do all of these groups seek but to live and love free from persecution, danger, and reprisal? Theirs is, in Carol’s words, a “basic human situation” that because and quite possibly in spite of Highsmith reflects the continuing relevance of her lesbian classic.

Works Cited Bale, Miriam. “Todd Haynes Explains the Cinematic Influences That Impacted His ‘Carol.’” IndieWire, 23 Nov. 2015, www.indiewire.com/2015/11/todd-haynes-explains-the- cinematic-influences-that-impacted-his-carol-52091/. Breen, Margaret Sönser. Narratives of Queer Desire: Deserts of the Heart. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Brown, Daniel. “Wilde and Wilder.” PMLA, vol. 119, no. 5, Oct. 2004, pp. 1216-1230. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Colton, James. Strange Marriage. New York: Argyle, 1965. Cook, Pam. “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce.” Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, London: BFI, 1998, pp. 69-80. Coward, Noël, director. Still Life. By Noël Coward, performances by Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Joyce Carey, Kenneth Carten, Betty Hare, Moya Nugent, Anthony Pelissier, Charles Peters, Joan Swinstead, Edward Underdown, and Alan Webb, 30 Nov. 1936, National Theatre, New York. ---, and David Lean, directors. In Which We Serve. British Lion Film, 1942. Curtiz, Michael, director. Mildred Pierce. Performances by Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, and Butterfly McQueen, Warner Brothers, 1945. Dill, Scott. “Visions of Violence: Christianity and Anti-Humanism in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 63, no. 3, Spring 2014, pp. 373-390. 28 Margaret Sönser Breen

Doan, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987. Dyer, Richard. Brief Encounter. London: BFI, 1993. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Ellis, John. “British Cinema as Performance Art: Brief Encounter, Radio Parade of 1935 and the Circumstances of Film Exhibition.” British Cinema, Past and Present, edited by Justine Ashby and Andew Higson, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 95-10. Farber, Stephen. “Not only is #OscarsSoWhite, it’s also #OscarsSoStraight with ‘Carol’ snub.” 4 Feb. 2016, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-oscars-gay-movies- 20160207-story.html. Accessed 18 Aug. 2017. Formo, Brian. “‘Carol’ Review: A Grand Gesture.” 5 Sept. 2015, collider.com/carol-movie- review-telluride-2015/. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. London: Jonathan Cape, 1928. “Harkavy.” www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=harkavy. Retrieved 9 Feb 2016. Haynes, Todd, director. Carol. Screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, performances by Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Jake Lacy, and Kyle Chandler, produced by Number 9 Films, Film4, and Killer Films, and distributed by StudioCanal and the Weinstein Company, 2015. Hesford, Victoria J. “‘A Love Flung Out of Space’: Lesbians in the City in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt,” Paradox: Studies in World Literary Genres, no. 18, 2003, pp. 118-135. Highsmith, Patricia. The Price of Salt. Tallahassee, FL: The Naiad Press, 1993. ---. Strangers on a Train. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950. ---. The Talented Mr. Ripley. New York: Coward-McCann. 1955. Holiday, Billie, singer. “Easy Living.” Lyrics by Leo Robin, music by Ralph Rainger, 1937. Hutchinson, Pamela. “Sunset Boulevard: What Billy Wilder’s Satire Really Tells Us about Hollywood.” 1 Aug. 2016, www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/01/sunset-boulevard- what-billy-wilders-satire-really-tells-us-about-hollywood. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017. Kaplan, E. “Introduction to New Edition.” Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, London: BFI, 1998, pp.1-14. Lean, David, director. Brief Encounter. Performances by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, Eagle-Lion Distributors, 1945. Lee, Benjamin. “#OscarsSoWhiteAndStraight: the Academy fails at diversity yet again,” 14 Jan 2016, www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/14/oscars-so-white-straight-academy-fails- diversity-idris-elba-straight-outta-compton-creed-carol-todd-haynes. Accessed 18 Aug. 2017. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Meaker, Marijane. Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950’s. San Francisco: Cleis P, 2003. The Locations of Politics 29

Medhurst, Andy. “The special thrill: Brief Encounter, homosexuality and authorship.” Screen, vol. 32, no. 2, Summer 1991, pp. 197-208. Marcus, Bennett. “Todd Haynes on Subverting the Male Gaze in Carol.” www.thecut.com/2015/11/todd-haynes-carol-male-gaze.html. Accessed 28 July 2017. Phillips, Gene D. Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2006. Prose, Francine. “Love is the Plot.” 11 Dec. 2015, www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/11/carol- love-is-the-plot/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2017. Rule, Jane. Desert of the Heart. Macmillan Canada, 1964. Shenkar, Joan. The Talented Miss Highsmith. New York: Picador, 2009. Sims, David. “Why Carol is Misunderstood.” The Atlantic, 15 Jan 2016. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/carols-misunderstood- coldness/424419/. Accessed 28 July 2017. Stroheim, Erich von, director. Queen Kelly. Performances by Gloria Swanson and Walter Byron, United Artists, 1929. Trask, Michael. “Patricia Highsmith’s Method.” American Literary History, vol. 22 no. 3, Fall 2010, pp. 584-614. Virtel, Louis. “‘Carol’ Director Todd Haynes on How to Film Falling in Love.” 15 Nov. 2015, uproxx.com/hitfix/carol-director-todd-haynes-on-how-to-film-falling-in-love/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2017. White, Patricia. “Sketchy Lesbians: Carol as History and Fantasy.” Film Quarterly, vol. 69, no.2, Winter 2015, pp. 8-18. Wilder, Billy, director. Sunset Boulevard. Performances by William Holden, Gloria Swanson, and Erich von Stroheim, Paramount, 1950. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. New York: Vintage, 1994.

The Posterity of Hiding:

A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Diary of Anne Frank

Yael Pilowsky Bankirer

Abstract

Focusing on Anne Frank’s diary, this essay brings to the foreground a reading that has continually been blue pencilled, unwrapping the way Anne’s localised position as a Jew in hiding is connected with her psychic process of exploring her desires as well as her voice as a woman. As this analysis reveals, Anne’s relationships in the Annex and her psychic development are in fact symbolically linked to her being chained in hiding, away from the social realm. Peeping at the world through a key hole from her marginal standpoint, she experiences a different process of growing into womanhood, whereby she reclaims the legitimacy of her voice and challenges basic conceptions of gender and sexuality.

Keywords: Anne Frank, psychoanalysis, hiding, adolescent sexuality, voice, gender, Holocaust

y recent encounter with The Diary of Anne Frank was an enlightening return to a familiar childhood reading scene and one that confronted me with the intersectional M orbits of my own situated reality as a Jewish woman living in Europe. Revisiting one’s childhood landscape is an experience accompanied by a spatial distortion in which playful spaces from the past may turn narrow, crowded and condensed. As with the chronicles of the diary itself, encountering Anne’s story as an adult brought to light not only her words but also the multiplicity of forces that have kept her silenced, rendering her un-spokenness, her censorships, her oppressions. Out of the diarist’s hiding space in the secret annex, the abundant written materials seem to enclose a smaller space for Anne Frank’s words. From being so deeply enclosed within her historically and politically situated attic, Anne has been mobilised out of her prison into a universality of “a normal teenage girl.” Readings of the diary, particularly psychoanalytic readings, have de-situated her experience in a way that has repudiated, foreclosed and repressed significant parts of her story. This essay brings to the foreground a reading of the diary that has continually been blue pencilled, unwrapping the way Anne’s localised position as a Jew in hiding is connected with her psychic process of exploring her desires as well as her voice as a woman. As I will show, Anne’s relationships in the Annex and her psychic development are in fact symbolically linked to her being chained in hiding, away from the social realm. Peeping at the world through a key hole, Anne occupies a socially liminal position. From her marginal standpoint, she experiences a

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ The Posterity of Hiding 31 different process of growing into womanhood, whereby she is able to reclaim the legitimacy of her voice and to challenge basic conceptions of gender and sexuality.

Introduction: Displacing Anne Frank Since the diary was first published in Dutch in 1947, two years after Anne’s death in Bergen-Belsen, it has received widespread attention. Her story has become part of the curriculum in numerous schools around the world and has been translated to more than 60 languages. While at first glance it seems that in the post-war reality Anne’s point of view, her experience of life in hiding, has been released from its concealment, a second, closer reading reveals that in the multiple publications of the diary, the original text has been censored, modified and mitigated. Significant parts of her narrative were omitted, neglected or politically denied. As Cynthia Ozick elaborates, “almost every hand that has approached the diary with the well-meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history” (78).1 Ozick’s particular argument is that “whatever was specific they made generic” (85). Under the demolishing pressure of popular media, the diary was de-historicized into a story exemplifying the universality of being human. Anne was removed from her situated position as a Jewish witness to and victim of the Nazis’ horrific actions, and her diary has been recast as a love story of innocence and purity. As Margaret Sönser Breen explains, the modifications of Anne’s narrative has created the image of Anne as “a universal child whose ‘politics of location’ (to borrow Adrienne Rich’s important phrase)…need not be considered as crucial to the attempt to understand her through her writing” (45). In these abbreviated versions of her narrative, not only her localised position as a Jew but also her gendered experience is attenuated. As Berteke Waaldijk explains, “Most of the passages [that were] left out refer to Anne’s experiences as a woman. They have to do with her body, menstruation and sexuality, her conversations with Peter about sex, and her relationship with her mother” (330). Indeed, it seems that the attempts to read The Diary of Anne Frank as the multifaceted experience of an actual young woman have been obscured by the pressures to maintain a narrow symbolic role. This universalisation of her voice and blurring of Anne’s situated reality is furthermore apparent in the few psychoanalytic readings of the diary. Texts analysing Anne’s sexuality and psychic development depict her story as an exemplar case study of a normal teenage girl. According to G. Scarlett, “The diary of Anne Frank affords one a rare glimpse into the thoughts of an adolescent.” It “displays the themes and forms common” at that age and thus can be regarded as an opportunity to understand the normal cognitive teenage development (265). Similarly, E. C. Evert refers to Anne’s diary as a testimony of “healthy development” that “demonstrates the feminine developmental progression from spreading excitement to an

1 Scholarship that establishes this argument, describes in detail the way Anne Frank’s narrative has been distorted in the multiple publications of the diary. This process of politically modifying the diary began with Anne Frank’s own father, Otto and then continued for many different reasons by numerous editors, translators, dramatists, legislators and the public itself. Elaborating the multiple censoring of the original text is beyond the scope of this essay. For further reading please see Bernard; Gilman; Goldstein; Loewy and Ozick. 32 Yael Pilowsky Bankirer increasingly stable sense of a fertile creative inner space after menarche” (114). K. Dalsimer explains that “[e]ven under these circumstances, we see the familiar processes of adolescent development.” In her view, Anne’s testimony reveals the “classic statement of the revival of oedipal passions” (495), and thus the diary becomes a validating proof for the psychoanalytic theory of female adolescent development. In describing the significance of situating any piece of writing, Rich recognizes that theory must always go back to “the earth” (to quote her words) in order to take into account the politics of location, the intersectionality from which any utterance begins. Interpreting Anne’s story as a classic illustration of the female adolescent development repudiates exactly the parts of her narrative that are localised and specific. In such readings, Anne’s psychic development is analysed independently from her traumatised situation as a Holocaust witness in a way that problematically reconstructs her localised gendered experience into a textbook case study of emerging womanhood. In such analyses, as Catherine Bernard has argued, a Holocaust testimony can be understood as written either “as a witness or as a woman, but not as both” (21). As I will elaborate in this essay, Anne’s testimony reveals a process of growing into womanhood that is inherently intertwined with her hidden position in the secret annex. It is in fact her situated location as a young woman, a Jewish teenager, born in Germany and hiding in Amsterdam, that has granted her the ability to creatively express herself, transforming her writing into a radical and critical process of becoming. Within the sheltered space of the diary and with growing awareness of being silenced, Anne articulates a different process of becoming a woman – one that challenges the multiple gender oppressions of her specific location.

INside/OUTside In one of the first entries to the diary, Anne records selecting which of her personal belongings she would bring with her into hiding. “[F]irst thing I stuck in was this diary,” she writes, “Memories mean more to me than dresses” (20, emphasis added). This statement describes Anne’s major life change, moving from the outer social realm, where she was a part of the cultural fabric, able to enjoy the outdoor fresh air, into an inner space of a closed and hidden attic. On July 1942, Anne’s family, her parents and older sister, moved into hiding. They fled from the abyss of German occupation, and were later joined by four other people, to find refuge in the back attic of a warehouse in Amsterdam. In a time of war and destruction, when her previous existence was about to be lost, Anne embraces her diary. Addressing an imaginary recipient named Kitty, she acknowledges that the essence that will remain important to her is not on the outside but on the inside; not superficial appearance but deep memories, which will be obtained through writing. Alongside the actual change of relocating her life in hiding, Anne’s psychic shift can be heard—a movement from an extrovert adolescent world to a space of writing, reflection, and thought preserved in the secrecy of the annex. While the adolescent period entails an intense movement from the intimate familial space toward the social realm, Anne’s life is taking a different turn and she is forced to encapsulate her The Posterity of Hiding 33 existence in a closed attic. Peter Blos has described the process of gradually abandoning the primary parental love object to reform new emotional and sexual relationships with peer group members during puberty (1-14). In this developmental state, he explains, revival of the oedipal complex becomes the conflicted grounds for channelling libidinal impulses into new interaction with peer groups. Youthful rebellion, the re-emergence of the conflict with the parents, is part of what Blos has called “the secondary individuation process,” in which the adolescent gradually forms her (or his) self-identity and establishes a secure sense of self and a coherent voice. According to feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, this process of individuation and secure separation has another side to it, especially when it comes to girls (ix-xxvii). She describes the process in the life of women in which their voice is lost, or to put it bluntly, silenced. As she sees it, this painful transition is forcefully grounded during puberty when social accord is enhanced and psychic attention is shifted from the intimate family unit to society and peer group cohort. Girls enter adolescence confident and assured in their own voice, but gradually censor themselves as they become aware of dominant patriarchal perceptions. Those that insist on maintaining their own voice and remain outspoken often find themselves labelled as troublemakers. Thus, Gilligan explains, a split is formed in the adolescent psyche in which their coherent voice is muted and becomes secretive. To avoid being excluded, they tend to hide their selves, to conceal their experience of the world, and accommodate an external voice that is congruent with the dominant way of thinking. An echo of such an internal rift can be heard in Anne’s description of a series of pre- hiding incidents in which she was repeatedly reprimanded for her behaviour in class. The teacher referred to her as “A Chatterbox,” and asked her to write an essay on the topic of incessant talking. Anne drew on her sense of humour and wit to present an argument “that talking is a female trait and that I would do my best to keep it under control, but I would never be able to break myself of the habit…there’s not much you can do about inherited traits” (11). In her answer Anne employed a mimetic strategy that enabled her to keep on talking while at the same time acknowledging the hegemonic perception of women’s speech being pointless. Throughout her diary, Anne is preoccupied with this conflict, struggling to find a way to be heard. She moves back and forth between speaking her mind and keeping her thoughts to herself. When she decides to speak out, she is often considered headstrong, loud, and selfish. Other times she chooses to remain silent. “I’m afraid they’ll mock me,” she explains to Kitty. “[They’ll] think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously.” That is why, she continues, “I’m split in two” (334-335).

Spatial Politics While veiled from the violence of the outside world, the Franks inhabited a small and crowded annex with constant restrictions on their daily routine, limited supplies and increasing fear of being caught. Confined to a narrow space that was both a sanctuary and a prison, they were totally dependent on their Christian helpers and lived in an enforced intimacy with four 34 Yael Pilowsky Bankirer other people. Adults and children alike shared the responsibility of hiding—muting their voices, restricting their movements and vigilantly managing their behaviour. Curtains had to be shut during daytime; opening a window had to be limited; flushing the toilet was only allowed on certain hours; cooking, eating and even sleeping had to be forethought. With this new reality in the annex, Anne’s playful ability to “walk between raindrops,” to wittingly humour herself out of complicated power relations, was no longer simple. Vulnerability, weakness, dependency, childlike behaviour, mischievous manipulations were not as tolerated as they were on the outside. The condensed and crowded space was felt not only in the reality of her everyday life but also in Anne’s psychic reorganisation. Upon arrival in their new dwelling, perhaps in an attempt to familiarise herself with the space, Anne describes in detail the spatiality of their hiding annex. In the back attic of a large warehouse, hidden behind a bookcase that concealed its entrance, was a two-floor loft space unseen by the outer world. At first, Anne shared a room with her sister, Margot, and then, when Mr. Dussel (Fritz Pfeffer) arrived, Margot joined the parents in their room, and Anne was compelled to share her intimate space with him. She describes the way he inadvertently expands his living space to invade hers, while at the same time restricting her movements with constant remarks on her behaviour. “Apparently,” Anne complains to Kitty, “I’m always making ‘too much noise.’” While shushing her and reprimanding her conduct, Mr. Dussel allows himself more freedom. He “switches on the light at the crack of dawn to exercise” and “pushes and bumps” chairs in the room next to Anne’s sleeping head (78-79). It seems that although both had to share the burden and responsibilities of their restrictions, the right for space was dissimilar. Mr. Dussel as an adult, a doctor and a man, was entitled to the privacy of the room and to the use of the table for most of the day. He commented freely on Anne’s actions and behaviour, repeatedly reminding her of both her gender and her age. “We must begin,” according to Rich, “not with the continent or a country or a house but with the geography closest in – the body” (212). The politics of location commence with the politics of the body – the fantasies, identities and images that dictate its discourse, boundaries, management and invasions. On one occasion, when Anne lay sick, with weakness, sore throat and high fever, it was decided that she would be examined by Mr. Dussel. To Kitty Anne reveals her discomfort with such invasion, but she is unable to liberate her rage beyond the pages of diary: “The worst part was when Mr. Dussel decided to play doctor and lay his pomaded head on my bare chest” (151). While Mr. Dussel could intrude into her most intimate space, her body, she had to tighten herself into the expected dimensions of a young woman, giving freedom to her thoughts only within the secretive space of the diary. Forced into sharing a room with Mr. Dussel brought into the foreground a gendered struggle: Anne’s inferiority as a young woman in the power relation with an older man. Under the surviving conditions of hiding, what was a productive strategy for Anne on the outside was no longer acceptable on the inside. She could not ask for concessions for being a woman; she could not use a mimetic approach accentuating her femininity (as she did with the “chatterbox” incident); she could not speak of her different needs, her changing body; and she could not The Posterity of Hiding 35 expose her emotional dependency on having a space for writing. Within the increasingly narrowing circles of Anne’s life, the diary is not just a space for reflection, mirroring her life in the annex. Under the enforced intimacies of hiding, it gradually turns into her breathing space. It becomes a transformative locus where she can both lose and find herself; hide her secrets and recreate her identity. Guarding her inner life within the pages of the diary is symbolically empowered by the reality of her location in hiding within a secret space, safely camouflaged behind a bookcase.

Hidden Between the Pages Struggling to find a space to preserve her secret voice, Anne turns to her diary. Since “Paper has more patience than people” (6), she can share her thoughts and feelings with Kitty openly and honestly, without fear of being excluded or criticized. In Anne’s descriptions, Kitty is an observer that is interested in her stories; excited to hear her news; concerned for her in the face of fearful events; bored when she repeats herself; and compassionate regarding her suffering. Indeed, Anne refers to Kitty as a real other, a reliable witness to her life under the most exceptional circumstances; someone who provides her with a secure space and the ability to listen to what the outer world cannot hear. At a time of loss and destruction the diary becomes Anne’s own sheltered dimension that not only records and echoes her extraordinary reality but also allows her to creatively develop her world view and inner voice. Under the extreme conditions of Anne’s life, the symbolic relationship between inside and outside are modulated through an act of writing that is dynamically linked to the emblem of hiding. Echoing the world outside, the inner realm becomes a precious element that is functioning under an ongoing attack, and needs to be saved and rescued. Just as in the reality of her life where finding a safe hiding place might be the difference between life and death, so it is on a psychic level: she finds refuge in the secrecy of the diary, where she can both hide her inner treasures and save them from oblivion. According to D. W. Winnicott, playing hide-and-seek reflects a dialectical desire that is fundamental to human experience: the wish to hide ourselves and the longing to be found (1965, 185-187). We all need a secure space to guard and creatively develop our inner treasures. Yet this inner work is relentlessly motivated by the need to communicate it to the outside world. “It is a joy to hide,” he continues, “but a disaster not to be found” (1965, 186). Throughout the text, the fantasy of Anne’s words breaking free from their cage and reaching a wider audience accompanies her writing. Although, on the one hand, Anne means for the diary to become an intimate space for her thoughts and feelings, on the other hand, she is constantly preoccupied with exposing it. “[J]ust imagine,” she asks Kitty with enthusiasm, “how interesting it would be if I were to publish a novel about the Secret Annex” (244). The prospect of her deepest thoughts revealed to the world fuels the creativity of her writing. For Anne, who faces traumatic reality, the diary serves as what Winnicott refers to as “a potential space” – an intermediate zone of experience that functions as a dimension of vague boundaries between inside and outside (1971, 1-25). This third space facilitates a dynamic movement between fantasy and reality, which 36 Yael Pilowsky Bankirer enables the subject to simultaneously invent the object and allow its independent existence. By writing the diary, Anne creatively experiences herself, and expresses her deepest feelings and fantasies to an other who is both a fiction of her own imagination and a promise to be heard and seen. The diary becomes a space to ingeniously challenge the complex psychic relation between her inside and outside worlds.

Intersectional “chains” Rachel Feldhay Brenner writes, “The poignancy of [Anne] Frank’s writing emerges from her awareness of the terrifying historical reality in which she is writing her life story” (22). Anne’s specific intersectional location—as a young woman, a German-Jew hiding in Amsterdam—formulates the unique position of the diary as a creative space for expression and experimentation. Applying the politics of location to the analysis of Anne’s psychic development, my task must take into account the position that allows her writing to exist as well as the silencing and censorships that have muted her words. As I have shown, in many of the references to her story, Anne’s narrative has been lifted from the grounds of her intersectional location. Various publications and discussions of the diary have distorted, omitted and silenced parts of her writing under a universalising movement. In spite all these castrating censorships, a simple fact remains true: Anne was able to write and her words have not only been published but become a cornerstone of Holocaust literature. She was fortunate to have an internal and external space in which she was able to express herself in a way that many other Jewish children during the war were incapable of. Anne’s words have broken free from the chains of her hiding place and reached unmatchable fame. A narrative of such a complicated position that is both oppressed and privileged can be heard throughout the Franks’ family history. Anne was the daughter of an affluent bourgeois and secular Jewish family, well assimilated in German society. Her mother, Edith was born to a wealthy Jewish family and her father, Otto, was the son of a bank owner, well established and prosperous. In 1933 due to growing segregation and oppression of Jewish people in Germany, Otto Frank decided to immigrate to Holland, where he had commercial connections that enabled him to establish a business and find a temporary refuge for his family. Though born in Germany, Anne spent most of her childhood in Holland and experienced herself as Dutch. In 1940, when Germany invaded the Netherlands, the persecution of Jews arrived with increasingly restrictive and discriminatory laws. Although for a while the family’s financial and social position allowed a relatively comfortable life, Anne describes in her diary a narrowing circle that had been increasingly closing in on her freedom: “After May 1940 the good times were few and far between,” she writes. “…Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees” (8). Finding a shelter for the second time was once again due a great deal to Anne’s father’s position and connections. Otto Frank managed to prevent the confiscation of his company by The Posterity of Hiding 37 transferring his shares and directorship to his business partners. This process allowed the business to continue and enabled him to plan the family hiding in the back attic of the company’s warehouse and offices. Under increasingly horrific reality Anne was able to sit by her window safely hidden but achingly watching the growing brutality that took place on the outside: “In the evenings when it’s dark,” she writes in her diary, “I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on … until they nearly drop. No one is spared” (69). Hiding for Anne was double-edged. It provided a restrictive safety that left her feeling enchained. “We’re Jews in chains, chained to one spot, without any rights,” she complains to Kitty (261). Alongside her dread of the horrors committed against Jews outside the walls of her hiding space, she shares with Kitty her unbearable feelings of imprisonment. Knowing that she is fortunate to be alive, she feels ungrateful for missing her previous childlike world in which she was free move without restraint; to speak and laugh out loud. “Whenever someone comes in from outside,” she admits to Kitty, “with the wind in their clothes and the cold on their cheeks, I feel like burying my head under the blankets to keep from thinking, ‘When will we be allowed to breathe fresh air again?’” (153). Having a space for writing allows Anne to embark on a self-reflecting process that induces a comprehension of not only her misfortune but also her privilege. In witnessing the growing horrors outside her window, she gradually realizes the difference between her situation and that of so many others destined to be tortured and led to their death. Growing feelings of guilt appear in Anne’s dreams, wherein she repeatedly sees her school friend, Hanneli, asking to be saved. Anne ponders the vulnerability around her with introspective questioning that achingly compels her to contemplate the ethicality of her position: “why,” she asks Kitty, “why have I been chosen to live, while she’s probably going to die? What’s the difference between us?” (149). The process of writing allows Anne to search for a way to bear the unbearable, to think about the unthinkable, and to face the constantly growing human monstrosities with poignant accountability of her own.

Soft Cheek The diary provides Anne the space to explore the “double bind” of her “chains” in hiding—chains that are both restrictive and preserving. During the process of writing, she comes to experience these chains not only as racialized but also as gendered. Anne’s need to break free from her confined space in hiding discloses her desire for a maternal embrace and grants her the freedom to discover her sexuality in ways that cannot be reduced to any normative narrative of growing into womanhood. In the process of exploring her “double edged chains,” Anne becomes increasingly preoccupied with her relationship with her mother. Torn between growing hopelessness and her sense of gratitude for being alive, she approaches her mother for advice. Edith Frank does not recognise her daughter’s pain in witnessing the suffering outside the annex’s walls. She explains 38 Yael Pilowsky Bankirer to Anne that she should just “[t]hink about all the suffering in the world and be thankful [she’s] not part of it” (211). With a growing feeling of despair, Anne is troubled by her mother’s ability to seal her heart to suffering. For a long while, they are both, as she says, “caught in a vicious circle of unpleasantness and sorrow” (158). Her writing records a continual rage towards her mother, an emotional rollercoaster, consisting of anger, insults and hostility without any soft and intimate encounter between them. With the increasing estrangement, Anne describes an ambivalent emotional position that moves between resentment and dependency. Although she clearly articulates feelings of aggression towards her mother, she simultaneously longs for her recognition and love: “I can’t stand Mother.” She shares her anger with Kitty: “I have to force myself not to snap at her all the time and to stay calm, when I’d rather slap her across the face” (50). Yet underneath all that rage, she confesses, “I miss ‒ every day and every hour of the day—having a mother who understands me” (154). In the loneliness of the annex, she yearns for a mother who is less focused on fixing her behaviours to accommodate the outer world. In many of her writings, Luce Irigaray portrays the enslavement of the mother-daughter relationship to the patriarchal structure and points to the way that women become objects in the dominant relation between men (15-51). As she explains, with the disappearance of women’s genealogy, mothers and daughters can only relate to each other as competitors for the one position designated for them under the oedipal structure—that of an object, a silent mirror to echo masculinity. Under patriarchal law, mothers are forced to teach their daughters to forget the intimate relationship between women, and daughters are obligated to forgo their mothers’ love in order to be able to enter the symbolic order. From this viewpoint, Anne’s frustration and ambivalent rage can be understood as the outcome of the rift that patriarchal culture enforces on mother-daughter relations. Within the strict surviving atmosphere of the annex, the governing rules of patriarchy are heightened with decreasing tolerance for maternal touch. In the context of this accentuated culture, Anne’s conflicted reaction proves to be a symptomatic marker of repressing the ancient lineage of women. Witnessing the horrors from her window, Anne realizes that “the hell,” as she puts it, does not stay on the outside, but comes from the inside. A series of dreams follow at the tail end of 1943, in the midst of what was probably the most emotionally difficult time at the annex. Under these circumstances, Anne has a dream, which she describes as vivid and powerful: “Peter’s eyes suddenly met mine… And then I felt a soft, oh-so-cool and gentle cheek against mine, and it felt so good, so good” (162-163, emphasis added). A while later, Anne writes to Kitty about a similar dream she had: “I dreamed we were kissing each other, but Peter’s cheeks were very disappointing: they weren’t as soft as they looked. They were more like Father’s cheeks, the cheeks of a man who already shaves” (213, emphasis added). Longing for the “soft cheek,” Anne wishes for a tender touch to soften the rough edges that have taken over her inner life. It is with a language of sharp and thorny prickliness that she constantly describes the relationship with her mother. “She hurls at me day after day,” she explains in her diary, “piercing me like arrows from a tightly strung bow” (81). On one occasion, The Posterity of Hiding 39 she describes, “A pin! Mother had patched the blanket and forgotten to take it out. …just to tease her I said, ‘Du bist doch eine echte Rabenmutter’ [Oh, you are cruel]” (184). The prickly cheek, just like a needle in the soft blanket, can be thought to represent a promise for maternal embrace that does not materialize between them. Although it is Peter who appears in the dream, we might interpret it not as a desire for a man (or, within the context of psychoanalysis, a man’s phallus), but as a need for a mother (or again, within psychoanalytic terms, a maternal breast). It is, after all, his “soft cheek” (emphasis added) for which she longs. Whereas a traditional psychoanalytic perspective portrays an oedipal process in which the mother is repudiated with rage for not giving the girl a penis (or a phallus), Anne’s dream reveals a different developmental course. As she searches for tenderness and recognition, her passionate longing for maternal embrace is displaced and projected onto a male figure. This shift can be thought of through the psychoanalytic understanding of Julia Kristeva, who conceptualises the identification with the Symbolic Order—father, for both boys and girls—as deeply rooted in the emotional relationship with the mother. As she sees it, maternal love and the identification with the mother are the psychic grounds for the relationship with the father. Under patriarchal phallocentric culture, she explains, the origin of this fundamental emotional structure has to be forgotten and the archaic identification with maternal subjectivity is replaced by an imagery of a lack, an absence that can only be filled by the phallus.2 From this perspective, Peter’s cheek appears in the dream as a moderator for Anne’s yearning for maternal softness, intimacy and recognition. Anne’s sincere testimony of her thoughts, feelings and dreams not only challenges the traditional psychoanalytic oedipal model but also brings to the foreground questions concerning sexuality and desire. On the same day she has the dream, Anne confesses to Kitty,

Sometimes when I lie in bed at night I feel a terrible urge to touch my breasts … Once when I was spending the night at Jacque’s, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she’d always hidden from me. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts. …. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude … I go into ecstasy. (161).

It seems that Anne’s psychic imagery dynamically shifts between different objects of desire and quickly moves from “Peter’s soft cheek” to her own breasts, to the memory of attraction to her girlfriend Jacque, to her excitement of the female nude body. Her fluid imagination quickly alters and a fantasy for different forms of the female body is deeply knotted with what later on materialises as an object of desire in Anne’s reality. The ability to move from her craving for a “breast” to the image of Peter’s “soft cheek” enables the formation of her desire towards Peter and provides the cultivating tissue for their relationship to take shape.

2 I am referring here specifically to the way Kelly Oliver reads Kristeva. For further reading see: Oliver, Kelly. “Kristeva’s Sadomasochistic Subject and the Sublimation of Violence.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 21(1), (2013): 13-26. 40 Yael Pilowsky Bankirer

One might wonder how Anne’s sexuality would evolve if she had lived to reach adulthood, a question that can only be speculated on and will remain unanswered. Still, her malleable shifting desire and her ability to identify herself with variable forms of sexual expressions calls for analytic reflection. In the confined space of the annex, and with the diary as a creative transformative locus, Anne is able to reveal her own “cheekiness” and formulate her sexuality in a way that challenges traditional concepts of growing into womanhood.

Coming Out of Hiding Concealed inside the annex walls, protected from the horrific reality of the outside world, the symbolism of hiding plays an important role in Anne’s need to free herself from oppressions. Both women’s and Jews’ suffering are integrated under the same symbol – which functions as a cameo in her psychic development—that of going underground, of hiding. In this dynamic psychical growth, the diary becomes a space for creative sexual experimentation facilitating Anne’s process of ingeniously redefining her desire. In a society that refuses to signify the experience of women, Gilligan writes, their voices go into hiding, descending beneath the surface into the depths of the psyche. Within a culture that does not value their world view and knowledge, they are forced into silence and their voices are muted in the social realm to become secretive. Irigaray’s descriptions of women’s experience employ a similar picture of disappearance. Using the myth of Demeter and Persephone, she demonstrates the forgetfulness of mother-daughter relationships under patriarchal culture. Persephone, abducted and forced to descend to the underworld, leaves her mother in a painful state of suffering. Demeter has no words to express her sorrow for her daughter’s disappearance, and so, winter becomes her symptom, and the upper world is covered with white snow. For Anne, within the context of hiding, writing allows her to register her own winter of missing maternal embrace and creatively explore her desire to liberate her voice as a woman from the “underworld” of silence. Following the “soft cheek” dream, Anne begins to form an intimate relationship with Peter in which she finds strength to challenge basic conceptions of female sexuality. As Anne’s sister, Margot, clarifies, an intimate relationship with a man “would have to be [with] someone I felt was intellectually superior” (229). Similar concerns are raised by her father, who explains that “[i]n matters like these, it’s always the man who takes the active role, and it’s up to the woman to set the limits” (277). Knowing that girls are meant to find their intimacy in hierarchical relations in which men take the upper hand, and women are not supposed to be actively passionate, Anne is constantly ambivalent about the different course her relationship with Peter is taking. “I’m still torn with guilt,” she confesses to Kitty. “… I know very well that he was my conquest, and not the other way around” (330). “Is it right?” she asks herself, “Is it right for me to be so passionate? to be filled with as much passion and desire as Peter? Can I, a girl, allow myself to go that far?” (275). How is it possible for a woman to be as passionate as a man? The Posterity of Hiding 41

Anne wonders about this question referring to her unique position confined outside the social realm: “Oh, Anne, how terribly shocking! But seriously, I don’t think it’s at all shocking; we’re cooped up here, cut off from the world, anxious and fearful, especially lately. …Why shouldn’t I do what my heart tells me …?” (267). Chained to the attic, Anne’s unconscious wish to break free of gender inhibitions surges forth, and with these words, she finds the strength to disobey cultural demand regarding gender norms. Locked away from social and peer group pressures that accompany most teenage relationships, Anne allows herself to be actively seductive, frequently leading their conversations and raising the subject of female sexuality. “In women, the genitals, or whatever they’re called, are hidden” (236), she admits to Kitty. Yet, she refuses to keep it all tucked away in silence and looks for a way to explain to Peter that,

When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things …. They separate when you sit down, and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris … (236-237)

Anne continues to describe the female sexual organs in great length. This detailed description should be contemplated beyond the dominant psychoanalytic perspective, whereby female sexuality is reduced to a fantasy of being penetrated by a man. Her brave outlining of the female body can be understood in terms of her desire to articulate her different way of thinking; to expose what is predominantly considered secretive and shameful; and, within the context of her reality as a Jew, to bring herself out of hiding. She wishes for her inner experience, her inner voice, her world view, and her sense of being to be heard, and for her inner organs to be recognized and seen. Anne’s dreams and her active role in the relationship with Peter are part of an evolving process in which she gradually establishes an ability to speak her world view out loud, to bring to light her different experience as a woman. Anne’s marginalised position outside the social realm grants her an admirable courage to fight oppressions. She wants to be recognized and seen; she aspires to be remembered; she yearns for her inner world to break free from its oppressive chains. “Can you tell me why people go to such lengths to hide their real selves?” (170), she asks Kitty, and then she shares her decision: “I’ll take every opportunity to speak openly” (172). She explores her attraction to women, raises questions about “the way things are,” and critically speculates about love, relationships, children’s upbringing, marriage and the social position of women. Looking at the world through the key hole and confiding in Kitty, Anne gradually realizes the valuable assets she possesses and acknowledges the intersectionality of her oppressions—it’s not only her Jewishness but also patriarchal chains that she is untangling. “I know that I’m a woman,” she writes, “a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage. If God lets me live … I’ll make my voice heard!” (262). 42 Yael Pilowsky Bankirer

De-Archiving Anne Frank Contemplating Anne’s process of liberating her voice in relation to the multiple “sanitising” publications that have taken ownership of her story, one might wonder about the way her desire to break free from hiding is still hindered by a silencing paralysis. Although her dream to become a famous writer has materialized, even after her death, parts of her narrative, specifically her experience as a woman, continue to be concealed and censored. The diary’s multiple re-publications have only further expressed the fact that an emancipation of her voice has been, in a way, neurotically repudiated. Anne Frank’s diary was never finished. Its vitality was abruptly discontinued on 4 August 1944, when the secret Annex was stormed by German soldiers and its dwellers arrested. Anne never concluded her writing nor was she able to record the last months of her life. The untold, unwritten component of the diary, as Ozick explains, is precisely these dreadful last months of her life, when no words existed. The diary’s legacy is that of a girl that suffered and died under the most dreadful conditions. “A survivor recalled,” Ozick continues, that Margot, “fell dead to the ground from the wooden slab on which she lay, eaten by lice, and that Anne, heartbroken and skeletal, naked under a bit of rag, died a day or two later” (78). While Ozick is right in identifying that “[t]he diary’s keen lens is helplessly opaque to the diarist’s explicit doom” (79), from a psychoanalytic perspective, it is exactly the uncanniness of her doom that obscured its lenses. Paradoxically, it is Anne’s unspeakable death that created the diary as a hopeful fountain of life; it is her painfully unbearable ending under the most extreme cruelty that made her into a symbol of faith in the human spirit; and it is the singularity of her location that founded her universalised generic image. Ironically, precisely her extraordinary circumstances as a young woman in hiding, witnessing the most horrific reality have created Anne’s archived narrative as a monument for a normal teenage story. The uncompromising attempts to find catharsis in her narrative and the restlessness of her unspeakable death can both find an echo in the continual retelling of the diary. These multiple controversial attempts to commemorate the vital words of a girl, a young woman, who, not yet sixteen, was brutally murdered, just one month before liberation, can be understood via what Jacques Derrida has called “mal de archive” (9-63). The various enterprises of commemorating the diary seem to reveal the agonizing conflicted mechanism of an “archive fever.” As Derrida explains in an interview with Michal Ben-Naftali, an archiving project is an act of memory “performed to prevent this [past] from being erased. But at the same time, which is ambiguous and horrifying, it is the very act of archivizing which contributes somehow to classification, relativization and forgetting” (Ben-Naftali 11). An archive fever means having a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire to return to the origin, a homesickness for the “most archaic place of absolute commencement” (Derrida 57), which gets so caught up in its desire to preserve and guard that it strangles the vitality out of every piece of evidence; until it repeats its primary fear—revealing that this past is always already dead. As Brenner elaborates, for Anne herself, the diary is an immanent creation of meanings in the face of an apocalyptic future. Rather than being a cathartic response to the The Posterity of Hiding 43

Holocaust, it is an aching resistance to the probability of eternal silence. Her encounter with the vulnerability of life within the prospect of her own death facilitates the painful and courageous act of speaking the unspeakable.3 “I want to go on living even after my death,” Anne announces to Kitty. “And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!” (250). The act of writing arises from Anne’s particular reality in what Brenner has called “the present of an ultimate ending” (25). Under the complexity of her localised position in hiding, Anne is creating words to defy consistent silencing oppressions. As a Jew, as not—yet a woman, living within an uncanny state of mortal nonexistence, she embarks upon an artistic voyage that can be thought of as a creative refusal to be archived. In the uncanny reality of her life, the diary provides an experimental locus, an intimate creative space in which Anne’s story will never be finished and thus can stay relentlessly open to new meanings. If an act of archivization springs out of an anxious need to seal off the diary from the horrific reality of the Holocaust and to sanitise it from any “live” memory of oppression, Anne’s writing is rooted in a growing awareness of the political locations of her reality, a rising consciousness of her being hidden and silenced, particularly as a woman.

