Queer Time in Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch

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FAILING AT HAPPINESS: QUEER TIME IN RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE, STONE BUTCH

BLUES, AND TOMBOY SURVIVAL GUIDE

Katerina Hirschfeld

Thesis

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the Degree of Master of Arts (English)

Acadia University

Fall Graduation 2019

This thesis by Katerina Hirschfeld was defended successfully in an oral examination on August

29, 2019.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

Dr. Can Mutlu, Chair

Dr. Karen Macfarlane, External Examiner

Dr. Kait Pinder, Internal Examiner

Dr. Anne Quéma, Supervisor

Dr. Wanda Campbell, Head

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English).

……………………………………

I, Katerina Hirschfeld, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to

archive, preserve, reproduce, loan, or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper, or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I undertake to submit my thesis, through my University, to Library and Archives Canada and to allow them to archive, preserve, reproduce, convert into

any format, and to make available in print or online to the public for non-profit purposes. I,

however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

______

Signature of Author

______

Signature of Supervisor

______

Date

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES v

ABSTRACT vi

ABBREVIATIONS vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed: A Theoretical Framework 10

CHAPTER TWO Affective Experiences of Queer Failure and Abjection 29

CHAPTER THREE The Potential Freedom in Forgetting Failure 61

CHAPTER FOUR Hopeful Collective Futures 84

CONCLUSION Then and Now: Reflections on Research as a Window into the

Present 106

WORKS CITED 109

WORKS CONSULTED 112

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Diagram of kitchen mixer from Tomboy Survival Guide (2). 50

Figure 2. Diagram of vacuum cleaner from Tomboy Survival Guide (140). 51

Figure 3. Diagram of clothes iron from Tomboy Survival Guide (174). 52

ABSTRACT

There is minimal scholarship focusing on Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown,

Stone Butch Blues (1993) by Leslie Feinberg, and Tomboy Survival Guide (2016) by Ivan E.

Coyote. In an attempt to remedy this lack in existing research, my thesis explores the temporal relationship between the three queer narrators of these texts and their failures to embody heteronormative ideals of happiness and success. The literary analyses of these texts are informed by a theoretical framework that is predominantly comprised of Judith Butler’s Gender

Trouble, Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, and Sarah Ahmed’s The Promise of

Happiness. I demonstrate that each narrator has memories of their repeated failure to be made happy by heteronormative ideals, and that these past experiences continue to affect them in the future. In addition, I demonstrate that, while the narrators attempt to forget their painful pasts of failure and their consequences, forgetting is an impossible task. Nevertheless, while forgetting is not an effective means for them to move on from these experiences, collective action is represented as a way for the narrators to cope with their memories of failure and pursue a hopeful future. However, their ability to connect with collectives is influenced by their respective sociopolitical moments.

ABBREVIATIONS

CHU Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

GT Gender Trouble

PH The Promise of Happiness

PHR Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

QF The Queer Art of Failure

RFJ Rubyfruit Jungle

SBB Stone Butch Blues

TBSG Tomboy Survival Guide

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I am indebted to Dr. Anne Quéma for her supervision. Thank you for your guidance and support throughout this process.

I would also like to thank Dr. Kait Pinder for her helpful comments on my thesis.

Additionally, thank you to Acadia University for the generous funding that made this project possible.

And, finally, thank you to my parents, Marda and Ralph Hirschfeld, for their unwavering love and support.

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INTRODUCTION

In this thesis, I investigate the temporal relationship between queer narrators and their experiences of failure and happiness in Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown, Stone Butch

Blues (1993) by Leslie Feinberg, and Tomboy Survival Guide (2016) by Ivan E. Coyote. In order to narrow the scope of my research, I weave together the theories of Judith Butler, Jack

Halberstam, and Sarah Ahmed to create a theoretical framework that will inform my subsequent literary analyses of these queer narratives. While Butler’s text focuses on the temporality of gender performativity, Halberstam considers the relationship between queer subjects and the normative parameters of success, and Ahmed investigates the relationship between queers and heteronormative objects of happiness. Since the experiences of Molly in Rubyfruit Jungle, Jess in

Stone Butch Blues, and Ivan in Tomboy Survival Guide revolve around their complex relationships to normative conceptions of gender, happiness, and success, these three theoretical approaches constitute the backbone of this thesis. I filter these three narratives through my established theoretical framework in order to investigate moments where the texts intersect with as well as deviate from these theoretical claims.

Additionally, as popular culture texts, these three narratives complement my established theoretical framework. Both Ahmed and Halberstam use examples from popular culture in their theoretical accounts and thus demonstrate that popular culture narratives can expose societal understandings of happiness and success. For example, both theorists analyze The Bee Movie

(2007), which is an animated film about a bee who, in Ahmed’s words, “revolts by not being happy with what he has been given” (PH 193). In other words, the bee protagonist aspires to do something other than make honey, which is represented as an object of happiness for bees. Thus,

he is made unhappy by a happy object. While Ahmed filters The Bee Movie through her own focus on happiness and unhappiness, Halberstam uses the same film as an example of a narrative that has the potential to be “about collective resistance to capitalist exploitation” (QF 49), but that ultimately falls back on capitalist and heteronormative ideologies. Even though The Bee

Movie is often considered a children’s animated film, both theorists demonstrate how such films grapple with societal conceptions of happiness and success and are relevant to their research focuses.

In a similar vein, I suggest that Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy

Survival Guide can all be considered popular culture texts in terms of the narrators’ class-status and the texts’ language. Indeed, like The Bee Movie, all three narratives are told in accessible language that can reach people of all class backgrounds. Molly in Rubyfruit Jungle is the adopted daughter of a poor family in the rural town Coffee Hollow, Pennsylvania. Jess was born into a working-class, Jewish family in New York. Ivan is from a working-class, Catholic family in

Whitehorse, Yukon. Thus, just as The Bee Movie is considered popular culture because of its ability to appeal to a broad audience, so can these three narratives be considered as popular culture texts that were produced in the early 1970s, 1990s, and in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century to address as broad a readership as possible at crucial stages of the historical development of queer and transgender movements.

Although each queer narrator is persistently confronted with normative ideals of gender, success, and happiness, their relationships to these concepts do not neatly comply with Butler,

Halberstam, and Ahmed’s theorizations. Indeed, I argue that Molly in Rubyfruit Jungle, Jess in

Stone Butch Blues, and Ivan in Tomboy Survival Guide open up new ways of thinking about queer relationships to normative ideals. I also suggest that these relationships are linked to the

experience of time in complex ways. Since there is no literary criticism on Tomboy Survival

Guide, and sparse material on Rubyfruit Jungle and Stone Butch Blues, it is my hope that this thesis shows how necessary it is for more academic research to pause on these narratives.

The relationship between normative ideals and queer failure is a theoretical focus among

Butler’s, Halberstam’s, and Ahmed’s texts. In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that the performativity of gender continuously requires subjects to approximate normative gender ideals, and that the subject’s inevitable failure to embody them often leads to experiences of punishment. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam focuses on normative conceptions of success and failure, arguing that capitalist ideologies reward heteronormative and colonial bodies while punishing others. Ahmed, in The Promise of Happiness, argues that happiness is not just a feeling but a familial obligation, and one that is profoundly heteronormative; she defines heterosexual love and the nuclear family as happiness-causes. If one is not made happy by these objects, then one effectively fails at happiness.

The social ideals that these theorists discuss do not operate autonomously but are created and enforced by social institutions. The family unit itself is an object through which the ideals of gender, happiness, and success are enforced and replicated through time. Ahmed suggests that the family unit is “a powerful legislative device” (45) that enforces social norms. Although

Ahmed primarily focuses on how ideals of happiness are regulated through the family, I use her claims regarding the power of the family to consider how it also functions to regulate one’s relationship to gender and success as well. Indeed, Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and

Tomboy Survival Guide all show narrators who are grappling with their family’s normative ideals of gender, happiness, and success. However, I argue that these queer narrators continuously fail to be made happy by heteronormative ideals of love, family, and identity.

Further, their memories of their failures threaten to constantly resurface and hurt them again in the present, and new experiences of failure often obscure any sense of their future. Thus, these narratives expose the complex relationships between queer individuals, their failures to be made happy by the right things, and the extent to which they are able to break away from these memories of failure and pursue alternative futures.

In my first chapter, I build the theoretical framework that I use to inform my analyses of these three narratives. I use Butler’s theorization of gender performativity to argue that success and happiness, as defined by Halberstam and Ahmed, can also be considered performative ideals.

As a result, the ideals of gender, happiness, and success require a subject’s repeated attempt to embody them in order to maintain social power. Further, I highlight how these ideals are filtered through the family unit. Thus, I suggest that family itself becomes a performative object around which these various social ideals revolve. Ahmed claims that a subject’s failure to orient towards their family’s objects of happiness creates affective gaps between the subject and those objects.

She identifies several affects that can emerge from this gap, such as shame and rage. I pair

Ahmed’s theorization of affective gaps alongside Butler’s and Ahmed’s theories of melancholia in order to establish a framework to theorize experiences of trauma. I focus on how both theorists discuss the temporality of melancholia in order to suggest that trauma manifests itself through patterns of repetition and therefore threatens to trap subjects in a cycle of recollection and pain.

However, while a subject’s failure to correctly orient towards familial objects of happiness can lead to traumatic experiences of abjection, their failure can also expose the oppressive nature of those objects of happiness. Thus, I establish that these theorists emphasize that one’s failure to embody these ideals enables one to imagine alternative identities and practices outside of their normative limits. The comparisons and contrasts between these three theories that I establish in

my first chapter inform my remaining three chapters, and I therefore end this chapter with pointed questions about how the literary texts represent queer failure, and how such failures impact the narrators’ relationships to their pasts, their identities in the present, and whether or not such failures open up new possibilities for their futures.

In my second chapter, I analyze the responses of both the narrators and their parents to the narrators’ failures to embrace these ideals as theorized by Butler, Ahmed, and Halberstam. I draw upon Ahmed’s theorization of affective gaps to demonstrate how the protagonists’ failure to embody heteronormative ideals creates an affective gap between themselves and their families’ objects of happiness. While Ahmed identifies disappointment, shame, and rage as affects that are generated by this affective gap, I add to her theory by incorporating Kristeva’s theory of abjection into my framework in order to suggest that abjection is another potential affect that arises out of the affective gap generated by the narrators’ failures. Further, I demonstrate that the narrators’ experiences of abjection take away their sense of subjectivity.

Neither subject nor object, the abjected loses objects of identification. I argue that these texts demonstrate that the loss of one’s identity through abjection pairs with the loss of one’s sense of time. While all three narrators experience various forms of abjection from the family unit, they each respond differently. I suggest that both Jess and Ivan emphasize the pain they feel in response to their experiences of abjection in order to emphasize the violence of queer oppression.

Molly, in contrast, defiantly refuses to be ashamed by her experience of abjection and instead attempts to respond with stoic indifference. However, I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s and

Margaret Morrison’s claims about the power of gay shame to argue that Molly’s refusal to acknowledge her shame causes her to be isolated from queer individuals who suffer from similar experiences.

Additionally, I suggest that the fact that violent acts of abjection are done to the queer narrators by their parents complicates Ahmed’s theorization of the causes of unhappiness for parents. While Ahmed outlines how parents may become unhappy at the prospect of their queer child having an unhappy future ahead of them, these texts reveal that parental unhappiness can stem from more self-interested desires. All three narrators describe the disappointment of their parents when the narrator does not embody a normative gender identity. Thus, I also argue that these narratives establish that the future happiness of the family unit can come at the expense of the queer child.

Halberstam claims that forgetting is a form of failure that enables queer individuals to simultaneously challenge heteronormative traditions and overcome the traumas that those traditions induce. On this basis, my third chapter focuses on representations of forgetting in these three texts. While Halberstam contends that forgetting allows queer subjects to carve out hopeful futures, I argue that these three narratives highlight the difficulties of such radical acts of forgetting in a way that Halberstam does not consider. I use Butler’s theory of melancholia to suggest that the narrators’ trauma manifests through patterns of repetition that prevent the narrator from breaking away from their traumatic memories of abjection. I demonstrate that both

Molly and Jess try but are unable to completely forget their families and their painful memories of abjection. Additionally, each narrator is unwillingly confronted with memories of abjection when they encounter similar experiences in the present, which emphasizes that present abjection can persistently recall the memories that they try to forget. I also argue that Ivan’s refusal to forget their family contests the notion that forgetting is a viable way forward. Instead, their narrative project revolves around remembering and patiently growing with their family members despite the pain their family has caused them. For Ivan, then, hopeful futures can be achieved

only when one does not run away from family members but embraces them in acts of mutual love and understanding.

While all three narratives challenge the notion that radical acts of forgetting can enable a subject to escape the pain of their past traumas, I inject Butler’s theory of melancholia into my analyses of Jess and Ivan’s top surgeries in order to suggest that, since melancholia is rooted in the body, certain bodily changes have the potential to free the narrators from their melancholic state. As a result, their bodies are no longer vessels of trauma but are transformed into their own happy objects of identification. However, while Ivan’s and Jess’s top surgery is represented as a bodily change that enables them to embody their queer identity, the bodily changes that Jess experiences through hormone therapy do the opposite. More specifically, I determine that Jess’s hormone therapy threatens to erase—and thereby forget—their queerness. Thus, in these texts, bodily changes that transform queer bodies into more heteronormative identities are forms of forgetting that do not lead to radical rejections of normativity but lead to the acceptance of those standards.

While an individual’s failure to orient towards familial objects of happiness can lead to painful experiences of trauma from which they continuously suffer, Butler, Halberstam, and

Ahmed argue that such failure can hold significant potential for change when it occurs on a collective level. Hence, my fourth and final chapter considers to what extent collectives are represented as happy objects that enable the narrators to overcome their traumatic experiences of failure and abjection in order to orient towards a queer future of happiness. I suggest that the narrators’ ability to join a collective movement is a reflection of the relationships between lesbians and queers during a specific moment in queer culture and politics. In order to demonstrate the link between the text’s representation of collectivity and the political landscape

in which it was published, I incorporate relevant political essays by Rita Mae Brown as well as

Leslie Feinberg. The relevance of their respective political essays stems from the fact that they were published at approximately the same time as their narratives. Indeed, Brown’s political essay “The Shape of Things to Come” on which I draw was published in 1972, only one year after the publication of Rubyfruit Jungle. Similarly, Feinberg’s political writings in Transgender

Warriors were published in 1996, three years after the publication of Stone Butch Blues. Brown and Feinberg were both prominent political activists, and so I draw on their political writings in order to establish how their narratives are informed by their involvement in lesbian and transgender politics. However, there are no political essays by Ivan Coyote other than their creative pieces, such as Tomboy Survival Guide.

With reference to Rubyfruit Jungle, I argue that Molly’s reluctance to join a feminist movement reflects the lesbian-separatist sentiments of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Due to the tensions between lesbian feminists and straight feminists, Molly’s inability to see women’s groups as happy objects that promise a hopeful future serves as a critique of the heteronormativity of those respective movements. While Molly does not perceive collectives as happy objects, Jess does. However, I suggest that Jess’s experiences of exclusion from lesbian- feminist collectives temporarily prevent them from achieving the sense of hopeful futurity that such collectives promise. Further, I demonstrate that Jess’s eventual ability to join a queer collective parallels their ability to envisage a hopeful future. However, the fact that Jess’s narrative ends as soon as they successfully orient towards a queer collective allows them to hope for the happy future such collectives promise without depicting their long-term experiences in a collective.