Works Cited Ben-Naftali, Michal. “An Interview with Professor Jacques Derrida.” 1998. Translated by Moshe Ron. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, Shoah Resource Center, 2000, www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-–%203851.pdf. Bernard, Catherine A. “‘tell him that I’: Women Writing the Holocaust.” Other Voices: The (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism, vol. 2, no.1, 2000. Blos, Peter. On Adolescence, a Psychoanalytic Interpretation. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. Breen, Margaret Sönser. “Coming of Age within the Secret Annex: Dislocations and ‘Frankness’ in Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.” Critical Insights: The Diary of Anne Frank, edited by Ruth Amir and Pnina Rosenberg, Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2017, pp. 40-59. Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “Anne Frank’s Diary: Self-Portrait of an Artistic and Ethical Evolution.” Critical Insights: The Diary of Anne Frank, edited by Ruth Amir and Pnina Rosenberg, Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2017, pp. 20-38. Dalsimer, K. “Female Adolescent Development: A Study of The Diary of Anne Frank”. Psychoanal. St. Child, no. 37, 1982, pp. 487-522. Derrida, J. “Archive Fever: A Freudian impression,” Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, Summer 1995. Evert, E. C. “Sexual Integration in Female Adolescence: Anne Frank‘s Diary as a Study in Healthy Development”. Psychoanalytical Study of the Child, no. 46, 1991, pp. 109-124.

3Brenner suggests that “the Diary is a work of art, which defies the fearful hiatus that brought it into being. It is not our evasion of the horror that should read optimism into Frank’s life narrative. It is, rather, her valiant artistic accomplishment and her courageous ethical vision that inscribes the fortitude of humanism into her story of fear and despair” (22). 44 Yael Pilowsky Bankirer

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. Edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler, translated by Susan Massotty, London: Puffin, 2002. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Gilman, Sander L. “The Dead Child Speaks: Reading The Diary of Anne Frank.” Jewish Self- Hatred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986, pp. 245-360. Goldstein, Judith. “Anne Frank: The Redemptive Myth.“ Partisan Review, vol. 70, no.1, 2003, n.p. Irigaray, Luce. Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. Translated by Alison Martin, New York: Routledge, 1993. Loewy, Hanno. “Saving the Child: The ‘Universalisation’ of Anne Frank.” Translated by Russell West. Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, edited by Rachel Langford and Russell West, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. pp.156-174. Oliver, Kelly. “Kristeva’s Sadomasochistic Subject and the Sublimation of Violence.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, vol. 21, no.1, 2013, pp. 13-26. Ozick, Cynthia. “Who Owns Anne Frank?” The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 1997, pp. 76-87. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes towards a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread and Poetry, W. W. Norton, 1987, pp. 210–232. Scarlett, G. “Adolescent Thinking and the Diary of Anne Frank”. Psychoanalytical Review, no. 58, 1971, pp. 265-278. Waaldijk, Berteke. “Reading Anne Frank as a Woman.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 16, no. 4, 1993, pp. 327-35. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic, 1971. ---. “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites.” The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, New York: International Universities, 1965.

Trans/itory Belongings: At the Borders of Skin and Citizenship

Tara Atluri

Alliance University, Bangalore, India

Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, Canada

Abstract

This essay discusses the case of Shivi, a transgender South Asian American who won a legal case in New Delhi against their parents, who tried to force Shivi to stay in India and live as a cisgender person. These acts of transphobic domestic violence were challenged by queer activists and judiciaries in India. With Shivi’s case serving as a starting point, this essay considers how South Asian diasporas imagine India to be sexually conservative in disturbing ways that do a disservice to the vitality of queer and feminist movements in the Global South. By looking at Hijras and other gender dissident communities within this context, this essay also suggests that a globalized grammar of LGBTQI rights ignores genealogies of gendered transgression and queer activism in non-Western contexts. I discuss national borders and the boundaries/borders of bodies as spaces of gendered translation, transgression and untranslatable violence.

Keywords: hijra, transgender, violence, heteronormativity, South Asian diaspora, borders

he notion of fluidity across borders is often celebrated as a means of subverting xenophobic ideologies of nationalism. And yet, the figure of the “world citizen” is a T biopolitical figure whose global vitality is perhaps productive of necropolitics, casting shadows over the world’s poor. Transnational elites possess an arsenal of symbolic and material capital that allows them some semblance of freedom globally. Simultaneously, subaltern bodes are exiled within the nations in which they are formally counted as citizens, their lives in states of constant precarity. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states,

…capital is in fact borderless; that's the problem. On the other hand capital has to keep borders alive in order for this kind of cross-border trade to happen. So therefore the idea of borderlessness has a performative contradiction within it that has to be kept alive. (Spivak 47)

Spivak observes that there is a relationship between borders and bodies, with the author discussing the vulnerability of the female body as that which can be permeated. As s/he states,

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

46 Tara Atluri

…in the simplest possible sense, the female body is seen as permeable. It is seen as permeable in perhaps the most basic gesture of violence. To respect the border of the seemingly permeable female body, which seems to be in the benign service of humanity itself for the continuation of the human race, to understand that one must attend to this border, respect it—we must nuance borderlessness, remember that citizenship is predicated on legitimate birth, breaking the border of the female body. (Spivak 47)

Spivak’s important insights regarding the gendered borders of bodies are useful in considering how sexual identities are imbricated into processes of citizenship. While Spivak’s work often interrogates the construction of gender, this discussion of the permeable ‘female body’ as symbolic of and/or metonymic to borders does not address transgender, gender queer bodies and their relationship to borders. Spivak further states, “[t]o be borderless is also a pleasure for the female and the male—to be borderless, to be permeable, can be a pleasure. So it is attending to borders rather than simply respecting them that is our first, gendered lesson” (47). While this assertion is descriptive of the hegemony of cis-gender heteronormativity, I am interested in discussing the permeability of the transgender and gender-queer body particularly in relation to transnational border crossing. This essay discusses the relationship between transgender people of colour and borders, where borders refer both to bodily exteriors that can be permeated and to the boundaries of nation states. Spivak’s binary schemata in this discussion of borders/borderlessness and male/female does not address how gender itself is performative and how the exteriority of transgender and/or gender queer bodies are often violently marked and trespassed against in a heteronormative world. The border of the transgender body calls into question Spivak’s assertion that permeable bodies are cis-gender female bodies, and concomitantly that all male bodies are impermeable. While Spivak discusses the performative contradiction at work in the concept of border/borderlessness, there is little attention to how gender itself is a performative and permeable category. Considering the rights and lives of transgender and gender queer people causes one to question how performative gestures, changes to embodiment, and gender transitioning and transgression create moments where one permeates one’s own borders in order to enact new modes of gendered being. For transgender and gender-queer people, performative enactments of gender transgression create unstable borders of permeable/impermeable bodies that evade the borderlines of gender binaries; the vulnerability of their bodies is revealed in their precarious embodiment and embodied violence. This essay focuses on the relationship between national borders and the borders of gendered bodies. Drawing on critical theory and a discussion regarding topical issues regarding queer politics in contemporary India, I examine the shifting nature of citizenship in the Indian subcontinent and the transgender and gender-queer person who crosses borders. I discuss changes to diasporic Indian citizenship schemes and how such schemes naturalize cis-gender, heteronormative familial lineages that reproduce and solidify casteism and imagined forms of bio-political purity. The breadth of the article focuses on the case of Shivy, a transgender NRI Trans/itory Belongings 47

(Non Resident Indian) who was forcibly brought to India by their parents, who attempted to use the Indian subcontinent as a repository for transphobic, heteronormative violence. I discuss Shivy’s case in relation to the 2016 Transgender Bill in India, and the precarious relationship between bodies and borders. This case was narrated in the global press in relation to the permeability of the trans male body in India and the permeability of the bodies of transgender people of colour in the West.

Shivy: Green Cards and Saffron Robes Shivy (referred to in this essay as both “they” and “he”) is a transgender South Asian American. They were brought to India by their parents, who attempted to force them to have a heteronormative marriage with a cis gender man. Shivy’s parents stole their passport and American green card. He subsequently sought refuge with queer activists in India and filed a petitition against his parents in the Delhi high court. The Delhi high court ruled in favor of Shivy, and they subsequently returned to the United States (Mishrai 2015). Shivy’s victory was considered to be a remarkable moment of justice in India, where, until September 6, 2018, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalized “unnatural” sexual activity and thus threatened the dignity and citizenship rights of LGBTQ people. As Aradhna Wal writes,

On 22 September, in the Delhi High Court, a most extraordinary thing happened. Judge Siddharth Mridul passed an interim order granting police protection to a young transgender male and the LGBT activists supporting him, from harassment from the boy's family and the notorious Uttar Pradesh police. As senior advocate Rebecca John said, in a country where the Supreme Court upheld Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, severely harming the rights of the LGBT communities, where state machinery is often mobilised on behalf of conservative families against young people trying to choose their own lives, the judiciary upholding the rights of 19-year-old Shivy was remarkable. (2015)

When Shivy’s parents discovered he was transgender, they forcibly took him to Agra, India, where they took away his passport, green card, all other identification documents, and his computer. Shivy’s parents discovered his transgender identity in California, when he told them he wanted to cut his hair. His mother reacted violently. She confiscated his phone and in so doing found information regarding his identification as transgender. In an effort to stop Shivy from leading his life as a transgender person, they took him to India and attempted to use the country as a space where heteronormative familial violence is tolerated. The case of Shivy received attention when he released an online video discussing the abuse he was facing from his family in India. Shivy then managed to retrieve his phone and contact the local queer activist organization Nazariya where he received the necessary support to escape his abusive family. Due to the political and economic clout that Shivy’s father has in Uttar Pradesh, the UP police subsequently began to harass queer activists in Delhi. The case offers an example of the 48 Tara Atluri complexities of transnational queer activism. The precarity of Western transgender lives is protected by local queer activists in the Global South whose own lives are precarious to the point of unremarked upon violence and death, often due to state persecution and the inequities of the global economy (Wal 2015). Gender and sexuality are borderless insofar as bodies and desires can move across national boundaries. However, due to the securitization of borders, white Western queer capital retains its strength, while national leaders in countries such as India simultaneously criminalize queerness by arguing in ahistorical ways that it is foreign to national culture. While Shivy’s case is an example of the remarkable work of LGBTQ activists in India and an instance in which the Indian judiciary showed empathy to queer people, it is interesting to ask how questions of citizenship and capital frame the case. Authors consistently discuss Shivy’s class background and privileged position in the United States. While there is no explicit mention of caste in accounts of the case, hierarchies of caste-based names often allow for the queer body to be invited into the biopolitical life of the nation state. Jasbir Puar discusses homonationalism, a process through which archetypal queer subjects are invited into the life of the nation to the extent that their bodies and aspirations correspond with the goals of nation building. One can ask how in India and the Indian diaspora, caste solidifies national belonging thus allowing for transgender and gender queer bodies to approximate dominant caste-based patriarchies. The production of transgender bodies, whose lives are validated within a discourse of universal transgender rights and language, corresponds to a casteist necropolitics, where narratives of idealized reproduction render Dalit and other lower caste Hijras and transgender people abject. The assault is framed in a way that highlights the violence of transphobia as an insult to the imagined progressive values of Western culture. As Wal writes,

A student of neurobiology at the University of California, Davis, an honours student with scholarships lined up, as he proudly related in the video, he was forced to take admission in Dayal Bagh Educational Institute, Agra. It was clear how the idea of a substandard education rankled him. (Wal 2015)

Had Shivy been a lower-caste Hijra, transgender, or queer person would the case have garnered such attention and a favorable response from the courts? The “substandard education” offered in India becomes a marker of ostensible underdevelopment and the right to transgender and queer rights is associated with capital. The ways that online videos and Internet-based technologies allow access to justice also leave one with lingering questions regarding who can access rights. Recognizable and technologically translated queerness born out of globalization often comes with a price tag that many Hijras and queer people in India without caste- and class-based privileges cannot access. The case of Shivy is territorialized and implicitly classed in ways that imagine transgender identity to be a marker of Western “progress” with no mention of the Hijra community and other gender variant communities in India that have existed for centuries and may not be easily translated as “transgender” or “queer.” Trans/itory Belongings 49

By threatening the full citizenship rights of LGBTQ people, the criminalization of queerness in India and the Indian diaspora has class- and caste- based effects for those whose queerness is inseparable from poverty and caste-based violence. Gee Imaan Semmalar discusses the necessity of solidarities between anti-caste and transgender movements and the relationship between casteism and transphobia. The author writes,

Caste is a system of vertical social stratification based on exclusion and violence, and intrinsically linked to Hinduism and its notions of purity and pollution. According to it, caste is transmitted intergenerationally, and occupations and social status are fixed based on caste. For the caste system to perpetuate itself, people are required to marry only endogamously (within one’s caste). (Semmalar 2016)

Heteronormative familial violence is both productive and reflective of the violence of caste and gender determinism. The reproduction of the idealized cis-gender body and its imagined “purity” of gender is also always a caste-based construct. In the writings regarding Shivy’s case, there is no reference made to caste explicitly. And yet, as I discuss throughout this essay, the inferences to caste are found in the constant narratives of wealth- and class-based aspiration that colour Non-Resident Indian (NRI) narratives of mobility. As I have previously argued (Atluri), there is an over determinacy of police violence, homelessness, and street-based harassment against Dalit, lower-caste, and impoverished queer people who do not have the capital to access certain elite spaces and to conceal public sex and sexualities. Stated in slightly different terms, the politics of location is used as a rhetorical device to heterosexualize spaces in caste- and class-based terms. The construction of India as “Motherland” territorializes gender, creating borderless violence for transgender men of colour whose bodies must be translated into the grammars of Western capital in order to be intelligible, while other genealogies of dissident gendered embodiment are willfully forgotten. The salvation of the “transgender” corresponds with a necropolitics of localized desire, as the lives and rights of Hijras, Kothis and other non-normative gendered bodies are maligned. Many commentators narrated Shivy’s case in ways that mapped “sexual freedom” and queerness as existing in the West, thus warranting Shivy’s return to the Unites States. That is, Shivy was granted sexual subjectivity and rights by the Indian nation state based on their access to Western citizenship documents and capital. This incident followed the 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court of India to effectively criminalize queer sex and people in India by upholding Section 377 of the Indian Penal code, a colonial sodomy law (see Atluri). When read alongside that ruling, Shivy’s case offers an example of the multivariate ways that the bodies of queer people of colour are used within competing narratives of state power, white queer benevolence, and diasporic heteronormative familial violence that crosses borders.

50 Tara Atluri

NRI/OCI/PIO/--QPOC? The overseas citizen and the heterosexualizing of belonging The Person of Indian Origin and Overseas Citizen of India (POI/OCI) schemes that were introduced by the Indian government allow those who are recognized as being part of the South Asian diaspora to travel to the subcontinent with life-long visas. This scheme exemplifies the performative contradiction of the border of which Spivak writes. My interest lies in how gendered bodies and sexualities become intelligible and/or invisible within systems of transnational citizenship. A wedding, a family visit, shopping for a wedding, remittances, and more weddings— these are a few of the common reasons that diasporic South Asians often give for wanting to return to or visit India. The Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) and Person of Indian Origin (PIO) schemes have drastically increased the numbers of foreign-born Indians, Indian migrants, Indo- Caribbean people, Indo-African people and others Desis who are travelling to the subcontinent. The scheme has also allowed for increased financial remittances to the Indian subcontinent, which are serviced by changes in banking that cater to non-resident Indians. It is important to point out that Shivy and their parents were not part of the OCI and PIO schemes instituted by the Indian government. Rather, Shivy is a U.S green card holder whose passport and green card were stolen from him by his parents. Shivy’s parents’ behavior is part of a broader trend in which members of the Indian diaspora return to the subcontinent, often guided by heteronormative familial ideologies of returning to the “motherland” to maintain and uphold structures of Brahminical patriarchy, homophobia, and conservative familial ideologies of violence. The OCI/PIO scheme, which values bodies based on the paternal inheritance of name and diasporic capital, is part of the same overarching ideology that allows cases such as the transphobic abuse of Shivy to occur. Shivy’s Indian-born parents, who also reside in the United States, brought Shivy to India in order to attempt to force Shivy to conform to a heteronormative set of injunctions. Shivy was enrolled in a school in India, forced to take on a feminine name, and to appear as a cis gender woman. Had Shivy not escaped, their parents could have forced them to have a heteronormative marriage to a cis gender man. Shivy’s case is one of many examples of how heteronormative and caste based violence are mutually constitutive. The body, violently marked as “woman” in India and the Indian diaspora, exists as a tool of exchange in a system of caste-based marriage. Transphobia and the erasure of queer identity in this case and many others is also an effort to reproduce caste-based lineages of heteronormative familial wealth. Shivy fled their abusive parents and filed a petition with the Delhi high court. The Delhi high court ruled in favour of Shivy who was given their green card and passport back and allowed to return to the United States. As Mishral writes,

Soon after the parents took the matter to police, Shivy had filed a petition in the Delhi high court, saying his parents had wronged him. He said he was a transgender, a student of neurobiology at a prestigious California college. He said Trans/itory Belongings 51

his parents had forced him to go to India and study at Dayalbagh University in a bid to "reform" his sexuality. (Mishral 2017)

Shivy’s case is not exceptional, but rather corresponds to a wider heteronormative diasporic imaginary. The will to return on the part of many who are part of the Indian diaspora is imbricated in the workings of “nostalgia” for India as an imagined pre-feminist, pre-queer utopia where gender-based violence can go unpunished. The NRI, PIO, and OCI schemes exemplify the conjoined relationship between heteronormative familial reproduction, biopolitical caste-based lineages, and wealth. For many in the South Asian diaspora, to return to India is to return to a “Motherland” in which “Mother India” is a feminized image of timeless culture and tradition. This territorializing of gender and sexuality has specific implications for feminist and queer South Asians, both in the diaspora and in the Indian subcontinent. Constantino Xavier discusses how the Indian government sought to capitalize on the Indian diaspora by offering diasporic South Asians cultural capital in exchange for the investment of diasporic capital in the region. Xavier, drawing on the work of Sanjay Chaturvedi, writes,

Perceiving the diaspora as a “‘displaced’ global actor endowed with substantial economic prosperity,” Indian government officials believed that Overseas Indians could “be drawn into India through the ‘powerful’ cultural attachment that ‘sons of the soil’ are believed as well as expected to retain for their ‘motherland.’”(42)

The relationship that national leaders have attempted to cultivate with the Indian diaspora charts the ideological shifts within nationalist ideology, from colonial freedom struggles to contemporary neoliberal market-based liberalism. The author discusses how in the first phase of anti-colonial resistance, political leaders attempted to mobilize diasporic South Asians to support independence. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle in South Africa, during a visit to Malaya, in 1937, Nehru even underlined the symbiotic nature of homeland-diaspora relations: “The aim of the people of India is the achievement of freedom and the future of Indians abroad depends on the future of India” (38). After formal independence was achieved, during the second phase of nationalism, Indian leaders asserted that the diaspora should focus on participating fully in the nations in which they lived, while those who remained in India should cultivate and lead the newly independent nation. It was during the third and fourth phases of diasporic incorporation that the Indian nation state began to experiment actively with strategies of diaspora incorporation and citizenship schemes. The motives were largely economic, with the Indian state realizing that it possessed a large diasporic population that often had access to foreign capital and retained a deeply symbolic and ancestral attachment to India. The final phase, which has led to the return of many South Asians abroad to India, began in the 2000s. In this phase, which has coincided with the aggressive neo-liberalization of the Indian economy, the Indian government has experimented with citizenship schemes such as the OCI and PIO scheme. In the speeches and debates that ensued leading up to the creation of 52 Tara Atluri overseas India citizen policies, the image of “the Motherland” and of cultural belonging was again invoked by South Asian diasporic politicians. As Xavier writes,

PIOs thus started to denounce what they perceived to be an asymmetric incorporation policy that effectively integrated them economically and culturally but, at the same time, also denied them access to formal rights as legitimate members of the Indian polity. The most poignant critique came from Lord Bikhu Parekh, a distinguished PIO and member of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, who imaginatively described the Overseas Indian “to [matter to] the mother country only as a cow that can be milked matters to its owner.” (42)

The Indian government has sought to imagine the Indian diaspora as “sons of the soil” and the subcontinent as a mother figure, to whom her sons would return home. Within this gendered symbolic system, members of the diaspora assert themselves as sons of the soil who are entitled to plant their feet on feminized soil and stake claim to India politically. Migration is deeply gendered, at the levels of both governmental discourse and citizenship policies. Policies tend to favour migrants with financial capital, educational qualifications, and skills. These schemes thus implicitly privilege cis gender upper-class, upper-caste male migrants whose education and professional success are supported owing to heteronormative patriarchal familial structures and wider processes of systemic and institutional discrimination that provide certain men with the means to migrate. Unsurprisingly then, transgender, queer, and women migrants have been largely overlooked in research regarding gender and migration from the Indian subcontinent. This willful ignorance towards queer migration in many mainstream sociological approaches to the diaspora in effect reaffirms heteronormative nationalist paradigms that heterosexualize nations and communities. The figure of the “foreigner” becomes “familiar” when their body can be reinoriented into a heteronormative family structure that, as Foucault suggests, is biopolitically invested in as the ideal unit for reproducing normative citizens (Foucault 2004). Studies have focused largely on heteronormative cis gender families. Feminist researchers, looking at the lives of cis gender South Asian women in the diaspora, have argued that South Asian female migrants often play roles as the preservers of Hindu and Indian culture. In discussing the role that certain Hindu women played during nationalism, Partha Chatterjee, for example, suggests that upper- class, upper-caste Indian women were forced to reproduce cultural norms in the domestic sphere as a means of protecting “Indian culture” and Hindu ideology from the external threat of colonial rule (622-623). Similar forms of gendered nationalism exist in the South Asian diaspora, where women’s roles within heteronormative patriarchal Hindu homes are sanctified in order to preserve Hindu nationalist ideologies and doctrines of imagined cultural and caste based purity against the imagined threat of secular Western culture. Turning women into symbolic sacred cows valorizes sexism, religious nationalism, and casteism as “culture,” while also making the desires of transgender, queer, and female South Asian migrants either invisible or pathological. Trans/itory Belongings 53

Contemporary narratives of Indian nationalism rely on a balance of ardent neoliberal capitalism coupled with an adherence to “tradition,” where “culture” is largely based on casteist, heterosexist ideas of Indian values. The irony of the erasure, invisibility, and violence that queer South Asians face lies in how the policing and criminalizing of non-heteronormative sexualities was instituted by British colonial law. In 2013 the Supreme Court of India ruled to uphold Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, criminalizing queer sex and people in India. This decision followed the 2010 decision made by the Delhi high court to read down these colonial sodomy laws following a tireless campaign by activists in the region. Cases such as Shivy’s demonstrate how the long and ongoing genealogies of anti-colonial queer politics are not imagined by state power, or by conservative diasporas as belonging to an India of neocolonial transnational capital coupled with Hindu nationalism.

Sons of the Soil? Transgender Men’s Citizenship State power often constructs problems for which it has solutions, narratives that will serve its celebratory branding. Shivy’s case made global news after the Delhi high court ruled in his favor in the legal proceedings between him and his parents. The transphobia of Shivy’s parents, who sought to correct their child’s transgender identity, is a violent expression of nostalgia, whereby “sons of the soil” lay claim to the “motherland” by brutally punishing those who do not assimilate to gendered nationalist discourse. The irony lies in how it was the courageous advocacy of transgender, queer; genderqueer, and feminist activists in India that helped Shivy win their legal battle. Shivy sought support from Nazariya, a queer and feminist NGO in Delhi that supported their right to a transgender identity and right to return to their girlfriend and studies in the United States. However, the case was narrated in the media and courts as one in which a U.S. citizen was granted their rights, at the same time that the 2016 Transgender Bill in India compromises the dignity of Hijras and transgender people who remain in India. Shivy’s case garnered attention at a time when the Indian state was also drafting The 2016 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, a rewriting of the 2014 National Legal Service Authority (NALSA) ruling that counted transgender persons as third-sex citizens of India. The new bill, which is awaiting formal approval, has garnered a great deal of critique in India. Under the newly drafted bill, many of the potentially radical sentiments of the NALSA ruling have been rewritten. The 2016 proposed legislation offers a limited understanding of transgender that delimits trans people’s ability to self-identify and also erases various third gender communities such as Hijras, who have existed in India for centuries. Hijras, Kothis and other gender dissidents are part of a long genealogy of non- heteronormative sexualities in India that encompass historical, religious, and embodied traditions that pre-date the contemporary English language universalisms of LGBTQ discourse. Jasbir Puar discusses the arrogance and missionary like zeal of what she terms “the Gay International,” largely comprised of Western queer organizations, NGOS, and activists in North America and Europe who want to spread universalist understandings of sexuality globally, through processes 54 Tara Atluri of epistemic violence that often mask themselves as benevolence. The proposed 2016 legislation is not only out of touch with global norms, it does a great disservice to sexual subalterns whose bodies and lives cannot be subsumed under categories that are made popular by LGBTQ communities in the Global North. The definition of transgender in the proposed 2016 bill reads as follows:

… “transgender person” means a person who is— (A) neither wholly female nor wholly male; or (B) a combination of female or male; or (C) neither female nor male; and whose sense of gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at the time of birth, and includes trans-men and trans-women, persons with intersex variations and gender-queers. (Roundtable India 2016)

This definition of “transgender person” does not reflect the tremendous work and struggle of LGBTQ activists and communities in India and transnationally. Simultaneously, it fails to do any justice to the long histories of sexual subversion that predate the globalization of the word “transgender.” The “ABCs” of transgender do not allow people to authorize their own lives, their own truths, and their own bodies. The convoluted bureaucracy of the bill reflects a deeply colonial ethos: one that legislates against lives and orders bodies into airtight coffins of categorical imprisonment. Alain Badiou suggests that law does not simply criminalize actions; it makes certain lives intelligible and therefore possible (Badiou 2012). The 2016 Bill causes centuries of dissident gendered bodies in India such as Hijras to symbolically and politically disappear. The bill also makes “transgender” lives intelligible through the terminology of a legal bureaucracy that names and orders lives, just as originary colonial law strived to categorize Hijras through the 1857 Criminal Tribes Act. Journalists writing in Roundtable India discuss the construction of “transgender” people in the 2016 bill, as compared to the previous definition offered in the bill that followed the NALSA ruling. The authors state,

… the 2015 version of the draft bill honored the right of transgender people to self-determine their gender identity as any of, male, female or transgender, and very strongly iterated that transgender identity is not dependent on any medical/surgical intervention. Not only is this lost in the 2016 version, but a totally pathologising and scientifically incorrect definition has replaced the earlier one. In addition to this, traditional trans feminine communities like Jogappas and Shiv Shaktis have been dropped all together in the new bill. (Roundtable India 2016)

A report written by the Parliamentary Social Justice and Empowerment Committee raises several concerns regarding this new legislation. Jayshree Basora, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, writes, Trans/itory Belongings 55

The bill contradicts several provisions laid down in the watershed 2016 Supreme Court ruling that transgender people have the right to self-identify as male, female, or third gender; that the government should ensure their fundamental rights without discrimination; and that they should receive special benefits in education and employment. (Basora)

Under the newly proposed 2016 Transgender Bill, transgender persons must seek certification and approval before a committee who will decide whether their gender identification is legitimate. The legislation reads as follows:

4. (2) A person recognised as transgender under sub-section (1) shall have a right to self- perceived gender identity…

6. (1) On the receipt of an application under section 5, the District Magistrate shall refer such application to the District Screening Committee to be constituted by the appropriate Government for the purpose of recognition of transgender persons…

8. (2) The District Magistrate shall, on receipt of an application under sub-section (1), and on the recommendation made by the District Screening Committee, issue a certificate indicating change in gender in such form and manner and within such time, as may be prescribed. (Roundtable India 2016)

Gender studies scholars and activists critique the disciplinary powers given to state authorities to name and adjudicate the authenticity of transgender lives. Discussing how the bill prevents self-determination among transgender people, they state,

In the current bill, a committee of gatekeepers have been entrusted with the right to determine who can or cannot be transgender. Such a move will adversely affect significant parts of the transgender population - especially pre-op/non-op transmen and transwomen, gender fluid, gender neutral, and intergender persons. (Roundtable India 2016)

Activists in India also discuss how transphobia impacts transgender men in India in deeply disturbing ways. Rituparna Borah, who works with Nazariya, discusses the marginalization of transgender men in India. Borah suggests that transgender men often face very specific forms of oppression and hatred, due to ingrained forms of culturally and religiously sanctioned misogyny that justify the preference for female born children. The overarching reverence for cis-gender men that forms the basis of Brahminical patriarchy creates a context in which transgender male bodies are often not recognized by many as “real men,” and the adoption of transgender male pronouns is also not respected.As journalist Kainat Sarfaraz notes, 56 Tara Atluri

The invisibilisation of the trans-men community spills over to the legal arena as well. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 does little for them…The bill neither defines trans-men nor addresses any of their specific concerns that arise due to their sex or gender. It doesn’t even acknowledge the blatant ostracisation of the community. The word ‘trans-men’ is just used once in the entire bill. (qtd. in Sarfaraz)

Does transgressing gender connote a transgression of the idea of borders? In the case of Shivy, capital reasserts borders by granting the transgender citizen in India rights as a U.S green card holder. The Indian state simultaneously threatens the rights and lives of transgender citizens of India through legislative changes to the third sex citizenship bill, which do not fully recognize those who transgress male/female, impermeable/permeable borders.

White Queers Saving Brown Queers from Brown Families: When Homonationalism Crosses Borders “Borderless” and “bordered” bodies are shaped by the impermeable whiteness of North American white settler colonial biopolitics. The ability and will of diasporic Indians to “return” to India should be considered as a response to racist forms of exile that often construct brown people as partial citizens who are left to forever reference a “back home” of another nation. One can also consider Western racism as a motivating factor for the “return” of many South Asians to the Indian subcontinent. The gendered body is one whose violation signifies heteronormative, patriarchal violence. Simultaneously the racialized brown body in a time of a global “war on terror” is also permeable, subject to violent deterritorialization, often justified due to the racist, Islamophobic rhetoric of “terrorism.” Whiteness is also a borderlessness entity. The performative tension of whiteness lies in how white bodies are unmarked, unremarked upon and therefore unremarkable while they also retain a positional superiority that crosses borders. The story of Shivy garnered a quasi- missionary outcry from white Western queers who constructed India and the abusive Indian family as a threat to queerness. Articles that appeared in the press in North America were accompanied with headlines such as “Transgender US College Student Trapped in India,” and other similar narratives that signify “India” as a “backward” place of terror and fear, while also constructing Shivy as an “American.” The rhetoric of a Western queer utopia that is ostensibly “progressive” in comparison to the imagined anachronistic backwardness of the Global South, also willfully ignores the routine violence experienced by transgender people of colour in the West. Transgender women of colour experience the highest rate of murder in the LGBTQ community in America, and transgender men of colour also experience high rates of homelessness, suicide, and routine hate crimes. What are the implications of these larger political frameworks for Shivy? The diasporic family is armed with an arsenal of Western capital and a blood lineage that aligns them with dominant Indian fictions of belonging, while they are always forever imagined as guests in the Trans/itory Belongings 57

Global North due to the racism and glaring whiteness of Western nationalisms. Armed with patriarchal biopolitical inheritances of caste-based names and wealth, the heteronormative violence of the NRI family permeates the Indian border and the body of the transgender child, gestures that are justified under a rhetoric of returning to “our culture” through violence. The permeability of the Indian border by the phallic power of diasporic Western finance and the permeability of the transgender body that is marked as female, gestures to the performative tension of border/borderlessness, impermeable/permeability, and male/female. The larger political valorization of the diasporic family through systems of paternal name and birthright supports a heteronormative patriarchal paradigm that lends itself to violence. The “borderless” nature of certain terms corresponds with Gayatri Spivak’s assertion regarding borders cited at the beginning of this essay. That is, certain terms connote capital, wealth and forms of cross-border exchange that solidify national borders by constructing countries in the Global South as in need of translation. Queer authors in the Global South warn against Western LGBTQ frameworks and their capacity to exact the erasure of traditional Indian gender minority communities through attempts to encapsulate them in solely Western frameworks. Ashley Tellis argues that the global “trans utopia” that is being promoted among LGBTQ groups and policy makers transnationally maligns Hijras and other gender nonconforming people whose histories and bodies cannot be subsumed within secular Western grammars of identity politics. The language of “trans” and “transgender” that is increasingly being used globally derives from the Global North, and its imposition on the Global South is due to neoliberal capitalist power. The power to name is deeply imbricated with authorial positions often occupied by those in deeply privileged positions. This is clearly demonstrated in our contemporary moment, where transgender politics, much like previous waves of gay and lesbian politics, are dominated by affluent white, Western secular actors. Just as Puar discusses homonationalism, a term that refers to the alignment of white queer bodies with North American nationalism (Puar 2008), transgender homonationalism can be read in similar ways. Transnationalism in this context can be used to refer not to moments of cross border solidarity, but to a reinforcement of colonial categorizations of borders and bodies through the epistemic violence of white Western transgender discourse. As Ashley Tellis explains,

Urban, upper class, upper caste trans activists have been grafting this US language, US concerns and US arrogance onto the LGBT movement here for some time now. Their privilege allows them disproportionate amounts of space and their articulations are abrasive and deeply insensitive. A good example of this is whose name gets on the Standing Committee on the Transgender Bill—an upper class, upper caste trans person and not any of the Hijras who also deposed before it. (Tellis 2017)

The rhetoric that emerged regarding the exile of the transgender body in India serves to further erase Hijras, Kothis, and others who defy gender binaries, even as their lineages are thousands of years old and well predate the branding of “trans” identities globally. “Trans” can and does cross 58 Tara Atluri borders, often with great difficulty, abuse, and harassment. However, the term increasingly translates across national contexts due to its use in Western contexts and alignment with capital. “Hijra” does not cross borders in the same way, and its inability to be widely translated and intelligible is demonstrative of Spivak’s assertions regarding the border/borderlessness of capital. The grammar of “transgender” is borderless to the extent that it flows with the currencies of diasporic and migratory bodies; however, the border is firmly in place to contain Hijras in the Indian subcontinent with their unintelligibility outside of India also determining their often low economic status and the precarity of their lives. Shivy was cast as a “respectable” transgender person due to their alignment with American institutions and the promise of social mobility. Hijras and transgender people in India and globally who engage in sex work continue to be pathologized by the state. In contemporary India Hijras are signified in the national imaginary as impoverished sex workers and therefore they are not granted the benevolence and sympathy of the state. Similarly, transgender women of colour who engage in sex work in North America are often subject to police brutality and high rates of sexual violence and murder, which rarely makes headlines. Transgender women of colour experience some of the highest rates of murder, as well as physical and sexual violence among LGBTQ people in North America, despite the illusions of legal protection and discourses of rights. What the cries of “transgender trapped in India” also willfully ignore is racism against transgender people of colour in North America and state-sanctioned transphobic policies in the West. While Indian and American states covet a geopolitical bromance largely based in mutual capitalist investments, the policies of both governments threaten the lives of transgender and queer people of colour. Within the context of media publicity, Shivy was quickly identified as an American trans man whose rights would be respected on the other side of a border. While activists in India worked to support Shivy and garner them mobility, the transgender bill that was passed around the same time in India does not allow for the legal intelligibility of gender transgressions on the part of Indian citizens who would then be allowed to move and live freely in India. Shivy’s struggle for justice underscores how transphobia is mapped onto the Indian subcontinent and the figure of the “Indian family.” In the media coverage regarding this case and other transnational bids for justice in the South Asian diaspora, there is often little mention of why brown people continue to see India as “home” despite spending years in America. The rescue narratives of white Western benevolence heterosexualize nations. Furthermore, those narratives associate India with transphobic violence in ways that produce further heteronormativity by assuming that the only queer story to be told begins after one crosses the border to the imagined liberatory spaces of the Global North. This rhetoric of neo-colonial salvation resonates with Spivak’s discussion of colonialism as a narrative of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (93). A queer narrative of white queers saving brown queers from brown families emerges in ways that reasserts the positional superiority of whiteness, thus ignoring the vitality of queer activism in contemporary India and throughout the Global South. This imperialist tale territorializes the U.S as a queer safe haven, ignoring the inordinate violence Trans/itory Belongings 59 experienced by transgender people in the West and how white queer racism produces and is complicit in this violence.