In contrast, Ivan’s narrative explores how to expand continuously a collective and embrace people within and beyond LGBTQ+ communities without universalizing their experiences. As a result, I suggest that Ivan’s narrative not only represents collectives as happy objects but also includes struggle and tension. Additionally, I include queer narratological theory in this chapter to show how Ivan’s deployment of second-person narrative voice enables them to connect with their readership and pursue a happy future for people of a variety of backgrounds.

While I establish connections between the political sentiments of both author and narrator in Rubyfruit Jungle and Stone Butch Blues, I suggest that all three narratives resist being categorized as purely autobiographical because they are not explicitly labelled as such by the author or narrator. Further, because these texts are not described as autobiographies by their authors, there is room for fictional liberties in the narratives. As a result, I cannot definitively assert that any of these texts fit into the genre of autobiography or fiction.

Additionally, there are several scholars who refer to Jess as she/her, but I have made the decision to refer to Jess by using the pronouns they/them.1 Jess does not use any pronoun to refer to themselves other than the first-person “I.” Since their narrative revolves around their struggles with the gender binary and their progressive ability to embrace themselves as someone who does not neatly comply with heteronormative gender identities, I believe that the pronoun “they” allows me to maintain the gender ambiguity that Jess’s narrative establishes.

1 For examples of scholars who refer to Jess as she/her, see Cat Moses, “Queering Class: Leslie Feinberg’s Stone

Butch Blues”; Jack Halberstam, “Lesbian Masculinity: or Even Stone Butches Get the Blues.”

CHAPTER ONE

Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed: A Theoretical Framework

In this chapter, I bring together the three theorists that I will use for my literary analyses of Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival Guide in the following chapters.

The three texts for my theoretical focus are Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Jack Halberstam’s

The Queer Art of Failure, and Sarah Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed’s theories are all concerned with social ideals that govern bodies according to normative practices of behaviour and identity. I analyze how these theorists conceive the relationship between subject, social ideals, and time. Further, since my literary analyses are organized into chapters that consider the narrators’ memories of failure, their attempts to move on from these memories, and their relationships to collectives respectively, I use this chapter to consider what each theorist argues regarding these topics as well. As a result, this chapter provides a tightly woven theoretical framework that will guide my analyses of the literary texts.

All three theorists are concerned with normative ideals that not only govern bodies and behaviour, but also exclude certain subjects from the promise of those ideals. Butler’s theory focuses on conceptions of gender, Halberstam considers normative conceptions of success and failure, and Ahmed examines the naturalization of happiness. Comparisons between how Butler,

Halberstam, and Ahmed discuss their respective areas of focus – heteronormative gender, success, and happiness – show that they are each addressing an ideal that people persistently assume to be natural. Further, my analysis also shows that all three theorists advocate for rethinking assumptions about gender, success, and happiness in order to realize that they are structural instead of natural. When one realizes that such social systems are not inevitable, one

can think beyond those systems and imagine new possibilities. My focus on temporality hinges on Butler’s theory of performativity. As a result, I demonstrate how Ahmed and Halberstam’s conceptions of happiness and success are also performative. Further, as performative ideals, heteronormative gender, happiness, and success are narrow possibilities for identity and behaviour that are not stable but constantly under revision. Next, this chapter considers how all three theorists discuss how one’s failure to embody the normative ideals of gender, happiness, and success continues to impact the subject over time by inhibiting the ability to move on from failure. Lastly, I consider how each theorist envisions collective action as a way for the subject to break away from the normative ideals of gender, happiness, and success.

Halberstam and Ahmed use examples from popular culture to show how popular culture perpetuates narratives of success and happiness. They both consider instances of culture that are often overlooked by literary scholars and theorists alike because of their status as “low-culture” pieces of work. However, as both Halberstam and Ahmed demonstrate, popular culture narratives have a lot to say about our conceptions of happiness and success, and thus warrant more academic attention. Not only are popular culture narratives generally overlooked by scholars, but queer narratives are as well. Susan S. Lanser acknowledges the lack of existing scholarship on queer narratives and argues that “the dual tracking of narrative elements with configurations of gender and sexuality over time and place could lay the narrative groundwork for astonishingly new insights into both the history and the possibilities of the narrative” (31).

Indeed, it is due to the sparse academic attention on popular culture and queer narratives that my research analyzes Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival Guide. What I intend to emphasize in my thesis is the legitimacy of these narratives. My justification for these texts over others is in the same vein as Halberstam’s and Ahmed’s justification for their research

interests: these are queer narratives that are pieces of popular culture in the sense that they describe working-class narrators rather than an educated elite. Further, they have been largely overlooked in literary criticism and warrant more academic attention because they contribute meaningfully to discussions about heteronormative ideals that revolve around gender, success, and happiness, and how those ideals impact a subject’s temporal relationships to surrounding objects.

Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed argue that heteronormative gender categories, success, and happiness are normative ideals that are persistently seen as natural. In critically examining these ideals, all three theorists expose these concepts as socially constructed; therefore, they are not natural but socially enforced. According to Butler, gender identity depends on repetition. She claims that gender is performative, which means that gender is “an incessant and repeated action” (GT 152). These actions create the “illusion of an abiding gendered self” (GT 192).

Therefore, according to Butler, gender is not natural. Instead, it is an illusion that one creates and maintains by consistently reaffirming it through time. In claiming that gender is performative,

Butler argues that “there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured” (GT 192). Indeed, she states that gender is not an essence or a truth but that it is “a regulatory fiction” that keeps the subject locked in “the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality” (GT 193). Thus, Butler asserts that when one recognizes that gender is performative, one can challenge and move beyond these restrictive frames of identity and behaviour.

Similarly, Halberstam’s and Ahmed’s theories call into question the dominant narratives of happiness and success by exposing both as regulatory fictions—to borrow and build upon

Butler’s terminology. Halberstam demonstrates that success and failure are assumed to be

contingent upon one’s own state of mind. Ahmed also argues that one’s happiness is often assumed to be determined by the subject’s ability to “do the right thing” and orient towards the right objects (PH 29). Thus, both Halberstam and Ahmed stress that the failure to succeed is often wrongly assumed to be the result of an individual’s own pessimistic outlook. Halberstam claims that when one upholds the assumption that failure is solely the individual’s fault instead of regarding it as a structural phenomenon, one hides the tilted scales of normative gender, sexuality, and race. Thus, Halberstam argues that “the negative thinker” who refuses to be optimistic and to continue to strive for success “can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United States” (QF 4). In other words, failure is the refusal “to be optimistic and [to] continue to strive for success” (QF 4). As a result, failing to aim for normative performances of success allows one to locate alternative ways of being outside of dominant modes.

Both Halberstam and Ahmed argue that there is potential in the pessimist, the subject that refuses to be optimistic or happy. Ahmed argues that “to kill joy” and be a cause of unhappiness is to “open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility” (PH 20). Making room for possibility through unhappiness is crucial for changing conceptions about happiness. Ahmed claims that the heteronormative conception of happiness is a narrow horizon of experience. Just as Halberstam argues that dominant conceptions of success hide the systemic inequalities that privilege some people over others, so Ahmed claims that social conceptions of happiness exclude certain individuals from its promise: namely, feminist killjoys, queers, and migrants (PH 49).

Indeed, Ahmed argues that if one’s identity does not allow one to orient oneself towards this narrow conception of happiness, then failing to achieve happiness is a way to “open up” this narrow horizon of experience for those who have been historically barred from its promise (PH

20). Thus, pessimism is a failure to embrace heteronormative scripts of gender, success, and happiness, and it allows one to find possibilities outside of the narrow heteronormative horizon of experience.

Halberstam and Ahmed discuss happiness and success in relation to the family as an institution that governs the subject’s relationship to those ideals. Halberstam defines normative conceptions of time in terms of “the logics of succession, progress, development, and tradition”

(QF 75) in order to demonstrate that such temporal conceptions privilege the heteronormative family unit. According to Halberstam, these “normative conceptions of time and relation give permanent (even if estranged) connections precedence over random (even if intense) associations” (QF 72). If the duration of a relationship takes precedence over other factors, then

“family ties, by virtue of being early bonds, seem more important than friendships” (QF 72). As a result, normative conceptions of time and relation render the family unit as the most important human connection. According to Ahmed, the happy family is regarded as “a promise, a hope, a dream, an aspiration” (PH 45). It lies in the future and is something one chases. Further, the family is “an inheritance” (PH 45) through which one is obligated to receive the past traditions of the family and replicate its form. Thus, not only are family members required to share the same orientation to happy objects in order to maintain the promise of the happy family, but each member is “asked to reproduce what [they] inherit by being affected in the right way by the right things” (PH 45). Therefore, the happy family is “both a myth of happiness” as well as “a powerful legislative device” (PH 45): it is considered a universal aspiration, and in order to achieve it, the subject must replicate the family it inherits. Hence, the happy family is an object of happiness, and one’s ability to obtain it depends on what one does in the present.

In order for a family to stay on the path towards the promise of the happy family, each member must constantly affirm their correct orientation towards the family’s established objects of happiness. As Ahmed states, “the happy family is both an object (something that affects us, something we are directed toward) and [it] circulates through objects” (PH 45). Thus, I suggest that the happy family is a performative object; its maintenance requires what, in the context of her gender analysis, Butler refers to as “incessant and repeated action” (GT 152) to reproduce the family one inherits. Further, if the happy family depends on acts of performativity to constantly affirm its promise, then it is constantly under threat. If a family member fails to orient towards the right objects, or fails to inherit the family’s values or behaviours that they are supposed to, then they threaten the possibility of fulfilling the promise of the happy family. However, feminists, queers, and migrants often experience an affective gap between themselves and their family’s objects of happiness. Ahmed claims that the experience of a gap between “the affective value of an object” and the affective outcome of an encounter with an object generates “a range of affects” (PH 45). She identifies disappointment, shame and rage as potential affects that emerge from this gap. Sometimes, Ahmed claims, one will try to bridge the gap by pretending to be affected by objects in the way one believes one should.

When a subject pretends to be correctly affected by familial objects of happiness, they maintain the heteronormative happiness narrative. According to Ahmed, objects of happiness are meant to promise happiness in the future. Therefore, when the subject does not experience the happy feeling that a familial object of happiness is supposed to create, it fails to experience the correct relationship to that object. When a gap occurs between the affective value of an object and the subject’s affective experience, the subject can attempt to conceal that gap in order to maintain the fantasy of the happy family. Ahmed uses the example of the wedding day, which is

supposed to be “the happiest day of your life” (PH 41). As the happiest day of one’s life, the wedding day itself is an ideal of happiness set in the future. However, if a bride finally encounters the wedding day and finds that she is not happy, a temporal gap emerges between the object and the happiness that is promised for the bride. According to Ahmed, the bride is “being affected inappropriately” if she is not happy when she encounters this happy object (PH 41).

The bride may pretend to be happy to hide the affective gap created between happy object and feeling. Thus, when the subject bridges the gap between object and affect, it can participate in the regulatory fictions of happiness.

The example of the bride demonstrates that happiness becomes an individual responsibility; it is up to the individual to orient the right way towards the right things. If the subject orients towards the right objects, then the subject supposedly gets a happy future.

However, one’s failure to be made happy by objects that are assumed to always cause happiness is an opportunity to recognize that happiness is shaped into a narrow horizon of likes and experiences that are naturalized. The subject’s failure to be made happy by such objects exposes that happiness is a regulatory fiction that enforces heteronormative narratives. Thus, the subject’s failure to be happy and subsequent banishment from the promise of happiness can allow it to recognize the systemic marginalization that the ideal of happiness enforces. This recognition can lead the subject to realize alternative futures outside of the parameters of heteronormative happiness.

Not only do happy objects remind the subject of its future path to happiness, but they can also be reminders of its inability to secure such a future. According to Ahmed, happy objects that do not make the subject happy can become objects of unhappiness. In her chapter on the

Feminist Killjoy, Ahmed claims that being surrounded by happy objects that “are not your own”

and therefore “do not…cause your [own] happiness” also “remind[s] you of your failure to be made happy by them” (PH 76-77). “Feminist archives,” Ahmed explains, “are full of scenes of domesticity in which domestic objects, happy objects, become alien, even menacing” (PH 77).

Thus, when the subject recognizes a disconnect between an object of happiness and its ability to achieve happiness in proximity to it, those objects become persistent reminders of its failure to feel the happiness it is expected to experience.

While a subject’s experiences of failure on an individual level can cause lasting trauma, those failures can still become a basis for political change. Ahmed offers “an alternative history of happiness” by focusing on those who are banished from its promise. She also considers what she calls ‘happiness dystopias’ and their ability to illustrate “alternative futures” (PH 18).

Similarly, Halberstam claims that queers are “very good at failure,” and that queer failure

“offer[s] us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems” (QF 89). Butler’s theory of gender performativity also revolves around the power of failure, as she suggests that failure in itself can become an act of subversion. As she states, “if subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself” (GT 127). In other words, a subject’s failure to follow heteronormative laws of gender, happiness, and success can be read as a form of resistance because their failures produce alternatives to those standards. Thus, Butler, Halberstam, and

Ahmed suggest that a subject’s failure to embody heteronormative ideals is a way to locate alternative possibilities outside of normative conceptions of gender, happiness, and success.

If the happy family is predicated on the subject’s ability to inherit the family, then forgetting the family is a radical break from the responsibilities of replication and normative

reproduction. Halberstam argues that forgetting, as depicted in Finding Nemo and 50 First Dates, consists of “opportunities to reject the historical or Oedipal fix and to resist the impulse to retrace a definitive past and map a prescriptive future” (QF 82). Forgetting, then, offers a radical solution to the regulatory nature of the happy family. When the subject forgets the family, it fails to inherit the family’s “definitive past” and opens up a future outside of the “prescriptive future” that the happy family requires (QF 82). Halberstam argues that “for women and queer people, forgetfulness can be a useful tool for jamming the smooth operations of the normal and the ordinary. These operations, generally speaking, take on an air of inevitability and naturalness simply by virtue of being passed on from one generation to another” (QF 70). Therefore, forgetting one’s family and failing to reproduce its lines exposes the family as a regulatory fiction instead of a natural inevitability. Additionally, other opportunities arise for the subject once replicating the family is no longer an option. Indeed, Halberstam suggests that “we may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place…where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and useable pasts” (QF

70). Therefore, the act of forgetting not only erases the family from the subject’s past, but allows for a start from a new place in the present and thus allows the subject to orient towards a new future.

While Halberstam argues that to forget is to allow one to overcome one’s traumatic past,

Ahmed explains how difficult it can be for one to forget one’s experiences of trauma by establishing the relationship between objects and their respective affects. As Ahmed claims, “the object of feeling lags behind the feeling” (PH 27). That is, we can experience feeling first and then look to see what object could have caused that feeling for us. As Ahmed explains, “I might assume, then, that the experience of pain is caused by the nail that is lying near my foot. But I

only notice the nail given that I experience an affect” (PH 27). Additionally, Ahmed argues that once the connection is made between object and affect, the object can produce that affect simply because the subject sees the object and recalls the past affect to which the object was previously tied. Ahmed uses the example of the nail to explain that the subject “can just apprehend the nail and [it] will experience a pain affect, given that the association between the object and the affect has been given. The object becomes a feeling-cause. Once an object is a feeling-cause, it can cause feeling, so that when we feel the feeling we expect to feel, we are affirmed” (PH 28).