Conclusion South Asian diasporas and Hindu nationalist leaders in the Indian subcontinent can and do heterosexualize “India,” as an essentialist construct resplendent with conservative family values. The simultaneous construction of India and the heteronormative, largely Hindu and upper-caste “Indian family” as sacred has material consequences. Marital rape continues to be legal in India, while Section 377 of the Indian Penal code, a colonial sodomy law, criminalized LGBTQ sex as duplicitously “unnatural,” and until September 6, 2018 threatened queer lives. The naturalizing of heteronormative family structures also connects familial lineage to land; fathers’ names and blood are used to construct ostensibly purified visions of belonging that value those who will rightfully inherit the nation owing to upper caste Hindu male paternity. With these rhetorical and political gestures, the nation is symbolically “cleansed” of queer bodies, feminists, religious and racial minorities, and lower-caste people. The 2016 Transgender Bill in India also offers an example of how borders are enforced, while borderless capitalist interests allow wealth and “world class” “global citizens” to move across time and space. Shivy, a transgender man, was brought to India by their parents, who constructed India as an imagined safe haven for abuse, transphobia, and heteronormative violence. Owing to the courageous activism of queer, genderqueer and transgender people in the Indian subcontinent, Shivy fled their parents’ abuse and escaped a non-consensual heteronormative marriage. And yet, while Shivy was granted the right to return to the United States, Hijras and transgender people in India cannot access basic entitlements of citizenship. This is a time of vulgar partnerships, with no blessings offered by a Hijra. Leaders such as Narendra Modi and Donald Trump are wedded in their conjoined bigotry, perhaps in love with money, power, and shifting definitions of national culture that expand with the promise of investment and cower with the possibility of justice. As I have attempted to argue throughout this article, the very idea of “home” is interwoven into heteronormative familial scripts and nationalist narratives in ways that violently exclude and expel those whose otherness delimits the very boundaries of belonging. As Mamoud Darwish writes, “Exile is more than a geographical concept” (qtd. in Shahtz).

Works Cited Atluri, Tara. Azadi: Sexual Politics and Postcolonial Worlds. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2016. Badiou, Alain. Philosophy for Militants. London: Verso, 2012. Basora, Jayshree. “Making Transgender Rights a Reality in India.” Human Rights Watch, 25 Jul. 2017, Web. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York: Routledge, 1993. 60 Tara Atluri

Chatterjee, Partha. “Colonialism, Nationalism and the Colonized Woman: The Contest in India.” American Ethnologist, vol. 16, no. 4, Nov. 1989, pp. 622-633. Chaturvedi, Sanjay. “Diaspora in India’s Geopolitical Visions: Linkages, Categories and Contestations.” Ethnic Diasporas & Great Power Strategies in Asia, edited by Robert Wirsing and Rouben Azizian, New Delhi: India Research Press, 2007. Cifredo, Joanna. “Why are so many Transgender Women of Colour Murdered Every Year?” The Advocate, 19 Nov. 2016, Web. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978-1979. Edited by Michael Senellart, Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hirschfield-Davis, Julie. “Military Transgender Ban to Begin Within 6 Months, Memo Says.” New York Times Online, 23 Aug. 2017, Web. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Mishral, Ishita. “19-yr-old NRI transgender gets back passport, free to return to US.” The Times of India, 5 Oct. 2015, Web. Accessed 11 Mar. 2017. Roundtable India. “The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights Bill 2016: Responses from Trans & Intersex Communities.” Round Table India, 8 Aug. 2016, Web. Accessed 22 Feb 2017. Sarfaraz, Kainat. “Trans-men: A minority within the marginalized.” The Indian Express, 10 Dec. 2016, Web. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Semmalar, Gee Imaan. “Why Trans Movements in India Must Be Anti-Caste.” TransCafe, 21 Dec. 2016, Web. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018. Shatz, Adam. “A Poet’s Palestine as a Metaphor.” The New York Times, 22 Dec. 2001, Web. Accessed 10 Mar. 2018. Spivak, Gayatri. “A Borderless World.” Conflicting Humanities. Edited by Paul Gilroy and Rosi Braidotti, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016, pp. 47-60. ---. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993, pp. 90- 105. Tellis, Ashley. “Bad Hijras versus Good Trans and the Delusional Trans Utopia.” Galaxy Magazine, 21 Aug. 2017, Web. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. “Trump administration revokes transgender washroom guidelines.” CBC News, 22 February 2017, Web. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Wal, Aradhna. “Transgender boy, Shivy, harassed, beaten by parents.” DNAIndia, 27 Sept. 2015, Web. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018. Xavier, Constantino. “Experimenting with Diasporic Incorporation: The Overseas Citizenship of India.” Diaspora and Citizenship, edited by Claire Sutherland, Elena Barabantseva, New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 34-54. Zizek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism or the Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review, no. I/225, Sept.-Oct. 1997, pp. 28-47.

The Politics of (Dis-)location:

Queer Migration, Activism, and Coalitional Possibilities

Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem

Saarland University, Germany

Abstract

This paper deals with the interrelatedness of borders and queer identities, bodies, sexualities, and the politics of (dis-)location in the U.S. and Germany. Looking into the relations between bodies and borders and the different ways in which activist groups in the U.S. and in Germany have attempted to develop new (re-)configurations of corpo- realities, this article shows how these groups help develop global and embodied forms of citizenship that present new forms of coalitional activism. As can be seen, processes of de- and reterritorialization increase the need for building alliances, which can function both as coalitional moments and revolutionary connections, revealing what Mohanty calls the “the temporality of struggle” (122) in the politics of location.

Keywords: queer migration, coalition building, Undocuqueer, queer refugees, de/reterritorialization, borders

Introduction: Queer Migration and Coalition Building “Most scholarship, policymaking, service provision, activism, and cultural work,” Eithne Luibhéid states, “remain organized around the premise that migrants are heterosexuals (or on their way to becoming so) and queers are citizens (even though second-class ones)” (“Queer/Migration” 169). Where is the place of queer migrants in this framework? How can we conceive of the various subject positions of queer migrants? In attempting to answer these questions, a new field of queer migration scholarship has developed in the U.S. that focuses on the phenomenon of queer migration. Scholars like Eithne Luibhéid, Lionel Cantú, and Karma R. Chávez have developed critical frameworks that conceptualize queer issues of migration. GLQ ran a special issue on queer migration in 2008, and several books and articles have been published in the past ten years.1 In Europe, by contrast, scholarship on queer migration is still scarce. There is, however, a growing sense of awareness in academia of the need of analyzing the intersections between sexuality and

1 See, for instance, Karma R. Chávez’s Queer Migration Politics (2013), Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú’s collection Queer Migrations (2015) and David Murray’s Queering Borders (2016).

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 62 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem migration.2 Conspicuously, there is also a new professionalization in queer activism, which entails new forms of coalition building between migrating queer people. This paper considers ways in which activist groups in the U.S. and in Germany attempt to develop new (re-) configurations of corpo-realities. Focusing on the intersections of queer and undocumented bodies and experiences as manifested in the work of the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP)/United We Dream and the UndocuQueer Movement in the U.S., we want to juxtapose their politics with the activities of the Germany-founded activist group Queer Refugees for Pride. Looking at some strategies of these groups, which situate the constructions of sexual and queer identities within global processes of globalization, capitalism, and nationalism, we argue that the formation of coalitional politics has the power to shift the politics of dislocation to a politics of relocation. In advocating for a global and embodied form of citizenship these groups present new forms of coalitional activism that in attempting to challenge current anti-immigration policies oscillate between what Karma R. Chávez calls “coalitional moments” (8) and what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “revolutionary connections” (473). Reading queer/(im)migrant/refugee activist groups and coalitions in the U.S. alongside those in Germany allows us to see parallels in coalitional politics despite the many differences in the cultural contexts of these two groups. At the same time, a juxtaposed reading also calls attention to the necessity of global solidarity and so highlights the simultaneity of coalitional moments in multiple locations of the world.

Body, Politics of Location, and Multiplicities in Processes of De- and Reterritorialization “[A] place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create” (Rich 212). In 1984, the feminist thinker Adrienne Rich famously linked her existence as a subject to her location, and argued that the anchoring of her positionality in her body allowed for her very existence. Rich’s politics of location, which was later elaborated on by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, stands for the geographical, temporal and cultural circumstances that produce woman as a subject, providing a frame for her existence. Locating herself within geo-temporal frameworks, Rich linked her location “not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in—the body” (212). What Rich calls politics of location refers to the very existence she becomes aware of within her own body, and which becomes visible, readably, and thus understandable within its location in a certain given geographical, temporal, and cultural space. For Rich, her own body is created in this geo-temporal and cultural environment as woman, lesbian, Jew, and feminist. As this environment is in constant flux, body and self also have to change in order to remain readable. On the one hand, the self, the

2 In 2016, Nuno Ferreira started his project “SOGICA—Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum: A European human rights challenge,” which is an EU-project funded by an ERC grant at the School of Law at the University of Sussex. For more info, see: www.sogica.org/en/the-project/ . Accessed 25 Nov. 2017. In June 2017, Astrid M. Fellner and Eva Nossem organized the workshop “Queer/Migration/Legality” in Saarbrücken, Germany. We are currently editing the collection Queer, Migration and Belonging: Intersections and Assemblages (St. Ingbert, Röhrig forthcoming 2018).

The Politics of (Dis-)location 63 intelligible subject itself, moves in a temporal dimension. On the other, the self also moves in geographical dimensions from one place on the map to another. Often it migrates from one set of geo-temporal and cultural circumstances, which impede the formation of a certain self in its multiplicities in a given condition, to another location, in the hope for a better existence or survival. The body moves away to other geographical locations, where it continues to transform in order to become intelligible in the new environment and to ensure its existence; at the same time the body introduces new geographies to the location of arrival, thus extending its territory. By leaving their original locations, the self and the body lose the geo-temporal and cultural contexts in which they were intelligible. The process of migration and border (crossing) provides a space for the different geo-temporal and cultural systems to clash, overlap, and merge; however, it is also a productive space that shapes the self/body. In the location of arrival, a reciprocal transformation process between the self and the new locality begins, where the self grapples to locate itself on the map, to become visible and intelligible in its new environment. These experiences of migration shape the self and the body, be it as first-hand migration experiences of the body that itself has changed locations and crossed borders, or as a second-hand inherited experience. Thus, much as the location of origin, the first location has shaped the self and the body, so does the location of arrival/second location as well as the migratory movement and border crossing itself. Mohanty calls this continual struggle for the existence of the self in changing geo-temporal and cultural locations the “temporality of struggle” (122), which she also connects to the forces of colonialism. As she explains: “Movement among cultures, languages, and complex configurations of meaning and power have always been the territory of the colonized” (122). Referring to Caren Kaplan’s work on home and exile, the temporality of struggle entails “a continual reterritorialization, with the proviso that one moves on” (Kaplan 98). During this process, “this reterritorialization through struggle,” Mohanty adds, “allows me a paradoxical continuity of self, mapping and transforming my political location” (122). In other words, the movements and changes in the processes of de- and reterritorialization, which develop due to the necessity of visibility, intelligibility and consequently existence, become constitutive of the self. For Mohanty, the politics of location then “refer to the historical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative boundaries that provide the ground for political definition and self-definition […]” (106). Analogously, we could speak of a politics of dislocation when thinking about the process of leaving one’s location and thus losing the signifying context; and of a politics of relocation for referring to the struggle of the self trying to locate its existence in a new geo-temporal and cultural context. Mohanty sees boundaries as constitutive for the creation of the self in a twofold way: On the one hand, through their limiting capacities, boundaries curtail and localize the self and the body. On the other, borders themselves become a fertile ground where the self is produced. Borders then, as Mohanty has it, are both “exclusionary and enabling” (2). In Deleuzoguattarian terms, we could speak of relative deterritorializations, together with simultaneous reterritorializations, and the line of flight as the shifting moment in between the two. Mohanty’s productive vision of the border as a fertile ground for the production of selves entails the production of a self not as a monolithic “rocklike identity” (Massumi ix), but, again with

64 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem

Deleuze and Guattari, as multiplicities. The merging or collision of different geo-temporal and cultural factors creates and shapes the self in its multiplicity, instead of a unity or identity. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities” (9). What we are interested in is the productive role of the border (crossings), the shaping of the self and the body that happens in processes of de- and reterritorialization, the production of the self through weaving together several lines of flight. What, in other words, happens to the self during migrations and border crossings, and how do the processes of de- and reterritorialization shape the body in its multiplicities. How does queerness affect this body?

Queer Migration This shaping of the self and the body in the processes of border crossings and of de- and reterritorializations have been neglected not only in mainstream discourse, but also in much of the activist work and research that has been done on migration, in which the multiplicities of the self are often subsumed by a monolithic heteronormative vision of the border-crossing body. Even though, as Luibhéid has stressed, sexuality “structures every aspect of immigrant experiences” (“Heteronormativity” 227), migrants are generally seen as heterosexual cis-males in hegemonic discourse, while queer people are seen as citizens. Highlighting the many ways in which sexuality and gender performances are integral parts of immigration policies and procedures, Luibhéid argues that sexuality is “centrally implicated in—but not reducible to—the gender, racial, class, cultural, and legal inequalities that immigrants continually negotiate” (“Heteronormativity” 232). In Queer Migration Politics, Karma R. Chávez also writes about the interconnectedness of borders, gender, and sexuality on the U.S.-Mexican border, analyzing the role of the territorial, national border as an instrument of protecting the mutually constitutive discourses of heteronormativity and whiteness. As she puts it,

The protection of this international border [the U.S.-Mexican border] is an extension of the protection of other kinds of borders between white and nonwhite, heterosexual and nonheterosexual. […] The preservation of whiteness literally depends on heterosexuality and appropriate gender norms, creating an interwoven relationship between the “nation-as-white” and the “nation-as-heterosexual” that leads to policing all kinds of borders. These borders are precisely the ones that are symbolically and physically violated by queers, migrants, and queer migrants. (11)

In this sense, the border fulfills the role of protecting and preserving a monolithic white heteronormative space, excluding border crossers who are considered a threat to this space. Queer migrants are seen as violating these borders of the territory, of gender and of sexuality. Because of their non-heteronormative genders and sexualities, they fall outside of the field of vision of immigration politics and consequently become invisible subjects. If, following

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Mohanty, borders “provide the ground for political definition and self-definition” (106), the body of the queer migrant is shaped as queer and migrant through the very process of crossing this border, which protects the white, heteronormative space. The various intersections within this multiplicity of the self lead to invisibility and exclusion: The queer migrant is invisible in migrant groups because of their queerness and in queer groups because of the experience of migration, the legal status, and social status, etc. Deterritorialization is the consequence of geographical movement across borders. Additionally, a queer body is deterritorialized by the queerness of the body; this process becomes clearly visible when queerness openly clashes with a heteronormative/homo- or transphobic surrounding which expulses the queer body from the surrounding community. The multiplicity of the self and the body constructed in the location of origin is taken out of its signifying frame through dislocation and is no longer visible and intelligible in the new environment, where it then undergoes a process of relocation in order to regain visibility and thus to re-locate itself on the map. In order to regain visibility and thus to recreate its own existence, the queer migrant body has to find new signifying frames through coalitional moments: coalitions in which the self is (re-)created and becomes intelligible. As K. Chávez observes, the queer migrant can therefore be seen as “an inherently coalitional subject, one whose identities and relationships to power mandate managing multiplicity” (9).

Borders and Coalitional Politics The body, as Adrienne Rich had it, also constitutes a border between the self and the rest of the world, between the “I” and the “Other.” The question arises whether these borders encapsulate every self individually with the consequence of precluding any possibilities of coalitions as expressed in the shift from “I” to “we” or whether building coalitions is possible. Rich outlines the difficulty of bringing different “I”s together to form a “we,” the basis for coalitional moments and solidarity:

The difficulty of saying I—a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying “we”? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say “I”; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through. (224, emphasis in the original)

In talking about building coalitions, María Lugones views coalition as a horizon of possibility. It “is always the horizon that rearranges both our possibilities and the conditions of those possibilities” (ix). A horizon is a “space where two seemingly different things merge and remain separate” (Chávez, Queer Migration 8), and it is an apt metaphor for the fine line of possible coalitional moments. As K. Chávez explains, coalition “connotes tension and precariousness […]. It describes

66 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem the space in which we can engage, but because coalescing cannot be taken for granted, it requires constant work if it is to endure” (8). Solidarity, as Jodi Dean has remarked, usually works as a request “I ask you to stand by me over and against a third” (3). Building on “Dean’s notion of a communicative, in-process understanding of the ‘we,’” (Mohanty 7), Mohanty has proposed a practice of solidarity in which the production of a third perspective should also mean that we decolonize and break down “feminist solidarity,” opening up the discussion to a more inclusive discussion of gender, queer and LGBTQIA-related issues. This expansion of the approaches to political solidarity—including feminist, gender, queer and LGBTQIA solidarity—can also challenge national identity politics, which is traditionally grounded in a politics of locality. As indicated by Judith Butler, solidarity should not be based on the obliteration, a doing away of the differences between identities, but it should rather constitute a “synthesis of a set of conflicts,” or, “a mode of sustaining conflict in politically productive ways, a practice of contestation that demands that these movements articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without therefore exactly becoming each other” (37, emphasis in the original). This form of solidarity leaves room for “self-difference,” which is at the core of each political position. Solidarity then can also be opened up to a transnational perspective, which is still involved in the politics of location but reaches out to translocal politics. This form of transnational solidarity should then be able to transcend boundaries. Looking at queer migration through, what K. Chávez calls, “the analytic of the coalitional moment” (8, emphasis in the original), we now want to look at coalitional moments in the U.S. and in Germany, and argue that for all groups presented here there is a necessity of coalitional politics in order for them to utilize their differences as sources of strength. Coalitional moments, according to K. Chávez, are moments “when political issues coincide or merge in the public sphere in ways that create space to re-envision and potentially reconstruct rhetorical imaginaries” (8). Deleuze and Guattari, in turn, describe revolutionary movements as “the connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything” (473) and observe:

Generally speaking, minorities do not receive a better solution of their problem by integration, even with axioms, statutes, autonomies, independences. Their tactics necessarily go that route. But if they are revolutionary, it is because they carry within them a deeper movement that challenges the worldwide axiomatic. (472)

In our analysis we want to show how borders and migration shape queer bodies and how the processes of (relative) de- and simultaneous reterritorialization increase the need and provide the ground for coalitional moments and revolutionary connections. Through our discussion of several community-based activist groups whose work exemplifies the territorialization and loca(liza)tion of queer bodies, we aim to show how coalitional politics are linked to the politics of (dis- /re-)location.

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Coalitional Moments and Revolutionary Connections: Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (U.S.), Undocuqueer Movement (U.S.), and Queer Refugees for Pride (Germany) We have selected the activist groups Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP), which is part of the larger organization United We Dream, and the UndocuQueer Movement in the U.S. For comparison we want to look at the Germany-founded activist group Queer Refugees for Pride. As we want to show, these activist groups can be viewed as acentered assemblages due to their non-hierarchical order of the involved multiplicities. While the Germany-based activist group is exclusively organized by and for queer refugees and migrants, especially those who have newly arrived in Germany, the U.S.-based groups consist of and focus on queer undocumented persons. Many of the undocumented persons in the U.S. who join together to form these activists groups have not themselves crossed the border. Either their parents or other relatives crossed the border and they “inherited” the experience of border crossing, or, as Chican@s, the border has crossed them. Despite the fact that some members of these groups never crossed the border into the U.S. themselves, they are nevertheless read as migrants in the public discourse and owe their (lack of) rights to their status as being undocumented. Our examples will show how the lack of citizen rights both correlates with the (in)visibility and thus the (in)existence of queer migrant bodies and facilitates the efforts to form coalitional moments and revolutionary connections and to join together in a shared project as collective multiplicities. The strategies employed by both the German and the American groups “go that route,” as stated above by Deleuze and Guattari (472). That is, the activist groups aim at gaining visibility and re-creating their existence in order to obtain rights and find a place within their new cultural environments. At the same time, some of these activities are revolutionary as they happen outside given frames. While building transnational alliances helps elaborate reformist tactics in order to reclaim their existence within the respective environments, these alliances also bear the revolutionary potential of “challeng[ing] the worldwide axiomatic” (472). The first group we examine is the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP), a subgroup of the organization United We Dream, which is the “largest immigrant youth-led organization in the United States.”3 According to the mission statement on their website, United We Dream “organize[s] and advocate[s] for the dignity and fair treatment of immigrant youth and families, regardless of immigration status.”4 The subgroup QUIP, a special interest group within the United We Dream network, focuses explicitly on the needs and (lack of) rights of queer migrants. QUIP

aims at organizing and empowering Undocumented Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer immigrants, LGBTQ immigrants and allies to address

3 See: unitedwedream.org/about/projects/quip/. Accessed 26. Nov. 2017. 4 See: unitedwedream.org/about/our-missions-goals/. Accessed 3 Dec. 2017.

68 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem

social and systemic barriers that affect themselves and the broader LGBTQ & immigrant community.5

The second U.S.-based group is the UndocuQueer Movement, an alliance of activists who concentrate mainly on queer 1.5-generation undocumented immigrants.6 On their website, they explain:

UndocuQueer activists came to the U.S. as infants or children. UndocuQueers struggle for the right to work, live, and love in the country in which they were raised and educated. Without documentation, even those who have earned college degrees are denied work in the above-ground economy and are subject to deportation.7

Finally, the Germany-based group Queer Refugees for Pride is a self-organized activist group by LGBTQ asylum seekers/refugees in Germany founded in 2016. They explain their mission as follows:

Queer Refugees for Pride supports and advocates with people seeking refugee protection because of persecution based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status. We are engaging in outreach, advocacy and public education on LGBT*QI refugee issues.8

The Queer Refugees for Pride group consists exclusively of refugees and migrants from many different countries of origin with different legal status who are currently based in different parts of Germany. As set out in their mission statement, Queer Refugees for Pride commits to helping all sexually and gender non-conforming migrants and refugees. At the same time, the group establishes collaborations with other LGBTQ rights organizations and supporters to be able to count on their solidarity through creating alliances, forming coalitions. Both the U.S.-based organization Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP) / United We Dream and the Germany-based activist group Queer Refugees for Pride introduce themselves and their coalitional politics on their respective websites and outline their ideas and the aims of their activism in a mission statement. Both QUIP and Queer Refugees for Pride explicitly mention the fight for the rights of their respective groups. QUIP advocates for an intersectional analysis in its activism9 and Julio Salgado, who is a member of the UndocuQueer Movement, explains the need for an intersectional approach:

Immigration and LGBTIQ issues are controversial topics that have gained prominence in political and social circles throughout the nation and at the ballot

5 See: unitedwedream.org/about/projects/quip/. Accessed 3 Dec. 2017. 6 1.5-generation undocumented immigrants refer to “those who emigrate before adolescence” (Seif 90). 7 See: equalityarchive.com/issues/undocuqueer-movement/ . Accessed 3 Dec. 2017. 8 See: www.refugee-pride.org/index.php/en/about/about-1 , acc. 15/0972017. Accessed 3 Dec. 2017. 9 See: unitedwedream.org/about/projects/quip/ . Accessed 3 Dec. 2017.

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boxes. These are not parallel movements, but intersecting ones in the fight for social justice. This is true for those who are undocumented and identify as queer, but also for those who are in one or the other (or neither) because of the interconnectedness of all those fighting for human rights.”10

Queer Refugees for Pride explicitly mentions their fight for visibility and full participation in the social and civil life in Germany. 11 The UndocuQueer Movement also points to visibility, but underlines the risks that it brings with it in the U.S. context: “Given their precarious citizenship

Fig. 1: The Rainbow Radar shared on their website and social media, www.facebook.com/QueerRefugeesForPride/?ref=br_rs .

10 Julio Salgado 2012; equalityarchive.com/issues/undocuqueer-movement . Accessed 3 Dec. 2017. 11 See: refugee-pride.org/index.php/de/ueber/unsere-aufgabe . Accessed 3 Dec. 2017.

70 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem status, sexual orientation and transgender realities, visibility makes UndocuQueers vulnerable, however, they refuse to remain in the shadows.”12 Both QUIP/United We Dream in the U.S. and Queer Refugees for Pride in Germany offer direct contact for help. QUIP offers a list of affiliate organizations all over the U.S.; Queer Refugees for Pride features helping institutions and groups on a map of Germany (Fig. 1). We can observe that Queer Refugees for Pride makes use of a map that shows Germany as a territory which is clearly defined by the borders to its neighboring states. Clearly, Queer Refugees for Pride deals with Germany in its organization as a state. Furthermore, in the provided list of contact points, this group sticks to the administrative division of the country into states (Länder), though this internal German administrative regional distinction does not show on the map. What is to be noted is that Queer Refugees for Pride only lists those Länder where contact points can be found, thereby rendering the other Länder invisible. By placing themselves and their contact points on the map, they mark and re-create their existence on the German territory, where hitherto their presence had been ignored. As the idea behind the creation of such a map is to provide information about where to find help to other “queer refugees” and to point to the closest contact point to one’s own location, each of these contact points covers a determined part of the territory. So we can say that by building this network of contact points, a new territory is created, or, in other words, the process of reterritorialization becomes visible. This newly created territorial network of contact points, on the one hand, represents a place in which the queer refugee exists and lives, in contrast to the former German territory that has denied their existence; on the other hand, this new network is connected with Germany and also modifies it by adding a new layer. What is to be noted is that the creation of this process of reterritorialization is initially produced on Queer Refugees for Pride’s Facebook page, that is, in cyberspace. Also QUIP makes use of the digital world to mark its presence in the U.S. In so doing they both augment their visibility in cyberspace and, in a process of reterritorialization, claim their existence on U.S.- American soil.

12 See: equalityarchive.com/issues/undocuqueer-movement/ . Accessed 3 Dec. 2017.

The Politics of (Dis-)location 71

Fig. 2: unitedwedream.org/groups/

For both Queer Refugees for Pride and QUIP, the process of locating oneself on a map bespeaks a process of reterritorialization that facilitates a politics of relocation. Both groups locate themselves and their coalitional partners within the space in which they live and which so far has denied their existence. By placing themselves and their allies on the map, they locate themselves and become intelligible and thus create and anchor their existence. While the placing on the map of an individual could be seen as indicative of an individual politics of relocation (for example, by

72 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem obtaining one’s own address = a (new) place to live = location), the placing on the map of coalitional groups can be regarded as a reterritorialization. That is, mapping delineates a net(work) that also shapes a new territory on the map, grating against and transforming the space/territory in which it develops. In this sense, we see that the formation of a coalitional net is a conscious act of the formation of a politics of relocation. Key to the building of this coalitional net, as well as more broadly of a discourse, is the use of labels. As Palmeri and Rylander explain, “Although the consistent and repeated use of the term undocuqueer […] makes visible the experiences of people who identify as both queer and undocumented, it, like all brand representations, risks flattening the complex embodiments of those it seeks to represent” (36). Analogously, we can say that the generalizing use of the label “queer refugee” might also lead to a flattening and essentializing effect of obliterating multiplicities. In light of the need to assemble under a common label, the term “queer refugee” proves, however, a useful and important tool for coalition building. All the activist groups that we have discussed, QUIP, the UndocuQueer Movement, and Queer Refugees for Pride, work for the creation of a shared identity under a common label, and at the same time they fight against the essentializing production of a monolithic overarching identity as “the” undocuqueer or “the” queer refugee, and strive for allowing and promoting multiplicities. The chance of uniting both apparently oppositional objectives can succeed in what Deleuze and Guattari call “collective multiplicities whose elements remain distinct but move together in a shared project to evade recapture” (Purcell 27). Respectively, both QUIP and Queer Refugees for Pride have conducted surveys about their communities, which, on the one hand, show their communities’ multiplicities and, on the other hand, produce community based on a coalition. The QUIP survey comes with the title “No more closets: Experiences of discrimination among the LGBTQ immigrant community 2016” and is a survey targeting queer undocumented people in the U.S. Also in 2016, Queer Refugees for Pride conducted and published their “Research about Queer Refugees in Germany 2016,” a survey of queer refugees/asylum seekers in Germany. In both surveys the community members are asked to answer questions about their age, their current place of residence, their country of origin, their gender and sexual identity, and also give information about their experiences with discrimination and violence. The survey questions materialize the shaping of the body/self as migrant through questions regarding their place of origin and the current place of residence, and as queer through questions about the gender and sexuality of the interviewee. Included in both surveys are singular quotes by the interviewed persons, which sum up the need of the community members to form alliances, creating shared identities and collective multiplicities, as the following quote in the report “No More Closets” shows:

I have to come out as both queer and undocumented, and each time people are only interested in one part of that struggle. They also expect me to be able to build up a another [sic] border, this time between my identities. When I point this out they say I’m being too sensitive, but they can’t cut me in half and expect me not to bleed. I’ve decided to take control of the narrative to talk about my identity as a whole

The Politics of (Dis-)location 73

and not let other’s decided how to define me. I am a queer latinx, I am undocumented, a survivor, and I’m no longer afraid to say it.13

This quote displays a transformational agenda: the forming of what Deleuze and Guattari have called “revolutionary connections” (473). It is exactly this decision of seizing the power of definition of the self and simultaneously wresting this power from others which could manifest within this group of allies, foregrounding the groundbreaking potential of the group. Deleuze and Guattari see the possibility of overcoming the limiting cycle of flight and recapture by forming net(work)s. As Purcell explains:

When an element is deterritorialized, when it escapes from an apparatus of capture and begins to construct its line of flight, it does not have to do so alone. It has the potential to connect up with other lines of flight, to line up with other deterritorialized elements and begin to form not just simple lines, but flows, aggregates, collective multiplicities whose elements remain distinct but move together in a shared project to evade recapture (27).

The formation of “revolutionary connections” shapes the queer migrant body/self who is “no longer afraid to say it.” The acknowledging and awareness of one’s own self and its existence leads to a politics of new-location that no longer requires inclusion through an externally-influenced politics of re-location, and advocates for an auto-determined shaping of the own queer migrant body/self. The surveys, however, also focus on a series of reformist aims: In the “No More Closets”- survey, we also find questions about “income and financial stability,” while the Queer Refugees for Pride’s survey also includes questions about “living conditions.” This difference in the survey shows the different needs of the U.S. group, which consists mostly of people who have been living in their place of residence already for a long time, and the German group, which consists of newly- arrived persons who need to find a home in Germany. The fight for recognition and citizenship rights for Queer Refugees for Pride therefore includes also the right to be able to work in Germany, a right which is limited by the (not yet) assigned legal status. The interviewees in the U.S. survey are also asked to classify their current immigrant status, thereby defining their status as non- citizens and highlighting the lack of citizen rights. This question was not raised in the German survey, maybe because the legal status of the “refugee” who is in the process of seeking asylum is subject to rather quick changes. The survey “No More Closets” includes a specific question about the relationship to and the coming out status within the family of origin. This is a question that seems irrelevant for the German survey. In this case, the interviewers seem to assume that the interviewee entered Germany alone and has been living without their family since arrival. The U.S.-based persons are thought to live in a family environment which might or might not be hostile towards their queerness, and

13 Dulce Gutierrez-Vasquez; Wenatchee, Washington. unitedwedream.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Report-No- More-Closets-1.pdf . Accessed 3 Dec. 2017.

74 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem thus many of them are part of (family) networks. They struggle with acceptance and recognition in their family community because of their queerness, and in queer environments because of their status as being undocumented. The family environment might offer a partial coalitional moment for the shared migration experience, and it might prove supportive of the queerness of the family member. But because the family can also be a dangerous space from which the queer subjects have to flee, some U.S.-based undocumented queers also have to look for extra-familial alliances. The German Queer Refugees for Pride cannot rely on any family network, as most members of this activist group presumably live on their own. In most cases, their only coalitional possibilities are queer communities and networks. Both the UndocuQueer Movement and Queer Refugees for Pride launched campaigns in 2016 with the aim of having a voice and being heard. The Queer Refugees for Pride campaign focused on distributing a flyer with the slogan “We have a voice!” at events, mostly pride parades, all over Germany. Furthermore, the activists have given interviews in group discussions, participated in conferences, 14 and offered workshops themselves; they have produced short informational videos about themselves and their projects and about current events which affect the LGBTQ community in Germany or abroad. Also the UndocuQueer Movement has produced a video, the UndocuQueer Manifesto. In this video, a series of queer undocumented activists give short statements, drawing the attention to their motivations and the need for them to make their voices heard and to form coalitions. One of the activists explains the need for coalitions and solidarity for their existence: “We have created a queer familia in our movement because our survival depends on it.”15 This quote shows how the collective multiplicities of such activist groups can offer coalitional moments that take on the supportive role which is missing, for example, in the context of the family of origin. In addition to campaigns which aim at making voices heard, there are also campaigns which focus on gaining visibility. Both types of campaigns can be seen as strategies of reterritorialization in what Mohanty calls the “temporality of struggle” (122). In the light of a politics of (re)location, being heard and being visible equal the creation of an existence. Visibility is intrinsically linked to the action of coming out; it implies a stop to hiding, to no longer being afraid, to coming out of the closet (“being” queer) and to coming out of the shadows (“being” undocumented).16 All the examined activist groups point to the importance of visibility through the participation in social events. For the German Queer Refugees for Pride group, social visibility through participation in public events is particularly important. They try to reach their goal of gaining visibility through active participation in Pride events all over Germany. In these events they make other queer people and the general public aware of their situation. Furthermore, they

14 Abdullah Jbr Al-Busaidi, Alia Khannum, and Javid Nabiyev for instance, participated in our conference on “Queer/Migration/Legality” in Saarbrücken in June 2017. 15 See: equalityarchive.com/issues/undocuqueer-movement/ 0:32-0:39 Emphasis in the original.. Accessed 3 Dec. 2017. 16 Leo Chavez describes undocumented people as living “shadowed lives” in his book: Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society.

The Politics of (Dis-)location 75 take advantage of the occasion in order to be able to build relationships with other LGBTQ persons and groups, and in so doing strive to build alliances and networks. The UndocuQueer Movement also focuses on coming out in a twofold way, namely coming out of the closet as queer and coming out of the shadows as undocumented. 17 Clearly, all the examined activist groups under investigation here rely on their strong presence on social media. Their works can be summed up with the slogans “immigrant rights are queer rights—queer rights are immigrant rights”18 and “Nothing about us without us.”19

Conclusion As we can see in these examples, border crossings shape the multiplicities of queer migrant selves and bodies in the politics of dis- and relocation. Processes of de- and reterritorialization increase the need for building alliances, which can function as coalitional moments and revolutionary connections. Our analysis of both the multiplicities of activists in groups and their many similar actions has shown how “the temporality of struggle,” in Mohanty’s words, allows for “a paradoxical continuity of self, mapping and transforming [the] political location” (122). We have examined how deterritorialization leads to losing one’s existence through losing one’s signifying framework, and how processes of reterritorialization can be seen as attempts to make the body visible and intelligible within a new given territory through the help of coalitional moments. Coalition building, as we can see, helps create new forms of territorialization with their own signifying frames. Juxtaposing queer/(im)migrant/refugee activist groups in the U.S. and in Germany can help us begin to account for the entangled relations of power in multiple locations of the world, and so draw attention to the need for translocal forms of solidarity. The transnational coalitional moments that we have talked about also point to a horizon of possible global solidarity—an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s “revolutionary connections.” By having staged a conversation between these activist groups in this article we hope to have opened up a pathway to new forms of transnational and transcultural connections. For truly revolutionary connections to take hold, global solidarity should not eradicate the local and national specificities but should constitute a form of coalition building that leaves room for self-difference. Only then can these connections help turn the experience of dislocation into a feeling of shared experience that constitutes a politics of relocation.

17 In her chapter “‘Coming Out of the Shadows’ and ‘undocuqueer,’” Hinda Seif delineates how the “language and political strategy of ‘coming out’ as undocumented” (88) has been adapted for immigrant political action. As she states: “Rather than the ‘closet,’ a dominant metaphor for undocumented immigrants in news, academia, and immigrant discourse is the ‘shadows,’ which reflects the different locations of undocumented status and its threats” (97). According to this immigrant discourse, “immigrants must be brought out of the shadow and into the light, with full rights, for society to be whole” (97). 18 equalityarchive.com/issues/undocuqueer-movement/ 1:59-2:03. Accessed 3 Dec. 2017. 19 gjspunk.de/queer-refugees-for-pride-nothing-about-us-without-us/ . Accessed 3 Dec. 2017.

76 Astrid M. Fellner and Eva K. Nossem

Works Cited Butler, Judith. “Merely Cultural.” New Left Review, no. I/227, Jan.-Feb. 1998, pp. 33-44. Chávez, Karma R. Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013. Chavez, Leo. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College P, 1992. Dean, Jodi. Solidarity of Strangers. Feminism after Identity Politics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Haritaworn, Jin, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, editors. Queer Necropolitics. New York: Routledge, 2014. Kaplan, Caren. “The Poetics of Displacement in Buenos Aires.” Discourse, no. 8, Fall/Winter 1986-1987, pp. 94-102. Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Latham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Luibhéid, Eithne and Lionel Cantú Jr., editors. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Luibhéid, Eithne. “Heteronormativity and Immigration Scholarship: A Call for Change.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2004, pp. 227-235. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/54590. Luibhéid, Eithne. “Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14, no. 2-3, 2008, pp. 169-190. Project MUSE, doi:10.1215/10642684-2007-029. Massumi, B. “Notes on the translation and acknowledgements.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Translated by Brian Massumi, Mineapolis: U of Minnesota P, pp. xvi-xix. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders. Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Murray, David A.B., editor. Queering Borders: Language, Sexuality, and Migration. Amsterdam: John Benjamins P, 2016. Palmeri, Jason and Jonathan Rylander. “Intersecting Realities: Queer Assemblage as Rhetorical Methodology.” Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics, edited by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 31-44. Purcell, Mark. “A New Land: Deleuze and Guattari and Planning.” Planning Theory & Practice, vol. 14, no.1, 2013, pp. 20-38. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Toward a Politics of Location (1984).” Blood, Bread, Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1984, New York: Norton, 1986, pp. 210-231.

The Politics of (Dis-)location 77

Seif, Hinda. “‘Coming Out of the Shadows’ and ‘undocuqueer.’” Queering Borders: Language, Sexuality, and Migration, edited by David A. B. Murray, Amsterdam: John Benjamins P, pp. 87-119.

Going Out, Not Coming Out:

Queer Affects, Secluded Publics, and Palestinian Hip-Hop

Alex Karaman

University of Arizona, USA

Abstract

In an effort to a draw attention to queer, Palestinian cultural practices that resist homonationalism and colonialism, this paper begins as a conversation between the fields of Palestine studies and scholarship on sexuality and passing in order to identify the important relationship between, on the one hand, aesthetics and movement in public spaces and, on the other hand, Palestinian social life and identity formation. The conversation then shifts to grounded theorizations of two key elements of queer hip-hop: “going out” as a resistant, queer, and Palestinian practice intimately tied to identity, space, and place; and “secluded publics,” built environments that materialize queer affects and eroticism through dance.

Keywords: Palestine studies, hip-hop, queer theory, affect studies, cultural geography, secluded publics

esearch on U.S.-based hip-hop has systematically engaged in lyrical analysis as a key approach to understanding why people participate in hip-hop cultural practices, an R approach which has correctly identified tensions between hip-hop and feminist and LGBTQ politics. 1 Miles away from the productive spaces of U.S. hip-hop, Palestinian queer activist and scholar Haneen Maikey describes a different set of constraints on women’s and LGBTQ self-representation, namely how “the unique social, historical, and political situation of Palestinians—the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and decades of discrimination against Palestinians in Israel—has created real obstacles for advancing respect for sexual and gender diversity in Palestinian society, which has not had the same opportunities to grow and evolve as many other societies have” (600-601). Nonetheless, Palestinians are actively creating and (re)establishing hip-hop spaces for queer folk within which queer affinities and eroticism form and flourish. To help clarify the apparent contradiction between a sexist and homophobic hip-hop lyrical history and the contemporary construction of a queer, Palestinian hip-hop scene, I contend that an attention to differential consumption practices, and not simply the lyrical, representational

1 See, for example, Rebollo-Gil and Moras (2012), Adams and Fuller (2006), and Weitzer and Kubrin (2009) for longer discussions of the sexist portrayal of women in hip-hop lyrics and the related topic of Black masculinity.

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Going Out, Not Coming Out 79 construction of songs, helps elucidate the capacities of listeners to reformulate and embody hip- hop practices in progressive, counter cultural, or anti-normative ways. This essay engages the development of scholarship concerned with embodiment and affect in order to suggest that the study of music practices must be concerned with how hip-hop is practiced as an identity and affinity forming enterprise, a theoretical relationship that has been scantly developed (See Roberts). This suggestion is not without scholarly precedent, as the intersecting fields of cultural studies and sound studies have become a formidable site of work on affect (See Goodman), and is meant to reflect a grounded theorization of Palestinian hip-hop as experienced by myself and those with whom I had the good fortune to spend time, and is further intended to elucidate how hip-hop practices (in)form embodied, Palestinian identities. In Palestine studies, scholarship on Palestinian identity formation tends to focus, through a range of methods, methodologies, and foundational concepts, on the representational aspects of ethno-religious and nationalist identities. This focus and the consequent elision of intersectional approaches to gender and sexuality ignore the ways through which Palestinians differentially embody and feel, rather than just think, their identities. Regarding Palestinian cultural studies, a scholarly preoccupation with older cultural forms contributes further to this elision at a time when new and notably transnational cultural practices, such as hip-hop production and consumption, help generate prefigurative, queer affinities with the aim of challenging patriarchal and homophobic norms within Palestinian society, despite a comparative lack of explicitly female and LGBTQ-positive lyrics from Palestinian artists. Taking these themes in Palestinian hip-hop praxis as a provocation to investigate the ways Palestinian identities form through participation in hip-hop practices and spaces, I move away from strictly representational, ethno-religious, and nationalist conceptions of Palestinian identity to more intersectional, hybrid, affective, and queer conceptions, ones that help elucidate the differential processes involved in Palestinian identity formation. This essay specifically prioritizes a spatial approach to Palestinian queer identity formation that foregrounds where hip-hop practices take place and their relationship to sexuality and affect. In an attempt to describe a differential, anti-essentialist, and affective construction of queer Palestinian identity, I focus on the role of space and place in the formation of identity through hip- hop practices in Haifa, Israel. This focus has its antecedents in literature on Palestinian public space, mobility, and visibility, in addition to scholarship on sexuality and passing. I begin with a review of those antecedents, producing a conversation between the fields of Palestinian cultural studies and queer geography in order to identify the important role of public space in practices of identity formation and (decolonial) Palestinian resistance. The focus then shifts to the theories grounded in my fieldwork in Haifa, including mapping projects, interviews with artists and activists, and participatory research at hip-hop shows. Two themes emerge from this research that merit attention: “going out” as a resistant, queer, and Palestinian practice intimately tied to identity, space, and place, and the role of the built environment in hip-hop spaces that I term “secluded publics,” a role which facilitates queer eroticism.

80 Alex Karaman

I. A Queer/Palestinian Geography of Public Space The modern history of Palestinian public space takes the growth of political Zionism in Palestine as a geopolitical turning point, involving the forced movement of Palestinians to rural areas (Shafir 41-44), the establishment of (new) urban centers for Jews (Rotbard 122-23), and the narration of settlement and development of a “land without a people” (Masalha 61-62). The expansion of Zionism necessitated a form of historic revisionism materialized through a new geography and toponymy that Nur Masalha describes as historicizing the natural place of Jews in Palestine, physically and discursively. The destruction of Palestinian towns and villages was just one material dimension of this transition, mirrored in a discursive attempt to rename cities and streets with Hebrew names, many of which glorified early leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine (Azaryahu and Cook 185-86). In Haifa, this is perhaps best represented by one of the nightlife centers, Ben Gurion Street, named after Israel’s first prime minister, founder of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and former leader of the World Zionist Organization, who was also noted for encouraging the “Judaization of Haifa” (Goren 135). Palestinian identity formation is intimately tied to engagements with public spaces, like Ben Gurion Street, where Palestinians navigate shifting regimes of mobility and visibility (Wagner 1-2). The various geopolitical machinations and practices of the Israeli state have considerably constricted the mobility of many Palestinians. Security checkpoints and other means of restricting travel to Palestinians in Palestine and Israel are commonplace. Thus, the theme of (im)mobility in scholarship on Palestinian identity and space highlights the role of settler colonialism in the geo- cultural imaginaries and daily lives of Palestinians and therefore the relational nature of Palestinian identity formation to different practices that engage with public space. More specifically, Wagner’s work indicates that the utilization of public space can be a resistant and identitarian endeavor, often performing and materializing what has been termed a “right to the city” (Mitchell 17-21). The theme of visibility further addresses the varying cultural norms of Palestinians pertaining to public space. The questions of who is permissibly visible, how, and where provide insight into Palestinian cultural norms pertaining to gender, sexuality, and class. For example, Mokarram Abbas and Bas van Heur describe three factors that play into the experience of women in public space, space audience (who is seeing), spatial opportunities (what is permissible in those spaces), and space organization (1225-26). Similarly, other scholars have identified the role of privacy for women as integral to their level of comfort engaging with public spaces (Al-Bishawi, Ghadban, and Jorgensen 1561-63). These same understandings of visibility and gender map well onto the experiences of queer Palestinians for whom different spaces offer different levels of comfort and encourage different ways of seeing and being seen. Visibility in Palestine is thus an intersubjective concern, involving visual displays and ways of seeing, which help differentiate among Palestinian experiences of public space informed by gender and sexuality. The themes of mobility and visibility offer a way of considering the importance of using public space as a form of resistance against settler colonial, sexist, and homophobic practices that render Palestinians differentially (im)mobile and (in)visible. Going Out, Not Coming Out 81

This visibility-mobility dynamic in scholarship on Palestinian public space has been well developed in regards to Palestinian ethno-religious and national identity, as well as to gender norms internal to Palestinian society, yet has only been recently taken up to study sexuality and public space in Israel-Palestine (see Wagner and Ritchie). However, sexual identity among Palestinians also involves questions of visibility: what displays or performances are permissible, and who can safely see you performing a non-normative sexual identity? Ben Gurion Street provides an excellent example of this in Haifa. If you are a new heterosexual couple in Haifa, Ben Gurion Street is a public space in which visibly performing your relationship takes on special meaning. If you are seen there with a potential partner, it indicates that you are officially together, publicly, and thus in line with the dictates of traditional Palestinian relationship norms, what Alana Bannourah terms “implied marriage” (“Confessions of a Palestinian Christian Girl”). However, Ben Gurion Street does not offer the same experience to sexual-minority, queer Palestinians, whose relationship to public spaces and practices of mobility and visibility are affected by Palestinian heteronormativity. Thus, queer Palestinians embody a differential subjectivity that must simultaneously navigate relations of ethnic discrimination and Palestinian heteronormativity. Roy Wagner helps highlight this in his discussion of a 2006 LGBT pride event in Jerusalem, when the police decided to remove protection from the event due to the focus at the time on conflicts in Gaza: “[Palestinian] LGBTs did move through the streets of Jerusalem on November 10, 2006; but those recognizable as manifesting pride, seeking LGBT visibility, were denied mobility…LGBTs had to choose between mobility and visibility” (4). While Tel-Aviv offers a number of explicitly coded gay places, a fact often touted in pinkwashing literature on the regional exceptionalism of Israeli LGBTQ politics (Papantonopoulou 278-79), those places are often policed with larger ethno-religious ideologies. Jason Ritchie’s work on the politics of visibility in queer Palestinian and Israeli social life highlights the policing of ethno-religious identity and state belonging within gay bars in Israel. Discussing an event where he and an Arab friend were turned away from a Tel Aviv gay bar, Ritchie describes how:

“that moment cast into sharp relief the discursive framework that governs sexuality and race in Israel-Palestine: the entrance to the bar was a sort of checkpoint, like so many others queer Palestinians regularly face, in bars, saunas, parks, Web sites, and other ‘egalitarian’ gay spaces; it was manned by a queer agent of Israeli nationalism, whose job it was to determine who belongs in this gay/Israeli space and who does not” (557).

Ritchie continues to build on criticisms of gay visibility, extending a metaphor of the checkpoint to help contextualize the fraught desirability and feasibility of “coming out” narratives for Palestinians living in Israel. Thus, Ritchie concludes:

“While the dream of ‘coming out of the closet’ into full citizenship and national belonging drives the activism of many queer Israelis, the violence of the checkpoint 82 Alex Karaman

— and countless other reminders of the impossibility of belonging (not to mention ‘citizenship’) — shapes the strategies of queer Palestinian activists” (558).

Wagner similarly describes a “double-passing” that occurs for some visibly queer Palestinians who receive the protection of the Israeli military or individual Israelis when going to LGBTQ events in Israel (12). Wagner contends that these practices are premised on the denial of an active queer, Palestinian social scene, that allows one’s “gay visibility to take over his Palestinian visibility” (12). Thus, Wagner’s notion of double-passing helps demonstrate the linked ideologies behind pinkashing (vis-a-vis the “regional exceptionalism” of Israel’s LGBTQ policies) and Ritchie’s subject-hailing checkpoint, ideologies that recirculate Orientalist depictions of anachronistic Palestinian sexual mores. As young Palestinians assert a queer and Palestinian identity in public space, they challenge the normative association of queerness with Israel and homophobia with Palestine, refusing to pass as Israeli or as straight. Part of the queer intervention in literature on sexual passing, which moved it away from a strict focus on strategic passing as straight and/or cisgender, has been in the focus on acts of disruption, performances of the self that challenge binary and other normative ideologies of gender and sexuality, rather than negotiate around and through them. Leanne Dawson concisely explains that “it is those who either cannot or choose not to pass, and therefore present a disruptive surface text, who have been most celebrated in queer theory, despite the fact that failing to pass can have serious socio-political consequences” (206). Further challenging this binary approach to acts of and scholarship on passing, Rachel Devitt’s work on gender performances at drag and burlesque shows weaves together staged femme performances directed at both passing and what she terms ambivalence. Drawing from Jose Muñoz’ work on disidentification and strategic misrecognition, Devitt writes of “a kind of passing that is not necessarily focused on a believable performance, but rather on a ‘tactical misrecognition of self’ that both invokes a racialised, classed and/or gendered archetype and challenges its limit(ation)s” (438). Devitt’s definition foregrounds a critique of the supposed stability and naturalness of gender and sexual identity categories, while recognizing their important roles in structuring social life. While Devitt’s work is focused on staged performances in queer, coded spaces, it resonates well with queer Palestinian practices of passing through public space. One of the people whom I interviewed, a queer Haifa resident who frequents hip-hop shows, described how their attention to grooming their beard and donning clean and fashionable clothing often gains them the praise of a heteronormative public gaze. People they know who they pass in public praise them for being so well put together and attractive, reading their aesthetic as an endorsement of and engagement with heteronormative gender performance. These practices of grooming and dressing well are commonplace for straight Palestinian men, thus, in the moment of passing through and as, many queer Palestinian men embody the liminality of Palestinian heteronormative mobility and visibility dynamics. Returning to Wagner’s framing of the visibility-mobility dynamic, I find that work on passing focuses heavily on visibility, on the ocular, defining passing as something akin to “appearing to be something you are not” (Devitt 430, emphasis added). While the ocular is a Going Out, Not Coming Out 83 primary means through which information or cues about gender and sexuality are gathered, this approach reduces passing to a mere negotiation of prevailing modes of ocular policing, leaving aside the very motivations for entering and moving through public, potentially threatening spaces. In foregrounding the prevailing ocular modes of policing gender and sexuality, and the respondent modes of survival queer Palestinians employ, scholars stand to miss the implication that, for queer and other marginalized peoples, engaging public space involves more than just a tactical way of surviving harassment, but is also a way of constructing one’s identity. Aesthetic and kinesthetic passings emerge in ways that simultaneously navigate constraints on mobility and visibility, while challenging them, what Wagner describes as “realigning, rather than strictly suppressing forms of visibility” (4). That is, the discussion of constrictions on visibility gay men face often implies an original, authentic gay aesthetic that is naturally desired by gay men everywhere. The colonial implication of this−that places where queer people do not mirror (Western) gay and lesbian aesthetics must do so due to systemic homophobia−is under-examined in literature dealing with sexual identity, queerness, and the Middle East. Thus, with regard to Devitt’s conceptualization of passing that invokes “a racialised, classed and/or gendered archetype and challenges its limit(ation)s” (438), queer Palestinian practices of passing through space challenge the ocular logic of a boundary between the West/Israel as liberal and the East/Palestine as homophobic. The literature on passing approaches public space largely as a gauntlet of potentially unknown modes of harassment that must be tactically navigated and survived. To pass quickly and tactically through public spaces and ignore people who might pose difficulty to you, has a particularly metropolitan feel to it, evoking stereotypes of a New York sidewalk, filled with the hustle and bustle of commuters trying to make it quickly to work. Depending on what neighborhood you are moving through, many queer Palestinians might need to be prepared to run into multiple people they know, and to perform and pass a version of themselves that will impress or appease the person they are talking to, thereby allowing their movement, their passing through. These recognition of the tendency to run into people you know also helps clarify one aspect of the queer, Palestinian apprehension of Western coming out practice. In one of my interviews with an organizer with Al-Qaws (The Rainbow), a Palestinian LGBTQ organization, the organizer described a useful metaphor comparing the different social landscapes of the U.S. versus Palestine, and their consequent effect on modes of queer identity formation. They likened being “in the closet” to being in a physically and socially constrictive space, described as being surrounded by a circular wall. When you come out in the U.S., they said, you ultimately dismantle that wall and stare out at a now open world of possibility. In Israel-Palestine, by contrast, the dismantling of the wall, the act of coming out, reveals yet another wall waiting behind the first. He described that wall as a new network of gossip, micro-aggressions, and other forms of policing that affect not only you, but also those who associate with you, providing the example of one of your mother’s co-workers interrogating her about her gay son. While the first part of the example, of an open world of possibility acquired through coming out in the U.S., is by no means an apt capture of the realities of U.S. queers who navigate extant homophobia, the second part sheds light on how imbricated identity formation is with public space 84 Alex Karaman in Palestine. Combined with Ritchie’s metaphor of the checkpoint, it is no surprise that, as opposed to the Western logic of coming-out narratives and practices, “queer Palestinians articulate a politics of social change that offers a potentially subversive alternative to the normalizing project of queer visibility” (Ritchie 558). Thus, the study of queer Palestinian practices of going out is a study of identity formation absent the declarative practice of coming out and the forms of state and citizenship-based interpellation that attend it. Coming out offers a framework for understanding, but not a monopoly on affecting, queer socialization and affinity. The proceeding sections begin to lay out an alternative framework, that of going out, as attendant to Palestinian practices of queer socialization in public spaces that offer critically important modes of seclusion.

II. Going Out, Coming Out Going out can be the highlight of the week for young, queer Palestinians who attend hip- hop and other contemporary music shows in Haifa. While hip-hop by no means is the sole site of queer socialization in Haifa,2 the rapidly growing hip-hop scene in Haifa means that you can find a hip-hop show almost every week. Combined with the fact that hip-hop venues have a queer appeal due to their association with counter-cultural and underground socialization (for example, feminist, socialist, anti-racist), hip-hop shows are attractive to, and sometimes organized by, considerable numbers of queer Palestinians. For instance, Haifa’s Scene Bar (discussed below), is operated by two women who actively market women-identified and LGBTQ, hip-hop events. Going out becomes a language in and of itself, a way of communicating one’s location and authenticity in the social scene of Haifa. As argued in the preceding section, the acts of passing as and passing through are important parts of the experience of going out, partnered with the socialization that takes place in hip-hop shows themselves. This section therefore approaches going out as involving two contrasting aesthetics and kinesthetic, visibility and movement to the venue in contrast to within the venue. The forms of aesthetic cultivation for and comportment through both of these spaces, the public space of the street and the secluded public of the venue, highlight the different pressures queer Palestinians face when going out and the reactive and proactive modes of socialization. Given the high likelihood of interacting with family, colleagues, or other acquaintances when walking to the music venues, queer Palestinians might engage in flexible forms of aesthetic cultivation to prepare for going out. The various aesthetics associated with hip-hop cultural practices in the U.S. are rarely seen in Palestine, normally reserved for the artists and die-hard adherents, rather than the mass of attendees at a show. The outfits you see at a hip-hop show could just as easily be seen at an electronic dance music (EDM) show or at a fancy restaurant, and it is common for young people to attend multiple shows and go to dinner with friends in a single night. This flexible mode of aesthetic cultivation can cross physical and cultural boundaries, making it

2 Bars, coffee shops, art shows/festivals, and electronic dance music shows also constitute major sites of queer socialization and cultural praxis in Haifa, with the downtown area and Massada Street being particularly important to a queer spatial imaginary of the city. Going Out, Not Coming Out 85 convenient for queer Palestinians who want to go out to navigate public spaces with comfort. One interviewee remarked that his straight friends take more time to groom themselves for going out and often wore nicer and more feminine dress. Another interviewee and friend said that they get compliments from family friends who often remark that he should “meet their daughter” or ask how he is not yet married, and he enjoyed remarking on the irony of the situation. His interactions with the parents of young women render visible the instability of hetero aesthetics as he passes as and passes through Haifa’s streets. Modes of movement compliment the role of visibility in acts of going out, as being seen takes place while moving to and through certain neighborhoods en route to the hip-hop venue. Queer Palestinians employ a number of tactics to pass quickly through public spaces, without ignoring the interpellative acts of hailing that might take place from friends’ parents, co-workers, or other acquaintances. One respondent described a group approach, wherein a small group of friends will meet at one house and walk together to a show. One benefit of this is to avoid parental scrutiny before leaving the home, as her parents feel better knowing she is with a group of friends and not alone. She further described how this helps avoid two unwanted interactions in public. In the case that someone whom she does not know, or who knows that she is queer, should want to harass them, being in a group helps quell that potentiality. That harassment, she remarked, might also include men’s unwanted sexual advances, which are less common if she is in a larger group. Similarly, since she will likely run into someone she knows, being in a group gives her an excuse to say a quick hello and goodbye without being expected to stop and make small talk. Another interviewee, the one who remarked on the propositions he receives from parents on behalf of their daughters, aptly described the connection between passing as and passing through. When in comfortable spaces, including hip-hop venues, he likes to strut and intentionally draw the attention of partygoers. In the case of the outdoor public streets, he knows to walk in a masculine fashion, with a quick gait and avoiding crossing his thighs over each other as he moves. These two narratives further evidence the complicated imbrication of sexuality and gender as, for example, gay men and lesbian women, navigate different regimes of mobility and visibility structured in relation to prevailing norms of masculine and feminine gender performance. As street harassment and social judgment take different forms for men and women, so, too, do the modes of comportment and aesthetic cultivation used by men and women to pass. Upon arriving in the space of the hip-hop venue, the shift in social norms immediately translates into varying practices of aesthetic cultivation and comportment. The pressure to appear as hetero while moving through heteronormative public space dissipates considerably, allowing queer Palestinians the freedom to complete the aesthetic transformation central to going out, a transformation that helps instantiate moments of queer socialization, moments of doing sexuality through displays and readings of queer sensibilities. Bathrooms in these venues become temporary dressing rooms, places where clothing and makeup receive additional modifications. A couple of my interviewees discussed bringing makeup with them to venues, knowing that it could bring additional scrutiny on the street, and that they would have to remove it before they left the venue. At some shows, going into the gender neutral bathrooms meant encountering small groups of men 86 Alex Karaman and women who were removing articles of clothing, unbuttoning the tops of their shirts, replacing previously removed piercings, and applying glitter, eye-liner, and other makeup. In the mass of people who don similar styles of clothing, these final touches allow Palestinians to communicate a queer aesthetic to other partygoers. These final touches further evidence the co-extensive aspects of gender and sexuality-based regimes of visibility. The movements within hip-hop venues similarly evidence a shift in regimes of mobility affected by changing spatial relations. While the next section takes up specific questions of dance and sexuality in the built environment of these secluded publics, some initial observations on movements as a performative embodiment of sexuality are worth mentioning. Modalities of visibility and movement allow partygoers to perform sexuality in ways that co-construct the spaces of hip-hop venues. In packed venues with sometimes upwards of one hundred attendees, the more you move, the more visible you become. Attendees have the option to sit in a corner, hardly noticed, in contrast to the option of dancing or moving in ways that make one visible, taking up space in ways that can (re)construct the venue itself as the materialization of queer potential. If Ben Gurion Street calls for particular gendered and sexuality-based movements, the hip-hop venue is comparatively freeing, allowing walks and sashays, leg crossings, and gesticulations that might draw unwanted ocular scrutiny and movement impeding harassment in other environments. During one hip-hop DJ set, a friend who attends many shows at the popular Kabareet and Scene bars, walked liked a model on a catwalk, crossing his thighs over each other with each step, before turning on a dime and walking the same distance back. In the midst of this movement, he turned his head to face a group of young men who were smiling and chuckling at his performance, jokingly yelling at them “Sorry straight boys, you can’t have me. I’m gay!” My group of friends and the young men he had spoken with erupted into laughter at the performance, which immediately affected the environment in ways that signaled the continued loosening of the visibility and mobility regimes that lay in wait just outside the venue entrance. The importance of publicity in these movements and visual displays is a key element in understanding going out as an identity forming practice. As per Wagner and Ritchie, mobility and visibility regimes in Israeli-Palestinian, public spaces render out, queer Palestinians subject to a range of checkpoints, from the West Bank wall to the entrance of a gay bar in Tel Aviv, which can deny one’s Arab-ness predicated on their queerness, or deny their queerness predicated on their Arab-ness, materializing a gauntlet of obstacles highlighted in the metaphor of the closet as a set of circular walls. However, if mobility and visibility are two constitutive elements of what coming out purports to offer, then the hip-hop venue is a space where queer Palestinian partygoers have flexibility in performances that are not subject to the same ethno-religious, heteronormative, and gender normative regimes of visibility and mobility.

III. Secluded Publics The two main sites of hip-hop in Haifa, Kabareet and Scene Bar, both offer regular shows, often including weekly appearances by DJs and rappers, and attract arguably the densest crowds Going Out, Not Coming Out 87 of any contemporary music venues in the city. The bars are located within a hundred yards of each other: Scene (a play on the English word Scene and the Arabic letter siin) on a street front corner, and Kabareet, in a more secluded location, down an alleyway off the same street. Though they cater to the same crowd of young Palestinians, the construction and aesthetic of the bars differ, with Scene, as the English name would suggest, offering a vibe more akin to a nightclub, while Kabareet looks and feels more like an underground coffeehouse turned bar. Neither venue can be viewed easily from the outside: the windows at Scene are mostly blacked out, and Kabareet’s only windows face to an outside patio also hidden from public view. This construction is functional for queer Palestinian such that both venues offer what I term secluded publics, built environments that exist at the periphery of the nightlife center and yet whose construction offer seclusion from the regimes of visibility and mobility that are enforced publicly in the proximal downtown area. Secluded publics thus create the experience of liberation offered by being visibly and kinesthetically “out” in public, an experience both thought and felt. Queer practices of going out mobilize towards these spaces and are made visible within them. In Kabareet and Scene, a dynamic emerges between the affects of queer visibility and mobility and the affects of the built environment. It is not merely the discursive, cultural associations of these venues that attract and accommodate queer Palestinians, but the feel of them when filled with partygoers. They function at and as the periphery of the city center and offer a shift into different, non-hegemonic, though nonetheless encompassing, embodied and embedded, regimes of visibility and mobility. This section approaches the notion of secluded publics from two directions, first, the location of the venues within the city, both within and outside the popular nightlife areas, and second, within the venues, examining the queer, erotic dancing that take place within. As the previous section highlights, queer Palestinians challenge gendered assumptions about appearance and movement through acts of passing as while passing through nightlife centers en route to Kabareet and Scene. Though both venues are approachable from one side without going through those centers, the people filling those streets are often on their way to the more mainstream nightlife center, without plans to stop in at either venue. As a result, many people walking by take notice of the small crowds formed in front of either venue, sometimes waiting to go in or smoking a cigarette, a public viewing that forms the last moment of ocular enforcement before one slips inside to a different visibility and mobility regime, a different, more secluded public. What is curious about this particular relationship between location, constructed space, and affect, is the recurrent metaphor of the checkpoint utilized by Ritchie to describe Palestinian experiences of entrances to gay bars in Tel Aviv. Certainly Scene and Kabareet have entrances that function as checkpoints. They typically have either security to check IDs or someone to check a guest list or take a cover fee. However, as both Ritchie’s and this example suggest, the experience of the checkpoint is (in)formed by the differing regimes of mobility and visibility that exist on either side of that checkpoint, not solely by the various acts of checking practiced there. The built and practiced checkpoints of Kabareet and Scene, therefore, materialize the shift in regimes of mobility and visibility to a space outside/within, a shift that functions as and through embodied and embedded identities. More specifically, women and men experience the venue checkpoint 88 Alex Karaman differently. As venue managers look to cultivate gendered and sexualized environments (e.g. ladies night, LGBTQ night), the bouncer often must assist the manager in that endeavor, deciding on appropriate numbers of men and women (as perceived by the bouncer) for the event. As one moves into the venue, the excitement of a changing visibility and mobility regime is immediate. Indeed, much of this shift relies on the discursive meanings attached to the spaces; they are known both by their regulars and those who avoid them as counter-cultural spaces, where you are said to avoid judgment for being queer and/or Palestinian. However, one cannot separate the built environments of Kabareet and Scene from their exciting and transgressive feel. Scene is a two-tiered space, whose upper level overlooks the lower level, while offering a space with tables and chairs to sit for a drink or cigarette. The street level is open as a dance floor, the bar along one side and a DJ booth opposite the entrance. Kabareet sits off a long alleyway, which you turn from into a narrow path leading to the venue’s entrance. The venue is split-level from the outside, with an entrance that takes you down about four feet to the inside, which, combined with the limestone archways throughout the venue, creates a feeling of being in a cave. Images of famous Palestinian artists and political figures and traditional Palestinian artwork decorate much of the space and a stage adorned with a rig for lighting sits on one end. Both venues are comparatively dark inside, perfect for dancing to a DJ set or live rapper, and characteristic of most dance venues across musical genres played in clubs, including hip-hop and EDM. Both venues also have a contrast between the center space of the dance area, where people are easily visible, and the edges, where small walls and alcoves offer more seclusion. Both places also have a culture of seclusion that extends within and beyond the spaces themselves and facilitates public eroticism. Photography of any sort in the venue is often prohibited in order to protect the identities and aesthetic and kinesthetic practices of venue goers. There is also an unspoken code of not discussing what was seen and done at the event with people who were not there, and certainly not with people who support the logic of heteronormative and gender normative regimes of visibility and mobility. Dance figures heavily in hip-hop events in ways that further stress the important role of visibility and mobility in queer eroticism. The affectivity of dance and movement has been well studied in the EDM scene (See Collin and Godfrey; Fikentscher; Jackson; and Garcia), but similar studies have not been conducted at length within the context of hip-hop cultures.3 Dance is an integral part of hip-hop practices, one of the oft-mentioned “four pillars of hip-hop”: turn-tabling or DJ-ing, rapping, b-boying or breakdancing, and graffiti. Each of the pillars represents a different sensory enterprise, musical, vocal, kinesthetic, and aesthetic, respectively, with the last two harkening to the visibility-mobility dynamic. We might refer to a recurrence of kin(a)esthetics in EDM scholarship that highlights the imbrication of movement and visibility in dance practices, as dancers use visual cues from other people in order to attune their dance styles to the music, the built environment, and to the larger crowd of people. Garcia’s study of the EDM scene explored the tactile function of music, highlighting “an important sensory–affective bridge between touch, sonic experience, and an expansive sense of connection in dancing crowds” (60). Garcia’s work describes EDM venues as “spaces of heightened tactility and embodied intimacy,” but departs

3 Walter provides one rare example of such work. Going Out, Not Coming Out 89 from established scholarship on EDM culture, dance, and affect to “go beyond the representation of tactility in lyrics and visual imagery, turning instead to the sound of EDM itself, which foregrounds percussion, texture, grain, and other sonic elements that resonate with heightened haptic experience” (60). His attention to the tactility of sound resonates with a study of queer affect in the hip-hop scene, as hip-hop lyrics have often included homophobic and sexist language, yet still are played in queer spaces where affinities develop with the music and between dancers. A study of queer hip-hop practices, therefore, cannot rely solely on the lyrical content of songs in order to understand their appeal to queer audiences, but must address the sonic tactility of hip-hop music played in queer spaces. Perhaps this is best highlighted by the fact that many queer, Palestinian youth who attend hip-hop shows do not listen to hip-hop regularly at home, but go to the shows because of the kin(a)esthetic practices found therein. Hip-hop event attendees come together to dance in ways that reflect a relationship between the built and sonic environment, the socio-cultural meanings attached to the event, and the tactility of sound. Humans display a relatively unique ability for beat induction, the ability to extract a beat pattern from a complex array of sounds, an ability rarely identified in other species.4 By extension, humans express the ability to entrain, a term emerging from biomusicology, referring to the synchronization of internal and external beat patterns, such as that between one’s own bodily rhythms and the music being played, or between oneself, other dancers, and the music. Hagen and Bryant argue that the ability to engage beat induction and entrainment served an evolutionary purpose for humans, and, more specifically, that dance and music form a basis for human cooperation, an insight more specifically evidenced by this discussion of dance as an erotic, queer affinity forming practice. More than a biologically determined expression, however, dance practices depend on both beat induction/entrainment and particular socio-cultural meanings attached to the music. Within hip-hop venues, there are styles of dance and specific moves that are more common, such as grinding with a partner or raising one’s arms to correspond with and express approval of the music. When practiced in large, group settings, these dance moves serve as the basis for inter-subjective entrainment and, as per Hagen and Bryant, human cooperation. Though not everyone dances in the exact same fashion, the cooperative practice of entraining with the music is affective, providing a tactile, kin(a)esthetic basis for affinities between dancers. Carla Walter’s work on hip-hop dance practices suggest that they are “a function of identity construction” (1), a suggestion that offers space for theorizing the queer potential of dance in hip-hop venues. The practice of grinding between two or more dancers is one example of the relationship between the socio-cultural meanings attached to particular musical genres, the inter-subjective practice of dance as beat induction and entrainment, and the embodied, kin(a)esthetic performance of identity. Thus, dance practices figure heavily in the ability for hip-hop partygoers to co-construct hip-hop spaces in ways that simultaneously support queer hegemonic and hetero-/gender-normative mobility-visibility regimes.