Thus, Ahmed’s theory regarding the relationship between objects and affects offers a possible account for memories of trauma. Once an object has been attributed as a feeling-cause – such as pain – then the object itself causes that feeling. In other words, the subject’s orientation towards an object that once caused pain can cause pain itself simply through the recollection of that pain.

While Ahmed conceptualizes the pain that can linger due to the memories associated with a particular object, Halberstam offers forgetting as a way to move beyond the painful objects that

Ahmed identifies. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam discusses trauma in their theorization of the power of forgetting. They claim that “memory can be painful, for it actively and passively keeps alive the experience of events that one may do better to blot out” (QF 83). Like the nail that Ahmed uses as an example, painful encounters persist for the individual who remembers them. Thus, “forgetting [can be] a gate-keeping mechanism, a way of protecting the self from unbearable memories” (QF 83-84). With respect to trauma, then, Halberstam argues that forgetting is a necessary “cocooning of the self in order to allow the self to grow separate from the knowledge that might destroy it” (QF 84). Thus, pairing Ahmed’s claims regarding the temporal relationship between object and affect and Halberstam’s advocation for forgetting trauma offers a way to move beyond trauma by forgetting the link between object and affect.

However, while Halberstam claims that forgetting can free a subject from its memories of trauma, forgetting is not always possible. Indeed, the subject’s refusal or inability to forget a traumatic object can inhibit its progress. In this respect, Butler and Ahmed refer to Freud’s conception of melancholia and connect it to experiences of trauma in their respective works. In

The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed discusses traumatic experiences in relation to the loss of a loved one or an abstract idea. If the memory of trauma remains, acknowledging and letting go of that object (the loved one) can allow the subject to move on. Using Freud’s essay “Mourning and

Melancholia” as a theoretical framework, Ahmed identifies mourning as “the relatively healthy process of grieving for a lost object” (PH 138). She asserts that mourning is healthy because when the subject mourns, it acknowledges the loss of the object and thus can “let the object go” and “form new attachments” to new objects (PH 138). Melancholia, on the other hand, refuses to let go of the lost object. Instead, the melancholic “holds onto” the object and refuses to move on

(PH 139). Thus, according to Ahmed, melancholia can freeze the subject in time and inhibit progression.

Butler also discusses the notion of melancholia in terms of a painful lack of linear progress. According to Butler, holding on to an object as a result of melancholia acts as a resuscitation of the lost object (GT 84). Thus, the melancholic subject refuses to let go of the lost object, and in fact resuscitates it and brings it back to life. Therefore, instead of allowing the object to rest in the past, the melancholic continuously brings it back into the present.

Furthermore, if the lost object was a site of ambivalence for the subject, melancholia does not simply cause the object to linger in the present but causes self-inflicted harm on the subject who continues to keep it alive. The outcome, she explains, is one of persistent pain for the melancholic. Still drawing on Freud’s conception of melancholia, Butler emphasizes that “even

though the relationship remains ambivalent and unresolved, the object is ‘brought inside’ the ego where the quarrel magically resumes as an interior dialogue between two parts of the psyche…the lost object is set up within the ego as a critical voice or agency, and the anger originally felt for the object is reversed so that the internalized object now berates the ego” (GT

83). Thus, not only does melancholia freeze a subject in time, but it is frozen in a state of self- inflicted harm. Therefore, the original object of ambivalence disappears, but ambivalence remains and latches onto the subject. In other words, melancholia caused by an object of ambivalence leads the melancholic to turn on themselves.

While both Halberstam and Ahmed argue that to forget social norms is to challenge them and move on from the trauma they cause, effectively challenging social norms must occur in multiples. Indeed, they argue that collective revolt against the normative ideals of happiness and success is necessary in order to break free from painful objects of failure. While failure is often seen negatively as the inability to succeed according to capitalist endeavours, Halberstam argues that we can “build upon” history’s failures “in order to counter the logics of success that have emerged from global capitalism” (QF 19). Halberstam refers to films that celebrate collectivity, social bonding, and diverse communities as “Pixarvolt” films (QF 47). Halberstam claims that

Pixarvolt films often tell the story of an individual who joins forces with others to revolt against hegemonic systems. Halberstam explains that “accordingly Kung Fu Panda is not about unworthy leaders or success; it is a story of awkward grace and odd connections between seemingly unrelated species” (QF 184). Thus, collective failures to achieve the logic of success is a way to open up new possibilities for identity outside of global capitalism. In a similar vein,

Ahmed claims that “unhappiness is collective or shared,” and thus “challenging happiness can only be shared project” (PH 196). As she says, “it is too hard to cause unhappiness of the many

as a one” (PH 196). According to both Ahmed and Halberstam, change happens through collective revolution. In order to effectively destabilize the dominant narratives of happiness and success, then, failures must occur in multiples.

While both Halberstam and Ahmed claim that collectivity is necessary for change,

Halberstam emphasizes that a collective must include a diverse range of individuals. The examples of collectivity that Halberstam identifies throughout their book are often not groups of one uniform species. Instead, Halberstam draws on examples of Pixarvolt films that depict groups that are made up of a variety of different species that band together in order to overthrow

“the tyranny of the few” (QF 176). As Halberstam points out, the protagonists do not learn to be themselves or follow their dreams. Instead, they learn “to think with others and to work for a more collective futurity” (QF 44). Thus, according to Halberstam, maintaining difference is important for collective action. While Halberstam claims that groups must consist of multiple identities and backgrounds, they do not address how difference can be maintained once a group is established. Indeed, while Ahmed also advocates for collective resistance, she warns that collectivity runs the risk of “assimilate[ing] in the specific sense of becoming like” (PH 112) hegemonic systems of oppression. However, neither Ahmed nor Halberstam offer a way to navigate the tension between collectivity and hegemonic assimilation.

Although Butler does not address the nature of collectivity in Gender Trouble, her collaborative piece with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek titled Contingency, Hegemony,

Universality discusses the nature of universality and how people can work together to create change without erasing each other’s differences. According to Butler, collectives often occur when individuals establish similarities with one another. Thus, the commonalities between the members in a group take precedence over their differences. She refers to Hegel to explain that

“universality in its abstract form thus requires cutting the person off from qualities which he or she may well share with others, but which do not rise to the level of abstraction required for the term ‘universality’” (CHU 17). Thus, searching for the traits, goals, or behaviours that universally bind a collective often comes at the cost of eradicating or looking past their particularities. According to Butler, hegemony first determines what these universalities are and then “eras[es] all remnants of those wills it excludes from the domain of representation” (CHU

22). She also claims that other minority groups who attempt to challenge hegemony often fall into similar practices of universality. Therefore, if the subject does not embody what has been deemed universal to a particular group, it does not belong in that group.

When multiple groups claim to embody universality, they compete with one another for authority. According to Butler, hegemony operates and is established by determining which competing universality “makes claim to [the ideal of] universality” (CHU 165). As a result, those who make the claim for universality “do not lose their status as particular,” but they come “to stand for the universal without becoming identical with it” (CHU 165-166). Butler claims that when a particular set of similarities stand in for the universal, “the possibility for the principles of equality and justice that define the political field within a nominally democratic context seems now to depend upon the actualization of the goals of the ‘particular’ sector” (CHU 166). Thus, the universalities within different groups compete with one another for the ability to define the principles of equality and justice.

Butler links her conception of universality to performativity by examining the temporality of universality. Like performativity, universality “not only…undergo[es] revision in time, but its successive revisions and dissolutions are essential to what it is” (CHU 24). Thus, universality is performative in the sense that it is not a stable entity but constantly requires its

reaffirmation in time and space. She also emphasizes that universality is an ideal that cannot be fully internalized. As a result, “a certain necessary tension emerges within any political formation inasmuch as it seeks to fill that place and finds that it cannot” (CHU 32). On this basis,

I suggest that the performative nature of gender, success, and happiness is similar to the performative nature of universality. Just as gender performativity is an ideal that can never be fully internalized, so too is universality an impossible ideal. Therefore, a collective will always fail to embody the universal.

However, as Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed have claimed previously, failure is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, failure can be an opportunity for change. Butler claims that the failure to create a universal collective free from particularities “is precisely the future promise of universality” (CHU 32). Thus, she argues that collective goals should not be geared towards establishing totalizing similarities. Instead, and as Halberstam advocates, collectivity needs to revolve around embracing each other’s differences. One of the main goals for the contemporary intellectual, according to Butler, “is to find out how to navigate, with a critical notion of translation at hand, among these competing kinds of claims on universalization” (CHU

163). This is indeed what Ahmed is also concerned about. After all, how can the members of a group band together without erasing individual differences and participating in the same hegemonic erasure that they are attempting to overthrow? Butler claims that the solution is “one of establishing practices of translation among competing notions of universality” (CHU 167). In other words, her solution to competing universalities among groups is to recognize these differences and maintain them in spite of collectivity. Thus, mobilizing minority groups together does not and should not involve a translation of their universalities into “a dominant discourse”

(CHU 168). Instead of erasing differences in order to create the illusion of universality, Butler

claims that there must be “a threading together of those competing terms into an unwieldy movement whose ‘unity’ will be measured by its capacity to sustain, without domesticating, internal differences that keep its own definition in flux” (CHU 168). Thus, the characteristics of a collective cannot and should not be established as fixed through time; instead, they should be allowed to change over time in order to allow for the multiplicities of identities that challenge any notion of universality.

Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed offer valuable theories for the research focus of this thesis. I consider their perspectives on the temporal relationship between subjects and normative ideals in order to demonstrate how Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival

Guide depict their queer narrators’ failures to orient towards familial objects of happiness.

Specifically, Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed’s discussion of how the lasting memories of failure impact individuals over time, and how severing the relationship between an object and its recollected affects can free an individual from traumatic memories open up interesting possibilities of interpretation in Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival

Guide.

All three of these narratives can be classified as a bildungsroman due to the fact that each text revolves around the protagonist’s development from childhood into adulthood. Family is a crucial element in each, as the narrators’ growth hinges upon their experiences and memories of family. While the focus on the narrator’s relationships to family is fairly traditional, the nature of those relationships is not. Indeed, the narrators’ development centres on their queer failure to orient successfully towards familial objects of happiness. For instance, Molly, Jess, and Ivan all fail to desire traditionally feminine clothing. Additionally, all three characters are either working or pursuing careers in male-dominated fields. Molly chases a career as a filmmaker, Jess works

in industrial plants, and Ivan pursues a career as an electrician. While all three texts narrate experiences with familial objects, Tomboy Survival Guide includes domestic images and diagrams throughout the novel. Their narrative includes images of objects from the feminized domestic sphere, such as toasters and diagrams for baking cookies, as well as objects from the masculine industrial sphere, such as ropes and hack-saws. If, as Ahmed claims, objects can become menacing to a subject when that subject does not experience the affect they are supposed to experience, then what affect do these images create for the narrator of Tomboy Survival

Guide? Does the inclusion of these objects allow the narrator to claim a space within both ends of the gender binary through orienting themselves to both conventionally male and female objects of happiness? In including these images, do the objects that the images depict lose their menace and result in a form of empowerment for Ivan? Or, alternatively, do they remain a persistent reminder of Ivan’s failure to successfully orient towards any object of happiness for either gender identity?

Thus, I use my established theoretical framework to indicate where text and theory intersect as well as where the texts deviate and reveal theoretical gaps in Ahmed’s, Halberstam’s, and Butler’s theorizations of family, objects of happiness, gender, and failure. Indeed, my second chapter assesses to what extent the representation of childhood in Stone Butch Blues and Tomboy

Survival Guide fits with Halberstam’s notion of childhood. Halberstam identifies children as demonstrating “a total indifference to adult conceptions of success and failure” (QF 120).

However, as children, all three narrators experience painful moments of abjection as a consequence of their failures. Are Molly, Jess, and Ivan truly indifferent to their own failures and the abjection that follows? Or do the narratives emphasize their hyper-awareness of their own inability to succeed according to their family’s conceptions of success? Ahmed uses Molly from

Rubyfruit Jungle as an example of the happily queer – one who “still encounters the world that is unhappy with queer love, but refuses to be made unhappy by that encounter” (PH 117). As

Ahmed says, “[Molly’s] experiences involve discrimination, violence, and rejection from would- be-lovers who cannot bear the consequences of following queer desire past the forms of recognition of the straight world” (PH 117). Thus, it would appear as though Molly embodies the anarchic queer child that Halberstam identifies. However, how realistic is such a depiction? Is

Halberstam’s notion of childhood, and therefore Molly herself, a romanticized ideal?

In my third chapter, I will investigate to what extent memories of failure create lasting experiences of melancholia, abjection, and trauma for Molly, Jess, and Ivan, and whether forgetting is a possible solution for them to surmount these memories. I will consider what these three narratives convey about the possibility for the subject to forget its family. Halberstam suggests that if the subject can forget its family, it achieves a clean slate to move beyond the past into a new present and prospective future (QF 70). Although it may be true that if the subject forgets family, it can imagine alternatives to the life it inherits through the family, do these three queer narratives show the benefits of forgetting their families? Or, alternatively, do they express the impossibility or even the undesirability of such an enterprise?

While my earlier chapters consider the experiences of trauma that queer failure induces for these narrators, my fourth chapter determines to what extent the narrators can harness their failures for political resistance. Since Butler, Halberstam, and Ahmed all argue that queer collectives can challenge hegemonic systems through their repeated failures, those collectives can be described as potentially happy objects since they promise to free queers from oppressive heteronormative institutions. However, as Butler states, collective resistance that universalizes rather than respects differences is not a hopeful vehicle for change but simply replicates the

oppressive systems it attempts to overthrow (CHU 168). Thus, in my fourth chapter, I will consider what Butler argues regarding the dangers of universalization in collectives in order to analyze whether queer collectives become happy objects for the narrators of Rubyfruit Jungle,

Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival Guide. For instance, Molly appears to avoid collectives because she sees them as threats to her individuality. However, does her persistent individualism offer her a hopeful future? In order to finally feel like she belongs to a group, does Jess need to universalize their struggles and therefore eradicate their differences? Is the ending of Stone Butch

Blues as hopeful as it seems or, alternatively, does Jess’s hope for collective action highlight the tensions between unity and universality against which Butler warns us? Similarly, to what extent do Ivan’s attempts to connect transgender struggles to all other misfits challenge the concept of a universal ideal? Or, do their attempts to reach out to other struggling groups, irrespective of their gender identity, succumb to the eradication of difference in favour of collectivity? Do any of these texts encourage us to “rethink universalities” (CHU 20), or do they perpetuate the concept of universality that Butler dismantles? Thus, the final chapter of my thesis is concerned with whether or not collectivity is represented as a way for the narrators to successfully cope with their memories of failure in order to orient themselves to a promising future outside of the heteronormative parameters of gender, success and happiness. In the process, I hope to show that these narratives open up new possibilities for thinking about queerness, happiness, family, and time.

CHAPTER TWO

Affective Experiences of Queer Failure and Abjection

Drawing on the theoretical framework which I established in my first chapter, I propose to examine the relationship between queer subjects and familial objects of happiness in Rubyfruit

Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival Guide. First, taking into account Halberstam’s discussion of success and failure, I investigate how the three narratives depict queer childhood.