4 Patel et al. suggest an initial framework for identifying entrainment practices in nonhuman animals. 90 Alex Karaman

Though only an initial sketch of the multiplicity of practices that (in)form Palestinian hip- hop culture, this essay’s discussion offers insights into the roles of going out and of secluded publics in queer social life in Haifa which gesture towards new directions for a body of Middle Eastern queer theory that militates against cultural imperialism, orientalism, racism, and homonormativity. Western queer scholarship can lend coming out a culturally imperialist, epistemic monopoly on theorizing queer social life, complementing discursive and representational notions of (gay/lesbian) community. By contrast, this discussion aligns with decolonial queer scholarship, attempting a move away from a reliance on such representational strategies, avoiding a stable or essentialist rendering of “queer community” or “hip-hop culture”, and focusing instead on practices of going out that cultivate queer affinities in the secluded publics of hip-hop spaces. This essay moves towards such a notion of affinity, grounded in a material analysis of embodiment and embededness in Palestinian queer social life.

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Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames

Rebecca S. Richards

Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA

Abstract

This article addresses Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s call for transnational feminist research that makes visible “the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations” (17). The author argues that videogames can contribute to feminist scholarship by creating virtual spaces that simulate how a transnational politics of location plays out on women’s bodies. This article provides a spatial analysis of three videogames, République, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Alien: Isolation, to show how the games’ procedures can persuade audiences to empathize with the surveillance and precarity of women’s bodies in real-life transnational experiences. While the games focus on “stealth,” the limitations provided by the gameplay simulate the different ways in which women’s bodies must “sneak” around national identities and rules, thus showing the ways in which a transnational politics of location creates “contradictory positions. . . [for women who] inhibit unitary identities” (Grewal and Kaplan 7).

Keywords: videogames, transnationalism, feminist belonging, procedural rhetoric, empathy, spatial politics

ith more than 65 million people displaced from their homes in 2016 due to war, poverty, environmental catastrophe, and political/personal threat (Edwards), many W nations are grappling with how to harbor (or hide from) the ever-expanding population of nomadic subjects.1 Though, as Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “[humans] have always been a traveling species” (215), many nation-states and institutions repress this historical human practice, reducing people to singularly located geographies or nationalities. In her work Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal writes that “any kind of single nationalism is a romantization of the past” (13), and her analyses of gendered artifacts and practices convincingly demonstrate how nationality is a shifting construct and gendered performance—one that is always imbued with contradictions that show how national boundaries, while materially constraining and impossible to ignore, are a fiction of “imagined communities” (Anderson). As feminist scholarship like Grewal’s indicates, women have had to confront the materiality of national borders and gender norms through dual/multiple citizenship practices, refugee petitions, and undocumented migrations, always attentive to the perils of late capitalism.2 Therefore, transnational scholarship seeks to address what Arjun Appadurai calls the “model of

1 Not counting the nomadic subjects who have always embraced their nomadic heritage. 2 In this essay, I focus on women for clarity and concision, though this analysis could easily expand to include all feminized subjects including gender and sexual minorities. I acknowledge that this focus glosses over the messiness of the category of “women.”

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 94 Rebecca S. Richards disjunctive flows” in globalized economies and communications, which include the flows of information, people, media, capital, goods, and ideas (21). In addition to these flows, transnational feminist scholarship must also address what Grewal calls the “scattered hegemonies” of neoliberal, global capitalism (Grewal and Kaplan 7). Attending to scattered hegemonies, or the various ideological and state forces of globalization, is messy and uncomfortable work, because it demands tolerance for ambiguity and flexibility in terms of the politics of location. While Adrienne Rich addresses how a politics of location grounds women in the specificity of their bodies, especially the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Rich could not have anticipated the ways in which globalization and late capitalism would complicate that idea. In this article, I analyze three videogames to demonstrate how transnational flows, including immigration, environmental devastation, and global capitalism, necessitate stealthing, for example, hiding, waiting, and passing undetected, as an update to the politics of location. One of the reasons stealthing has become vital to a transnational politics of location is because, as the numbers of displaced people grow, many of the globe’s most economically privileged countries are promoting isolationist rhetoric and policies. The most obvious examples come from the U.K. and the United States, where Britain voted to withdraw from the European Union, that is, the Brexit vote, and U.S. politicians, including President Trump, have advocated for building a wall between U.S. and Mexico. In other words, while the population of displaced or nomadic people continues to rise, some governments are resorting to exclusionary practices and border policies. To respond to this confluence of isolationism and escalation of displacement, this article addresses Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s call for transnational feminist research that makes visible “the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations. . . [and] the dynamics of these conditions” (17). To examine such conditions, a transnational feminist methodology provides a “counterhegemonic feminist reading” (3), which critiques the global-local and center- periphery models of the politics of location, a dominant idea that flows transnationally (12-13). Additionally, a transnational feminist analysis looks for the practices and locations that are often unseen but still challenge spatialized binaries—regardless of whether or not they are metaphorical, virtual, or material. I argue that some videogames help reveal these unseen practices and places by creating virtual spaces where audiences engage in a simulation of how a transnational politics of location plays out on women’s bodies. Videogames, while providing a means of entertainment, also hold the potential to encourage empathetic responses to the lived realities of transnational belongings. More specifically, videogames provide procedural rhetoric—that is “symbol manipulation” or “the construction and interpretation of a symbolic system that governs human thought or action” (Bogost 5)—that communicates how women are often positioned as agents to be constrained, labeled, and disciplined for nationalistic projects (Dingo 2012; Kaplan, Alarcón and Moallem 2007; Yuval-Davis 1997). While procedural rhetoric emerges from “inflexible systems that do not empathize” with players (Bogost 6), videogames allow for virtual experiences that can engender empathy in their audiences. Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames 95

To prove this point about videogames encouraging empathy, this article provides a spatial analysis of three videogames, République (2016), Alien: Isolation (2014) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017), in order to show how the games’ procedures—the rules and processes of the software— can persuade audiences to empathize with the surveillance and precarity of women’s bodies in real-life situations involving immigration, refugee petitions, and transnational capitalism.3 While the games are set in fictional futuristic, post-national settings where there are limited traces of previous national affiliations, the procedures of each game force players to change their strategies within the virtual gamespace, thus simulating the ways in which women must engage in stealth as a means of engaging a transnational politics of location. While all three games focus on “stealth” as a game procedure, the limitations provided by the gameplay simulate the different ways in which women’s bodies must “sneak” past or around national gender norms and rules, thus showing the ways in which transnational gendered belonging creates “contradictory positions. . . [for women who] inhibit unitary identities” (Grewal and Kaplan 7) in the material world. I use the concept of procedural rhetoric in this analysis because it is a different rhetorical situation from historical and classical understandings of rhetoric where there is a clear speaker/writer and audience. Instead, procedural rhetoric involves, not only the human agents of the player and developers but also “rule-based” processes run by a computer in order to negotiate “expressive” computation. As videogame scholar Ian Bogost explains:

I want to suggest that videogames have a unique persuasive power…, videogames can also disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. . . this power is not equivalent to the content of videogames. . . rather, this power lies in the very way videogames mount claims through procedural rhetorics. (ix)

In other words, videogames make “claims” not only through the visual, narrative, audio, spatial cues of the game, or players’ chosen actions, or the developer’s intent, but also through the computer, players, and the developer, who co-construct an experience that creates a persuasive act. Consequently, videogames are in the unique position to persuade people to have emotional experiences. Game scholars like Katherine Isbister have studied how games provoke—through “interesting choices” (2) (that is, actions with clear consequences), and “parasocial interactions” (7)—more complex emotional responses like empathy and compassion, emotions that “typically cannot be accessed with other media” (40-41). In other words, procedural rhetoric, “. . . allow[s] players to identify and engage in new ways, awakening different kinds of emotions that designers use not just for entertainment, but also for encouraging the deep awareness that travels alongside agency—a feeling of responsibility and of the complexity of relating to other beings” (42). The

3 Due to the journal’s guidelines for submissions, I do not provide a game analysis of these games. For a more expansive analysis of these videogames, see my forthcoming book, Not Playing Around: Feminist and Queer Rhetorics in Videogames (working title). 96 Rebecca S. Richards following section presents case studies with varying degrees of success in building an affective or empathetic responses about the politics of location in a transnational era.

Stealthing the Detention and Surveillance of the State in République Released in five episodes between 2013 and 2016, République engages stealth gameplay in a dystopian setting that involves state-controlled surveillance and security. Stealth gameplay stands in opposition to the more familiar first-person shooter (FPS) or action-adventure gameplay of popular videogames, which focus on subduing and often killing opponents to achieve progress. Instead, stealth gameplay relies more on eluding enemies and achieving goals without detection. Therefore, stealth gameplay focuses more on how players strategically move through the virtual gamespace, deciding when to risk actions that might draw attention and when to hide and wait. République builds upon this stealth gameplay tradition by presenting a female protagonist and eliminating the violence of the aforementioned FPS and action-adventure games. It is in this manner that République is one of the first videogames to engage in what I am calling “empathy- through-stealth” procedural rhetoric. In République, players cannot kill or permanently injure enemies, though they can incapacitate them with pepper spray or a taser. Instead, the majority of the game is about sneaking, hiding from, and eluding authorities, most often by crouching and using the gamespace strategically. Adding further innovation to the gameplay is the ability to hack digital technologies to aid in the stealth mechanics. With these gameplay mechanics, République conforms to the genre of stealth video games while providing some gameplay innovation. Featuring a female protagonist who must stealthily navigate a detention center, République establishes the foundations for empathetic gameplay that maps onto issues of transnational feminisms. The game’s protagonist is a young woman named Hope, who is also known as 390-H by the authorities. In the opening cut scene,4 players see Hope’s face framed on a mobile phone screen. She pleads to players: “I don’t have much time. They want to erase me. They want to erase who I am. They’re coming.” With these few words, players learn that Hope is being surveilled and followed, and that she exists in a place where she is not allowed or threatened. Following this cinematic scene, players receive a level map of what appears to be a detention facility, framing Hope as an incarcerated subject of some dystopian governmental system. Players learn some of Hope’s backstory during the gameplay, including that Hope is a cloned test subject, called a Pre-Cal (abbreviation for Pre-Calibration), in this detention center, and she is trying to escape by reaching “the Surface.” Instead of taking on the perspective or role of Hope, players take on the role of an unnamed hacker who can control the digital technology in the facility, overriding computers, alarms, and locked doors; manipulating security cameras to help Hope know when it is safe to move into a room; and analyzing data. Players also control Hope’s movements, deciding when to walk, run, crouch, and even pickpocket the guards, called the Prizrak, to gain knowledge and resources to help her escape.

4 A cutscene is a part of a video game that is not interactive, meaning that the content is scripted by the developers and players cannot alter it. These moments are also known as cinematics. Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames 97

The game is set in a 1984-like world but with some “real world” contexts, specifically the experience of displacement, migration, and detention. The game is almost entirely set in a detention facility (“Metamorphosis”), and that setting establishes tacit connections between the gameworld and real-life spaces of an often-referenced transnational subject: the detained immigrant. Using an actual immigration detention center as a setting for the game would allow players to bring the specific historical and location-specific political framing of that contested space from their nationalities. By setting Hope in a fictional detention center, players can help a detainee sneak around a space that is all too “real” in the current geopolitical context without that space being over-determined by players’ national affiliation, which then allows the often unseen space of a detention center to become visible. Moreover, throughout the game, there are clear signs that Metamorphosis does not belong to any contemporary nation-state. The Prizrak, according to their ID cards (which players can access via pickpocketing), come from a variety of nationalities; the diversity of the Prizraks’ nationalities undermines any claims to a singular nation-state in the gameworld. By fictionalizing the gameworld, the loaded and over-determined space of the detention center becomes a mystery to be discovered—a problem to be solved: how can players help Hope to the “Surface” without detection? Most of the gameplay is slow and requires patience, as players access the new rooms of Metamorphosis through hacking security cameras. When Hope is “caught” by the Prizrak, the interactivity of the game ends; the player can do nothing but watch Hope be led back to the nearest detaining cell. There is no limit to the number of times Hope can get caught. The game does not end when Hope is caught; rather players just begin again from the detaining cell, unlocking digital doors and scoping out spaces ahead of Hope’s movements. While no doubt the subject of the detained immigrant cannot escape an immigration center, the recursive practice of eluding authorities and repeated detention simulates some of the threats and experiences of undocumented immigrants. Furthermore, this recursive gameplay forces, without alternative, a slow stealth mechanic that requires collaboration and trust between the “hacker” and Hope. By forcing one singular gameplay strategy, République compels players to engage in a different videogame mindset that is based on a non-traditional pace, that is, slow and patient, for a non-traditional goal, that is, escape. Furthermore, the fact that players take on the role of an unknown hacker to help Faith show that a stealth politics of location relies on communal belonging—not just individual resilience or endurance. I argue that this stealth mindset creates the conditions for a possible empathetic response for the experiences of detained subjects. The analogy of Hope sneaking around Metamorphosis with undocumented immigrants avoiding detection, while obvious, is nevertheless historically relevant. The gameplay and gamespace correlate well with the detained (im)migrant and provide some political pedagogical impact for players, thus showing how some bodies experience recursive detention and stealthing with a transnational politics of location. However, being one of the first videogames to engage in empathy-through-stealth, République does not account for crucial gameplay procedures such as interesting choices and diverse parasocial interactions. In spite of these shortcomings, République 98 Rebecca S. Richards shows that videogames can provide virtual worlds that help players understand the world in which they inhabit, in this case, the world of immigration detention centers and state-sponsored immigration surveillance. The game, therefore, provides a baseline of how videogames, once an ephemeral and purely entertaining medium and often a project of violent masculinity, can engage in the politics of location for the gendered subject. As such, it is a founding text of a genre that includes later blockbuster games like Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Stealthing and Attacking After the Environmental Apocalypse: Horizon: Zero Dawn As noted in the previous section, not all stealth games omit the possibility of violence and aggression. In fact, some of the most lucrative games blend stealth with action-adventure mechanics such as shooting, free running, hand-to-hand combat, and tactical warfare such as traps and bombs. Horizon: Zero Dawn (HZD) falls into this blended genre of gameplay. HZD encompasses a much more expansive gameworld than République, requiring around 30 hours to complete. Unlike République, which requires linear gameplay, HZD is an “open world,” meaning that the gamespace is completely explorable at players’ discretion. Players can decide when to tackle specific missions, or they can explore the gamespace by hunting and collecting materials. Briefly summarized, HZD presents a post-apocalyptic world that emerged after an environmental catastrophe caused by corporations’ unethical use of green technologies— originally invented to solve climate change—to develop weaponized AI. The AI take the form of hostile intelligent dinosaur-looking machines (called “the Machines”), which now roam the lands and threaten human survival. Like République, HZD uses elements from the real-world to build a gameworld. The virtual world is a re-presentation of the actual United States, specifically the western states of Colorado and Arizona, though the artifacts of contemporary civilization (e.g., buildings and monuments) are covered in plant-life or reduced to rubble. By using the historical threat of climate change as the cause of this apocalypse, as well as the geographical location of the western United States, the gameworld leverages actual political issues and geographical spaces to engage questions about the politics of location for the transnational subject in our historical moment. HZD also features a female protagonist, Aloy, who becomes an excellent hunter of the Machines, thanks to the rigorous training she receives from her guardian, Rost. Firearms do not exist in this virtual world; instead she uses archery weapons, including trip lines, fire arrows, and explosive arrows. She is aided in her skills by a found digital technology from the lost civilization, a neurological device called a “Focus,” which allows her to digitally scan the environment to detect threats, find natural resources, and collect data about the fallen civilization. In Aloy’s world, digital technologies are forbidden because they are believed to have caused the environmental catastrophe, so she often must hide her Focus. Players can choose when and how Aloy uses her Focus to traverse space or defeat Machines or hostile humans. In using the Focus, players can engage in stealth gameplay, hiding in tall grasses, setting traps, or sneaking past threats. While sometimes direct confrontation with hostiles is unavoidable, Aloy can often eliminate threats without detection. Players use environmental clues, juxtaposed Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames 99 with digital technologies, to move from one location to another. However, using stealth mechanics exclusively can prove to be time consuming and, in many situations, an aggressive combat strategy helps players progress faster. The impact of blending stealth with direct aggression creates two important outcomes in terms of the game’s engagement with transnational themes and concepts. First, the innovative stealth gameplay demands that players consider how environmental factors and digital technologies can work together or function more efficiently on their own. The use of the Focus slows Aloy’s actions, inhibiting her capacity to move quickly; however, it can allow her to perceive items in the environment that would otherwise be obscured. Therefore, players must judiciously decide when to interpret the landscape, flora, and fauna with the Focus and when to move about the natural environment unfettered. In the era of climate change, this cognitive and spatial strategy is an urgent one for people impacted by shifting weather patterns and environmental decline. While technologies, such as carbon scrubbing or weather tracking, could prove effective in avoiding displacement or harm, they are costly and time consuming. Sometimes, the best course of action is to read the readily available environmental cues, without technological intervention, in order to find a safer shelter. Secondly, the combat mechanics speed up the missions and narrative of the game, thus allowing for more character development and side quests, including many more cutscenes, interesting choices, and parasocial interactions. The addition of these lengthy cutscenes allows the narrative content to directly address questions regarding a transnational politics of location. The game’s narrative engages the problem of scattered hegemonies in that, within this post-apocalyptic society, humans have organized into tribes.5 Since birth, Aloy is an “outcast” from the Nora—a tribe known for their aversion to all technologies and metals and often called “savages” or “uncivilized” by the other tribes. Raised by Rost, another Nora outcast, she belongs to no territory or group of people. However, when the Nora are attacked by another tribe and threatened by the Machines, Aloy begins a quest to bring peace to the people who shunned her. As she encounters other tribes and people, they called her “Aloy of the Nora” because her clothing, body, and mannerisms correspond with those of the Nora. At one point, Aloy meets another character, Talanah Khane Padish, who also challenges tribal belongings and identity structures. Talanah remarks that Aloy should be called “Aloy Despite the Nora,” noting that Aloy’s strengths and skills are her own, emerging from her liminal tribal affiliation. This encounter, while brief, highlights that Aloy’s nomadic subjectivity both constrains and aids her, and she can strategically cloak herself in the Nora’s customs to pass as a Nora when necessary. As Aloy’s reputation increases in relation to her good deeds, she is invited to “stay” and make a home within different tribes, and players can choose Aloy’s dialogue to respond to such requests, thus presenting players with “interesting choices” that are not present in games like

5 Since HZD uses real-world locations (i.e. Arizona and Colorado landmarks) for its post-apocalyptic setting, further analysis could show a (dis)connection between the imagined tribal societies of HZD and indigenous communities of the US West. However, this piece could not tackle such a nuanced analysis while presenting analyses of the other two games. 100 Rebecca S. Richards

République. Her reputation earns her costumes that are affiliated with different tribes, so she can pass as a tribal member in those areas. Players can choose to equip these costumes at will, helping Aloy survive threats in those specific territories through a costume-based stealth. Moreover, in HZD, many of the side quests require players to direct Aloy in aiding in quotidian, personal issues with different tribes people, building parasocial interactions that increase empathy during the gameplay. These side quests continually require that Aloy show care and concern for the minutiae of human relationships. The narrative content of these side missions engage an ethics of care on the behalf of players that can easily be connected to central themes within transnational feminist theory. While players can forgo these side quests and errands, to engage them means that players must care enough to engage in everyday errands like finding a family heirloom or searching for a sister’s sibling who suffers from mental illness. In these side missions, the repeated narrative trope relates to the ethics of care, especially in relation to the gendered aspects of daily life that are often overlooked in games or deemed less than heroic. The final cutscene reiterates this ethics of care. Aloy’s final mission leads her to find her mother, who is long deceased. Upon finding her body, Aloy also finds a recording from her mother, recounting a story of her past and a lesson learned as a child. She expresses that she learned, as a child, that she “had to care. . . [because] being smart will count for nothing if you don’t make the world better. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death.” This final cutscene directly articulates the repeated narrative message in the side quests and other missions: to care is the only ethical work one can bring to the world. With this narrative content, along with the stealth mechanics (particularly the capacity to pass among different tribes), players are encouraged to care about not only Aloy’s liminal politics of location but also the gendered experiences of other liminal subjects. It is in this manner that HZD demonstrates how national or geographical belongings are flexible, contingent, and yet materially important for shaping a life. The game shows that a politics of location is about acts of belonging, not about residence and family lineage. Aloy eventually belongs to each of these tribes because she genuinely cares for and serves people in each territory. Furthermore, Aloy must use stealth strategies to earn trust from other people who live outside the tribal system. Players learn that survival is less about a static locatedness but more about who you choose to care for—and that caring for others allows people a way to sneak or stealth in and out of locations that would otherwise be hostile or unavailable. While the combat and action-adventure game mechanics could undermine the ethics of care and ethos of peace and harmony that the game tries to engage, Aloy’s nomadic subjectivity nevertheless highlights how a transnational feminist belonging can stealthily evade the exclusionary practices upon which scattered hegemonies are founded. Stealthing Transnational Capitalism in Alien: Isolation The final videogame in the case study builds upon the ideas and gameplay strategies from the previous two games. However, Alien: Isolation (Isolation) uses a virtual space to examine how transnational capitalism creates scattered hegemonies for the gendered subject—in this case Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley—the protagonist of the 1979 Ridley Scott classic, Alien, Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames 101 famously portrayed by Sigourney Weaver. Amanda is an engineer and welder for a “megacorporation” called Weyland-Yutani. She is approached by a corporate executive, Samuels, about a mission to the Sevastapol space station, which is a “permanent freeport facility” owned by the Seegson Corporation, orbiting a giant gaseous planet. According to Samuels, another ship found the Nostromo’s flight recorder (the original ship from the film Alien), which may help Amanda gain some “closure” about her mother. Samuels explains that they are going to Sevastapol because the data recorder is “proprietorial material” or IP for Weyland-Yutani. Upon arrival, an explosion separates the travelers, leaving Amanda alone to enter the station. The rest of the game follows Amanda as she navigates the nearly abandoned space station. She encounters—and often collaborates with—androids and humans, but she also encounters the xenomorph (the alien) from the Alien film. The gameplay is about Amanda surviving these encounters and about finding out what happened to her mother and Sevastapol. The narrative of the game is not terribly compelling; most of the narrative content is derivative of the Alien film franchise. But like the film franchise, the game engages questions about the ethics of capitalistic goals—in this case, interstellar mining and exploration. Ironically, this lack of narrative tension in the game is what allows the procedural rhetoric of transnational politics of location to be compelling and thick. Unlike HZD, Isolation relies heavily on ludic elements—the ways in which players engage the virtual gamespace to create a meaningful, nuanced, and compelling experience. The procedural rhetoric of stealth, or sneaking, is thereby framed as vital for nomadic subjects’ survival when navigating the scattered hegemonies produced by transnational corporate capitalism. Isolation uses many of the traditional stealth mechanics found in République and HZD. For example, players guide Amanda, who almost always walks in a crouch position because running or walking upright makes noise, thus alerting enemies to Amanda’s location. The game also allows for the use of other mechanics to aid in the stealth gameplay, like crafting “noisemakers” to attract the xenomorph or other enemies, thereby allowing players/Amanda to move in the opposite direction. To help players develop a stealth strategy, Isolation provides two mapping mechanics: level maps (that provide global spatial knowledge) and a “motion tracker” (to provide local spatial knowledge). As players move around a new level, the level map becomes more complete— showing spatial learning on the part of players/Amanda. These level maps help players understand Amanda’s relationship to the global spatial layout of Sevastapol. But this global mapping does not help players survive the immediate threats facing Amanda. To this end, the game provides players with a “Motion Tracker.” This device, which players can choose when and how to use, provides a 360-degree radar detection of localized movement. Knowing the local position of the xenomorph, androids, or other humans can help players decide how and when to move. However, if enemies are close, they can hear the beeping of the radar, so using the motion tracker can actually hinder Amanda’s progress. By providing both the local and global mapping/tracking mechanics, the game engages the dialectic between the problematic local/global binary that Grewal and Kaplan critique. Both mapping systems are incomplete in and of themselves. However, when engaged 102 Rebecca S. Richards simultaneously, players have a stronger spatial understanding, allowing for more successful stealthing. Where the stealth game mechanic adds something radically different from other stealth games is that the Artificial Intelligence, or AI, of the xenomorph is unpredictable. Creative Assembly, the game developers, coded an engine where the xenomorph moves in unpredictable or new ways based on players’ actions. When Amanda dies, the next time players respawn, the AI will not behave in exactly the same way. There’s no way to learn or memorize the path of the AI because its behavior is contingent depending on players’ spatial behavior, meaning that the AI reacts to the specific actions of a given player. Some reviewers found this AI mechanic to be brutal or tedious, requiring a lot of time on the part of players since Amanda will die over and over without making progress. The resultant procedural rhetoric of this AI mechanic means that players cannot “run” away or defeat the xenomorph. When Amanda is detected, she will die. There is no way to injure the xenomorph through aggression. Players continue confronting this immortal threat because game includes an official “end” where Amanda destroys the freeport facility and ejects herself into the vastness of space where she floats ambiguously between life and death. In essence, she destroys one space of interstellar capitalism, thus resigning her own existence to a slow death in a space suit or some kind of unlikely rescue. Finally, making the gameplay even more tedious, complicated, and user-based, there is no autosave or “soft save” check points in the game. Instead, there are diegetic “save” mechanics, in the form of old emergency phones, which require players to install an access card—during which time Amanda can be killed or detected. This “manual” save mechanic compels players to evaluate the space and the level of risk they are willing to take. Do you risk going to the save spot and being detected, but saving your hard won progress? Or do you forge towards your goal? I argue that the spatial design of the game, juxtaposed with the stealth mechanics— especially the game engine AI—produces a procedural rhetoric about the difficulties of transgressing or moving across boundaries in a transnational capitalistic world. In the case of Isolation, the “transnational” world is interstellar, but the space station is still a “freeport facility” in the language of the game. The stealthing mechanic is, on the surface, a way of hiding from the horror of the xenomorph. However, the spatial and gameplay analysis show that the xenomorph is not the “alien,” or that which is threatened in this transnational location. The xenomorph can move without fear or any kind of defense. Conversely, humans aboard the station are the alien Other who must sneak around or risk annihilation. In this virtual world, humans, like Amanda, exist under the orders of capitalist labor or interstellar capitalism, which reduces them to sneaking around and trying to survive. The mission for the Nostromo, in Alien, is to mine for resources, without concern for interstellar limits. In Isolation, the mission is to control intellectual property related to interstellar exploration. While the act of interstellar expansion is not irresponsible in and of itself, in the film series and the game, the human characters are all laborers who are in peril because of capitalism’s inability to abide any limit. Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames 103

The gamespace, therefore, presents the affective and challenging experience of navigating the scattered hegemonies of transnational capitalism. Through its level design and game mechanic, the game repeatedly highlights that players are constantly threatened with no way to overcome this threat. Instead, the best one can hope for is to sneak past in a tedious manner, e.g. hiding in lockers and vents or backtracking to less threatening spaces which forestall Amanda’s progress. In other words, this virtual space expresses that humans have transgressed or gone beyond a limit some time ago, which the gameworld reflects in the condition of the broken down and abandoned space station. The game mechanics highlight the fact that the concept of linear “progress” is no longer helpful in orienting players in this perilous space. Such peril engenders constant disorienting and remapping since players cannot memorize the space and how the threat moves in it. Linking back to Isbister’s work on videogames and emotion, the procedural rhetoric of Isolation is all about affect—the impact of horror, fear, and tension as players try to avoid a threat that they cannot defeat, nor ever fully elude because the AI engine keeps evolving as the game continues. The xenomorph, therefore, comes to represent the ever-shifting scattered hegemonies of transnational capitalism, forcing players to spend time in spaces that—in other games—players would run by without a moment’s pause. Therefore, progress is slow, the threat is always near, and players’ movements are rarely linear. Isolation provides a more pessimistic procedural rhetoric about a transnational politics of location, but regardless of this point of view, it captures the horror of stealthing scattered hegemonies of transnational capitalism. Most of us, in the non-virtual world, are constantly stealthing transnational capitalism, figuring out our ways around the threat, which often push us into spaces that we rarely discuss but tolerate/endure nonetheless. Whether it is jumping the turnstile at the subway station or crossing national borders for more affordable medications, people—even in economically privileged nations—learn to navigate the structured logics of transnational capitalism, causing many of us to double back, to stand still, or to even hide to wait out potential threats or punishments. The procedural rhetoric of Isolation mounts the tedium and recursive nature of such movements.

Conclusion These three videogames’ stealth mechanics provide simulated experiences of a transnational politics of location thereby highlighting empathy-through-stealth. In République, players get to stealth around a detention facility, hacking digital technology to help a detainee escape, thereby foregrounding stealth as the only means of a transnational politics of location. In HZD, players are presented with narrative content related to flexible citizenship and transnational belonging, as well as an ecological critique of climate change and gendered responses to it. HZD focuses on how stealthing necessitates caring about quotidian dilemmas in order to build a network of solidarity, or what in game studies is called parasocial interactions. Finally, in Isolation, players cannot escape the threat of the xenomorph, thus stealthing is only possible with strategic local and global mapping, often used in tandem. Each of these games present virtual locations where national belongings are traces that both do and do not constrain the gameplay experience. Read together, 104 Rebecca S. Richards these games allow players to engage theoretical questions about how stealthing works (or does not work) in relation to avoiding the material consequences of transnational flows. In making this argument, I do not mean to flatten all transnational stealthing into the same category. Indeed, there are significant differences between transnational stealthing, especially in terms of their consequences and level of threat. Instead, these videogames show how stealthing is an inherent component of a transnational politics of location—more and more situations call for stealth strategies as a way for women to survive the material consequences of transnational flows. Furthermore, these games are not free from faults and gaps in their procedural rhetoric. As noted earlier, HZD employs a type of violence that is all too prevalent in AAA videogames. Furthermore, these games all feature white and/or Anglo- or Euro-centric female protagonists. The phenomenon of systematically over-representing white playable characters is well documented in videogame scholarship (Williams et al). Since some of the most vulnerable transnational citizens tend to be racial minorities in the spaces they stealth, this is a significant flaw in these games’ abilities to build empathy and understanding of a real-world transnational politics of location. The invisibility of the protagonists’ whiteness, while not always relevant for the fictional context (e.g., Isolation’s xenomorph), means that visible racial differences are not part of players’ stealthing strategies. Nonetheless, my overall argument is that games, such as République, HZD, and Isolation, show much promise in the evolution of videogames to present complicated feminist themes. While each game is hardly free from ideological or formal critique, they mount urgent simulated experiences that transcend filmic or literary representations of the transnational subject, creating the potential to engender positive emotional responses that encourage deep thinking, reflection, and care. Because they focus on single protagonists, these games facilitate an engendering of empathy for the social and individual aspects of a transnational politics of location rather than a recognition of institutional responsibilities for the transnational subject. In spite of this limitation, the games in this article demonstrate how videogames, often artifacts of empire and transnational capitalism, can be transformative. Isbister argues that “no other medium offers this kind of transformative power at the individual and social levels” (71), and I find that these three games prove her point. Moreover, they give audiences pause to think about the ways in which our politics of location—especially in globalized capitalism—demand that we sneak around borders and barriers, an all too timely concern for this historical moment.

Works Cited

Alien: Isolation. Creative Assembly (U.K), Sega, 2014. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2010. Dingo, Rebecca. Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2012. Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames 105

Edwards, Adrian. “Global Forced Displacement Hits Record High.” UNHRC: The UN Refugee Agency, 20 June 2016, www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/latest/2016/6/5763b65a4/global- forced-displacement-hits-record-high.html . Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Horizon Zero Dawn. Guerilla (The Netherlands), Sony Interactive Entertainment, PS4. 2017. Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2016. Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, editors. Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. République. Camoflage (USA). Sony Entertainment Systems, PS4. 2016. Williams, Dmitri, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory. “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games.” New Media & Society, vol. 11, no. 5, 21 July 2009, pp. 815-834. doi:10.1177/1461444809105354. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage Publications, 1997.

At Home in Narrative: The Kept Mistress in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda

Katie R. Peel

University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA

Abstract

This essay argues that in her novel Daniel Deronda, George Eliot offers her kept mistress character a compassionate context, integrates her into the narrative in a meaningful way, and locates her in the domestic space of a middle-class housewife. She thus performs an intervention on levels of both narrative structure and content that challenges conventional Victorian ideology and creates a new narrative for kept mistresses, who had previously been invisible in both nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction.1

Keywords: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Lydia Glasher, kept mistress, narrative, and domestic space

Introduction: Undocumented Women ritish doctor William Acton’s Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social & Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities with Proposals for the Mitigation and B Prevention of its Attendant Evils (1857) and essayist W. R. Greg’s Prostitution: The Great Sin of Great Cities, (1850, reprinted 1853) proved two of the most popular texts on prostitution, and consequently on women’s sexuality, in the mid-nineteenth century.2 In their essays, a blend of medical, legal, public health, sociological, literary, and moral approaches, both Acton and Greg use Alexandre Parent du Châtelet’s earlier Parisian study as a touchstone, and like du Châtelet, both writers claim that one of the categories of prostitute that cannot be quantified by any census is that of the kept mistress.3 Acton defines the kept mistress as a woman “who has in truth, or pretends to have, but one paramour, with whom she, in some cases, resides” (54), and he positions her in contrast to the “common streetwalker,” who, because she is visible, can be identified and counted. Kept

1 I am grateful to Margaret Breen, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, and their readers for this opportunity, and for the generosity of Amy Schlag, Katherine Montwieler, Michelle Scatton-Tessier, Marissa Bolin, Susan McCaffray, and the British Women’s Writers Association and Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies communities. 2 While I would use the term “sex work” to describe this labor today, because I am making distinctions in nineteenth- century definitions, I will rely on nineteenth-century vocabulary. For a synopsis of the scholarly reception of Acton’s work, see Shalyn Claggett’s “Victorian Pros and Poetry: Science as Literature in William Acton’s Prostitution.” 3 Parent du Châtelet’s study includes a discussion of the contemporary practice of registering prostitutes in the city of Paris, one reason for his emphasis on the census approach, and becomes the model for both Acton’s and Greg’s studies despite the lack of such registration in London.