As I state in my previous chapter, Halberstam argues that children are indifferent to “adult conceptions of success and failure” (QF 120). Contrary to Halberstam’s claim, however, I argue that the nature of the relationship between queer subject and familial objects of happiness in these narratives shows that all three narrators are sensitive to these conceptions from a very young age. Their sensitivity stems from the punishment they face from their parents on account of their difference and their non-identification with normative objects of success. Further, their failure to orient successfully towards familial objects of happiness produces an affective gap, as theorized by Ahmed. While Ahmed identifies shame, rage, and disappointment as affects that manifest in such affective gaps, I incorporate Kristeva’s theorization of abjection into my literary analyses to suggest that the narrators’ families respond to these affective gaps by abjecting their children. As a result, abjection is another affect that manifests in response to queer failure.

Additionally, I show that, while Jess and Ivan describe instances of their abjection to highlight the harmful violence of queer oppression, Molly refuses to convey a similar story. Instead, she refuses to be objectified by heteronormative as well as queer figures of authority and decides to remain abject rather than subject. I draw on Sedgwick’s theorization of gay shame to suggest that

Molly’s refusal to show shame in the face of abjection risks limiting rather than empowering her

narrative. Further, she may attempt to hide her shame, but her narrative nevertheless exposes that she frequently experiences it. Thus, Rubyfruit Jungle ultimately highlights that shame is a core aspect of her identity despite her attempt to repress it. Lastly, I consider the causes of unhappiness for the narrators’ parents in the context of Ahmed’s theorization of the relationship between queer child, parents, and unhappiness. Ahmed argues that the parents of a queer child can be unhappy because they assume that their child’s queerness will lead to an unhappy life (PH

49). While this is a likely cause of unhappiness for some parents, I argue that the parents’ unhappiness in all three narratives are not caused by their concern for their child’s wellbeing; instead, they are caused by the fact that their queer child threatens the already tenuous survival of the family. Contrary to Halberstam’s claims, then, all three narrators are aware of – and deeply impacted by – the adult conceptions of success and failure that lead to their experiences of abjection.

Kristeva defines abjection as an act of rejection and revulsion (PHR 4). That which is treated as abject is seen as filthy; however, she states that “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (PHR 4). The process of abjection, then, can occur on the individual and collective level. When the subject turns away from and vomits at the sight of “food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung,” the subject is “thrust[ing] aside” what threatens its identity by provoking disgust (PHR 2). In the same vein, an individual can become abject when their community determines that their presence is a threat to their system’s order and identity. Therefore, Kristeva not only defines the abject as what is expelled from a society as well as from the body, but she also claims that abjection functions as “my safeguards. The primers of my culture” (PHR 2). If the abject is filth, then those that are not

abject are clean. As a result, order, purity, and identity are established and maintained at the expense of the abjected.

While those that abject a subject seek to reaffirm their own identities, the subject that becomes abject loses its sense of self. Indeed, when an individual or community rejects something out of “repugnance” (PHR 2), the act of rejection allows the one who rejects to turn away from and deny any correlation to the abject. The abject can be defined by negation, as it is

“not me,” not subject, “not that,” not object, but at the same time it is “not nothing either” (PHR

2). Kristeva states that the process of identification depends on the subject/object binary. More specifically, she claims that humans establish their identity by orienting towards objects.

Abjection, however, is the process that prevents identification from occurring. Since the abject is neither subject nor object, it does not fit into either end of the binary and is thus unable to establish its identity in relation to objects around them. On this theoretical basis, I consider how each narrative conveys experiences of abjection. While Kristeva’s theory is a detailed psychoanalytic account of abjection, she discusses it in a heteronormative context. These three narratives, on the other hand, conceptualize abjection through queer perspectives. Ultimately, the queer experiences of abjection in Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival

Guide open up new possibilities for understanding the concept and process of the abject outside of a heteronormative frame.

While Ahmed claims that the affective gaps produced by a queer’s failure to experience familial objects of happiness can cause shame, rage, and disappointment, she suggests that there are some queer characters who remain indifferent to the affects that their failures produce. In

“Unhappy Queers,” Ahmed defines unhappy queers, happy queers, and the happily queer by examining literary examples to explain how each type of queer is affected by the happy objects

around them. According to Ahmed, Molly is happily queer because she “refus[es] to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of [her]” (PH 116).2 Ahmed argues that Molly’s narrative is proof that “it is thus possible to give an account of being happily queer that does not conceal signs of struggle” (PH 118). However, it can be argued that Molly not only witnesses that others are ashamed of her, but that she also experiences abjection as a consequence of that shame. As a result, her awareness and experiences of abjection complicate both Ahmed and

Halberstam’s claims regarding the indifference of queer characters and children.

Kristeva claims that abjection is “a threat issued from the prohibitions that found the inner and outer borders in which and through which the speaking subject is constituted” (PHR

69). In other words, just as Butler claims that “we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right” (GT 190), so does Kristeva claim that those who do not conform to dominant ideologies and conventions are punished with abjection. In response to Ahmed’s interpretation, I suggest that Molly attempts to outwardly portray herself as “happily queer” in the face of her abjection, but that she nevertheless does experience shame as a result. Several instances of abjection in Rubyfruit Jungle indicate that Molly is determined not to show others that she is negatively affected by her abjection. Her refusal to acknowledge her shame suggests that she sees it as a sign of weakness. However, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, gay shame should not be denied but embraced. Specifically, Sedgwick states that shame “attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is” and is therefore an integral facet of one’s identity (51). Further, she

2 Esther Saxey is another scholar who argues that Molly is indifferent to her identity as a bastard and that “Molly rejects these labels or drains them of meaning by displaying indifference to such categorization” (“Lesbian Bastard

Heroes” 35).

contends that shame is “the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity” for queer people. In the context of Sedgewick’s theorization of gay shame, I suggest that Molly’s attempt to hide her shame is a harmful attempt to hide crucial aspects of her own identity.

Although Halberstam argues that children are indifferent to adult conceptions of success and failure, Molly’s narrative shows that she is aware of and impacted by such conceptions.

Furthermore, not only is she aware of them, but her refusal to orient towards familial objects of happiness leads to repeated experiences of abjection that solidify her identity as a failure.

Although she insists that she is impervious to the psychological impacts of abjection, her internal dialogue in the narrative indicates that she is nonetheless affected by it. Carrie, her adoptive mother, abjects her from the family whenever she fails to orient successfully towards familial objects of happiness. The first instance in the narrative where Carrie abjects her occurs when

Carrie tells her that she is not her biological child. Carrie states that she is “Ruby Drollinger’s bastard” in an attempt to emphasize that, because of who her mother is, she “ain’t so fine” as she thinks she is (RFJ 6). Thus, Carrie declares that being a member of a biological family is a form of success, while being a bastard is a failure. Her intention is to stop her from thinking highly of herself, as she exclaims afterwards, “now let’s see you put your nose up in the air” (RFJ 6).

Carrie’s assertion that she is a bastard connotes more than simply the fact that Carrie is not her mother. Indeed, in the Oxford English dictionary, “bastard” is defined as “a mongrel, an animal of inferior breed” (“Bastard”). Thus, to be a bastard is to be less than human – animal. And, as

Kristeva says, the abject lies “on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities

(subject/object etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal” (PHR

207, emphasis added). Hence, when Carrie calls her a bastard, she strips her of her subjectivity by placing her in the animalistic space of the abject.

While Carrie abjects Molly in an attempt to reduce her sense of self, Molly meets these moments with a refusal to be ashamed. When Carrie claims that her daughter is a bastard, her response is one of defiance, as she asserts that “[she doesn’t] care” and that “it makes no difference where [she] came from” (RFJ 7). Her insistence that she does not care about who her mother is suggests that, at least outwardly, she expresses an indifference to Carrie’s abjection.

Not only does she suggest that she does not care, but she even attempts to embrace her abjection by running into the woods. However, her experience of abjection is depicted as a timeless void of non-identification that proves to be uninhabitable for her. Once darkness encroaches in the woods, she realizes that there is no moon visible in the sky. The moon is both a gravitational anchor and an indication of time. Hence, the invisible moon causes the woods to be a dark void without an object of identification that would provide her with a sense of where or even when she is. The effect of the absent moon symbolizes the effect that her abjection has on her: since

Carrie removed herself as her mother, Carrie is no longer an object for Molly to identify herself with. In the woods, she ponders what her “real mother looks like” in order to determine whether she “look[s] like someone” (RFJ 9). Her wondering at who her real mother is, however, not answered.

Therefore, Molly attempts, but fails, to orient towards a new object of identification during this moment of exclusion from Carrie and her family. Without anything or anyone to connect to, she states the following: “the black filled my nostrils and the air was full of little noises, weird sounds” (RFJ 9). Indeed, the environment in the woods is the space of the abject.

The black, which in this text symbolizes the emptiness of non-identities, threatens to engulf her.

Blinded by the darkness, she stumbles back home. Without Carrie or the family as an object of identification, she loses her sense of self as well as her sense of time. Thus, this passage outlines

that one’s sense of time hinges on one’s ability to identify with familial objects. Although she asserts that she is indifferent to her abjection, her retreat back to the family unit after being unable to identify with another mother-figure highlights that she indeed is afraid of losing the only familial objects of identification she has.

Although Molly insists that she does not care about the fact that Carrie calls her a bastard, she is nonetheless affected by these moments of abjection and clearly internalizes her bastardy because she experiences shame at its recollection. The narrative exposes her shame with respect to her identity as a bastard when her uncle Ep uses the term in a derogatory way. When Ep comes home bloody and bruised from a fight, he says that he “fought about the boys with that bastard, Layton” (RFJ 18). When she hears Ep call Layton a bastard, she says the following: the

“word made me cringe,” and “my face went hot and I didn’t dare look up from my butterfly bandages for fear someone would see my color” (RFJ 18). Clearly, then, her identity as a bastard has become a source of shame for her. However, although the word causes her to cringe and exhibit physical signs of shame, she is determined not to let anyone see her reaction. Thus, Molly may refuse to show that she is ashamed, but that does not mean that she is not ashamed at all.

Indeed, these passages demonstrate that she has internalized the conception that being a bastard is a form of failure that threatens her abjection from the family unit.

Her identity as a bastard continually strips her of her humanity and pulls her into the abject. When she asks about the racial segregation of bathrooms and says that, since she doesn’t know who her “real folks are” she might be colored, Carl laughs and tells her “who knows what you are, you’re a mongrel, that’s all” (RFJ 53). As stated earlier, the definition of a bastard is a mongrel and an animal. Even though Carl says this in jest, his remark still abjects her. Not only does Carl strip Molly of her humanity by calling her a mongrel, but he also says that they do not

know what she is, not who she is. Further, her response to Carl in this passage indicates that she internalizes her abjection. She responds to Carl in the following terms: “I don’t care what the hell

I am” (RFJ 53). Indeed, she continues to emphasize her indifference to her lack of identification.

However, since she refers to herself as “what” instead of “who,” she does not fight for her personhood but settles into the identity of the abject.

If these initial moments of abjection still allow Molly to maintain a point of identification with Carrie and Carl through her proximity to the family unit, her queerness is the failure that causes Carrie to completely abject her and sever her from it. The moment when Carrie completely abjects Molly from the family is compounded by the language she uses to strip Molly of her humanity, voice, and ultimately her identity. When Carrie finds out that Molly was forced to leave the university she attended because she was in a sexual relationship with her female roommate, Faye, Carrie abjects her from the household and ultimately her family, telling her to

“go on and get outa here. I don’t want you” (RFJ 121). Further, Carrie also proceeds to describe her as an animal, which further emphasizes that Molly, no longer tied to the family, lacks an object to identify with and thus loses her subjectivity. When she asks Carrie “where else am I gonna go?” Carrie responds with: “that’s your problem, smarty-pants. You’ll have no friends and you got no family. Let’s see how far you get, you little snot-nose…well, I hope I live to see the day you put your tail between your legs. I’ll laugh right in your face” (RFJ 121-122). However,

Molly continues to defiantly face her abjection from Carrie and the family unit, as she retorts with the following: “then you’d better live to see me dead” (RFJ 122). Thus, while earlier as a child she was able to make the decision to leave the darkness of the woods and reorient towards

Carrie’s family unit, now she is forced to walk “out in to the cool night air” (RFJ 122), but she still refuses to show Carrie that she is ashamed of her failures and her subsequent abjection.

Kristeva explains that abjection is a powerful mechanism to enforce “borders, positions, rules” (PHR 4). However, Molly’s continual indifference to abjection challenges the power of this mechanism to enforce heteronormative order. Once she is abjected from her family, her immediate environment mirrors her sense of abjection. Her relationship to her apartment simultaneously expresses indifference to and an internalization of her abjection. Kristeva claims that abjection is a means of “excluding filth” (PHR 137). Molly’s “ragged apartment” in New

York reveals that she is settling into the filth that, like her, has been excluded by society (RFJ

137). As she explains, “the bathtub was in the kitchen, the electricity was d.c., and the walls were layers of multicolor from so many coats of paint and wallpaper peeling over decades of misuse”

(RFJ 137). Not only is she surrounded by objects that mirror her own abandoned state, but she physically internalizes them. She narrates that she is “eating the wallpaper off the walls” (RFJ

151) because she cannot afford food. Thus, she does not exclude the filthy walls but internalizes them. Her consumption of the apartment shows that she has internalized the process of abjection.

However, she refuses to express the shame that abjection has induced. As she says, “so I’m eating wallpaper off the walls and ripping off day-old bread. Tough shit” (RFJ 151). Indeed, she persistently expresses indifference by remaining defiant.

Molly’s refusal to acknowledge her shame prevents her from confronting the harsh realities of queer oppression and connecting with others who share similar experiences. Margaret

Morrison emphasizes that the experience of gay shame is not solely harmful but can also be an affect that binds queers together. As she says, “if, to heterosexists, queer sexualities count as

‘indignities,’ these ‘indignities’ help queers cohere in shared shame with dignity” (25). Molly’s refusal to admit her shame is evident in her response to her cousin, Leroy, when he tells her that he is “all mixed up” (RFJ 57) from the pressures to conform to normative modes of behaviour

and identity that he faces at school in spite of his homosexual desires. He admits the following:

“they’re all tough and if I don’t act tough, they’ll whip my ass and laugh me right outa the school” (RFJ 57). The fact that Leroy says that he acts tough reveals that he is performing, and that he is therefore hiding certain shameful aspects of his identity that he knows he will be punished for. Indeed, his fear to stray from normative behaviour and identity stems from the fact that he consistently witnesses the violent abjection that another student, Joel, suffers on account of his difference. Leroy tells Molly that “she should see what they do to him. Nobody’s doing that to me” (RFJ 57). While Leroy admits his feelings of gay shame, Molly’s response to Leroy makes it clear that she refuses to accept his shame or to acknowledge her own, as she replies,

“who cares what those dumb jocks think?” (RFJ 57). Thus, instead of experiencing a moment of shared shame at their queerness, she expresses indifference which comes across as a lack of sympathy for his situation. Therefore, while Morrison suggests that shared shame binds queer together, Molly’s refusal to acknowledge her own shame prevents her from experiencing that bond with Leroy.

Molly encounters multiple threats of abjection from heteronormative institutions, but she also faces it in queer spaces. Kristeva draws on anthropological studies to demonstrate that defilement is often used in Western civilizations as a means to separate the sexes. More specifically, she argues that defilement is a tool used by men in power to exert their authority over women (PHR 70). However, Molly’s narrative demonstrates that abjection can be used as a tool for authority in queer relationships as well. When Chryssa Hart, a wealthy older woman, offers to pay for Molly’s tuition and to make her a kept woman in exchange for companionship, she is making an offer to take Molly away from her filthy surroundings. Thus, if Molly agrees to be bought by Chryssa, she no longer exists as a filthy abject but as a sexual object. However, she

rejects the offer because it would mean that she has no autonomy. Molly justifies her decision to reject the offer by claiming that Chryssa “buys me the way she goes and buys a winter coat or a

Gucci handbag. I’m a piece of meat” (RFJ 150). Therefore, defilement is not only a threat wielded by men over women in exchange for women’s submission, but it can operate in relationships between women as well.

In Stone Butch Blues, Jess’s memories as a child demonstrate that, like Molly, they are also extremely aware of adult conceptions of success and failure. However, while Molly expresses defiant indifference to her failures and subsequent experiences of abjection, Jess expresses fear. Indeed, their awareness and fear of failure are rooted in their fear of abjection.

They immediately begin the narration of their childhood by explaining that they “didn’t want to be different,” and that they wanted to be normal because that is what “grownups wanted” (SBB

13). They immediately emphasize that, as a child, they were extremely aware that their difference was something that was “wrong with [them]” (SBB 13), and that it stopped them from being what grownups wanted them to be. Thus, they realize that their difference is a cause for abjection because they do not receive love as a result. Further, abjection becomes a form of punishment for Jess on account of their failure to orient towards familial objects of happiness.

When their mother has “been informed that [Jess] could no longer attend temple unless [they] wore a dress” (SBB 18), they are sent to their room. In other words, their failure to orient towards the right objects causes to them to be temporarily banished from the rest of the family. Therefore, as a child, they are threatened with abjection on account of their familial failures.

Jess’s parents are not the only characters that abject them to make them aware that their difference is a form of failure. They are also punished with abjection by other children, which highlights that conceptions of success and failure are not specifically adult conceptions but are

internalized and upheld by children as well. The group of kids, called the Scabbie gang, confronts Jess and physically assaults them in order to “see how [they] tinkle” (SBB 18) due to their ambiguous gender identity. They recall the following: “one of the boys…knocked me down and two of the others struggled to pull of my pants and my underpants” (SBB 18). Next, “they pushed and carried me to old Mrs. Jefferson’s house and locked me in the coal bin” (SBB 18).

The only objects to which Jess is in close proximity are the “coal soot and [their own] blood”

(SBB 18). Thus, the Scabbie gang defiles them by forcing them into close contact with the dirty coal soot in order to punish them on account of their difference. Overall, this instance emphasizes that these children are not only aware of adult conceptions of success and failure, but they feel entitled to abject Jess in order to remind them that their failure to conform to heteronormative object orientation is a form of failure that leads to violent alienation.

The above passage additionally emphasizes how afraid Jess is of their abjection. Just as the woods in Rubyfruit Jungle represent the psychological space of the abject, so does the coal bin reflect the isolated existence of abject failures such as themselves. They recount that “it was dark in the bin” (SBB 18). Without light, and physically isolated in the bin, they are severed from all other connections. Their fear of the coal bin further emphasizes their fear of isolation from objects of identification, as they narrate the following: “I was afraid I would never get out” (SBB

18). The environment of the abject, then, is a place in which they do not want to remain. Thus, both Molly and Jess’s experiences of abjection in the woods and the coal bin emphasize the isolating experience of abjection. However, while Molly defiantly faces threats of abjection and refuses to show fear or shame, Jess persistently expresses both emotions when they experience abjection.

While Molly experiences abjection through being exiled from her family, Jess’s failures to orient towards familial objects of happiness results in repeated instances of violent defilement at several moments throughout the narrative. Although Molly’s abjection causes her to live in her filthy apartment, she does not face the brutality that Jess does. Indeed, Jess’s experiences of violent defilement and rape by both boys and police officers indicate how both male groups use abjection as a tool to punish Jess for their failure to embody heteronormative ideals of gender and sexuality. Kristeva says that the “ritualization of defilement is accompanied by a strong concern for separating the sexes, and this means giving men rights over women” (70) and renders women “passive objects” (PHR 70). In other words, defilement is a form of abjection that puts women into their objectified place. On this basis, I argue that Jess is defiled and raped because their failure to orient towards heteronormative objects of happiness also signifies their refusal to fit into women’s normative, ordered place. When they are raped by the boys on the football field, one of the boys, Jeffrey, calls them a “fucking bulldagger” (SBB 41). They acknowledge that their failed heteronormativity is the reason for the rape by stating the following: “all my crimes were listed. I was guilty as charged” (SBB 41). Thus, rape is a way to abject them through defilement, and the boys make it clear that this violent form of abjection is a form of punishment for Jess’s failure to orient towards heteronormative objects of happiness.

Jess continues to suffer from violent acts of defilement on account of their gender identity and sexuality throughout the narrative. I suggest that the section in the narrative where they are raped by the police exposes the brutality of heteronormative hierarchies. When they are detained by the police, Lieutenant Mulroney orders them to “either eat me or eat my shit, bulldagger. It’s up to you” (SBB 62). Thus, they are forced to make a choice between objectification or abjection.

If they “suck [his] cock” (SBB 62), they admit subservience to Mulroney as a figure of

patriarchal authority. If they refuse, then Mulroney forces Jess to consume the impure objects that others expel in disgust. However, regardless of their ‘decision,’ they are defiled by the police. Indeed, they are both forced to feel “the hard shape of shit against [their] tongue” when he dunks their head in the toilet, as well as suffer through rape when the police handcuff them onto a desk (SBB 62). Thus, they are forced either to submit to this violent enforcement of heterosexuality or become abject. Mulroney’s ultimatum for Jess unveils the brutality that is required for patriarchal figures of authority to maintain existing power structures.

As Kristeva says, defilement is not only a means for men to enforce their authority over women, but it is a form of abjection (PHR 70). The effect that this rape has on Jess’s psychological state establishes that abjection cuts the subject away from objects of identity orientation and thus prevents identity formation. Once they are defiled and raped, they are released and return to their apartment. Although they are surrounded by some of their friends, the narrative emphasizes a disconnect between themselves and the world around them, as they say the following: “silent and still. Muffled. That’s how the world seemed to be now” (SBB 166).

Their inability to clearly hear the world around them emphasizes that they are unable to orient themselves towards the objects on which they previously relied in order to form their identity.

Even though they “wish [they] could tell Peaches or Betty how peaceful [they] felt” to be surrounded by friends, they “couldn’t speak” (SBB 66). Thus, their experiences immediately following their rape convey the effects that abjection has on their identity. Their inability to speak or clearly hear the “muffled” world around her demonstrates that those relationships have been effectively severed because of the abjection they faced from the police.

As Kristeva says, identity is a process that occurs through the subject’s relation to objects.3 One of the pivotal objects in Jess’s identity formation is a ring that was given to them by a Dineh grandmother. When they were an infant, they were predominantly taken care of by several Dineh women in a neighbouring apartment when the women saw that Jess’s mother was not taking adequate care of them.4 When their parents eventually ceased their relationship with the Dineh women, the Dineh grandmother gifted them the ring. Thus, it can be argued that their relationship to this ring is the one strong connection that they have towards an object due to the fact that their loss of this object leads to the loss of their sense of time as well as identity. As a child, their identity progression is facilitated by the ring. When they try on their father’s clothes in an attempt “to catch a glimpse of the woman [they] would become” (SBB 20), they say that the ring was the missing piece to their future identity. Indeed, the ring appears to project their own sense of selfhood, as they describe the following: “the silver and turquoise [in the ring] formed a dancing figure. I couldn’t tell if the figure was a woman or a man” (SBB 20). This figure, then, mirrors their own gender ambiguity. Additionally, this passage demonstrates how their identity is a process that revolves around their developing orientation towards the ring.

When they put it on, they remark that “the ring no longer fit across three of [their] fingers” but

3 Kristeva’s conceptualization of identity formation hinges on the subject’s relationship to objects, as she says the following: “the ego’s identity…could not be precisely established without having been differentiated from an other, from its object” (PHR 62).

4 Jess narrates the following about their birth and early infancy: The Dineh grandmother “found me in the bassinet, unwashed. My mother admitted she was afraid to touch me, except to pin on a diaper or stick a bottle in my mouth.

The next day the grandmother sent over her daughter, who agreed to keep me during the day while her children were at school, if that was alright” (SBB 14).

now “fit snugly on two” (SBB 20). Thus, Jess’s physical development is marked according to their growth into the ring. Ultimately, their orientation towards this ring is the one object that allows them to progress towards their own identity.

Jess’s loss of their ring marks their sense of disconnection from time and the objects around them. When they are raped by the cops and then released from jail, they remark that “the ring was gone. The only tangible proof it had ever existed were the blood blisters on my ring finger; the cops must have pried it off while my hands were cuffed and swollen” (SBB 65). Not only is their sole object for identity formation gone, but its absence also leads to a loss of time.

As they state, “the ring was gone. There was nothing to hope for now” (SBB 65). Since the ring facilitated their identity formation, its absence symbolizes a loss of future for them as well. Thus, the relationship between Jess and the ring establishes that the process of identification that occurs between subject and object is deeply related to the subject’s sense of time. Without such objects, they also lose any sense a hopeful future.

While Jess and Molly’s experiences of abjection prevent them from establishing their identities through object orientation, Ivan in Tomboy Survival Guide is initially prevented from developing their identity by the objects themselves. If, as Kristeva argues, identity formation is facilitated by a subject’s relationship to objects, Ivan’s inability to orient towards objects signifies their struggle to form their own identity. It can be argued that Ivan’s abjection from normative objects of happiness emphasizes the struggles that gender fluid and trans people face when their only means for identity formation rests on objects that are traditionally seen as exclusively for individuals on either end of the gender binary. However, the temporality of

Ivan’s failures to orient towards these objects simultaneously exposes the performativity of all gender identities and thus demonstrates how one’s failure to orient towards these objects exposes

normative gender ideals as regulatory fictions. Further, I argue that the ways in which the images included in Tomboy Survival Guide are portrayed signifies the narrative’s attempt to destabilize the normative exclusivity of objects according to one’s gender and allow the narrator to orient towards the objects from which they are usually excluded.

Ivan, like Molly and Jess, is aware of adult conceptions of success and failure from a very young age. Further, their feelings of failure stem from their failures to orient towards normative objects of happiness. As a child, Ivan recognizes that they are different because they compare the objects towards which they orient themselves to objects with which other girls their age identify.

Indeed, they recount the following: “I knew already that I wasn’t like most little girls” because “I didn’t like the things they liked and I didn’t get how or why to play Barbies…and I hated gymnastics and volleyball” (TBSG 33). Ivan recognizes their difference on account of their failure to orient themselves towards these feminized objects of happiness. Furthermore, when their childhood friend Janine Jones starts dating a boy, Ivan presumes that the objects towards which Janine orients herself will also shift. Ivan begins to equate Janine with “those girls and their tinkling laughs and mascara-draped eyes…the way their pink angora sweaters [and] the way they snapped their gum” (TBSG 41). Ivan’s fixation on objects as a means to contextualize their difference emphasizes that object orientation grounds one’s identity. Therefore, Ivan recognizes their difference from others because they are aware of their failure to orient towards objects with which other girls identify.

Butler claims that a subject’s gender is constituted through practices of repetition by which the subject’s gender performance is measured against normative gender ideals.

Additionally, she argues that a “failed copy” of a gender ideal “expos[es] the rift between the phantasmic and the real” (GT 186). In other words, the impossibility of gender ideals is exposed

when subjects fail to embody them. Thus, Butler suggests that the subject’s failure to embody a gender ideal is an opportunity for “subversive repetition” that contests the inevitability of heteronormative gender identities (GT 201). In this context, Ivan’s relationship to their new bike echoes Butler’s conception of gender performativity. Indeed, the pain inflicted on Ivan during their own gender failure occurs in brief moments of discontinuity and highlights their failure to approximate normative gender ideals.

Ivan’s new bike signifies their rejection of traditionally female objects of happiness in favour of male ones. While their “old bike had been a purple one-speed with a sparkly banana seat” (TBSG 35), their new bike was “a blue ten-speed with curled handlebars wrapped in white plastic tape and hand brakes” (TBSG 35). The description of the two bikes situates them as objects that are symbolic of both ends of the gender binary. The purple bike is the feminine object for girls, which Ivan “had never loved” (TBSG 35), and the blue ten-speed bike is a more masculine object. Ivan’s failure to completely orient towards the new bike occurs as soon as they are on the precipice of total union with it. They recount themselves “pedal[ing] with [their] head bent, eyes down, watching the chain slide from one sprocket to another and back, starting to see how everything worked” (TBSG 35), a scene that is immediately followed by another in which

Ivan is “blinking [their] eyes and trying to get them to focus” after they crash into a parked car

(TBSG 35). Butler argues that when the subject exposes the gap between one’s approximation of a gender ideal and the ideal itself, they “reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness” of that ideal (GT 192). Thus, the temporality of Ivan’s failure to orient successfully towards the bike indicates the performative nature of object orientation and gender identity in general.

The bicycle is one example of the objects of happiness that prevent Ivan from orienting towards them as a child and therefore prevent their identity formation. In addition, once Ivan

begins to successfully pursue an identity as an electrician, the men around them intervene and attempt to abject Ivan. Ivan’s performance at electrical school signifies their ability to successfully pursue a profession that is traditionally reserved for cis-gender, heterosexual men.

They claim that they were “proud of [their] toolbox” and “loved picking [up the various tools inside] and feeling their solid heft in [their] palm” (TBSG 71). Repeatedly holding these objects enforces the sense that Ivan is succeeding at electrical school and is hopeful about their ability to become an electrician. As a result, their future identity as a tradesman is becoming solidified.

They recall that “nearly every day our instructor pointed out [their] work to the rest of the class as an example of the kind of attention to detail that would make [them] into a fine tradesman”

(TBSG 71). Ivan’s memories of the beginning of electrical school emphasizes that they are carving out a future for themselves that lies outside of the parameters of heteronormative identities.

However, when Ivan begins to experience success in a traditionally male vocation, others around them defile their tools in an attempt to abject them. Ivan recalls “reach[ing] into [their] spotless toolbox for a Robertson No. 3 screwdriver and felt something wet and almost warm,” eventually realizing that “it was piss…one of the dudes in the building had pissed in [their] toolbox” (TBSG 72). When “the dudes” defile Ivan’s toolbox, they force Ivan in close proximity to the filth that they reject. Thus, the defilement of Ivan’s toolbox is an attempt to defile Ivan and place them back into the ambiguous borderline position of the abject.