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ At Home in Narrative 107 mistresses, however, belong in the group that Acton describes as “women who regularly or occasionally abandon themselves, but in a less open manner” (15, italics mine). In other words, they exhibited few visible signs of mistresshood. Unlike the streetwalker or a woman who worked in a brothel, kept mistresses would not likely have been in public soliciting or in a recognizable brothel. The problem of finding and counting these women who, like prostitutes, had sex outside of marriage, was made complicated in that kept mistresses were located elsewhere. They were at home. The status of kept mistress entailed a transactional role in which a sexual relationship was the price for financial stability. Although with the rise of companionate marriage in the nineteenth century, the idea of marriage as an exchange was often considered vulgar, married women in the nineteenth century were kept women of sorts. That said, a married woman and her children had legal, financial, and social protection and sanction that a kept mistress did not, although the wife may have had less freedom in some other ways. There were, of course, other transactional relationships for women at this time, for example women who lived with and cared for an ailing relative. Such exchanges were not (usually) sexual in nature, and did not place the woman at risk of the social consequences that a kept mistress faced. The primacy of the extramarital sexual exchange, and the subsequent danger to a woman’s reputation, made kept mistresses’ existences risky. Also undocumented in marriage registers, censuses, and studies like Acton’s and Greg’s, these women experienced an invisibility that rendered them particularly vulnerable in a culture that applied heavy penalties for perceived illegitimacy. This invisibility of kept women extends to British fiction. Unlike French or Russian novels from the same time period, mid-nineteenth-century British novels tend not to feature mistresses in prominent roles. Instead, kept mistresses hover at the margins of popular narratives, often as rumors or in unflattering histories of male characters. This is not the case in the fiction of Wilkie Collins or George Eliot, whose Daniel Deronda (1876) is the focus of this essay. While both Collins and Eliot employ similar strategies, particularly in their uses of domestic space, Eliot’s commitment to realism and her sustained integration of a kept mistress character into her contemporary novel underscore the urgency of her portrait.4 In Eliot’s novel, Lydia Glasher is a central character; she may technically be a kept mistress, but she looks like a middle-class housewife. Locating Lydia in her home, where studies like Acton’s and Greg’s would not have found her, Eliot recovers the kept mistress from the ideological category of prostitute and makes her, in the words of the novel’s Sir Hugo, an example of one of those “‘sort of wives’” (613), dismissed by standard accounts, fictional as well as social. With Lydia, Eliot counters the conventional representations of fallen women, and, as Roxanne Eberle argues about some

4 In “The Natural History of German Life,” Eliot argues that an artist’s responsibility to faithfully represent a subject is in fact a moral obligation when depicting those less fortunate. In Collins’ sensation fiction, a kept woman passing as a middle-class housewife, while a deliberate narrative strategy, might also contribute to the horror produced by anonymity and questions of identity. 108 Katie R. Peel nineteenth-century women writers, interrupts “the harlot’s progress,” a narrative that follows a downward trajectory through prostitution to death.5 In her characterization of Lydia, Eliot casts the body as well as the location of the kept mistress as a site of revision.6 In so doing Eliot responded to medical, legal, social, and religious discourses that alternately objectified, erased, overlooked, or vilified the women who lived as wives to men who were not their husbands. Eliot makes explicit that her fictional mistress is not a courtesan, but rather a woman who fell in love and is subject to rigid marriage laws.7 No longer portrayed as contaminated or the source of temptation, Eliot’s kept mistress inhabits a domestic setting, and accordingly counters prevailing negative narratives. At a time when a woman who had sex outside of marriage was officially categorized as a prostitute by medical, legal, and social institutions, and ideologically portrayed as a scourge and the opposite of all that a woman should be, Eliot adopted a revolutionary strategy: she presented her kept mistress as a realistic, middle- class wife and mother living in her home. 8 Furthermore, Lydia herself is agent in her own domesticity. Nicole Reynolds, author of Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain, writes, “embodied subjects both determine and are determined by architectural spaces and the activities that unfold within, around, and through them” (6). Lydia’s body, presented within the home, makes her the ideal, middle-class woman: wife and mother. Her inhabitance of Gadsmere with her children makes the estate more than just an asset listed in Grandcourt’s will: Lydia makes Gadsmere a home. Ultimately, Lydia’s representation offers a realistic, lived experience of a woman disenfranchised by unforgiving ideologies and practices. Eliot’s sympathy for Lydia and her situation as a kept mistress, use of narrative allotment, and placement of the mistress character in domestic space result in a new narrative for the kept woman. In this way, Eliot combats what Chanel Craft Tanner calls the invisibility that is not only erasure, but violence (274-5). In terms of otherness, while Daniel Deronda is most regularly cited

5 Ideologically, a woman who has sex outside of marriage is fallen, and tends to be represented as a prostitute or on her way to inevitably becoming one. Greg writes of this representation: “No language is too savage for these women. They are outcasts, Pariahs, lepers. Their touch, even in the extremity of suffering, is shaken off as if it were pollution and disease” (3). In her pioneering Tainted Souls and Painted Faces, Amanda Anderson notes that while many scholars treat “fallenness” as a somewhat fluid category, few treat it as an issue of “attenuated autonomy and fractured identity.” She places fallenness into a context of agency and selfhood (2-3), and others have since followed her lead and complicated understandings of fallenness. Various scholars have worked on recuperating Victorian prostitutes, both fictional and, in the case of Judith Walkowitz’s work, historical. 6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, and Eliza Lynn Linton present variations on this relationship in their writing, as well. 7 Collins includes a number of women characters who are kept in various arrangements, including Norah Vanstone’s mother in No Name, and Sir Percival’s mother and Mrs. Catherick in The Woman in White. In many cases, these characters are part of Collins’ larger project revealing the injustices of marriage and inheritance law. 8 In real life women such as Lydia were often deemed concubines, the term used in the nineteenth century to indicate cohabitation outside of marriage. Ginger Frost’s excellent Living in Sin studies the complexities of concubinage. Because in Daniel Deronda Grandcourt no longer lives with Lydia, I am not using Frost’s model here, though it can be applied to other kept mistresses who cohabitate. If they did cohabitate prior to Colonel Glasher’s death, Lydia and Grandcourt would fall into Frost’s first category of concubinage: those who cohabitate because they cannot marry. This is also the category that Eliot herself falls into. At Home in Narrative 109 for its representation of Judaism and Jewish concerns in an Anglo world, I argue that through the character of Lydia Glasher, Eliot challenges narrative convention in a way that reveals that the legal and social strictures concerned with marriage are constructs disengaged from a compassionate morality.

Compassionate Context As part of her critique of the legal and social systems that restrict women, Eliot presents Lydia within a context that encourages reader compassion.9 Eliot offers a key with which to read Lydia and her situation: the epigraph to the chapter that takes place entirely at Gadsmere, Lydia’s home, reads “No penitence and no confessional: / No priest ordains it, yet they’re forced to sit / Amid deep ashes of their vanished years” (286). With this self-authored epigraph, Eliot underscores the sacrifice and loneliness of kept mistresses, as well as their dependent state and the potential abuses they might face. Eliot’s is a portrait of a woman trapped by a legal system that offers her no relief from a bad marriage; Lydia’s relationship with Grandcourt appears to be her one available method of escape. Lydia is a woman who fell in love while in an abusive relationship with her husband. Her husband did not divorce her because he did not want his private life made public, and he himself was not interested in remarrying (287). Filing for divorce was near-impossible for a woman to do at the time, and thus Lydia began an affair with Grandcourt. Theirs was initially a loving relationship: they lived together for some time (287); he gave her his mother’s diamonds “with ardent love” (303); and her understanding based on Grandcourt’s own professions were that when her husband passed away, he would marry her (303). That said, Lydia is no victim. Lydia has neither been seduced, nor is she a courtesan, two stereotypical representations of a kept mistress. Eliot not only affords Lydia agency, but also makes her accountable for her actions. Eliot’s is a representation of a mature woman who made choices and has reconciled herself to their consequences. Lydia deeply regrets leaving her first child with her husband; her sorrow both underscores the multidimensionality of her very human character and reminds readers that she is a mother (287). These continued reminders of her maternal qualities serve to render her more like the housewife than the (imagined) prostitute on the street. Lydia’s act in approaching Gwendolen, the woman engaged to Grandcourt and one of the protagonists, is not selfish (another quality often applied to a woman who had sex outside of marriage); she asks for Gwendolen’s mercy on behalf of her children, not herself. Lydia’s present obsession with marriage to Grandcourt is not about her love for him, which she admits has cooled, but about her duty to her children: she is prepared to endure anything in marriage for her children (288). Were Grandcourt to marry Lydia, he would also settle his estate on her son and restore what he had initially promised to their children: financial and social sanction.10 Lydia is dependent upon

9 See Ginger Frost and Jennifer Phegley on nineteenth-century marriage and divorce legislation and reform. 10 Unlike on the continent, British children did not automatically become legitimate when their parents married, thus the emphasis on Grandcourt’s will. 110 Katie R. Peel

Grandcourt, and Eliot emphasizes this financial arrangement, as well as the gendered double standard: “she was a lost vessel after whom nobody would send out an expedition of search; but Grandcourt was seen in harbor with his colours flying, registered as seaworthy as ever” (287). Amanda Anderson writes that Victorian writers tended to create fallen women characters as “hyperdetermined and disturbingly ‘false’ (painted, melodramatic, histrionic),” thus creating “an effect of greater verisimilitude around the nonfallen” (10). Instead, Eliot presents Lydia as a complex character who acknowledges her situation plainly and admits her own responsibility. Therefore, Eliot renders Lydia not only like the chaste Gwendolen and Mirah, the Jewish woman who will eventually marry Daniel, in that they are all three penned in by the dearth of options for women who are not independently wealthy, but she also makes Lydia realistic for nineteenth- century readers.

Narrative Presence Although Daniel Deronda is usually discussed as the novel with English and Jewish parts, with Gwendolen and Daniel as the protagonists, I argue that the narrative is largely Lydia’s.11 The question of her marriage precedes Gwendolen’s; it is her appearance to Gwendolen that inspires the latter’s trip to Leubronn, where readers first meet her. Gwendolen’s major act of wrong (marrying Grandcourt) is against Lydia, and it is this betrayal that plagues Gwendolen, and makes her seek Daniel’s advice and atonement. It is the declaration of Lydia’s son as heir to Grandcourt’s estate that establishes order for Gwendolen, Lydia, and the narrative at the end of the novel. Lydia’s extramarital relationship, and her children’s (il)legitimacies are those against which the marriages and legitimacies of other characters (including Gwendolen’s and Daniel’s) are measured. As a marginalized woman, Lydia is at the periphery of master narratives. Eliot renders her integral, however, and in this way, the character who is seemingly marginal to the Jewish and English plotlines is in fact crucial to both of them, and determines their concerns and functions. From this perspective, the primary relationship of the novel is not between Gwendolen and Daniel, or Daniel and Mirah, but between Lydia and Gwendolen. Not only does Lydia affect the protagonist’s decision-making process and understanding of the world, but Eliot blurs the lines between legally married woman and mistress. Lydia initially presents herself to Gwendolen as the rightful wife to Grandcourt. Later, in the passage in which Lydia appears before the Grandcourts in a London park, Eliot writes that when confronted by “the dark shadow thus cast on the lot of the woman destitute of acknowledgement by social dignity,” Gwendolen recognizes “a future that might be her own” (518, italics mine). When she does marry, Gwendolen feels that she has sold herself to Grandcourt, and thus the marriage renders her a fallen woman (573). Eliot makes plain that both Lydia’s and Gwendolen’s relationships with Grandcourt are business arrangements; at least in Lydia’s case, there was once love. The provisions in Grandcourt’s will determine that one

11 While Lydia has received little critical attention, both Oliver Lovesey and Kathleen Slaugh-Sanford connect her to other characters in the novel, and argue that she is crucial in Eliot’s use of female racial otherness to interrogate Englishness (Lovesey 7). Slaugh-Sanford is one of the few scholars who makes Lydia central to her own reading. At Home in Narrative 111

“wife” will be banished to Gadsmere, based on whether or not Gwendolen is pregnant with a son, effectively making the two women equals in the same dubious relationship with him. Making the novel’s key relationship one between two women in effect queers the narrative structure, a quality underscored by the fact that the primary business exchange, the transfer of diamonds, is also between Lydia and Gwendolen. Furthermore, Lydia’s role is echoed in the various other unconventional marriages and reflections of otherness. There are two new, happy marriages in the novel, but both challenge those typically found in nineteenth-century narratives. Daniel and Mirah, whose wedding closes the novel, do not remain in England, but travel East, away from England, and out of the Empire. The happily wedded couple that does remain in England are the heiress Catherine Arrowpoint and her Jewish musician husband, Herr Klesmer. They are the new inheritors of English legacy and property. Lastly, there is the queerness of the relationship between Daniel and Mordecai, and the fact that the true marriage, “‘the marriage of our souls,’” at the end of the novel can be theirs (643). This relationship is not only transformative for protagonist Daniel, but, like Lydia, challenges the heterosexual, legal definitions of marriage. Notably, the more conventional English marriage celebrated by one of the protagonists, Gwendolen, is miserable and ends in tragedy. Eliot is not the first to perform this kind of narrative intervention, whereby a novel’s form and content revise contemporary representations of non-ideal women. Roxanne Eberle, tracing the various narrative interruptions performed by women writers, argues that “a revisionist ‘harlot’s story’ allows women writers to address systemic sexism, moral hypocrisy, and patriarchal privilege” (6). Eberle contends that Romantic writers combat the use of harlot, prostitute, and fallen woman with “well-spoken, self-reflective, and ultimately proactive heroines who invariably assume that their narratives are significant and, furthermore, indicative of a greater social malaise that the text aims to cure” (8). When it comes to later-nineteenth-century narratives, however, “the Victorian ‘fallen’ woman tends to be the object of reformer discourse” (12). I extend Eberle’s “alternative discourse” (7) of sexual transgression specifically to Eliot’s work with the kept mistress, and argue that Eliot’s Lydia is more in keeping with these self-reflective, proactive Romantic women characters than Eberle’s Victorian examples. Lydia’s visibility and activity go beyond the spectral presences of other kept mistresses in literature. Eliot invests Lydia with independent action and voice: Lydia travels to speak to Gwendolen, insists upon controlling the delivery of Grandcourt’s diamonds to her, and appears independently of Grandcourt in multiple passages. She has a backstory that makes her predicament more understandable for readers, and she is well-integrated into the narrative structure of the novel. Lastly, we see her in her home, and hers is the portrait of a middle-class family. Chapter Thirty is set entirely at Gadsmere, the estate occupied by Lydia and her children with Grandcourt, where she lives as a widow. These efforts do what the studies on prostitution cannot: they locate and validate the existences of kept mistresses.

112 Katie R. Peel

The Kept Mistress in Domestic Space According to the conventional understanding of the Victorian ideology of separate spheres, Lydia, a fallen woman in a domestic setting, is a public woman in a private space. Historians since Lawrence Stone have complicated this public/private binary. Stone posits that the home itself is a mediation of public and private, and tracks the move towards increasing group and personal privacy. More recently, scholars including Sharon Marcus, Karen Chase, and Michael Levenson, have argued for a more porous, or situational binary, noting, among other things, that each term implies and constructs the other. 12 Such readings offer nuanced interpretations of the interplay between gender and space; even so Victorianists continue to underscore the intransigence of public/private divide. For example, while finding this more recent scholarship compelling in its revelations of both limits and opportunities, Janet Wolff notes that the reason for the persistent adherence to the public/private binary model might lie in the dangers in abandoning it, “if this implies an equal access that is clearly not, even in the twenty-first century, the reality” (15). Conditions are not yet such that genders are treated equally, so we should still consider how our spaces and systems are gendered. Similarly, Leonore Davidoff suggests that because women in the nineteenth century were rarely the ones defining these spaces and limits, it is still useful to consider them as categories (22). Lastly, the prevailing negative narrative is that kept mistresses, as women who are sexually active beyond the bounds of marriage, were still associated with both prostitution and the street in the nineteenth century. While he distinguishes between invisible kept mistresses and visible streetwalkers, Acton notes that many of his contemporaries argue that “all illicit intercourse is prostitution” including “the female who, whether for hire or not, voluntarily surrenders her virtue” (7). In her essay on prostitution in the nineteenth century for the British Library, Judith Flanders writes, “More than anything, a woman’s lack of respectability was signaled by her presence in a place of public entertainment” (“Prostitution,” np). A woman whose sexuality made her no longer respectable was associated with public space. The street itself, as described by Marcus in her study of urban space, was associated with contagion, crime, moral depravity, and promiscuity (104-5). Narratively, for Marcus, Acton, and Greg, the lodging house, the representative shorthand for urban dwelling, and its lack of privacy, shared these associations with the street, and was considered one step on the path to the brothel. So, while the complication of the public/private binary matters, particularly for the (technically) sexually-well-behaved Gwendolen and Mirah, Lydia faces another particular set of ideological circumstances, for which critical attention to the distinctions between the street and the home, the public and the private, is still relevant in considering her representation.13 For Victorians,

12 See Sharon Marcus’ review of this scholarship in her Apartment Stories (6-7). Also, in their introduction to Inside Out, Teresa Gomez Reus and Aranzazu Usandizaga note the many ways women subvert conventional gendering of space. 13 Drawing on Nicole Reynolds’ work on Romantic space, I consider how, within a Victorian context, the location of a public woman in a private space informs her subjectivity. At Home in Narrative 113 the street, together with spaces associated with it, was positioned as the antithesis to the middle- class home, the dwelling of ideal wives and mothers. Eliot disrupts this opposition. Lydia is a woman who would ordinarily be considered a public woman, and yet Eliot positions her inside her home. Given the gendered spatialized logic of her contemporaries, Eliot’s representation is extraordinary. Eliot places Lydia within the home, and not just any home, but Gadsmere. Gadsmere is described in the first line of Chapter XXX as a “rambling, patchy house, the best part built of grey stone, and red-tiled, a round tower jutting at one of the corners, the mellow darkness of its conical roof surmounted by a weather-cock making an agreeable object either amidst the gleams and greenth of summer or the low-hanging clouds and snowy branches of winter” (286). This building evidently had various additions installed over time; it is an old building with history and legacy, though no uniform aesthetic. Gadsmere may lack the regularity of form prized in London architecture (Marcus 95-7), and the kind of surface-level aesthetic that might appeal to Gwendolen, but it has the character and heritage of a great country house. Later, when Gwendolen inherits the estate, Eliot writes that “Sir Hugo had seen enough of the place to know that it was as comfortable and picturesque a box as any man need desire, providing his desires were circumscribed within a coal area” (651). Sir Hugo tells Mr. Gascoigne, Gwendolen’s uncle, “‘if one’s business lay there, Gadsmere would be a paradise. It makes quite a feature in Scrogg’s history of the county, with the little tower and the fine piece of water – the prettiest print in the book’” (651). He also tells Mr. Gascoigne that it is a much “‘more important place than Offendene [Gwendolen’s family’s current dwelling],’” and that “‘the rooms may not be larger, but the grounds are on a different scale’” (651). Given that grounds are one of three crucial elements of a stately home (Stone 230), Gadsmere should be understood as such, the kind of estate inherited in upper-class families of perceived quality. Lydia has not been installed in a fashionable apartment in the city, where one might find a courtesan, but rather an estate signaling the values held by those with both genteel blood and old money, where one would find a wife. While the kind of property worthy of an inheritance, Gadsmere is located in remote coal- mining country, and thus in all likelihood in either the northern or western part of England, and far from London. Its location renders the estate less attractive to Gwendolen, and when she inherits it as a punishment (Sir Hugo uses the word “banishment”) at the end of the novel, she decides to rent it out, probably to someone connected to the coal industry (613). To those who live elsewhere, the stately home bears the dark stain of mining, manufacture, industry, and, literally, soot. Additionally, Gwendolen, referring to Gadsmere as “purgatorial,” likely associates the property with Lydia and Grandcourt, the wrong she has done to Lydia in marrying Grandcourt, and her own humiliation in having these intimate details publicized by Grandcourt’s will (651). Although these linkages render the estate unappealing for Gwendolen, the isolation works for Lydia, as it keeps her far from the society that Grandcourt keeps. Furthermore, in this locale she can pass as a widow:

The complete seclusion of the place, which the unattractiveness of the country secured, was exactly to her taste. When she drove her two ponies with a waggonet full of children, there were no gentry in carriages to be met, only men of business 114 Katie R. Peel

in gigs; at church there were no eyes she cared to avoid, for the curate’s wife and the curate himself were either ignorant of anything to her disadvantage, or ignored it: to them she was simply a widow lady, the tenant of Gadsmere [. . .]. (286)

Gadsmere is in a region marked by the effects of a destructive industry, and this landscape facilitates Lydia’s anonymity. Eliot’s initial description of the location does seem bleak:

the flower-beds were empty, the trees leafless, and the pool blackly shivering, one might have said that the place was somberly in keeping with the black roads and black mounds which seemed to put the district in mourning; —except when the children were playing on the gravel with their dogs for companions. (286)

In November in coal country, Lydia’s own children breathe life into the scene (286). The sense of “mourning” described serves to remind readers of the epigraph’s ashes that Lydia finds herself in as a mature woman living with the consequences of earlier life decisions, and Slaugh-Sanford points out that Gadsmere’s own developing darkness mirrors Lydia’s development from a fair young woman to a mature woman with dark features (407). Overall, Eliot’s description of the Gadsmere estate and Lydia’s own family’s effects upon it encourages a sympathetic reading of Lydia. This is the setting in which Eliot locates Lydia. While Lydia’s exterior surroundings are bleak and suggest exile, her interior space is homey. Eliot places Lydia “in the pleasant room where she habitually passed her mornings with her children round her,” or, the morning room (290). According to Judith Flanders in Inside the Victorian Home, morning rooms were women’s rooms: “they were where women who had staff did the organizing of the household: spoke to servants, did their correspondence, kept their accounts—all morning tasks, for the good housekeeper. It was in morning rooms that many women entertained their less formal callers, their close friends, and did sewing and other household tasks” (292). Moira Donald draws attention to the reproductive labor of the private sphere in which women and servants engage in order to produce and reproduce the domestic effect (104); Lydia is not only placed in this private sphere by Eliot, but works to produce this space. In fact, as Flanders writes, a good housekeeper is understood as a good person; a woman’s virtue is indeed evident in her home, and this is where readers encounter Lydia modelling various kinds of wifely activity (17-8). This space is determined and produced by Lydia; Gadsmere is no mere building in which to stash a mistress, but a family home, and Lydia herself and her body create this effect. In this room of women’s business, Lydia performs the important tasks of wife and mother. As a mother, Lydia represents the reproductive body, as opposed to the unreproductive and thus deviant sexual body, aligned with the prostitute (Bell 41). Lydia does not look sexually deviant, but rather, like a middle-class woman: both maternal and (necessarily) sexual. Her sexuality, however, like the ideal wife and mother’s, must be more implied than explicit. While Eliot foregrounds Lydia’s maternal qualities and concerns, she also continually reminds readers of her former beauty, and Grandcourt’s passion for her. At Home in Narrative 115

Lydia’s chapter at Gadsmere is a family tableau, with all four children gathered in the morning room:

[The furniture was] littered with the children’s toys, books, and garden garments, at which a maternal lady in pastel looked down from the walls with smiling indulgence. The children were all there. The three girls seated round their mother near the window, were miniature portraits of her—dark-eyed, delicate-featured brunettes with a rich bloom on their cheeks, their little nostrils and eyebrows singularly finished as if they were tiny women, the eldest being barely nine. (290)

Their brother plays with “the animals from a Noah’s ark,” and “Josephine, the eldest, was having her French lesson; and the others, with their dolls on their laps, sate demurely enough for images of the Madonna” (290). Eliot ties the children to both the Old and New Testaments, for readers who might associate virtue with things biblical. Lydia is teaching her daughter French, a task allotted to mothers, and the fact that she is able to instruct in French reminds readers that she herself has had at least a middle-class woman’s education. In this small passage there are many elements of the maternal: from the painting on the wall, to the daughters described as demure enough to be the Madonna, to Lydia’s own actions. Her children, particularly her daughters, are replicas of her. These comparisons—the daughters to the Madonna, the daughters to Lydia—serve to upend the conventional linkage of kept women to aberrant sexuality. Lydia is a mother whose children resemble both her and the Anglican ideal of the mother. Thus, the portrait Eliot offers readers of Lydia’s household is one of domesticity and virtue. As prostitutes were considered women of excess on multiple levels, it is significant that not even Lydia’s children are out of control. Eliot’s is not a portrait of monstrous motherhood. Instead, insofar as interiors are connected with moral positions in Eliot’s fiction (Logan), Lydia is operating as mistress of this home, and its interiors appear as one would expect those of a married, middle- class woman’s home to look. Beginning with the tableau, the Gadsmere chapter emphasizes family time. The family eats together, and as in many families, the parents say only a few things in front of the servants (293). Two of the children actively engage with Grandcourt: he takes Antonia into his lap as she is entranced with his bald head, and promises Henleigh a saddle (294). What makes this family different is that the children do not recognize Grandcourt as their father, but merely “Mamma’s friend,” and consequently, the older daughters are a bit shy (294). The disagreement between Lydia and Grandcourt regarding his impending nuptials even contribute to a mood recognizable to nineteenth-century readers: the narrator tells us, “all this mechanism of life had to be gone through with the dreary sense of constraint which is often felt in domestic quarrels of a commoner kind” (293-4). While the specifics of their argument are unusual for a nuclear family, this time together makes them look like the typical Victorian family. Not only is Lydia located in and producing what looks like the ideal Victorian domestic setting, but the conversation of Grandcourt and Lydia’s arrangement is set within this space, and largely in the room where a woman conducts her business. Their relationship is domestic business. 116 Katie R. Peel

Grandcourt is explicit in the financial arrangements he has made and is making for Lydia and their children: “‘But you found the money paid into the bank’” (291). When discussing the possibility of his impending marriage to Gwendolen, he tells her, “‘—you and the children will be provided for as usual [. . .] It will be better for you. You may go on living here. But I think of by-and-by settling a good sum on you and the children, and you can live where you like. There will be nothing for you to complain of then. Whatever happens, you will feel secure. [. . .] You have never had any reason to fear that I should be illiberal. I don’t care a curse about the money. [. . .] There is no question about leaving the children in beggary’” (292-3). The conversation of their arrangement is discussed plainly in Lydia’s living space. Eliot renders this arrangement part of the everyday affairs of the household, and not the abstraction that prostitution could be in nineteenth-century imagination. The other part of their domestic business regards the delivery of Grandcourt’s family diamonds to his new bride. This discussion of the diamonds is one of a power negotiation. While readers are never allowed to forget that Grandcourt owns Gadsmere and controls Lydia’s finances, Lydia exerts control over the diamonds, and succeeds in convincing Grandcourt to allow her to arrange for the delivery of the diamonds, literally the “family jewels” and bearing all of the weight of their sexual significance, to Gwendolen herself (294-7). It is a small but important victory for an otherwise disempowered woman. The chapter at Gadsmere is one about a family in family space, and one of the few times that readers see Grandcourt with his “left-hand family,” or “family under the rose” (649, 274). Externally, Gadsmere, no matter how maternal the interiorscape, is marked by soot. While the soot may work to hide Lydia further, as the building takes on the coloring of its environs, the inescapable dirtiness serves as a symbolic black mark, not on Lydia and her reputation, but on Grandcourt and his. Indeed, Slaugh-Sanford links the blackness of Gadsmere to Grandcourt, his “cruelly dark nature,” and argues that it represents his colonization of Lydia (407).14 In Eliot’s schema, Grandcourt is the morally reprehensible character. Her use of spatial politics not only renders a conventionally stigmatized character literally “closer to home” to the reader, but also places her in a morally decent light.

Conclusion How does Eliot work with narrative, which, according to Rachel Brownstein and Marilyn Farwell, is invested in the ideal woman and heterosexual marriage, given her own lived experience in which she is excluded by the same ideologies? What is the relationship between the world that persecutes her and the world that she creates? Sir Hugo describes Lydia as “‘a sort of wife” to Grandcourt, and it is this status with which the novel is concerned (613). Eliot, a writer eventually celebrated as the moral voice of the mid-nineteenth-century novel, strained in her life against the

14 Slaugh-Sanford reads Lydia as aligned with racial others in a nineteenth-century rhetorical context of racial purity, citing Eliot’s descriptions of Lydia’s dark features, as well as her marriage to an Irish officer, and Anglo-Irish baby (401-2). At Home in Narrative 117

Victorian constructs of femininity, and addressed them in her contemporary, realistic novel. Eliot paints a picture of a world in which the legal and social strictures have limiting and damaging effects on human experience. In contrast to the assertion that Eliot kept her life and fiction separate (see Rose), Daniel Deronda demonstrates that Eliot’s lived experience informed her realistic fiction. Living in a hostile climate, beyond the bounds of legally sanctified relationships, Eliot created a character who is similarly positioned; is the true heart of the novel; has a presence and voice; and succeeds via the narrative closure. Lydia disrupts nineteenth-century narrative convention. Eliot’s feminist narrative intervention not only recovers a kept mistress character, but also creates a new narrative for and encourages readers to empathize with her. Eliot’s location of the kept mistress character in a domestic space challenges a punishing ideology and changes a prescriptive narrative. Eliot places the woman associated with the street in the space of the ideal woman, and makes her look realistic. Indeed, the realism of Lydia’s existence as a middle-class woman strikes Gwendolen, who sees her and feels “a sort of terror: it was as if some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and said, ‘I am a woman’s life’” (128). When confronted with the character Lydia, Gwendolen and readers are encouraged to read her like any other of Eliot’s female characters: she is a woman making hard choices. Above all, Lydia inspires readers’ empathy.15 In recognizing that Lydia’s humanity subsumes her kept mistress status, readers might be able to also recognize both the abusive men and the external institutions that limit her. Given Eliot’s own experience with exclusion from various legal and social institutions, and her commitment to faithful representation, Lydia’s representation matters. In fact, Eliot’s narrative disruptions are in accord with her own convictions that she was a wife to George Henry Lewes. In creating a legitimate narrative space for a marginalized woman, Eliot presents her own codes of morality, which have been well documented in her letters and other work, a morality independent of legal, religious, and social laws. Her moral code is based on devotion to other human beings, a commitment to humankind, and yes, duty to family: we know that Eliot herself financially maintained Agnes Lewes’ household, even after George Henry Lewes passed away. Eliot invites readers to extend their sympathies to Lydia, a woman living beyond the law.

Works Cited

Acton, William. Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social & Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities with Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of its Attendant Evils. London: John Churchill, 1857. Archive.org, 18 Jan. 2008, www.archive.org/details/prostitutioncons00actouoft . Accessed 22 Sept. 2017. Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.

15 In this, Lydia comes to resemble the “engaging narrator” of Victorian literature whom Robyn Warhol discusses. 118 Katie R. Peel

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Bell, Shannon. Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Brownstein, Rachel. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982. Chase, Karen and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Claggett, Shalyn. “Victorian Pros and Poetry: Science as Literature in William Acton’s Prostitution.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, vol. 33, no. 1, 2011, pp. 19-43. Davidoff, Leonore. “Gender and the ‘Great Divide’: Public and Private in British Gender History.” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11-27. Donald, Moira. “Tranquil Havens? Critiquing the Idea of Home as the Middle-Class Sanctuary.” Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, edited by Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999, pp. 103-20. Eberle, Roxanne. Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792-1897: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress. London: Palgrave, 2002. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. ---. “The Natural History of German Life.” The Essays of George Eliot, edited by Nathan Sheppard, Pp. 141-77. Project Gutenberg, 9 Mar 2009, www.gutenberg.org/files/28289/28289-h/28289- h.htm. Accessed 28 Jan 2018. Farwell, Marilyn. Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives. New York: NYUP, 1996. Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: Norton, 2005. ---. “Prostitution.” British Library. 15 May 2014, www.bl.uk/romantics-and- victorians/articles/prostitution . Accessed 10 Aug. 2017. Frost, Ginger. Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England. Manchester: Manchester UP: 2011. Greg, W. R. Prostitution: The Great Sin of Great Cities. 1853. Google Books, www.books.google.com/books/about/The_Great_Sin_of_Great_Cities_a_Reprint.html?id =C8JYAAAAcAAJ . Accessed 22 Sept. 2017. Logan, Thad. “Decorating Domestic Space: Middle-Class Women and Victorian Interiors.” Keeping the Victorian House, edited by Vanessa Dickerson. New York: Garland, 1995, pp. 207-234. Lovesey, Oliver. “The Other Woman in Daniel Deronda.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 30, no. 4, 1998, pp. 505-20. Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Phegley, Jennifer. Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England. Westport: Prager, 2011. At Home in Narrative 119

Reus, Teresa Gomez and Aranzazu Usandizaga. “Introduction.” Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, pp. 19- 31. Reynolds, Nicole. Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. New York: Vintage, 1984. Slaugh-Sanford, Kathleen. “The Other Woman: Lydia Glasher and the Disruption of English Racial Identity in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 41, no. 4, 2009, pp. 401-17. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. New York: Harper, 1979. ---. “The Public and the Private in the Stately Homes of England, 1500-1990,” Social Research, vol. 58, no. 1, 1991, pp. 227-251. Tanner, Chanel Craft. “Antoine Dodson’s Sister: On Invisibility as Violence.” The Crunk Feminist Collection, edited by Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robyn M. Boylorn. New York: The Feminist P, 2017, pp. 273-6. Warhol, Robyn. “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.” PMLA, vol. 101, no. 5, 1986, pp. 811-18. Wolff, Janet. “Foreword.” Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space, edited by Teresa Gomez Reus and Aranzazu Usandizaga. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, pp. 15-17.

Out! and New Queer Indian Literature

Shalmalee Palekar

University of Western Australia

Abstract

What, exactly, constitutes a new queer literature in India? This essay attempts to examine this question by focusing on works written in the twenty-first century, with particular attention given to two short stories from the 2012 anthology Out! Stories from the New Queer India, edited by Minal Hajratwala: Sunny Singh’s “A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil” and Ashish Sawhny’s “Nimbooda, Nimbooda, Nimbooda.” Intended as neither a legal nor a historical study, this essay considers the interplay of literary cultural production and real-world, watershed events. Through asking questions such as “What is ‘new’ about these twenty-first century works?” and “How are they ‘queer’?” I seek to map the politics of location in Singh’s and Sawhny’s texts. More generally, I consider contemporary queer Indian literature, particularly with regard to its focus on what I would term “visible-invisibility”—the contradictory, complex, time-and-place-specific discourses that construct queer Indian subjects across diverse religious, gender, and community contexts.1

Keywords: Queer, Indian, Contemporary, Literature, Out anthology

Contested Locations: The Question of Queer Indian Literature and Historical Contexts n exploration of what is “new” about new queer Indian literature requires a brief historical sketch and a clarification of what is meant by “queer” in an Indian context. A Given India’s complex pre-and-colonial past and legacy, the question of “queerness” is necessarily a vexed one. It requires a recognition of both the intolerance of non-normative genders and sexualities, which may be understood as a relic of colonialism, and the circulation of expansive understandings of society and individual lives in ancient and medieval Indian writings. India’s laws and their effect on queer lives have owed much to British colonial rule. So, for example, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code carried over a colonial-era 1861 law that deemed “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal” illegal. The ways in which colonial law influenced and continues to influence postcolonial cultural- nationalist formulations with regard to gender, religion, class, and caste, as well as sexuality, is the subject for entire books. However, one of the aspects of this influence pertinent to my discussion is the loss of plurality that was historically a feature of belief systems and, indeed, literary and lived practices of precolonial India. This is not to point to any kind of utopian state,

1 I would like to extend a special thank you to Rulmini Panda and Anneli Strutt.

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 121 of course, but rather to the fact that ancient and medieval texts reveal more flexible societal structures and non-normative lives than those in place after Independence. Here the work of queer literary and cultural critic, writer, and translator Ruth Vanita has been particularly influential. She explains, “British nineteenth-century administrators and educationists imported their generally anti-sex and specifically homophobic attitudes into India. Under colonial rule, what used to be a minority puritanical and homophobic voice in India became mainstream” (11). This statement, while sweeping, illustrates one of the main impetuses behind the evolution of queer studies and more generally, queer writing in India: a vivid recuperation of India’s precolonial queer past. Article 377 of the Penal Code, which continued to be enforced until 2009, when provisions outlawing consensual sex between adults in private were struck down by the New Delhi High Court, was struck down by the Supreme Court on September 6, 2018. The ruling represents a major victory for queer activism. It is indicative, as the court observed in its ruling, of “changing times.” While there has been a shift in public opinion regarding the acceptance of queer rights, conservative voices within the country continue to frame queer communities and individuals as something alien to “Indian culture” and a corrupting product of “Western influence.” Contra to this homosexuality-as-Western-disease discourse, influential scholars such as not only Vanita, but also Saleem Kidwai, Giti Thadani, and Devdutt Pattanaik have established that plurality and liminal states have historically been productive of queer tales that are imbricated in Indian cultural history. Very often undertaken in response to conservative efforts, these scholars’ projects seek to show how the queer has always been present in the fabric of Indian society, even as what that means has changed over the centuries. This body of work has been extremely important in interrupting modern discourses that seek to alienate queer communities in India from their own cultural roots, and while these projects have been critiqued as exercises in retrospective reading, they remain crucial in maintaining a multiplicity of canons. While these projects differ in scope and subject matter, their common interest lies in examining the subcontinent’s varied “classic” literary texts, both secular and religious. One of the first instances of Indian scholarship of queer recovery is Gita Thadani’s Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India (1996). It is an important collection but as Vanita points out, “is flawed by its erasure of medieval, especially Muslim materials” (10). In 2000 Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai published Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, which is now considered a foundational text in Indian queer studies. Vanita has also edited a number of other similar works2; Devdutt Pattanaik’s The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore (2002) is another example of this genre. Some of the fictional texts these scholars examine and/or translate were produced under restrictive social conditions and therefore, with few exceptions, relied heavily on subtext, subterfuge, and reading against the grain. One example of an early twentieth-century queer

2 These include Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (2001) and Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (2005). 122 Shalmalee Palekar literary work is the collection of Urdu short stories Chocolate (1927) by Pandey Bechan Sharma, which Vanita translated in 2009. Sharma writes with remarkable candour and passion about male love and relationships, even though his stated intention is moralistic and homophobic—to warn against forming such attachments. For its part “The Quilt” (1941), a short story by Ismat Chughtai (also originally written in Urdu), subtly describes a young girl witnessing an intimate scene between a woman and her maid. Chughtai was brought up on obscenity charges when the story was first published, but it has since entered the canon and is taught in many university courses in India. Within non-fiction, a canonical presence from the mid-to-late twentieth century is My Story (1973), originally published in Malayalam. It is the once-scandalous autobiography of writer Kamala Das, wherein she describes several of her intimate relationships with women.3 As even this short list suggests, the history of literature concerning covert or overt non- heterosexual relationships and queer sexualities extends much further back than the establishment of India as a modern nation-state (and certainly much further back than the post- liberalised economy of the 1990s). It is against this quickly sketched summary that I begin my exploration of new queer literature across a range of genres. Here the term “queer” requires a sensitive and nuanced approach. Indeed, when discussing any aspect of queer culture in India one must recognize the complexities that necessarily attend one’s approach: the vocabulary that tends to be used to describe queerness in India is sourced from theory formulated elsewhere and so is sometimes inadequate in its representative capacity. A vast number of identities and practices fall under the umbrella term “queer” in an Indian context, and consequently I use the term as a flexible descriptor of these identities rather than as a singular or homogenizing marker. While in the 1980s a number of diasporic writers such as Suniti Namjoshi and Vikram Seth began to publish queer work,4 the 1990s and 2000s saw a surge in queer writing in India. The early pulp fiction novels of Shobha De deserve mention, particularly Strange Obsession

3 While most queer Indian literature continues to be written in English, these early examples testify to a linguistic diversity within queer writing that continues into the present day. More contemporary examples include Bindhumadhav Khire’s Partner (2005) and Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue (2006), both published in Marathi (though the latter was translated by Jerry Pinto 2013). Vijay Dan Detha writes in both Rajasthani and Hindi and draws from folk tales, teasing out their often subversive messages. The famous Rajasthani folktale of Teeja and Beeja for instance (celebrating a lesbian relationship) is contained in New Life: Selected Stories (2008). While this strand of analysis is outside the scope of this essay, I will briefly mention that writing in regional languages provides a welcome departure from the dominant mode and is also indicative of a shifting politics of place within queer writing. 4 Among these writers Suniti Namjoshi is notable as one of the first lesbian writers to engage with explicitly lesbian subjects. Her most interesting novel is The Conversations of Cow (1985), a novel that mixes fable and fantasy as it examines the relationship between Suniti, a feminist lesbian separatist, and Bhadravati, a lesbian Brahmin cow. Vikram Seth remains one of the most visible queer Indian writers, and his remarkable novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986), is partially concerned with the relationship of two male characters, though neither are Indian. Firdaus Kanga’s Trying to Grow (1990) is also significant, not only for the fact that the author is from the Parsee community but also because it delves into intersectional issues of queerness and disability. Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 123

(1992) which featured a prominent lesbian character.5 Two major anthologies of note, Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing in India (1999), edited by Ashwini Sukthankar, and Yaraana: Gay Writing From India (1999), edited by Hoshang Merchant, were subsequently published. In some texts queer characters are part of a cast, as in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe (2001), which deals with both homosocial spaces and lesbian desire, as four women characters share their stories. One of these stories concerns Marikolanthu (a maid)—significant not only for her sexual relationship with her mistress but for the explorations of the hierarchies of class and caste that play into it. Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman (2002) is in turn a straightforward narrative about a woman gradually rediscovering her agency and sexuality after tiring of a life ruled by patriarchal expectations. Kapur writes about sexual desire with a notable candour and explicitness. By comparison, Abha Dawesar’s Babyji (2005) is startlingly provocative, as its sixteen-year-old protagonist engages in three very different affairs with an older woman, her maid, and her classmate. Gayatri Gopinath’s watershed critical text, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005), can be read in part as a response to this growing body of work. Concerned with the “impossibility” of female queer desire specifically across South Asian diasporic communities, her critique is relevant to our understandings of queer writing in India as well. Gopinath uses the example of the Indian community in New York refusing to let SALGA (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association) participate in the India Day parade in the 1990s in order to show the deep discomfort with queer identity that those communities exhibit. This discomfort/erasure continues in many contexts, and we can clearly see a recurring juxtaposition between the notions of the “West” as an imagined escape, on the one hand, and the oppressive “home” of India, on the other hand. To further nuance this argument, most of these stories that deal with “coming out” in locales other than India focus on gay male characters. Does the “impossibility” of queer female desire in the diaspora lead to a silence in literature as well? As Dasgupta notes, “…ironically, this erasure of queer female subjectivity is a feature not only of patriarchal and heteronormative nationalist and diasporic discourses, but also a feature of some gay male and liberal feminist framings of diaspora” (n. pag.). In the 2000s it also became increasingly difficult to productively and clearly divide writers into those belonging to the diaspora and those living in India. With the movement between countries becoming increasingly easier and Indian publishing becoming more lucrative, there has been a strong trend of writers who have migrated but find it easier to secure book deals in India. With regard to queer texts, the 2009 ruling certainly made it easier for writers to create explicitly and for publishers to print explicitly queer texts. A number of these works could be classified as “classic” coming-out narratives, but what is particularly interesting is how these are positioned and how, in their availability in India, they queer simplistic notions of location, subversion and belonging. In fact, this new queer literature became—particularly in the 2000s—

5 De’s depiction of lesbianism in her novels relies heavily on negative stereotypes and is evidently deployed for shock value, but I mention her work because it did make an impact on the popular, English-reading Indian consciousness. 124 Shalmalee Palekar one of the ways in which Indianness travelled and circulated transnationally and was appropriated and reabsorbed into other cultural matrices and contexts.