Although Ivan is hurt by their abjection, they attempt to face it stoically in a similar way that Molly does. However, while Molly defiantly faces her abjection in isolation, Ivan effectively eliminates the power of abjection by cleaning the toolbox and by continuing to make connections with those around them. Thus, this act of abjection does not prevent Ivan from orienting towards

the toolbox as an object of happiness. When Ivan realizes that at least one of the men in their class urinated in their toolbox and then proceeds to clean it, they remark the following: “I had to peel off its rubber case to clean it properly, gagging a little bit and trying to blink through the tears I could not keep from welling up in my eyes” (TBSG 72). Indeed, Ivan is emotionally hurt by this act of abjection. However, they make their “toolbox dry and spotless” before anyone is able to see that it was vandalized. Additionally, they defiantly assert: “I for sure wasn’t about to let any of them see me cry about it” (TBSG 73). Therefore, although they are hurt and disgusted by the vandalization of their toolbox, they refuse to show that they are affected by it. Instead, they “pretend like nothing was wrong” when “the first of [their] classmates came in” from lunch

(TBSG 73). Ivan’s ability to eliminate traces of the defilement that occurred eliminates the power of abjection by showing that the man’s attempt to abject Ivan was ineffective.

Further, Ivan’s ability to immediately connect with a male class member after this incident further mitigates the power of that act of defilement and abjection. In the same chapter that their toolbox gets defiled, they recount how their friendship with Barry developed. Barry, “a really quiet giant of a man who sat across the aisle from [Ivan] in class” (TBSG 74) sheepishly asks Ivan for “marriage advice” (75) one day after class. When Ivan saw Barry after they gave him some marriage advice, he “grinned with his whole face and opened both of his arms wide…and gave [them] the first and last hug [they] ever witnessed him engage in” (TBSG 78).

The immediate transition from an attempt at abjection to Ivan’s new friendship with a heterosexual man further emphasizes the futility of the attempt at abjection through the toolbox.

Not only is Ivan able to continue orienting towards the toolbox by cleaning it until it is spotless, but they are also able to maintain their subjectivity by developing relationships with others

around them. Ultimately, this section emphasizes Ivan’s ability to remain a subject in spite of attempts to render them abject.

Tomboy Survival Guide consists of illustrations that are both inserted into and separating chapters. The majority of these illustrations are of domestic and industrial appliances, such as vacuums and circuit-breakers, and are reminiscent of diagrams that one would find in an appliance manual. While the narrator recalls their childhood memories of failure to orient towards objects of happiness, it can be argued that the images of objects inserted in the narrative refuse to fit into either category of the gender binary. Thus, while the childhood narrator experienced abjection because of their inability to orient towards objects that were associated with one end of the gender binary, these objects visually resist the gender binary that resulted in the narrator’s abjection.

Figure 1. Diagram of kitchen mixer from Tomboy Survival Guide (2).

Figure 2. Diagram of vacuum cleaner from Tomboy Survival Guide (140).

Figure 3. Diagram of clothes iron from Tomboy Survival Guide (174).

There are several images that depict domestic, and therefore traditionally feminine, objects such as a kitchen mixer (see fig. 1), vacuum (see fig. 2), and clothes iron (see fig. 3).

However, although these objects are traditionally seen as female objects of identification, they are taken apart and each piece of the object is labelled. As such, these images are what one would find in a how-to manual and are represented in a scientific and technological light.

Therefore, while the objects themselves are traditionally seen as female objects of happiness, the manner in which they are depicted are for a traditionally male audience. As a result, these images refuse to be categorized as either male or female objects of happiness. No longer exclusively for men or women, they open up the possibility for any individual to successfully orient towards them and not suffer abjection on account of their gender identity.

Ahmed claims that one’s failure to be made happy by familial objects of happiness result in those objects becoming menacing for the individual. She argues that when an individual is surrounded by these objects, they are constantly reminded of their failure to be made happy by them. Although Ivan’s text successfully transforms potentially menacing gendered objects into ones that embody both ends of the gender binary, their birth name is a menacing object that they can neither transform nor completely abandon. I suggest that Ivan’s birth name is a familial object of happiness because names are significant points of identification for subjects. Since parents traditionally choose the names of their children, they do so with the idea that the name will be accepted by the child. Further, the fact that Ivan becomes unhappy with their name suggests that names can transform into unhappy objects of identification for subjects. In order to move on and cultivate an identity that makes them happy, Ivan changes their name. However, some of Ivan’s family members refuse to call Ivan anything but their birth name even though

Ivan claims the following: “I lose a little bit of my heart every time anyone I love calls me by my

old name” (TBSG 167). Thus, the family members that refuse to let go of Ivan’s birth name also persistently remind Ivan of their failure to orient successfully towards their familial objects of happiness. Ivan’s failure to eliminate the presence of this menacing object highlights that transforming or eliminating objects of menace is not always within one’s power.

The refusal of Ivan’s family members to call Ivan anything but their birth name suggests that they refuse to accept Ivan’s failure to orient towards their family’s heteronormative objects of happiness. Since the family unit requires each member to orient successfully towards the right objects, Ivan’s new name signifies their failure to do so. Thus, just as Ivan’s birth name is a menacing object to Ivan, so too is Ivan’s new name a menacing object to their family. The different affect that Ivan and their family members experience from Ivan’s birth name establishes that the happiness of the family can actually be predicated on the unhappiness of the queer subject. In The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed focuses on one specific facet of the “psychic drama of the queer child” (PH 92), and that is the self-fulfilling prophecy of unhappiness that is created from the parents’ reaction to the child’s queerness. Ahmed uses one literary example from Annie on my Mind (1982) to explain how parents’ assumptions that a queer life is a necessarily unhappy life can actually cause the unhappiness they expect.

More specifically, Ahmed claims that a parent may become unhappy that the child is queer because they perceive queerness to be a precursor to an unhappy life. The queer child, as a result, becomes unhappy because the parent sees their identity as one that leads to unhappiness.

Thus, the parent sees the fulfillment of their belief that queer lives are unhappy ones (PH 92-93).

While Ahmed addresses one potential cause for the unhappiness of queer children and their parents, these three narratives demonstrate that there are different causes of unhappiness from those that Ahmed identifies. More specifically, I argue that the parents’ reactions to the queer

narrators’ failures are not based on their concern for their child’s well-being but is rooted in their conception that the survival of their family is predicated on their normativity.

As I explain in my first chapter, the promise of the happy family becomes a performative object when considered alongside Butler’s theory of performativity. Just as Butler claims that gender is an ideal that can never be fully internalized, so too is the happy family an ideal that a subject can never completely embody. As Ahmed explains, the promise of the happy family is still a power mechanism that dictates familial objects of happiness. However, none of the families in these three narratives are particularly happy. The ideal of the happy family may not be a goal that these families are attempting to embody, but they all strive for normativity. As such, I suggest that Ahmed’s claims regarding the promise of the happy family can be reinterpreted to explore the promise of the normative family as well. As Ahmed says, the family is a performative object. Thus, regardless of whether a family attempts to embody the happy ideal or simply survive, the unity of the family unit requires each member to correctly orient towards proper familial objects of normativity. I analyze the parents’ responses to their child’s failures in these three narratives in order to demonstrate that the parents’ unhappiness in these moments is caused by the fact that the child’s failure to orient towards the right objects threatens the family unit’s ability to conform to normative societal expectations.

The nature of Carrie’s unhappiness in response to Molly’s failures to conform demonstrates that Carrie’s distress is not caused by her concern for Molly but is born out of her desire for their family to conform to normative standards. The root of Carrie’s unhappiness is evident when she hears that Molly physically hurt Cheryl Spiegleglass. Cheryl and Molly are differentiated according to their respective relationships to normative female identities and behaviour. Molly describes Cheryl as a girl who always “wore a dress, even when she didn’t

have to” (RFJ 27). As a result, “Carrie loved her” and was always hopeful when Molly and

Cheryl spent time together because she hoped that Cheryl would “influence [Molly] for the better” (RFJ 27). Thus, Cheryl embodies the ideal female child for Carrie because she successfully orients towards the right objects of happiness. However, Molly refuses to orient towards the same objects that Cheryl does. When Cheryl tells Molly that she cannot become a doctor because she is a girl, Molly hits her and gives her a “split lip” (RFJ 28). Molly’s violence towards Cheryl symbolizes Molly’s complete rejection of that identity and the normative object orientation that Cheryl embodies.

Molly’s violent rejection of the normative objects of happiness that Cheryl symbolizes prevents her family from embodying the normative family unit. When Carrie hears that Molly hit

Cheryl, she is angry because Molly’s rejection of Cheryl and the normative identity that she stands for prevents them from the normative family ideal. Molly recounts that “when [she] got home…Carrie was hopping mad” (RFJ 29). Her anger is due to the fact that Molly’s failure to

“act like a lady” causes Carrie shame, as she asks “how [she can] show her face around here” after Molly hit Cheryl, “that sweet child” (RFJ 29). Clearly, Molly’s failure to behave like a

“sweet child” such as Cheryl exposes their family unit as one that does not embody the happy family ideal. The shame that Carrie exhibits in response to Molly’s non-normative behaviour emphasizes that her desire for Molly to orient towards the right objects is not for the sake of

Molly’s own happiness, but for their family to be “normal” in relation to those around them.

Therefore, although the cause of unhappiness that Ahmed identifies in The Promise of Happiness is one possibility, the nature of Carrie’s unhappiness at Molly’s queer failure highlights that a parent’s unhappiness can also be rooted in self-interested desires rather than concern for their child’s wellbeing.

Carrie’s varying responses to Molly’s object orientation further emphasizes that her happiness is contingent on Molly’s willingness to conform to gender norms. There is a significant contrast in Carrie’s earlier reactions to Molly when she refuses to embody traditional feminine ideals. When Molly asserts that she “didn’t want two-dollar blouses from Lerner’s” and wanted more expensive clothing instead, she was surprised that “Carrie didn’t get mad like [she] expected” (RFJ 55). On the contrary, Molly observes that Carrie was “pleased that [she] was taking an interest in [her] appearance” and rewarded her by allowing her to “buy a few good things from a better store” (RFJ 55). Carrie’s previous anger when Molly violently rejects normative feminine clothes compared to her pleasure when Molly appears to desire those objects shows that Carrie desires Molly to orient to traditionally feminine objects. Since Carrie’s happiness seems predicated upon Molly’s normative appearance, it is apparent that Carrie is not so much invested in Molly’s happiness but in the fact that Molly’s normative orientation is required for them to be perceived as a normal family.

Similarly, the responses that Jess’s parents have to their non-normative object orientation demonstrates that their concern is rooted in their self-interested desire to embody their conception of the normal family. Although Ahmed’s claims about family units revolve around the happy family ideal, her conceptions can also be applied to families that are vying for survival rather than idealism. As Jess says, “everyone in [their] family knew about shame” (SBB 19) on account of the fact that they are Jewish. As such, they experience various instances of Anti-

Semitism from people around them. When “two teenagers pulled down their pants and mooned

[them]” as they called them “Kikes,” her father did not chase them away but instead “closed the drapes” (SBB 19). Thus, their family ideal is not rooted in the desire for the happy family but the safe one. As such, Jess’s failure to orient towards normative objects of happiness threatens the

family’s normativity. Indeed, Jess is aware that their difference is a cause of unhappiness for their parents, as they narrate the following: “Then I came along and I was different. Now they were furious with me. I could hear it in the way they retold the story of my birth” (SBB 14).

Further, their parents remind them that they are “one more bad card life had dealt [their] parents”

(SBB 13). Thus, Jess’s family struggles for survival in an anti-Semitic environment, and their parents see their failures as one more difficulty that they cannot handle.

Indeed, Jess’s failure to orient towards normative objects of happiness prevent their parents from fitting in with the community around them. Since their family is Jewish, their parents regularly attend a temple. However, their mother is informed “that [Jess] could no longer attend temple until [they] wore a dress, which is “something [they] fought tooth and nail” to avoid” (SBB 18). Since the temple is a significant aspect of their family’s identity, their failure to be accepted by those who control access to the temple threatens the family’s ability to belong to the community around them. As a result, their failure to orient towards this particular object of happiness causes their mother to be “so ashamed” (SBB 18) of them, which emphasizes that their parents are primarily concerned with the fact that Jess’s failures reflect negatively on them. Their failure, then, causes unhappiness for their parents because it threatens their ability to conform to their community’s standards.

Even though Ivan’s parents do not explicitly say that they are ashamed of Ivan’s failure to uphold a normative female identity, their body language still emphasizes that Ivan’s inability to do so threatens their own happiness. Ivan describes a childhood memory from 1974, “when

[they] first started kindergarten and [their] mom cut [them] a deal that [they] could wear pants to school every other day” (TBSG 110). Although Ivan attempts to oblige their mother, they exhibit such a degree of unhappiness and fear when they have to wear a dress that their mother “took

pity on [them] and bought [them] two more pairs of brown corduroys” so that they no longer have to wear a dress to school (TBSG 110). However, although Ivan’s mother feels pity for

Ivan’s failure to happily orient towards normative objects of happiness such as dresses, she is still unhappy at their failure. Ivan narrates that when their mother buys them more pants, she gives a “cutting look in [their] direction” because they had disappointed her again (TBSG 110).

Her cutting look in Ivan’s direction on account of their failure conveys her anger at Ivan’s failure and emphasizes that their failure negatively impacts their family’s happiness.

While the narrators’ failures to orient towards the correct familial objects of happiness cause feelings of shame and disappointment for their parents, one of Ivan’s childhood memories of failure nevertheless suggests that moments of failure for the queer child can also be moments of happiness for the parent. When Ivan hurts themselves from trying to ride their new, more masculine bike, they experience great pain while their father appears to be satisfied at the outcome. After Ivan fails to ride the bike, they “cry all the way home, pushing [their] broken bike and choking on tears and blood and dirt and snot” (TBSG 37). Although Ivan “thought [their father] would be mad about [the] damaged bike…he just smiled…and asked if [they were] missing any teeth” (TBSG 37). Their father is not angry that they damaged the bike because

Ivan’s failure is actually the outcome he desires. Ivan’s failure to orient towards the traditionally male bike is actually a cruel moment of success for their father because that bike is not a normative object of happiness for Ivan. Due to the gender that Ivan was assigned at birth, they are not meant to be able to ride this bike. Thus, their failure to do so is actually a moment of successful normative object orientation from the father’s standpoint. The contrast in Ivan’s affective response and their father’s to Ivan’s failed object orientation demonstrates that moments of failure for a queer child can simultaneously be moments of happiness for the parent.

My work in this chapter adds to Ahmed’s theorization of affective gaps by demonstrating that these narratives depict abjection as an affective consequence of queer failure. The queer narrators’ childhood memories of abjection are described as violent threats to their subjectivity, which ultimately challenges Halberstam’s claim that children are indifferent to adult conceptions of success and failure. As I will show in my next chapter, these memories of abjection are not simply confined to the narrators’ pasts but constantly resurface in their narrative present. I build upon my findings in this chapter by analyzing how the adult narrators continuously recall their childhood memories of abjection. The persistent resurfacing of these painful memories allows me to conceptualize trauma in terms of patterns of repetition. Additionally, I will consider whether radical acts of forgetting are a means for these narrators of breaking away from their traumas.

CHAPTER THREE

The Potential Freedom in Forgetting Failure

This chapter considers to what extent the act of forgetting is a possible solution for

Molly, Jess, and Ivan to cope with their traumatic experiences of abjection. Halberstam argues that “forgetting allows for a release from the weight of the past” because it “allow[s] the self to grow separate from the knowledge that might destroy it” (QF 84). They claim that forgetting can be a particularly useful gate-keeping mechanism for trauma because it is “a way of protecting the self from unbearable memories” (QF 84). However, my comparisons between Halberstam’s theory and these queer narratives show that forgetting can be more difficult than Halberstam explains. In this chapter, I begin by establishing to what extent these narrators try to forget their families in order to orient towards a possible future. Although Jess permanently severs themselves from their biological family at the beginning of the narrative, they still face experiences that remind them of the pain their family caused them as a child. Jess’s separation from their biological family, then, does not release them from the psychological weight of their past traumas. While Jess’s narrative highlights how ineffective radical separation from one’s family is in erasing traumatic memories, Molly and Ivan’s narratives show how both narrators incorporate their family into their lives in spite of the pain they have caused them in the past.