Out!: Travelling and Transnational Sites This travelling and transnational site of reciprocal currents is precisely where we can situate the 2012 anthology Out! Stories from the New Queer India. It was published by Queer Ink, an Indian queer portal and publisher that, edited by the diasporic US writer Minal Hajratwala, gives voice to a number of queer Indian authors. For Hajratwala, the desire to showcase possible queer presents and futures is at the heart of the collection’s literary and cultural intervention. In a magazine interview she explains that “certain issues such as lesbian suicide have been written about quite a lot, so we wanted to make sure we offer a more diverse and balanced picture” (n. pag.). Significantly, her words appeared in a mainstream, non-queer publication—signposting not just the anthology’s positionality in the year’s literary output, but a shift in sexuality-related discourse in a public culture context. The anthology’s politics of location also embody the blurring of the now outdated, discrete categories of “Indian homeland” versus “diaspora,” and work against queer formulations that privilege the diaspora in this now-problematic binary. When approaching such an anthology, the question inevitably rises as to what exactly could make up the stories of the “new queer India.” What is new about these queer stories in today’s India, specifically? The answers to these questions are surely not reducible to just characters or settings, but rather require us as readers and critics to formulate a new aesthetics, whereby we, adapt our theoretical lenses to accommodate emerging forms of writing. It might also be helpful here to keep in mind film scholar T. Muraleedharan’s formulation of “queer.” For him, queer

empowers a mode of enquiry that refuses the grid of sexual/non-sexual divisions in conceiving pleasures. In other words, it repudiates conventions that classify pleasures as ‘innocent’ and ‘sexual’ or even ‘corporeal’ and ‘spiritual’, highlighting zones of fluidity and blur such distinctions, in order to generate fresh perceptions of human intimacies and corporeality. (71)

Out! offers such “fresh perceptions of human intimacies.” Further, through the thematically and stylistically wide-ranging stories that comprise it, the collection also implicitly tackles the urgent need to nuance the critical language and theoretical frames that are traditionally used when dealing with non-Western queer cultures. The anthology is written in English, but certainly troubles dominant and/or Western and/or globalising queer literary models. Thus the new queer writing in Out! effectively opens up queer possibilities and modes of reception within and for India’s cultures, cityscapes and literatures. As Dasgupta contends:

…within the context of processes of globalisation, Euro-American signifiers of queer/non-heterosexual desire are increasingly becoming the blueprint for same- Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 125

sex loving individuals across the globe... These include such assumptions as the notion of a unitary ‘gay’ identity that exists in opposition to heterosexuality and hence can only find fulfilled expression through public visibility and departure and separation from heteronormative socio-cultural structures and institutions like the patriarchal family/home...In a global framework, the power-hierarchy between a politically and sexually ‘evolved’ articulate and visible lesbian and gay identity, and other ‘less evolved’ same-sex subjectivities gets replicated through an underlying developmental logic that sees a Western-style ‘out’ lgbt identity as the (only) end point for all Third World non-heterosexual sexualities. (Dasgupta n. pag.)

This point about disrupting a reductionist “developmental logic” about “less evolved” LGBTQ sensibilities is crucial, especially as several texts in the years immediately following the 2009 judgement situated queer desire squarely within the realm of the extended family/home. 6 The value systems sketched out by Dasgupta above would not do these texts justice. In fact, articulated within structures like the family/home/local community, the stories I read closely in this essay– question, sometimes critique, but never completely reject queer desire.

Sunny Singh’s “A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil”: Locating Queerness in Visible-Invisibilities Though Singh’s story is a relatively short piece, it stands out because of the sensuousness and subtlety of its prose. While never explicitly naming the relationship shared by the two women, Anu-di and Vibha-di, Singh does not come off as coy. Instead, the text clearly negotiates with the discourse of the “invisible lesbian” in Indian society, which Gita Thadani and others have discussed. Thadani writes, “In India the phenomenon of lesbian invisibility is linked to the myth of tolerance which makes two contradictory statements: firstly, that lesbians do not exist, and secondly that there is no discrimination against them” (149). These assertions, while written in 1996, still hold true to a degree. In “A Cup” Singh delves into the networks of complicity that allow these contradictions to exist, while also underlining the inevitable points of rupture. The

6 For example, The Last Pretence (2010) by Sarayu Srivasta follows Mallika as she interacts with a dizzying array of characters, including the eunuch Kamala. I would struggle to “classify” Mallika, but she does explore queer desire with another woman, although her central struggle remains with her relationship with her son. Among more contemporary novels, Perfectly Untraditional (2011) by Sweta Srivastava Vikram stands out for having a central character who is definitely lesbian. It explores how she came to articulate that identity once she moved to America, in the context of her attempting to come to an understanding with her estranged father. Once again, notions of family and belonging are at the forefront. The Dark Rainbow (2012) by Vikrant Dutta, however, seems to slide back into narratives of women finding solace in each other after disappointing relationships with men. Sharmila Mukherjee’s The Green Rose (2012) is a coming-out story set within the landscape of Delhi and is notable in its attempt to imagine the repercussions of the central character refusing to marry and explicitly naming her identity to her family and the larger community. While the quality of the writing may be debatable, the novel is almost alone in attempting this narrative, placing it very much in a public space that has proven to be oppressive to any expressions of female desire, let alone explicitly queer ones. 126 Shalmalee Palekar tension between what is unspoken yet understood is maintained and produces a text rich with queer possibility. Singh makes use of a narrator-protagonist who recounts a childhood episode from the earlier point of view of her young, innocent self. Along with this choice, Singh’s decision to frame from the outside the relationship of two women whom the young girl encounters is subtly suggestive: “They lived next door, Anu-di and Vibha-di. ‘Elder sisters,’ everyone called them…” (96). It is perhaps worth noting that while a vernacular vocabulary for gay male self-definition exists in present-day India, there is no vernacular equivalent for the word “lesbian” (Choudhuri 171). The addition of “di” to to Anu’s and Vibha’s names, which frames the two women as “elder sisters” and comes from the Indian tradition of calling unrelated older people by kinship terms such as aunt, uncle, elder brother, or elder sister, simultaneously underscores and obscures the women’s intimacy. Naming the two women elder sisters can be read as a deliberate strategy on behalf of the community to absorb the threat of the queer by replacing it with a safe familial term. Yet, as Singh’s narrative shows, it is precisely from within a family ritual that a queer form of pleasure irrepressibly flows. From the beginning of the narrative we see Anu-di and Vibha-di linked to each other and the world within a set of finely calibrated yet unspoken assumptions. The now-adult narrator recalls how she perceived the two “dis” when she was a young girl: “I lived next door and was fascinated by the didis: that they lived by themselves, seeming to need no one else but each other… All invitations, for weddings and engagements, births and pregnancies, would be sent to both of them: Anu-di and Vibha-di. The envelopes never carried any last names” (96). Both women are part of the larger life of the community and invited to important occasions as a unit. However, their inclusion is clearly predicated on the careful bracketing off of any acknowledgement of their actual relationship. The text is marked by silences but the quality of those silences is malleable, changing quite rapidly from that of shared understanding to hostility. The notion of the closet or closetedness as formulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (which can and often does function quite differently in the Indian context) still seems pertinent here: “a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence — not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it” (3). The narrator as a young girl encounters such a network of silences. Not yet aware of its significance, she tries to puzzle it out. The narrative could have continued in this vein, with the young child being a voyeur-witness to an adult relationship of which she is not part (much as in Chughtai’s “The Quilt”); however, Singh develops the story in a different, much more intriguing way. The gendered ritual of an older female relative oiling a young girl’s hair is a ubiquitous part of life in the subcontinent, so Singh’s choice of making this act the focus of the short story at once makes the story and the act both general and remarkably personal. It clearly is a ritual in the text, with a well-worn lead up, familiar to all the participants. The older women take pleasure in teasing the young girl with a sexual undercurrent that she does not yet understand. This Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 127 suggestive teasing is also a feature of homosocial situations among women in India, and Singh is deliberate in teasing that tension out:

I would want to protest, knowing what was to follow, but something always held me back. There was something compelling in Anu-di’s voice, something dangerous in the soft pressure of her fingers on my shoulders…Her eyes would laugh down at me for a moment, dark with something strange and mysterious, powerful enough to make me slump against her legs. (97)

The tension is only heightened in the description of the massage itself: “The first drip of the oil on my crown would make me shiver slightly… The dreaded scent would wind down to my nose… The oil would squelch and slither… I would hold my breath, waiting half-anxious, half-excited” (98). The choice of words here is highly suggestive, forcing the reader to appreciate the inherent sensuousness of the act, and clearly illustrating the “zones of fluidity” that mark the queerness of pleasure (Muraleedharan 71). The narrator continues: “Then Anu-di’s hands would begin to move through my hair… Her palms would knead the side of my head, moving determinedly down my neck in long, even strokes… Slowly her fingertips would massage my temples, moving steadily to the back of my ears” (98). The power of this passage is disquieting as we are confronted by the powerful intimacy of an everyday act. This process of defamiliarisation is of course an important part of postcolonial and/or queer writing, but in this case, for an Indian reader in particular, the description of the oiling of the young girl’s hair may open up specific spaces of experience that may have otherwise been left unexamined, and in the process engender “fresh perceptions of human intimacies” (Muraleedharan 71). Singh also plays with spaces in the narrative. The oiling ritual at first happens in public, under the watchful eyes of the narrator’s grandmother, who participates in the teasing and who seems complicit in the larger conspiracy of silence surrounding Anu-di and Vibha-di as well. It is when the girl enters their house, away from public scrutiny that the queer potential of the ritual seems to gain an edge. Singh is evocative in her description of the house: it is “dark and cool…full of strangely feminine things. Lace and glass, soft colours and frills—things that would never have survived in our own more practical household…” (99). It is clear that this a space “of their own,” as it were, and the ritual conducted within it suddenly appears as a threat to the larger societal order, as represented by the grandmother’s reaction as the girl is ordered out of the women’s house: “You! Didn’t I ask you to stay in the house! Get back home now” (99). The scene between Anu-di and the grandmother is full of significant silences after the initial outburst. Singh once again chooses to nuance this interaction, even though our access to it remains unstable. The narrator recalls, “I walked slowly, trying to make sense of all that remained unspoken in that room. In my grandmother’s face there had been suspicion and anger; now there remained an odd sadness and maybe, could it be, embarrassment?” (100, my emphasis). The question mark after the grandmother’s “embarrassment” lingers. Is it embarrassment at her overreaction or at finally having had to acknowledge (albeit through fear) her neighbours’ actual relationship? The acknowledgement clearly has repercussions, as the 128 Shalmalee Palekar narrator recounts: “Grandmother’s command had broken some magical spell, and I didn’t go over the wall any more… My grandmother insisted in oiling my hair herself, with coconut oil, once a week” (100). By taking over the ritual, the grandmother strives to obscure the ritual’s eroticism. Her actions construct the lesbian relationship as both legible and therefore dangerous, and yet invisible precisely through all that remains unspoken. “A Cup” closes with the narrator—now part of the adult world and party to its erasures— being once more confronted with the memory of that episode. Significantly, it takes place at her wedding, a presumed entrance into a societally sanctioned heterosexual partnership and another family ritual. Vibha-di and Anu-di still remain part of the cultural life of the community, with the former participating in a very different kind of ritual: “Vibha-di came to apply mehndi on my hands, her sari as crisply starched as ever” (100). Anu-di, however, continues to be disruptive, defying the passage of time; “still in her girly churidaar kameez,” she brings a “heavy garland of fresh jasmine. She smiled at me, only half-mischievously, in the mirror as she pinned the flowers to my hair. ‘Now that you are grown up, you’ll know the scent is an aphrodisiac’” (100). Here, instead of quashing them, Singh allows any further queer possibilities to linger, and in doing so, allows them to go beyond the purely subtextual and “against the grain” queer readings of earlier decades. While Singh’s short story is not at all explicit and the interaction between Anu-di and the narrator remains in the realm of suggestion, clearly the narrator- protagonist’s account of Anu-di’s words and gestures carries with it a very definite shared knowledge—one that both participants, as well as the story’s readers, must ultimately acknowledge.

Ashish Sawhny’s “Nimbooda, Nimbooda, Nimbooda”: Hyphenated Identities, Bollywood Affect, and the Queerness of Mumbai In 2005, the year that Gopinath’s Impossible Desires appeared, another critical collection, Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, was published, edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan. This volume, which in its problematisation of the linkage of queer identities to “Western” influence recalls Vanita’s work, sketches some of the contemporary concerns of the queer movement in India, touching on article 377, as well as other issues. In the introduction Narrain and Bhan ask:

For a country that lives under a Constitution and a penal code modelled on the nations of the West, and which firmly and desperately to be part of a Western, globalised, consumer culture, the larger question is why the “tag” of Western (however wrongly applied) is construed as an invalidation of passionately felt sexual desires and strongly defended identities, only when it comes to sexuality? (16)

For Niladri Chatterjee, the collection demonstrates a “clear-sighted identification of the several fissures that run through the Indian queer movement. Hyphenated queer identities emerge” Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 129

(n. pag.). Precisely these hyphenated queer identities—not just “traditionally” hyphenated in terms of diaspora, but with “internally” hyphenated, sometimes contradictory sites and positions — prove key in any examination of new queer Indian texts. One such text is R. Raj Rao’s novel The Boyfriend (2003), which remains a benchmark in gay writing. Rao’s witty yet unsentimental treatment of the (then much more underground) gay scene in Mumbai in The Boyfriend in particular, has garnered significant attention. The novel is also notable for mapping urban gay life, in extremely explicit detail, onto the familiar geography of the city of Mumbai, which has continued to be a popular site for other such narratives.7 The text explicitly explores the idea of hyphenated identities as the central character, Yudi, encounters issues of class, caste, and religion in his myriad encounters and relationships with other men. He maintains, “Homos are no different from Bhangis. Both are Untouchables,” and further that “homosexuals have no caste or religion. They have only their homosexuality” (81). His pronouncements are, however, proven false by the experiences of his love-interest Milind, an actual Bhangi, 8 who is not magically granted access to an egalitarian, casteless world, even though he identifies as queer. As The Boyfriend indicates, “place,” and specifically the city in all its reiterations, is an important expressive lens in queer Indian writing. Perhaps because the gargantuan, messy, overdetermined city itself functions well as a metaphor for different bodies/communities that share space, so many queer stories dwell on city life. Here the notion of transgression becomes important, as it links the discourses of spatiality and sexuality. In recent years, the term “transgression” has been used by scholars to question dominant spatial and sexual ideologies. For example, Tim Creswell cites examples of transgression in “normative geographies” in order to “delineate the construction of otherness” and challenge dominant belief systems (9). The phrase “normative geographies” refers to the notion that space helps “tell us who we are in society”: certain spaces expect certain behaviours (Creswell 8). When these spaces are unexpectedly transgressed, behaviour thought to be “natural” to a space is shown to be a spatial/cultural construct. Rao’s novel, together with the theoretical questions that it invites, lays the crucial groundwork for another Out! short story. Ashish Sawhny’s “Nimbooda, Nimbooda, Nimbooda,” a text in which plural or hyphenated identities play central roles, engages with the queer potential of the Indian city (once again Mumbai) through transgressive actions that explicitly disrupt the city’s normative geographies, and in which plural or hyphenated identities play central roles. While the stories in Out! cover a remarkably broad range of queer lives in India, “Nimbooda” stands out for its treatment of that simultaneously visible and invisible minority within that umbrella, the Hijra/crossdresser/transgender community. I place these descriptors together not

7 A similar urban gay aesthetic is present in How I Got Lucky (2013) by Farhad Dadyburjor. The work is an irreverent and salacious romp through the entertainment world of Mumbai with gay film stars out to seduce confused journalists. 8 The sociologist D. R. Gadgil defines Bhangis as “… castes traditionally confined to the business of removing night soil. They are on this account considered among the most degraded in Hindu Society” (qtd. in Shyamlal 94). 130 Shalmalee Palekar because they are interchangeable but because each label could be placed on the protagonist Aslam, depending on the context in which he is being described.9 This is reinforced by the fact that the narrative itself uses different descriptors at different points. In contrast to the cultural negotiation that still takes place over terms like “lesbian,” “gay,” or “bisexual,” the figure of the Hijra or “third gender” is one that is named and known within traditional societal structures.10 The participation of members of the community in auspicious occasions such as weddings is considered to bring good fortune, and there is an established tradition of gender-bending amongst divine beings in Hindu religious texts. Even so, the Hijra community remains very vulnerable to abuse, especially as a large number of them have no options but to be sex workers. When in this context the target of violence, Hijras have little or no recourse to be found in law enforcement. Relatedly there is also little awareness of sexually transmitted diseases or support available for treatment. “Nimbooda” touches on all these issues, even as Sawhny casts his protagonist Aslam as irrepressible. The result is a story that is as touching as it is lively, humorous and poignant. The title of story comes from a “Bollywood” film song,11 and indeed Aslam is inspired by the aesthetics of popular Hindi cinema, revelling in melodrama and theatricality with an obsession with romantic love. Perhaps this is another feature of new queer writing in India—one that finds parallels in contemporary, popular filmic texts. Certain “new Bollywood” films such as Dedh Ishqiya have, as I have argued elsewhere, shown the potential to “subvert and transmute… heteronormative romances” (Palekar 171). The story “Nimbooda” transfigures this potential into an explicitly queer narrative. It touches on the everyday flows between life, Bollywood, and literature in a subversive way by making the protagonist a queer, Muslim individual; the border- crossings in which Aslam engages—and the non-normative, liminal spaces they foreground—are crucial to the story’s frames of reference and reception. The specific film referenced in the story, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, is befittingly full of dramatic scenes with (heterosexual) lovers threatening to kill themselves if they are not reunited, and the title clearly evokes those connections to a Hindi film-watching audience. Indeed, references to Bollywood punctuate the entire narrative and become shorthand for emotional states. Ironically, mainstream Bollywood remains largely insensitive in its portrayal of the trans* community, usually using those characters for comic relief or villainy. Yet while queer audiences

9 The Trans* community in India is perhaps its most complicated in terms of how queer theory seeks to “place” it, especially since Western categories do not really fit the diversely embodied identities and self-identifications that comprise it. Sometimes these categories are so specific and local that they are not recognised even in a neighbouring state. 10 From 2011 the Indian government has officially allowed an identification other than male and female on the official Aadhar or identity cards being newly issued. 11 I use the term Bollywood in the full knowledge that it is a contentious and unsatisfactory one, and has been strongly critiqued. The film industry, critics, and scholars often prefer Bombay cinema or popular Hindi cinema. However, it is also the most recognised “brand name,” particularly in overseas markets/audiences, and like Osuri, Prasad, Dudrah, and other contemporary scholars, I use it to foreground its massive soft power acquired through the drive to participate in a globalised modernity. Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 131

(of which Aslam is evidently a member) continue to feel the pull of cultural works that exclude them, those works can nonetheless function as useful, if ambivalent, paratextual sites for audience members’ engagement with and re-fashioning of their own queer selves (Palekar 158). Aslam’s affinity with Bollywood is significant for two further reasons: he aligns his form of queerness with an industry that is quintessentially Indian, and this linkage further underscores the queer possibilities of Mumbai itself, which is the centre of that industry. The story opens with Aslam being placed within another minority community in India as his name identifies/marks him as Muslim. He seems to have no conflict with this part of his identity, however, as “His mind flitted from the sombre tones of religious faith to working out his ‘look’ for Saturday night” (351). This intertwining of religious, sexual and gender concerns is a striking feature of queerness in an Indian context, where conflict with religious identity rarely takes precisely the same agonising shape as it does in Western narratives. Similarly non-angst- ridden approaches to the intersections of sexuality, gender and religion are found in other texts as well.12 Aslam is established as visibly different in numerous aspects of his life, including his relationship with his family. His long hair is symbolic of this defiance, and he seems to have won out over convention:

Nothing and no one, not even Aslam’s dearly deceased father, had ever managed to get the better of the hair situation. Right from the time Aslam had been a baby, he had been adamant about wearing his hair long. Monthly visits to the barber proved traumatic. Aslam’s father would be forced to leave with the shrieking lad in tow, and the whispering neighbours would have more grist for their gossip mills. (351)

Aslam’s love life is tempestuous and certainly scandalous according to his community, yet Sawhny relates it with the same matter-of-fact tone as characterises the rest of the narrative. Majid Shirazi could be any no-good, faithless lover who causes grief to his beloved, and Sawhny’s treatment of the relationship is refreshingly direct and laced with laugh-out-loud moments. Aslam’s attempts at courting Majid are similarly banal yet humorous, as he memorises

12 In Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter (2016) religion and queer desire coexist comfortably for Badal, a temple guide in the fictional seaside town of Jarmuli, who is attracted to a young man, Raghu. Following one of Badal’s daily visits to the tea stall where Raghu works, we are casually told that “After the thrill of seeing Raghu at the beach was over, Badal stood at a food shop near the Vishnu temple, casting his eye around for possible clients, clinking the coins in his pocket” (54). Rakesh Satyal’s Blue Boy (2009) also employs Hindu mythology for a queer purpose. The novel traces a few months of the life of Kiran Sharma, a twelve-year-old gay boy who has recently moved from India to Cincinnati. Attempting to navigate through an unfamiliar and threatening world, both within his family and social interactions at school, Kiran begins to identify with the mischievous God Krishna (in his boyhood form). This is a remarkable narrative turn, as Kiran shows how his use of mythology can be very much his own, untrammelled by dogma. Finally, while not specifically falling under the ambit of gay or lesbian writing, Devdutt Pattanaik weaves Hindu mythology with fiction in The Pregnant King (2008) to show how queer tales are very much a part of Indian cultural history. 132 Shalmalee Palekar

“sex tips” peddled by women’s magazines, “while escorting his Amma to the Chinese dentist in Dongri” (352). Within the narrative this continual placement of the everyday and banal alongside the recognisable physical landmarks of Mumbai (including the indication of Aslam’s lower economic class through the specific signifier of Dongri,13 located well outside of the urban geo- political sites of queer visibility in Mumbai), reinforces the already multiple, already existing expressions of queerness within the cityscape. And significantly, this situating gives voice to a non-elite urban queerness. Aslam’s strategy for wooing Majid back draws on Bollywood once again when he decides to emulate “Aishwarya Rai’s ‘Nimbooda’ look... traffic-stopping red mouth, blue azure eyelids, and hair chicly slicked back” (352). The image is a striking one, even though this love story seems doomed. Indeed, the expected betrayal comes swiftly, striking the first chord of pathos. Majid has been pursuing a woman in order to marry and have children. While continuing to be shot through with humour, the reality of Aslam’s position is clear: “He was someone who never would have the satisfaction of being loved in return beyond the post-coital grunts of ‘meri jaan [my love]’. Had his rival been a queen, the claws would have done the trick... But being cheated on for a younger girl was the worst blow” (353). Having distinguished himself from his family in the form of his long hair and performative flamboyance, and in his refusal to be conventional or discreet, Aslam seeks solace in a different kind of “family”: his Bollywood heroines. Aslam’s reliance on Bollywood proves to be a coping mechanism, whereby he can claim kinship to the “tragedy queen” Meena Kumari: “He felt a deep, soulmate-like connection with the tragedy queen on the screen: gorgeous, unloved and sozzled” (353). Sawhny’s use of Bollywood as a kind of emotional shorthand for Aslam’s queer and outcast status (to mainstream society) is masterful: Aslam’s fascination for the ever-heartbroken actress calls up dozens of common references for the Indian reader without overburdening the prose itself. By the same token, while Aslam’s death wish may at first seem histrionic, it soon proves to be deeply distressing: “Death meant an acknowledgement. It also meant a full stop to all the world’s cacophony and confusion that rang incessantly in his ears, telling him that something was not right about him, though he couldn’t fathom what” (354). The climax of the action occurs at another point in the cityscape, at once familiar to readers and tourists, but now also explicitly queered. In this case it is The Wall at the Gateway of India—a “fertile hunting ground for all types of folk, whether the elite gays from Voodoo, or straight men from anywhere” (354). 14 Aslam’s entry into this climactic scene is suitably melodramatic: “He managed to step out, all five feet six inches, clad in pristine white bhartiya nari vastra [in the pristine white clothes of the ideal/idealised Indian woman]” (354). However, the impact of Aslam’s suicide attempt (the latest of many) is lost on Majid; Aslam collapses in

13 A predominantly Muslim area with a chequered history. It was once a hub for Muslim intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers, and later, underworld dons (Livemint n. pag.). 14 This description also gestures to one of the sustained critiques of the queer rights movement in India, that its focus has been on the elite, urban (male) citizen. Stories like “Nimbooda,” much like Rao’s earlier work, point sharply to the issues of class, caste and religion, along with divides along urban and rural issues that exist within it.

Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 133 appropriately Meena Kumari-esque fashion, and is rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. It is here that the most frightening realities that underlie queer life in India become explicit as Aslam is almost denied treatment with the reasoning that “Hijra case hai. Sorry [This is a Hijra case. Sorry]” (355). As Sawhny notes, “The authorities of the hospital had decreed that transsexuals, drag queens and hermaphrodites were beyond their Hippocratic realms and did not deserve to be treated. First should the poser be placed in a male or female ward? Then, the stigma and myths surrounding HIV in the third world meant that treating someone like Aslam was inviting trouble” (355). The utter lack of support is also made clear as Aslam’s friend Salim realises that Aslam’s death will mean further trouble from the police. To be saved then, “Aslam would have to be proven male. Penis and testicles would fulfil the requirements, never mind the consequences” (355). To be deemed deserving of being admitted to hospital Aslam must be stripped naked and de-queered publicly. The violation is stark, especially considering his refusal to bow to convention when conscious. This process of “proof” also brings into question the categories of identity discussed earlier. Aslam does not identify with any of the categories mentioned, of “transsexuals, drag queens and hermaphrodites.” However, as the narrator explains, to be considered human enough to get medical attention the medical practitioners must “ignore what he looked like from the neck up...” (355) and focus only on his genitals. Aslam’s return to consciousness underscores the damage caused to queer lives by such practices, as relief at being alive is damped by the knowledge of his public exposure: “Being unconscious and naked meant that strangers have espied upon his manhood. What a travesty of respect!” (356). While comically expressed, the trauma exacted on his bodily autonomy and his right to self-identification is clear: “You bitch, mujhe nanga kaise rakha? [You bitch, how could you strip me naked?] How many men have seen me? They know I’m a man now!” (356), he cries out to his friends. Aslam does recover to live and love again, “incurably romantic, alive and not quite suicidal” (356), but we are well aware of the tenuousness of his “filmy” queer life.

Conclusion: Indian Queerness, New Voices and Reciprocal Flows The anthology Out! signals a shift in the politics of place and positionality within queer writing in India. It emboldens new voices to continue to emerge and take on the important task of writing forms of queerness that arise from and speak back to life in India (and its diasporas). Not conforming to any dominant (read: Western) queer literary models, the new queer writing in Out! effectively opens up queer possibilities within and for India’s culture and cityscapes and literature. By presenting different interpretations of queerness within the domestic or family sphere, both Singh and Sawhny are able to address the present contradictions in Indian society: the dialectic of the visible-invisibility of Indian lesbianism structure “A Cup”; the gender crossings foreground questions of hyphenated Indian identities within “Nimbooda.” Singh’s narrative also speaks of hope by mobilising feelings of kinship and connection through the popular icons of Meena Kumari and Aishwarya Rai. The linkage of Bollywood to the formation 134 Shalmalee Palekar and reinscription of Aslam’s queer identity takes on special significance within the context of diverse queer audiences, readerships, and public culture — and the flows across them. The relationship between literary cultural production and real-world events is never only unilateral, and both short stories illustrate as much in the explicit and implicit questions they raise. Functioning as provocations, they ask (and attempt to answer in their own ways), whether, insofar as the city of Mumbai lends itself to functioning as a queer urban backdrop in several texts, these texts in turn queer the actual city of Mumbai. As an increasing number of writers and readers constitute it as a queer site, does the city itself begin to “accrue queerness” and disrupt normative geographies? Is it possible to speak queerness within the Indian family or community? If so, what might these voices sound like? Of course, the Supreme Court’s striking down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in September 2018 will not magically wipe out all conservative resistance. Nor will its repeal signal a “return” to some kind of pluralistic, pre-colonial India unsullied by colonial influence. India is necessarily in dialogue with not only its various past societies but also with its present societies, including queer subcultures and their dis/engagement from/with Western queer conventions. As the Supreme Court ruling suggests, homosexuality is becoming less stigmatised in India. Thus I broach a final point on the politics of location with regard to the interplay between public culture and textual culture: Indian writers of queer texts challenge the norms of stigma and invisibility with which their works have conventionally been met. In India, there are happy endings in real life, including queer life. In recent years more explicitly queer Indian works have been included in literary festivals and community events. The texts in Out! may feature endings that are equivocal, but those endings are neither inexorably tragic nor violent. Importantly, the anthology emphatically demonstrates that same-sex love or desire is not fundamentally foreign to the mediations of pleasure of either Indian literature or its readers; in fact, those mediations underscore queer possibilities within diverse loci. While there is still a long way to go in terms of giving queer people (and particularly queer women) a prominent voice, Out! has played a vital, contemporary role in representing queer Indian lives in all their varied, literary manifestations. Out!’s appearance in a post-2009 watershed world, has resulted in specific effects, such as an upsurge in well-publicised readings and community events, initially driven largely by the efforts of publishing house Queer Ink founder, Shobhna S. Kumar. These developments also underline what queer communities (literary and other) increasingly expect—a sense of connectedness and a shared creative/literary/performative being in public spaces. 15 An invisibility of queerness in mainstream literature, public spaces, and discourses is not inevitable any more. New queer Indian literature has become a fresh site of reception as well as a stage for the performance of various cultural inflections of queerness, not just enabling new insights into the writing itself, but also constituting dynamic languages for new queer reading publics.

15 Shared queer spaces in earlier decades largely focused on HIV-prevention and activism centred on men who have sex with men (MSM) as well as Hijras, though there were some lesbian-feminist activism exceptions. Pleasurable, creative, literary, performative activities were largely confined to the private domain, such as house parties, and usually divided along gender lines (Kumar). Out! and New Queer Indian Literature 135

Thus understood, the growing, dynamic body of new queer Indian literature becomes a negotiated, locally embodied, yet globalising experience. In other words, I read new queer Indian literature (and readerships) as having a distinct, emergent presence, and a strong sense of place, yet existing in a productive flow and flux with other queer textual literatures and cultures.