Although embracing their family opens them up to future experiences of trauma, both narrators emphasize the importance of maintaining family connections.

Next, I use Ahmed’s theorization of objects as feeling-causes alongside Butler’s theory of melancholia to consider how new experiences of trauma force the narrators to continuously confront their memories of familial abjection. As Ahmed states, an object becomes a feeling-

cause once there is an “association between the object and the affect” (PH 28). Further, “once an object is a feeling-cause, it can cause feeling” (PH 28) because the subject recalls this past association between object and affect. Butler’s theory of melancholia also describes how past objects can cause present feelings, but she suggests that recalling past objects can be willful acts of denial over the loss of those objects. She states that melancholia occurs when a subject

“refuses the loss of the object, and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object” (GT 83). In this context, I suggest that these three narrators’ present experiences of abjection are feeling-causes that force them into a state of melancholy. I analyze how both

Molly and Jess are forced to recall their past experiences of abjection when they are confronted with new experiences in the present. While Ivan does not attempt to forget their family, they do strive to forget a traumatic experience of abjection. However, even though they forget this particular childhood trauma, they still have a powerful affective response when they are confronted with similar experiences. Thus, while Molly’s and Jess’s narratives show that forgetting trauma is an impossibility, Ivan’s narrative suggests that one’s ability to forget about past traumas does not necessarily prevent present objects from resuscitating those memories.

Lastly, I end this chapter with an investigation of how Jess and Ivan’s bodily changes transform their own bodies from melancholic containers of their traumas into happy objects of identification. While Ivan only undergoes top-surgery, Jess experiences both breast-reduction and hormone-therapy in order to pass as a man. Therefore, I investigate to what extent Jess’s bodily transformation through hormone therapy impacts the relationship they establish between the heteronormative world, their identity, and their experience of time. I demonstrate that their ability to pass as male results in the erasure of their queer sense of self and therefore serves as a form of forgetting. However, they ultimately determine that forgetting the past is more harmful

than helpful, and thus the narrative does not advocate for forgetting trauma but remembering as a means of embracing queer identity.

When Jess radically cuts themselves off from their biological family, they initially have new possibilities for their identity development. When they leave home, they say that they “felt free. Free to explore what freedom meant” (SBB 47). Running away from their family offers them new opportunities and room for growth. Additionally, the erasure of their last name signifies their attempt to erase their past and orient towards a queer futurity. When they go to the gay bar, Abba’s, for the first time, they introduce themselves as “Jess…Just Jess” (SBB 49).

Removing their last name from their identity symbolizes their attempt to remove their family from their selfhood. Their decision to remove their family name from their identity symbolizes their attempt to erase their past in order to assert a new sense of self in relation to the new queer spaces they encounter.

Although the erasure of their last name provides them with a clean slate that is not tethered to their past, they still demonstrate a strong desire to replicate the family they left behind instead of abandoning that construct altogether. However, the family units that they establish are queer renditions of the family they left behind. As a result, their replication of family is a form of queer failure that transforms the family unit from an object associated with abjection into a new one associated with love, queer growth, and identification. For example, their relationship to

Butch Al queers the father-child relationship that they lost when they ran away from home.

Butch Al’s parental role is evident when Jess describes her in the following way: “She was gruff with me alright. But she peppered it with scruffing my hair, hugging my shoulders, and giving my face something more than a pat and less than a slap…She took me under her wing and taught me all the things she thought were most important for a baby butch like me to know before

embarking on such a dangerous and painful journey. In her own way, she was very patient about it” (SBB 29). Butch Al’s gruff way of mentoring and protecting them echoes conventional paternal affection. Butch Al’s paternal role is enforced further when she talks to Jess about sex.

Jess deems their conversation a “father to son” talk (SBB 30). This father-to-son talk is not heteronormative in nature but homosexual, as Butch Al talks to Jess about making love to other women. Thus, their relationship to Butch Al reveals that it is possible for Jess to transform family into an object of queer happiness that produces love rather than abjection.

Although Jess’s relationship to Butch Al mimics the rhetoric that is emblematic of normative families, Jess’s ability to orient towards a queer family unit nevertheless enables them to grow outside of heteronormative limitations. They say that they “could look at the old bulldaggers [such as Butch Al] and see [their] own future” (SBB 29). The future that they see, then, is not one that is bound by heteronormative scripts but is instead a queering of them. As they say, they “learned what [they] wanted from another woman by watching Butch Al and her lover Jacqueline” (SBB 29). Although they use normative family language to describe their new queer community, a queer future is now available to them. As a result, their queer appropriation of normative family roles does not narrow their possibilities but instead opens them up to new horizons that lie outside of heteronormative conceptions of familial identities.

However, in spite of their ability to sever themselves from their biological family, they are unable to leave their memories of childhood abjection in the past. I suggest that they can be considered a melancholic subject due to their resuscitation of their past traumas. They say the following to Theresa: “Maybe I don’t have feelings like other people. Maybe the way I grew up changed me inside. Maybe I’m like the plant: my feelings got so choked up that I grew in a different way” (SBB 150). Even though they are able to escape new experiences of trauma

caused by their biological family, their inability to forget about painful memories of family threatens to permanently hurt them in the present.

Additionally, forgetting their traumatic past is not a solution to free Jess from pain simply because similar experiences are always on the horizon. After they realize that the police arrest and rape their queer friends, they realize that they will repeatedly experience abjection because of their butch identity. As they say, “it was going to happen to me. I knew that. But I couldn’t change the way I was. It felt like driving toward the edge of a cliff and seeing what’s coming but not being able to brake” (SBB 53). As Ahmed states, an object remains a feeling-cause when “the proximity of an affect and object is preserved through habit” (PH 28). As a result, continuous experiences of abjection will prevent Jess from severing the bond between abjection and pain.

Since their existence seems to guarantee repeated instances of traumatic abjection, it is not possible to completely erase these memories from their psyche.

While Jess spends the majority of the narrative attempting to escape painful memories, they eventually embrace them. Thus, the narrative not only highlights how impossible it is to forget such traumas, but that healing can only occur once they allow themselves to remember them. The first time that they remember “Theresa’s face when [Jess] was arrested,” they “pushed the memory back down” (SBB 137). Their refusal to acknowledge this painful memory is also a refusal to acknowledge their emotions, as they describe that their “eyes felt dry as dust” (SBB

137). A pivotal moment in the novel occurs when they are confronted with the same memory once more and decide to embrace it: “A memory suddenly gripped me: the look of pain in

Theresa’s eyes the night I was arrested in Rochester. I covered my face with my hands so I wouldn’t see it, but the image was behind my eyes. Let it come, I thought to myself. It’s all in there anyway. Let it come up” (SBB 280). The fact that they state that this memory grips them

suggests that Jess is unable to avoid such painful recollections. Further, their futile attempt to cover their eyes emphasizes that these memories are internal and therefore permanently attached to their person. Thus, they eventually learn to stop trying to forget their pain but embrace it.

Just as Jess attempts to sever themselves from their childhood family in order to pursue alternative possibilities, so does Molly see New York as an object of happiness that will enable her to orient towards a new future that lies outside of the heteronormative expectations of her family. As she tells her friend Calvin, “something tells me I have to stay in this ugly city for a while…it’s like I’ll make my fortune here or something” (RFJ 135). New York is a new object of happiness for Molly. She believes that if she orients towards it, it will lead her to a promising future fortune. Not only does she see New York as an object that promises happiness, but it promises a happy future that is not normally accessible for a woman such as herself. She tells

Calvin that the future New York promises her reminds her of “those old children’s stories where the young son goes out on the road for adventure and to make his fortune after he’s been tricked out of his inheritance by his evil brothers” (RFJ 135-136). Her recollection of a children’s story about a young son instead of a daughter emphasizes that the narrative she is embarking on is traditionally unavailable to girls. However, the fact that she sees herself as the young son suggests that New York enables her to pursue a future that is traditionally unavailable for girls and women. Thus, the happiness that New York promises for Molly is a happiness that lies outside of heteronormative conceptions.

Although Molly attempts to forget her family in order to orient towards this new future, there are several instances in the narrative that highlight how difficult forgetting her family actually is. When she is riding the subway home one day, there are several moments when her thoughts inevitably lead back to various family members. First, she is thinking about the clothes

she is wearing when she recalls that “Florence always [said] that clothes make the man” (RFJ

149). While she was initially thinking about her clothing, her thoughts drift into thoughts about her family members, as she says “Oh, for sure, Florence. What the hell were they doing now that

I was riding the BMT? Right this minute?” (RFJ 150). Her thoughts about her family are portrayed as inevitable and also undesirable when she tells herself “The hell with them. Why am

I thinking about them anyway?” (RFJ 150). Not only do her thoughts unconsciously lead to thoughts about the family that abjected her, but she tries to stop herself from thinking about them. Thus, even though she is physically severed from her family, she involuntarily remembers them.

Although she attempts to move on from her family in New York, her continual return to thoughts about them demonstrates that she embodies Butler’s concept of the melancholic subject, as she persistently resuscitates painful objects of her past and prevents a smooth linear narrative progression as a result. Her present situation revolves around her ability to figure out how to pay for film school without relying on the financial support of an older queer woman named Chryssa.

However, she is unable to focus on her immediate dilemma without reviving past memories of

Carrie. When she decides that Chryssa’s support is not her only option and that she can persuade

N.Y.U. to give her a scholarship, she says the following: “Hell, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Carrie all the time said that. Shit, I wish I’d stop thinking about Carrie” (RFJ 151).

Even though Molly rejects these thoughts, her memories surface in the present moment. As a result, the narrative does not flow in one linear direction but is stalled through involuntary reflections backwards into the past. Since Molly’s memories of Carrie are associated with her memories of abjection, Carrie is a painful object. Molly’s inability to forget about Carrie in spite

of the pain she has caused signifies that she is a melancholic subject, and her constant struggle to forget painful objects of her past impedes the narrative’s progression.

While Molly attempts to sever her ties to her adopted family, she expresses a need to reconnect with and remember Shiloh, the town she grew up in. When she expresses fatigue from her relentless turmoil in New York, she experiences a longing to return to her childhood home in order to reenergize herself: “I’d like to rest every now and then. I’d like to see the hills of Shiloh and lay my body down in the meadow behind Ep’s place, out where they buried Jenna. Maybe the smell of the clover will get me through one more winter in this branch of hell. Maybe I can keep myself together with a day in the country” (RFJ 191). While she initially tried to sever herself from her past in order to pursue a new future, now she thinks that reconnecting with that past will enable her to continue to pursue it. Although she desires to forget family members that hurt her in the past, she needs her memories of Shiloh in order for her to endure her present.

Indeed, her return to Shiloh demonstrates that her ability to pursue a future outside of her hometown’s narrow possibilities is not predicated on her ability to forget. Instead, her return to

Shiloh causes her childhood past to merge with her present, which energizes her and enables her to continue pursuing her future. Once in Shiloh, she recognizes several landmarks that remind her of her childhood, such as “the road down to Ep’s place,” “plowed earth,” and “the pond”

(RFJ 192). She “[takes] a deep breath of air and got higher than orange sunshine could ever get

[her]” (RFJ 192), which conveys that it is not the sunshine alone but these landmarks that elevate her spirits. Although she still desires to pursue a future that lies outside of the limited possibilities that her past circumstances allowed, the natural world of Shiloh nevertheless provides her with the necessary strength to continue. Although she describes New York as

“where millions of us live side by side in rotting honeycombs…polluted, packed, putrid” (RFJ

198), she sees it as the only place that allows her to pursue a queer future. As she says, “it’s the only place where [she has] any hope” (RFJ 198) for a future where she is “more than a breeder for the next generation” (RFJ 198). While she sees New York as a putrid place, it is still a place of possibility. Shiloh, in contrast, rejuvenates her, but only if she is not permanently trapped there.

Further, she learns that, as in the case of Shiloh, she needs to remember her familial relationships in order to continue pursuing her dreams as a filmmaker. Her desire to merge her familial past with her prospective future is evident when she works on her final project for film school. When Professor Walgren asks her what she is going to do for her senior project, she says that it consists of “a twenty-minute documentary of one woman’s life” (RFJ 199). Carrie is the woman on whom she wants to focus for her final project. While she previously attempted to forget about Carrie and the family that she left behind, her film project suggests that she is now attempting to reconcile her family with her goals for her future.

Not only does her reunion with Carrie reintegrate Carrie into her present and future trajectories, but it also allows her to establish connections to her biological parents. On the day that she is going to return to New York, Carrie tells her about Ruby, her biological mother, as well as who her biological father is. When Carrie describes the characteristics of her biological parents, she continuously links them to her own appearance. Carrie tells her that her father “was a handsome devil” and “that’s where [she] got sharp features and dark eyes” (RFJ 211). She does the same with Molly’s mother when she tells Molly that she “don’t look a whit like Ruby,” but she “got her voice, exactly” (RFJ 211). Carrie claims that her voice is so much like Ruby’s that it pulls Ruby’s image from the past into the present, as she says the following: “whenever I hear you talk if I close my eyes I can see Ruby standing there” (RFJ 211). Thus, when Molly reunites

with Carrie, she also unites with her biological parents. The fact that Carrie draws similarities between Molly and Molly’s father and mother allows those memories to not only emerge in the narrative present, but to continuously remain bound to Molly’s own identity.

Her response to Carrie’s revelation about her biological family emphasizes that she is no longer trying to forget family but longs to learn more about them. She only interjects occasionally to ask more questions. For example, as Carrie is telling her about her father, she asks “what was his name?” (RFJ 211). The fact that she asks Carrie questions highlights that she is interested in knowing more about her biological family. Her desire to learn about her past is further emphasized when she tells Carrie the following: “I’m glad you told me, Mom. I used to wonder about it a lot” (RFJ 212). Ultimately, her reunion with Carrie enables her to connect with her family’s past, and her desire to do so demonstrates that she is not indifferent to where she came from but actually desires to embrace her ancestry.

Furthermore, she eventually determines that her relationship to Carrie hinges on love in spite of the painful childhood experiences that this relationship has caused her. On her way back to New York City, after visiting Carrie for several days, she says the following: “Carrie whose politics are to the right of Genghis Khan. Who believes that if the good Lord wanted us to live together he’d have made us all one color…. And I love her. Even when I hated her, I loved her.

Maybe all kids love their mothers, and she’s the only mother I’ve ever known. Or maybe underneath her crabshell of prejudice and fear there’s a human being that’s loving. I don’t know but either way I love her” (RFJ 217). In other words, she realizes that her love for Carrie endures despite her oppressive politics that led to Molly’s traumatic abjection. Her lasting attachment to

Carrie underscores the difficulties of navigating familial trauma: love for family can remain even if maintaining a relationship can lead to pain.