Works Cited Chatterjee, Niladri. Review of Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, ed. by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, no. 14, Nov. 2006, intersections.anu.edu.au/issue14/chatterjee_review.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2013. Choudhuri, Sucheta Mallick. Transgressive Territories: Queer Space in Indian Fiction and Film. 2009. U of Iowa, PhD Dissertation. U of Iowa, ir.uiowa.edu/etd/346. Chughtai, Ismat. “The Quilt.” 1942. The Quilt and Other Stories, translated by Tahira Naqvi, Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996. Creswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1996. Dasgupta, Romit. Review of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, by Gayatri Gopinath. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, no. 14, Nov. 2006, intersections.anu.edu.au/issue14/dasgupta_review.htm . Accessed 20 Sept. 2013. “‘Gay sex is not a crime,’ says Supreme Court in historic judgment.” Times of India., 6 Sept. 2018, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/gay-sex-is-not-a-crime-says-supreme-court-in- historic-judgement/articleshow/65695172.cms . Accessed 6 Sept. 2018. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005. Hajratwala, Minal, editor. Out! Stories from the New Queer India. Mumbai: Queer Ink, 2012. “India’s National Council of Churches Advocates for Repeal of Section 377.” The Independent, 23 Jan. 2018, www.theindependent.sg/indias-national-council-of-churches-advocates-for- repeal-of-section-377/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018. Kelkar, Suhit. “Love Stories Are Not Straight.” Open, 2 Feb. 2013, www.openthemagazine.com/article/books/love-stories-are-not-straight. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018. Kumar, Shobhna S. Personal Interview. 7 Jan. 2011. Muraleedharan, T. “Crisis in Desire: A Queer Reading of Cinema and Desire in Kerala.” Because I Have A Voice: Queer Politics in India, edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan, New Delhi: Yoda P, 2005, pp. 70–88. Narrain, Arvind, and Gautam Bhan, editors. Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Yoda P, 2005. 136 Shalmalee Palekar

Palekar, Shalmalee. “Picturing Queer India(s).” Contemporary Culture and Media in Asia, edited by Daniel Black, Olivia Khoo, and Koichi Iwabuchi. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016, pp. 157-73. Rao, R. Raj. The Boyfriend. Bombay: Penguin Books India, 2003. Roy, Anuradha. Sleeping on Jupiter. London: MacLehose P, 2016. Roy, Sandip. “The Gay Novel: Passé in America, but Cool in India.” Firstpost, 12 July 2013, www.firstpost.com/living/the-gay-novel-passe-in-america-but-cool-in-india-950865.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2013. Sawhny, Ashish. “Nimbooda, Nimbooda, Nimbooda.” Out!, edited by Minal Hajratwala. Mumbai: Queer Ink. pp. 351-356. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Sharma, Sanjukta. “A Door to Dongri.” Livemint, 9 Sept. 2010, https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/TeB1q2gncVOYvNla6XOiWN/A-door-to- Dongri.html. Accessed 20 April 2018. Shyamlal. The Bhangi: A Sweeper Caste. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1992. Singh, Sunny. “A Cup Full of Jasmine Oil.” Out!, edited by Minal Hajratwala. Mumbai: Queer Ink. pp. 96-100. Strutt, Anneli. Review of Queering Paradigms II: Interrogating Agendas, edited by Burkhard Scherer and Matthew Ball. Limina vol. 18, no. 1, 2012, www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/18/scherer-ball . Accessed 10 Feb. 2018. Thadani, Giti. Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India. London: Cassell. 1996. Vanita, Ruth. “Introduction.” Queering India: Same Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vanita. London: Routledge, 2002. pp. 1-11.

Harcourt, Wendy, ed. Bodies in Resistance: Gender Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 (xxi, 362 pp). ISBN: 9781137477798 (hardcover); ISBN: 9781137477804 (eBook).

Part of Palgrave’s “Gender, Development and Social Change” series, Bodies in Resistance by Wendy Harcourt comprises activist and academic accounts of people—bodies, resisting different manifestations of oppression related to and/or brought about by neoliberalist practices. The volume offers essays of interdisciplinary research on key feminist issues, such as sexual health and reproductive rights, human and civil rights, global advocacy, masculinities, and different ways of “doing feminism” (3), among others. While the majority of studies in the field provide systematic—and, more often than not, universalising—expositions of the aforementioned, the collection invites authors to develop and locate their work within their different political, structural, cultural and discursive contexts, namely that of Brazil, Colombia, India, Iran, Mexico, Nepal, Turkey, Nicaragua, East Africa, and Latin America. Adopting a reflexive learning process—that is “respecting differences of approach, age, experience, gender, race and education” (11), the volume consists of an introduction and two parts (with seven and eight chapters respectively), and is organised in line with the diverse approaches to knowledge and experiences of bodies in resistance. Part I examines place-based experiences of feminist movements with reference to academic discourses on body politics; Part II focuses on the contributors’ personal experiences of bodies in resistance from their involvement in academia, advocacy, and policy struggles. In the introduction (Chapter 1), Wendy Harcourt, Silke Heumann and Aniseh Asya lay out the goal of the discussions and, thus, the volume as a whole: bridging of the gap between academia and activism. The introduction successfully establishes the interrelationship between neoliberalism, “as the dominant ideology of today’s phase of capitalism” (7), and the body/ies resisting it, highlighting how political struggles are gendered and have gendered the body. Building on Foucault’s notion of power and knowledge, the introduction underscores the importance of “rethinking, reclaiming and repositioning bodies” (10-11) as ways of challenging and resisting the different forms that neoliberalism has taken. The seven chapters that follow delve into the politics of place in relation to gender, movements and bodies, as these have played out within the specific locales of Colombia, Mexico, India, Nepal, Iran, Turkey and Nicaragua. Focusing on the municipality of Madrid, Colombia, the second chapter, co-authored by Juliana Flórez Flórez and others, examines the impact capitalism and industrialisation have had on the land, as well as on the bodies of women workers. The essay traces the encouraging changes the Escuela de Mujeres de Madrid and their eco-feminist activity brought about on the land, on the women’s bodies, and on the experience of their bodies. In like manner, in the third chapter Daniela M. Gloss explores the politics of place of the Ecologist Women of La Huizachera Cooperative (COMEH) in Mexico, where bodies are understood as spaces and instruments of social production. The essay considers how COMEH, by supporting the

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 138 Irene Stoukou construction of domestic and community gardens with ecological technologies, contributed to amending not only the soil of the region but also the social status of the women of the co-op. The four chapters that follow provide representative case studies of biopolitics in India, Nepal, Iran, Turkey. Chapter 4 looks into the intersections of the feminist movement with other movements in India that address issues related to gender and sexuality. Manisha Desai analyses the ways in which queer, sex worker, and transgender movements not only inform but also reinforce each other. Kumud Rana in the fifth chapter, spotlighting the male-dominated political arena of Nepal, demonstrates the relation of the—female—body to the right of citizenship, the obstacles to obtain the latter, and the ways in which women in Nepal plead for gender equality and their rights as mothers. Chapters 6 and 7, reflecting on family planning and abortion legislation respectively, revolve around the impact of Islamic law and ethics on (bio)politics in Iran and Turkey. On the one hand, as Aniseh Asya explains, family-planning volunteer organisations and women advocates of gender justice in Iran, by adopting a realistic stance towards the gendered roles stipulated by the Islamic state, have managed to ameliorate women’s existing conditions (128). On the other hand, Chapter 7, building on the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, where the (woman’s) body transforms into a political space, records the pro-family policies of Turkey’s conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP). Aimed at balancing the country’s demographics (143), these policies have resulted in the marginalisation of women’s individual rights (153). In this, one of the most representative essays of the volume, co-authors Cevahil Ozguler and Betül Yarar draw attention to the ways in which neoliberalist ideology has been adapted to serve AKP’s nationalist- Islamist tenets, and, in so doing, underscore the resistance posed by activist groups towards the abortion law. In the closing chapter of Part I, Silke Heumann and others take us back to Central America, Nicaragua, in order to explore the inclusion of transgender people and politics in the Nicaraguan feminist movement. The study is structured by dialogues with transgender and cisgender feminists; similar to Chapter 4, it explores the auspicious prospect of movement intersection and inclusion, while exposing the essentialist views adopted by both trans- and cisgender feminists. Part II, “Points of View on Gender Politics, Rights and Bodies in Resistance,” comprises engrossing personal accounts of the authors who, as advocates and/or academics, have been involved in diverse aspects of body politics. In the ninth chapter of the book, Wendy Harcourt speaks from the privileged position of a feminist working in gender and development policy and advocacy, and discusses the social issues brought to the fore due to feminists’ engagement with the body, and the co-optation of feminist understandings of the body in development practices. The chapter that follows constitutes a trialogue, in which Sara Vida Coumans, Wendy Harcourt, and Loes Keysers explore the intergenerational positioning and shifts on body politics, and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). The conversation could certainly be read alongside the collection’s introduction, since it presents the reader with key feminist points in an effort to “[adapt] feminist methodological tools of self-awareness and reflexivity to the process of academic knowledge production” (214). Book Review 139

The next two chapters may be understood as responses to the above exchange. In Chapter 11, Rishita Nandagiri offers three open letters that lay out for older generations of feminists the challenges younger feminists encounter today and ponder the need and problematics of handing down the legacy of older feminists and creating space for younger ones. For his part, Jan Reynders in Chapter 12 poses the question “Where are the Men?” in an effort to discuss the ways in which patriarchy oppresses men and boys, while reflecting on manhood, masculinities, and gender justice. Reynders’ engaging essay notes not only the increasing participation of men in gender equality debates, but also the potential outcome of this shift. Chapters 13 and 14 centre on Latin America: the first apropos of human rights, the second dealing with new epistemologies of (decolonial) feminism. In the former chapter Wendy Harcourt and Jacqueline Pitanguy give a succinct history of the sexual and body politics of Brazil; their dialogue offers insight into the institutional and governmental response to and policies regarding sexual and reproductive rights. In Chapter 14, Virginia Vargas, working in the broader Latin American context, reads “the body as a territory, as a living system, complex and integral” (301). For Vargas, indigenous women’s struggle for territory not only constitutes political resistance, but goes hand in hand with the end of the patriarchal control of the body. Chapters 15 and 16 round out the volume. In the former chapter, Karen Gabriell looks into the politics of pleasure and positions. Locating resistance within the body of the researcher, she delineates the challenges those studying pornography have to overcome. In the latter chapter, Chloe Schwenke traces the status and reception of transgender people in Africa, and juxtaposes the relationship between trans activists and feminists in Africa with their counterparts in the USA. Locating African feminism within the global feminist scene, Schwenke emphasises the little attention gender identity and trans activism have been given in Africa in relation to feminist advocacy (334). Most contributors to the volume embrace an interdisciplinary approach as they examine engendered and embodied knowledge within specific historical and socio-political contexts. The rather self-standing contributions constitute both the strength and limitation of the collection: at times only tangentially related, the individual chapters invite selective reading, though not an appreciation for the findings of the collection as a whole. Nonetheless, Gender Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism is not only an ambitious and major contribution to gender and development studies, but an indispensable resource for students and researchers in contemporary social sciences in general, since it moves from theoretical discourses on sexual politics towards embodied experiences resisting neoliberalist ideology. Methodologically varied, as the authors’ diverse backgrounds indicate, the essays of the collection blur the boundaries between academia and activism: in so doing they effect the volume’s intent; smooth the way for further interdisciplinary ventures; and establish (bodies in) resistance as indispensable to change in neoliberalist regimes.

Irene Stoukou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017 (208 pp). ISBN: 9780252040993 (cloth); ISBN: 9780252082481 (paper); ISBN: 9780252099540 (ebook).

Brittney Cooper’s debut monograph is an intellectual history of African American women’s writing, speeches, and reform work that starts in the 1890s with the figure of Fannie Barrier Williams. Though the kernel of Cooper’s critique ends in the 1970s with a discussion of the work of Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Toni Cade Bambara, her brief epilogue extends her considerations to the present. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women intervenes in discourses of black studies, philosophy, American history, and literary theory in the specific and cutting prose modeled by its title. By virtue of writing an intellectual history of Black women, Cooper demands that scholars contend with the concepts and theories of Black women authors with the same vigor applied to the work of, for instance, Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze. Cooper’s designation of the public intellectuals she analyzes as “race women,” moreover, intervenes in the allocation of reform activity to Black male intellectuals—or “race men”—over the past 150 years. By referring to the thinkers she discusses as “race women,” Cooper reminds her readers of Black women’s significant roles in the public theorizing of gender, race, sexuality, and the nation throughout American history. By using the term “race woman,” Cooper also confronts the tensions of class embroiled in the figure of “race men,” who, as in the cases of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, often celebrated themselves as particularly successful models of Black respectability. This response importantly engages prevailing methods of analyzing the work and lives of Black women, namely Darlene Clark Hine’s and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s concepts of dissemblance and respectability, long highlighted as methods that reject Black embodiment and lower class and anti- bourgeois lifestyles. Cooper’s methodology for moving beyond these concepts is not to wholly reject or ignore them, but rather to develop a Black feminist method of critique distinguished by “care” and “trust.” To consider the work of Black women with care, Cooper writes, is to consider it with “scholarly rigor” (2). To trust Black women intellectuals is to “acknowledge, appreciate, struggle with, disagree with, sit with, and question” their work (2). Though her overt subject here is the work of Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944), Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), and Pauli Murray (1910-1985), among other intellectuals, Cooper’s history becomes a careful and trusting history of dissemblance and respectability: she locates these concepts’ tensions, uses, and restrictions in the particular contexts of what it meant for Black women to speak publicly in the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. For instance, Cooper relates Mary Church Terrell’s acceptance of her interpellation as white at the 1904 International Congress of Women in Berlin until the critical moment in which she took the podium, where she spectacularly identified herself as Black. While passing is often read, like respectability, as indicating “self- hatred” or “an attempt to secure white privilege” (81), Terrell’s delayed joke on the women who consistently asked her if she knew the “Negress” who would speak that weekend is both

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Book Review 141 reformative and political. Instead of forgiving or forgetting these women for promulgating politics such as respectability, Cooper locates these women in their specific contexts in order to more fully contend with their intellectual work. Cooper’s primary analytical tool throughout this text is her theorizing of “embodied discourse,” a concept she extrapolates from the work of the post-Reconstruction Black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964, of no relation to Brittney Cooper herself). Unlike dissemblance or respectability, embodied discourse foregrounds Black women’s representations of their physical existence. It is “a form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies and, in particular, working-class bodies and Black female bodies by placing them in the texts they write and speak” (3). In Berlin in 1904, for instance, embodied discourse is the means by which Mary Church Terrell makes her point clear: “by disrupting […her colleagues’] attempts to read her as a white woman, by forcing them to see her as a Black woman after they had come to respect her intelligence and education, she was able, through the use of embodied discourse, to reframe the ways they thought about Black womanhood” (80). Historians and cultural critics cannot fully contend with nor locate the work of Black woman intellectuals in instances such as this one, Cooper argues, if they do not move beyond readings of respectability. In addition to its critical importance for the discourse and practice of history and feminist theory, Cooper’s text is as lively and biting as the work she produces for popular venues such as the New York Times, The Root, and her co-created blog, the Crunk Feminist Collective. She terms, for instance, Terrell’s delayed embodied discourse in Berlin a “negression”:

In the spirit of Terrell’s wry and subversive humor in the face of having endured her white women colleagues referring to her as a ‘negress’ for days on end, I’d like to think that her big reveal at the podium was a negression, an act of social transgression designed to bring visibility to Black women on their own terms, and to resituate, even if briefly, the power of the gaze—of looking—in the eyes and at the hands and body of the Black woman. (80)

In other words, if Brittney Cooper designates her monograph Cooperian, following Anna Julia Cooper, she makes it easy for her readers to create (Brittney) Cooperian texts in turn: as in naming Terrell’s performance one of “negressive politics,” Cooper develops numerous useful concepts throughout her critique for the kind of work her subjects undertake and the kinds of methods authors engaging in the discourse of Black feminism can employ across disciplines. For its methodology and its development of theories of “organized anxiety” (34, 43), “dignified agitation” (58, 64), “listing” (26), and the “black radical spectacular” (121) alone, this book will prove itself to be important and game changing for generations of scholars to come.

Abigail Fagan University of Connecticut, USA Leibniz Universität, Hanover, Germany

Brownie, Barbara. Acts of Undressing: Politics, Eroticism, and Discarded Clothing. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017 (160 pp). ISBN: 9781472596192.

From daily routine rituals carried out in automatic precision to elaborately choreographed pieces armed with a challenging or otherwise disruptive agenda, acts of undressing are informed by an array of intentions and lend themselves to rich interpretation. Barbara Brownie’s Acts of Undressing: Politics, Eroticism, and Discarded Clothing is a recent addition to Bloomsbury’s interdisciplinary series “Dress, Body, Culture” – a bulging, provocative collection of works that examine the connections between culture and dress, from clothing to tattooing and beyond. True to the eclectic spirit of the series, this book undertakes to engage performance art, burlesque, fashion, protest, trauma, commemoration, and gang culture in an off-beat and bold dialogue with each other. The author’s main line of argument is that “dressing and undressing may be intended as a meaningful action” instead of a necessary means to an end (i.e., un/covering nudity) and the number of cases she employs is intended to bring our attention to all those “missed opportunities to acknowledge the significance of [this] journey” (2). The book is comprised of six chapters, as well as an introduction and a conclusion. Its asset is arguably that all chapters are in continuing dialogue with one another and each could potentially be expanded into a separate study. Brownie takes up undressing as a discursive, choreographed event taking place between an actor and (witting or unwitting) observers, with focus predominantly resting on its public, stage-worthy qualities rather than its everyday practice occurring in the privacy of one’s home. Brownie’s selection of cases allows her to focus on various kinds of intentionality, including eroticism, aesthetic pursuits, fashion statements, provocation to particular ends, protest, resistance, and trauma commemoration. The book’s aim is essentially “to consider the actions that lie between dress and nakedness” and to thus find its place in the burgeoning scholarship of the “liminal, the permeable, and the structurally undetermined” (Reus and Gifford 2013 qtd. in Brownie 14). Brownie’s is a sustained argument that, in its implicit focus on Western culture, differentiates between nakedness and the act of becoming naked, with the latter aspect being arguably absent from relevant studies. In the introduction, the author delineates the theoretical and critical frameworks within which acts of undressing occur. As she writes, “to equate undressing with nakedness is to confuse an action with the state,” thus calling attention to the fluid, transitory nature of an act of becoming versus the fixedness of a state of being. Even unclothedness itself becomes relative, as it points to various levels of undressed or under-dressed body conditioned by varying cultural contexts. This book thus succeeds in exposing the intricacies of what appears to be a spectrum of potentialities reflected through the shifting perspectives of displacement and replacement of clothes. The first chapter traces the indistinct line that separates private from public acts of undressing. The author employs a wide selection of examples, ranging from contemporary film to magazines, and spanning from seventeenth-century undressing ceremonies in the Palace of

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Book Review 143

Versailles attended by a privileged few, to sanctioned voyeurism in early twentieth-century films that presented the domestic space “as if subject to a panoptic gaze” (14). The chapter further delves into the shifting perspectives of participant and observer in order to show how these roles, which have been differentiated over time, become intertwined and blurred in contemporary performance art, where observation, participation, and appropriation interface with debates on agency, control and privacy. The second chapter looks into burlesque performance and the way it has evolved through time to signify alternative narrative paths of sensualizing the undressing body. It brings into discussion neo-burlesque and its self-referential narrative structures, “boylesque” and its questioning of gender stereotypes, and most interestingly, burlesque performances by people with disabilities, men and women, who have been immensely successful in re-mapping erogenous zones on the disabled body. From the start this chapter clarifies that neo-burlesque is not about nudity as an anticipated destination, but rather about relishing the process. The suggestion or promise of undressing rather than the completion of the act is the focus of the third chapter. The author identifies striptease qualities in fashion catwalks that mobilize Roland Barthes’ thoughts on the eroticization of flesh exposed right “where the garment gapes” (44). The hiding-and-seeking of flesh allowed by the fluid motion of the fabric turns out to be far more erotically stimulating than total nudity. Drawing on cases such as Versace’s bold openings activated by the wearer’s movement, Chalayan’s robotic garments of remotely controlled panels migrating along the models’ torsos, or Errazuriz’s dress consisting only of zippers instead of seams, Brownie demonstrates how “the migration of a piece of clothing can simultaneously be an act of dressing and undressing,” granting wearers not only “the option of customizing their dress” but also of turning it into “a mode of communication” and an “extension of body language” (57). The fourth chapter in turn sheds light on the aggressive explicitness of gestures of undressing (i.e., streaking, mooning, and flashing), the accusations they have met with, and the circumstances under which they have become legitimized. The author’s intention here is to draw a distinction between acceptable political protest, like women’s or animals’ rights, and other more trivial ones, like the “sanctioned deviance” (72) during certain festivals and the commercial value of the temporarily naked bodies that have now come to be a regular (and jocularly welcomed) disruption of major sports events. Such delineations attest to the fact that “it is not bodily exposure, but rather the intention behind the gesture that defines an indecent act” (64). Undressing can also, as the fifth chapter indicates, become a weapon of defiance and resistance in the hands of the oppressed, “a last line of defense that is almost universally accessible” (80). Returning to FEMEN’S strategies of “protest undressing” examined in the previous chapter, Brownie discusses the conscious exploitation of the female body through the dynamic removal of clothes in order to instantly “distract and disarm” (82); she suggests, however, that this appropriation of sexuality can only work as long as the female body is itself the agent (not the victim) of this appropriation. The discussion shifts to yet more transgressive acts of defiance, such as anasyrma (i.e., skirt lifting to expose one’s genitals), transforming the female body from “erotic object” into “intimidating Other” (83). The chapter closes with a fascinating discussion of 144 Vinia Dakari undressing as “a prelude to execution,” one of the most pervasive images of the Holocaust. The author examines how the piles of clothes, and shoes in particular, found in concentration camps were re-located to memorial museums and inspired various art installations that “employ location as much as materiality to preserve the memory of past event” and invite us to contemplate stepping into them (92). With the image of empty shoes, Brownie segues into the final chapter, which seeks to track down the destination of clothes once these are separated from the body. From jackets left on theatre seats to shoes tossed on top of power lines to demarcate a gang’s territory or denote one’s presence in the area at a past moment, the fifth chapter examines ample variations of garments as an extension of the body and the multivalent ways they reference back to it as a “defense to one’s own absence” (108); Brownie concludes the chapter with her interpretation of permanently abandoned clothes: symbolic gestures of leaving the old self behind; signifiers of tragedy; or strategies of deception (pseudocide). Brownie ends her book by gesturing toward further possible explorations of her topic, such as mutual undressing; denuding as dehumanizing practice; in various settings like prisons or airports; biblical acts of undressing; and anthropological aspects of unveiling for Europe-based Islamic populations. For scholars of anthropology, visual and performing arts studies, and related humanities disciplines, Acts of Undressing is an engaging volume. One cannot help feeling, however, that a glimpse at public performances of undressing in other cultures and parts of the world—for instance the naked protests and genital cursing in Nigeria, Uganda, and elsewhere on the African continent (Diabate 51)—would have added interesting angles to the author’s argument and would have enriched its scope significantly and substantially. One can also readily imagine another chapter dedicated to theatre acts of undressing. These suggestions for extending Brownie’s subject attest to the liveliness of her discussion and the richness of her topic. With its eclectic blend of primary and secondary materials and wide-ranging bibliography, Acts of Undressing is an altogether useful and fascinating addition to the growing scholarship of dress culture in cross-disciplinary studies.

Works Cited Diabate, Naminata. “Women’s Naked Protest in Africa: Comparative Literature and Its Futures.” Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities, edited by Shalini Puri and Debra A. Castillo, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 51-71.

Vinia Dakari Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Avery, Simon, and Katherine M. Graham, eds. Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c. 1850 to the Present. London: Bloomsbury, 2016 (320pp). ISBN 9781474234924.

From its very first pages, the edited collection, Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c. 1850 to the Present, declares its awareness of the complexity of the task it undertakes: namely, to provide an interdisciplinary exploration of the queer spaces of London over an extensive period of time. The volume is divided into two sections: an introductory one in which the editors, both individually and together, engage in “Framing Queer London,” while the second section, which is comprised of thirteen essays, features the contributors’ attempts at “Exploring Queer London.” The lack of chronological, thematic or disciplinary categorization in the second section, as well as the absence of an all-embracing conclusion, reflects the fact that, as Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham note in their joint introduction, the volume intends to “facilitate dialogue across disciplines, spaces and times, in ways that create synergies between the chapters and their topics, both thematically and ideologically” (41). Synergy and connection are not only structurally central here, but they also determine the mode of engagement that the volume wishes to elicit from its readers. In her part of the introduction, Graham actually encourages readers to refrain from reading only those chapters pertinent “to one’s own research interests,” inviting them instead “to read widely –here, to do so is to read inclusively” (25). In this way, readers familiarize themselves with the assumptions underlying the attempt to map the multiplicity of “Queer London,” grasping, at the same time, how this volume differs from previous work in the field. More specifically, for all the transformations that the meaning of the term “queer” has undergone over time, the term has frequently entailed a sense of opposition, contrast, or exception that potentially led to the marginalization of its referents. Consequently, exploring spaces hosting “sexuality, desire and intimacy which trouble and disrupt [‘normalized’] orthodoxies and categories,” this volume essentially engages in an act of “recovery” of what has been, and is still, omitted from narratives of the metropolis, as Avery notes (14, 4). Throughout the volume, time is a connector, rather than a barrier, in the exploration of the mutually informative relationship between space and subjectivity, two concepts that are constantly “in flux, unfixed and changeable,” composing an ever dynamic picture of “Queer London” (10-11). To better illustrate this urban reality, this volume departs from previous studies that were limited to specific subject positions, and addresses diverse manifestations of “sexual practices and identities” across different moments in time and various disciplines (18). The essays in the second part constitute proof of the volume’s successful completion of its objectives. Methodologically diverse, since their sources include lived experiences, literary and artistic representations, and historical, and biographical research, the essays cover an equally broad thematic range: the AIDS epidemic and the ensuing transformation of urban life for gay men; race as a lens for the perception of non-normative sexuality; the reception and popularity of female appropriations of masculinity; considerations of homosexuality from a legal, and medical

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 146 Elisavet Ioannidou perspective; queer spaces of entertainment; contemporary technology and the reconfiguration of the concept of queer communities through their dissociation from actual physical locations; the life and work of artists such as Simeon Solomon and Francis Bacon; the poetry of Claude McKay, and the fiction of Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst; organizations such as the Victorian British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology and the Anthropological Society; the archival documentation of queer life; this brief overview of the volume’s focal points and thematic axes suggests the various ways in which London influenced, and was, in turn, transformed by the expression of multiple facets of queer sexuality from the mid-Victorian era to the present. Significantly, London emerges not only as a terrain of opportunity and freedom, but also as a site of containment and loss for queer subjectivities. This contrast highlights the significance of the attempt put forward by the essays collected here. The appreciation of the temporal connections that link seemingly disparate experiences sheds light into the tensions and contradictions that have always been part of queer metropolitan life; the volume effects thus the inclusive reading it pursues (Graham 35), precisely because it views queer London as a diachronically composite organism that evades monolithic signification. Closing his essay on Alan Hollinghurst, Bart Eeckhout notes the author’s acknowledgment of “how ephemeral and uncontainable all those queer lives lived in and around London really are –and how much of their sexual histories is bound to remain forever unwritten” (217). Echoing the fact that the insightful essays of the volume cannot possibly offer an exhaustive retrieval of queer lives and their complex interaction with urban space, this remark suggests, nevertheless, that Sex, Time and Place works against the impossibility of reinstating queer lives in the history of the city, and thus paves the way for similar future endeavours.

Elisavet Ioannidou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Larsson, Lisbeth. Walking Virginia Woolf’s London: An Investigation in Literary Geography. Translated by David Jones. San Marcos: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 (247 pp). ISBN 9783319556727.

Lisbeth Larsson’s recent eight-chapter study of Virginia Woolf’s novels in light of the literary geography of London combines an extensive and detailed discussion of Woolf’s novels with an original and fascinating use of Google Maps. Translating fictitious space into the actual space of real London, Larsson depicts the characters’ movements on the map by means of exhaustive and clearly annotated dots and lines. Larsson examines how Woolf locates her characters in a web of London streets that, dependent on historical period, biological sex, gender and social class, afford them either opportunities and liberty or obstacles and impasse (4). In the process Larsson successfully manages to demonstrate how deeply and subtly political Woolf’s fiction is. As Larsson explains, reading the novels alongside the map of London reveals the severity of Woolf’s criticism of British systems of class, patriarchy, and colonialism (4). Larsson organizes her discussion of the novels chronologically, according to their dates of publication. In her analysis of Woolf’s debut novel, The Voyage Out, for example, Larsson distinguishes between “London” and London: the former encompasses greed, unhappy marriages, hypocrisy, prostitution, class oppositions and gender hierarchies; the latter, in turn, is a utopian place free from all these things (24-25). Larsson delineates similar kinds of contrasts at work in Night and Day. In that text London’s parks, serve as places that liberate the characters from the norms and conventions of the city and enable them to explore alternative, free versions of themselves. In Woolf’s early novels, such spaces as parks and the Embankment play a crucially formative role, allowing characters to open up to their emotions and change both inside and outside (57). Throughout Night and Day, Woolf’s attentiveness to the gender implications of her characters’ location and movement attests to her social and anti-patriarchal commentary. Tracing the routes of the main characters on the map of London, Larsson, on the one hand, makes evident female characters’ actual and metaphorical stagnation, and on the other hand, confirms the main male character’s ability to free himself from social inferiority and function as the active force in the novel. In the next chapter Larsson insightfully extends her discussion of the subtle ways of Woolf’s criticism from gender to a whole range of crucial social issues. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf uses the London map, as well as authorial voice and the bird’s eye view, to show not only how small and insignificant but also how important an ordinary man can be (94). In this chapter, Larsson extensively discusses devices such as the lack of a clear-cut main character (84); fragmentation and non-traditional plot (83); mapping; and the combination of the narrative and authorial voices (84). These devices, Larsson argues, facilitate Woolf’s social critique of a range

GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism: Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 ©2018 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 148 Katia Tachmatzidou-Exarchou of issues: from nationalism, colonialism, and the idealization of war, to sexual hypocrisy and women’s compliance with the patriarchal voices that stifle them (101). Similarly, Larsson’s subsequent discussion of Mrs Dalloway combines analyses of Woolf’s uses of mapping and narrative voice. Larsson considers both how the lines of characters’ movements either diverge, converge or intersect each other, and how interior monologue (116) and explicit narrative voice reveal characters’ inner thoughts: their views regarding their lives, their relationships with each other, and their attitudes toward the restrictions imposed on and the possibilities open to them (127-130). It is perhaps fitting that in her next chapter Larsson simultaneously widens her view and condenses her readings in order to consider four novels: To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and Flush. This chapter is also the only one not to include Google Maps. These shifts in approach coincide with Larsson’s examination of Woolf’s critique of the categories of time, space, biological sex and gender as extremely restrictive for character formation. Here, Larsson considers Woolf’s exploration of these categories: her highlighting of their fluidity and ambiguity; her awareness of and concern with their liberating and restrictive capacities. In the final two chapters, Larsson elaborates on the twist that she perceives in Woolf’s conceptualization of the city and its impact on her characters. In her reading of The Years, Larsson delineates a London transmuted. In Woolf’s earlier novels, London, especially with its centre, streets and parks, offered characters a degree of physical and psychological freedom, as well as possibilities for personal development. In The Years, London proffers only a bleak reality. The noise and the bustle of its streets have gradually become louder, with disastrous repercussions for human communication and relationships (171). Despite the fact that in this novel the characters move across a larger area of London (an area that covers the city centre and increasingly spreads out towards London’s periphery) than do their counterparts in the rest of Woolf’s fiction, their movements are interrupted and confused (175). For Larsson, Woolf’s depiction of London here facilitates a highly political, anti-patriarchal and anti-imperialist discourse (172). Woolf sustains this view of a dismal city in her last novel, Between the Acts. In what Larsson describes as “the exhaustion of London mapping” (230), all the values that Woolf links to London in her previous writing, (that is, modernity, the potential for social change, humanity, and the liberation of women), collapse and give way to male aggression, money, avarice and power (230). In conclusion, Larsson’s innovative reading of Woolf’s novels alongside the Google Maps of London and her insightful discussion of time, space, place, biological sex, gender, class, colonialism and the ways that all these are intertwined make Walking Virginia Woolf’s London an engaging and worthwhile study. Its language is rich yet accessible, thanks to David Jones’ excellent translation from the original Swedish, and the eight chapters are nicely and coherently linked. Larsson’s attention to literary-historical context also makes this book a suitable introduction to Woolf studies. In short, Walking Virginia Woolf’s London offers a detailed and well-informed argument that incorporates a broad bibliography; delves into key literary and social issues; makes an original and very interesting use of Google Maps; and offers insightful interpretations of Woolf’s novels. The book will undoubtedly prove useful to Woolf specialists, as Book Review 149 well as numerous scholars in such fields as modernism, geocriticism, and spatial literary studies, among others.

Katia Tachmatzidou-Exarchou 150 GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism; Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793

Notes on Contributors

Tara Atluri ([email protected]) holds a PhD in Sociology and is the author of two books: Azadi: Sexual Politics and Postcolonial Worlds (Demeter Press, 2016) and Uncommitted Crimes: The Defiance of the Artistic Imagi/nation (Inanna Publications, 2018). She currently serves as an Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Law of Alliance University in Bangalore, India, and as a Lecturer at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Canada. She lives between Toronto and Bangalore.

Yael Pilowsky Bankirer ([email protected]) is a feminist psychoanalyst and a psychotherapist. She is a medical doctor (MD) and a researcher (PhD) of gender, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. She has written about the (in)ability to listen in mental health institutes and about her experience of leaving psychiatric training: “Resuscitate” appears in the 2015 collection In Visible Ink (alternate Hebrew title, Be-guf Rishon), edited by Shlomit Lir and published by Pardes. She is currently completing her third training with The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in London and working in a private practice in Cambridge, UK.

Margaret Sönser Breen ([email protected]) is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she specializes in LGBT literature and gender studies. Her publications include Narratives of Queer Desire: Deserts of the Heart (Palgrave, 2009) and the co-edited volume Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies (Ashgate, 2005).

Virginia (Vinia) Dakari ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research and writing encompass current developments in the rising interdisciplinary field of the Medical Humanities and the aesthetic, therapeutic, and pedagogic values of the theatre/medicine encounter. She is the Greek Representative for the Arts Health Early Career Research Network, as well as a working group member of the Greek Cancer Society’s Centre for Support, Education, and Research in Psychosocial Oncology. She has co-edited "Medicine and/in Theatre," special topic issue (no.17/June 2018) of Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques (e-journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics—IATC).

Abigail Fagan ([email protected]) is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Connecticut. Her dissertation considers the radical potential of temperance propaganda to rewrite structures of power located around white male supremacy in the nineteenth-century United States. She is currently a research assistant and instructor in American Studies at the Leibniz Universität in Hanover, Germany.

Contributors 151

Astrid M. Fellner ([email protected]) is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (Germany). Her monographs include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-Representation (2002) and Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-Eighteenth-Century American Culture (forthcoming). Her research areas include Border Studies, Gender/Queer Studies, Early American, U.S. Latino/a, and Canadian literatures.

Elisavet Ioannidou ( [email protected]) is a PhD candidate researching the intersections of space, gender, and social class in neo-Victorian fiction at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests revolve around neo-Victorianism, Victorian fiction, film, and adaptation. She has published articles in Victoriographies, Adaptation, and Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism.

Alex Karaman ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at The University of Arizona. He is also completing a minor in Geography. A Palestinian-American raised in Los Angeles, he combines his personal and academic background music with his own experiences of Palestinian hip-hop cultural practices. His dissertation fieldwork, taking place in Israel-Palestine over the last four years, constructs grounded theorizations of the Palestinian hip-hop scene in conversation with contemporary spatial theory, affect theory, musicology, queer theory, and Palestine studies. His dissertation is entitled “Beyond the Lyrics: Hip-Hop Culture and Palestinian Identity Formation.”

Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou ([email protected]) is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She teaches and publishes on Realism, Modernism, and the English novel, as well as on gender, sexuality and body theory. She recently co-edited a volume titled Liminal Dickens: Rites of Passage in His Work (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016) and another Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion: From Classical Antiquity to the Modern Era (Routledge, 2018). She is general co-editor of the European Journal of English Studies (http://essenglish.org/ejes/) and has been president of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE, www.enl.auth.gr/hase/) since 2014.

Eva Nossem ([email protected]) is a graduate translator for German, English, and Italian. She is the scientific coordinator of the INTERREG V A project “UniGR-Center for Border Studies” and an instructor in English linguistics, both at Saarland University (Germany). She is currently working on her PhD project in Italian linguistics: “Un dizionario Queer—il lessico italiano della noneteronormatività.” Her research interests include Border Studies, Italian and English linguistics, Gender and Queer Studies, and translation studies.

Dr. Shalmalee Palekar ([email protected]) works in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her research covers postcolonial and transcultural theories/practices, South Asian literatures, and Indian cinemas. She is also a published poet and

152 GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism; Vol.25, 2018; eISSN: 2529-1793 translator of Marathi poetry, and has performed with three women and a cello, collectively called Funkier than Alice.

Katie R. Peel ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches courses in Victorian, young adult, queer, and Holocaust narratives. The essay included here is part of a larger work in progress on kept mistresses in Victorian literature.

Rebecca S. Richards ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (USA). Her research and teaching explore the intersection of rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and media. Her most recent book, Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies (2015), analyzes how gendered concepts circulate among women who have been world leaders. Her work also appears in journals like Feminist Formations, Feminist Teacher, and Kairos, as well as in edited collections like Hillary Rodham Clinton and the 2016 Election.

Irene Stoukou ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki working on (British) Children’s Literature. She holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Thought (Sussex U, UK), and a BA in English Language and Literature (Aristotle U of Thessaloniki, Greece). She is interested in the alliance between gender and utopias in children’s fiction, while her doctoral research focuses on the representation of gender and the body in the film adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

Katia Tachmatzidou-Exarchou ([email protected]) has studied English Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds an MA in Translation Studies (University of Warwick, England) and a PhD in English Literature (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), which was funded by the National Scholarships Foundation (IKY).