While Molly eventually learns that forgetting the past is a never-ending struggle and learns to embrace Carrie despite her flaws, Ivan in Tomboy Survival Guide immediately and consistently embraces their family members. As a result, their narrative offers an alternative solution for queer individuals struggling with family trauma. Radical forgetting is not possible for Ivan, but it is not possible for Molly or Jess either. Ivan does not forget family but demonstrates how familial relationships can remain when they revolve around reciprocal love and understanding. However, their decision to stay connected to family also causes them to be more vulnerable to painful experiences of abjection that arise through their failure to orient to familial objects of happiness in the past, present, and future. Thus, I investigate how Ivan’s narrative navigates the complex terrain of family love mixed with pain in order to embrace family while also successfully embracing themselves as queer.

While Molly and Jess attempt to forget their families, the narrative structure of Tomboy

Survival Guide highlights that Ivan chooses to remember theirs. Tomboy Survival Guide consists of vignettes that are not in chronological order. More specifically, the vignettes jerk back and forth from stories of Ivan’s childhood to stories from their present circumstances. As I established in my previous chapter, several of these memories are traumatic moments of failure.

Ivan can be read as a melancholic subject due to their unwillingness to let go of these traumatic memories. Ahmed states that the melancholic “holds onto” the object and refuses to move on

(TBSG 139), which causes the subject to become stagnant and unable to progress. In addition,

Butler emphasizes how a melancholic subject’s continuous resuscitation of the lost object enables it to persistently inflict harm on the subject. Thus, the fact that these past memories of trauma are continuously revisited in the narrative present demonstrates that Ivan refuses to let go of these memories in spite of the pain that they cause.

In my last chapter, I established how Ivan’s father and most of their uncles force Ivan to remain in close proximity to a menacing object – their heteronormative name – in spite of their desire to separate from it. Despite the pain that these family members have caused Ivan, Ivan claims that these family members were key to Ivan’s success in career pursuits. When they flourish at the electrical school, they state the following: “I found myself grateful to my dad and my uncles, and my aunts too, for everything they had taught me. All those hours in my dad’s shop, in my uncle Rob’s boat, tagging along while my dad and his brothers built our new house on Grove street. I had already learned more from them than most of the guys in my class at school” (TBSG 69). In spite of the pain that these family members perpetually inflict on Ivan every time they call Ivan by their birth name, they nevertheless attribute their present success to their family members’ guidance.

Further, Ivan’s reliance on their family members’ advice when they are faced with new challenges emphasizes that their future is influenced by their memories of family. They state that, when they first began electrical school, their grandmother Patricia gave them the following advice about working in a male-dominated field: “Only tackle the important offenses, and always do it one on one, alone, just you and whichever asshole you can no longer tolerate. Never challenge him in front of his peers. That will get you nowhere at all. Take him aside, and whatever you do, don’t cry. Save your tears for the car ride home. I always did” (TBSG 70). Ivan remembers their grandmother’s advice and follows it, ignoring the vandalism that occurs to their locker and their work table (TBSG 70). Their recollection of past advice given to them by their family suggests that their memories continue to help them in the present. Thus, instead of attempting to forget their family, they emphasize how crucial it is for them to remember.

Although they attempt to emphasize how important memories of family are for their future survival, some of these memories are purely painful. Ivan claims that the traumatic moments of their childhood were not done out of malice but instead were due to love and a lack of understanding on both their own behalf as well as their family’s. Their childhood memory of their mother forcing them to wear dresses to school, for example, is a traumatic experience that has a lasting negative impact on their development. As they say, “and so began a lifetime of hating most of my clothes” (TBSG 111). While this memory shows how their mother’s behaviour enforces heteronormative limits onto their gender expression and leads to a persistently difficult relationship with their clothing, they describe their forgiveness over it as a sign of maturity. They state: “I used to be mad at [her] for squeezing me into everything, but I grew out of it” (TBSG

111). They claim that they grew out of their anger when they realized that “she was just worried about [them]” (TBSG 111). Although their mother’s behaviour hurt them, their perception that it was done out of worry emphasizes that the cause of the pain was born out of ignorance and love.

Their description of this trauma and its causes therefore describes their anger as a misplaced emotion and emphasizes the importance of patience and understanding in return.

Ivan also draws on positive memories of family members. However, they explain that they use these memories in order to overlook the harmful behaviour that they do in the present.

Thus, their narrative exposes that holding on to memories of family can modulate one’s ability to enact radical feminist politics. They recall their childhood memory of watching their uncle John brush his girlfriend Cathy’s hair and emphasizes how this moment transformed him into an image of tenderness compared to his usually rough demeanor (TBSG 142). They state that they rely on this memory to stop them from confronting problematic statements that he makes in the present, as they say the following: “I use that image of him to chase his cruel words out of my

ears. I remember this better him, and it helps me keep my mouth shut” (TBSG 142). Thus, their decision to stay connected to family is also a decision to ignore continual expressions of harmful rhetoric.

However problematic and harmful Ivan’s family is, they emphasize that their relationships to family primarily revolve around love. As a result, Ivan’s refusal to sever themselves from their family is an effective way to patiently mould them into allies for the

LGBTQ+ community. They portray the importance of patience in fostering greater understanding for queer individuals in heteronormative spaces when they say the following: “It took me over forty years to accept myself. I didn’t fully come to terms with being and calling myself trans until a couple of years ago. So, by that math, I give them another forty-two years of practice before I will start to expect them all to have it down perfect. Fair is fair” (TBSG 169).

They acknowledge that change—for their own perspective as well as their family’s—does not happen overnight. Their ability to stay connected to their family gives them a sense of hope that, over time, their family can learn to grow and accept their trans identity just as Ivan has.

While the three narrators experience abjection within the family unit, they also experience similar instances of abjection in the public sphere. I demonstrate that Molly and Jess do not experience these moments of abjection in isolation. Instead, new experiences of abjection cause the narrators to recall memories of similar experiences in the past. As a result, present instances of abjection are feeling-causes that anchor the narrators in a state of melancholia, as they recall memories of similar traumas. While Molly and Jess consciously acknowledge this layered affective response with past and present traumas, Ivan suffers the same reaction unconsciously. Thus, Ivan’s bodily response to new experiences of trauma demonstrates that,

even if a subject forgets the bond between an object and a painful affect such as abjection, those objects can still force the subject to recall and suffer from painful memories associated with it.

Although Molly moves to New York in order to forget her abjection from her family and pursue alternative possibilities, her present experiences of abjection force her to recall the past experiences she tries to forget. For example, when she tells Polina that she is a lesbian, Polina says that she needs to “go home and think this through” (RFJ 175). In other words, Molly’s lesbian identity causes Polina to temporarily abject her. Molly’s response conveys that she is not only thinking of this experience in isolation but is forced to recall previous instances of abjection. Her inability to forget the pain that her abjection from her family caused her is evident when she narrates the following: “Why does it get to me? Why can’t I just write off those people the way they write me off? Why does it always get through and hurt?” (RFJ 175). When Molly experiences rejection from Polina, then, she also thinks back to previous experiences of abjection from others such as her family. As a result, not only is she unable to forget previous instances of her abjection, but the affective response from these past memories–pain—rush back and become compounded with the pain from the present experience.

Jess also encounters people that remind them of the painful childhood experiences that they try to forget, which emphasizes that one’s past can involuntarily resurface in the present.

For example, when Duffy tells Jess that Jack set her up by removing the safety device on the die cutter, they state the following: “It reminded me of when my parents had me committed [to the psychiatric hospital], or the cops opened my cell door” (SBB 93). Present experiences of abjection, then, force them to recall similar experiences from their past. Additionally, when they meet a man named Eddie and find out that his brother-in-law is Bobby, one of the boys that raped them in high-school, they tell Eddie that they need to “run to the store for something” and

then “walked away…faster and faster,” narrating that they were “running from [their] own past”

(SBB 173). Thus, they are unable to completely forget about their painful experiences of abjection. All they can do is persistently run away from reminders with which they are inevitably confronted.

Jess’s memories of abjection also flood back to them when they witness the abjection of another unfolding. When other workers at the factory where they work start a riot, they watch

Jan get arrested and pushed into a police van. When they watch Jan enter the van, they are forced to remember and re-experience the pain they felt when they were also arrested in the past. As they tell Jan afterwards, “when you got busted, I suddenly remembered things I didn’t want to think about, like they were happening to me all over again” (SBB 99). When they witness Jan’s arrest, their past pain resurfaces in the present. The fact that this pain returns in spite of their desire not to think about those memories reveals that their ability to forget their family does not allow them to forget the trauma associated with them.

While Molly and Jess fail to forget their traumatic pasts, Ivan temporarily forgets that they were sexually assaulted in high-school. However, while Halberstam argues that forgetting enables one to sever the link between object and affect, Ivan’s narrative shows that such memories can remain rooted in the body even if they are wiped from the mind. Ivan states that they did not remember their own sexual assault for several years, but they still experienced strong physical reactions when hearing about other cases of sexual assault. Although they do not remember their own sexual assault for a period of time, their bodily reactions upon hearing about new cases clearly show that the bond between affect and object nevertheless persists when they state the following: “I couldn’t figure out why every time I read another article supporting or calling for patience or facts or more proof against Jian, or Cosby, or Woody Allen, the tears

welled up so hot and easy, why my stomach knotted itself into itself and wouldn’t come undone for hours” (46). Indeed, even though they successfully forget their traumatic past, it does not prevent their past pain from resurfacing when they encounter similar experiences. Thus, while

Molly and Jess’s narratives suggest that the bond between affect and object is a difficult one to break, Ivan’s narrative suggests that forgetting is not even an effective solution.

Although Stone Butch Blues and Tomboy Survival Guide demonstrate that the act of forgetting does not necessarily release a subject from the weight of its past traumas and enable it to pursue alternative futures, they both suggest that bodily transformations can offer alternative possibilities for a subject’s orientation towards objects of happiness. If, as Butler states, melancholic subjects internalize their lost objects, then the body becomes the container of its painful pasts. Thus, I suggest that Jess’s and Ivan’s decision to change their bodies becomes a radical means to deprive melancholia from its bodily support. However, while Jess and Ivan experience significant bodily transformations in their narratives, Molly does not. Molly’s narrative revolves around her refusal to adjust her identity in any capacity, and her relationship to her body mirrors her attempts to remain uncompromising and confident in her identity. While

Molly does not express discomfort with or a dissociation from her gender identity, both Jess and

Ivan spend a significant amount of time establishing their bodily identity. Therefore, I end this chapter with an analysis of how Stone Butch Blues and Tomboy Survival Guide recount the narrators’ bodily changes. I suggest that both Jess and Ivan highlight how changing their bodies through top surgery enables them to transform their own bodies from an unhappy object to a happy object. While Ivan only undergoes top-surgery, Jess has breast-reduction surgery and also undergoes hormone therapy for several years. It can be shown that Jess’s bodily change through hormone therapy changes their relationship to the future as well as the past. Ultimately, their

realization that their ability to embrace a queer future hinges on their ability to remember their past identity as a he/she destabilizes Halberstam’s assertion that the act of forgetting enables queer subjects to pursue alternative futures. On the contrary, their ability to do so is predicated on their ability to remember.

Jess and Ivan both emphasize how they perceive their breasts as obstacles that prevent them from identifying with their own bodies. As Jess states, “it had been so long since I had been at home in my body,” but the prospect of getting breast-reduction surgery allows them to believe that “soon that was going to change” (SBB 171). The fact that Jess does not feel at home in their own body suggests that their body is an unhappy object. Similarly, Ivan emphasizes how their breasts prevent them from seeing their body as a happy object. They explain that the only way that they can “look in the mirror, and leave [their] apartment” prior to surgery is to “bind [their] breasts” (TBSG 112). Since they can only look in the mirror if they bind their breasts, their ability to achieve the identity they desire hinges on their ability to shape their body into a new form. Thus, both Jess and Ivan demonstrate that their ability to be happy in their bodies is dependent on their ability to change them.

Indeed, the ways in which both characters describe their relationship to their bodies before and after top-surgery emphasizes that their bodies have transformed into pleasurable objects. When Jess looks in the mirror after their breast-reduction surgery, they state the following: “There it was—the body I’d wanted” (SBB 177). The way in which they identify their body as finally being “there” suggests that this change has completely transformed their body from the body they did not want to the body they do (SBB 177). Jess, then, expresses a completely new orientation towards their body as a result. Similarly, Ivan states that their top- surgery makes them “feel like [they are] standing in the right shape” now (TBSG 152). Because

of this new shape, Ivan feels ownership over their body in a way that they did not feel previously. As they state, “Now, when I run, or swim, or dance, or fuck, or ride my bike really hard, I can look down, and see my own heart pounding there, just beneath the thin and tender skin of my new chest. My own heart pounding” (TBSG 152). Their new chest after top-surgery, then, enables them to claim their body as their own. As a result, both characters demonstrate how bodily changes can change one’s ability to successfully identify with one’s body.

While both characters undergo top surgery, Jess’s decision to take hormones in order to pass as a man suggests that bodily transformations can also be required not only to change a subject’s orientation towards its own body, but in order to secure its future. Jess’s butch identity threatens their personal as well as financial safety, as they narrate, “the police really stepped up their harassment after the birth of gay pride” (SBB 135). Not only is the LGBTQ+ community facing greater police brutality in the 1970s, but the 1973 economic recession makes their ability to secure a job even more tenuous than it was previously. Their financial stability is threatened because “everyone [they] knew was laid off” (SBB 141), while their personal safety is described as under threat when they say the following to Theresa: “it’s getting too scary out there, Theresa.

It feels like it’s getting worse. I hate to even go outside anymore” (SBB 141). Since their personal safety is threatened, so is their sense of futurity. They tell Theresa that they “can’t survive as a he/she much longer” and that they are “not gonna make it” if they remain tethered to this identity (SBB 146). Thus, due to the oppressive sociopolitical environment of the 1970s, their identity as a he-she threatens their future.

Jess’s bodily transformation through hormones causes the heteronormative world to create different impressions on them. This new perception coincides with Ahmed’s claim that “if our bodies change over time, then the world around us will create different impressions” (PH

23). While Jess previously felt as though their future was under threat, their new appearance as a heterosexual man causes them to be welcomed into the heteronormative world, from which they were previously barred. They emphasize this new sense of safety when they describe the experience of passing to Edna as the following: “It feels good to be free to do little things, like go to a public bathroom in peace or to be touched by a barber. It’s nice to be smiled at by strangers or flirted with at a lunch counter” (SBB 213). While they previously experienced hostility from heteronormative people, now they are welcomed due to their bodily transformation. Thus, their bodily transformation causes the world to welcome them and allows them to achieve a greater degree of safety and security than they were able to achieve before.

Although they experience more safety when they pass as a man, they nonetheless decide to stop their hormone treatment. Jay Prosser argues that Stone Butch Blues challenges conventional transgender narratives due to the fact that Jess eventually decides to stop taking the male hormones that allow them to pass. He claims that the moment of transition for transsexual subjects is typically seen as “simply a means to an end rather than an end in itself” (488). He distinguishes Jess’s narrative arc from other transsexual narratives by stating that “Jess turns back in her transition, thus refusing the refuge of fully becoming the other sex and the closure promised by the transsexual plot” (489). I suggest that the point of Jess’ decision to reverse their male transition is precisely to turn back and unearth their past identity that passing erased.

Indeed, their reasoning to cease hormone treatment is described as follows: “At first, everything was fun. The world stopped feeling like a gauntlet I had to run through. But very quickly I discovered that passing didn’t just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive”

(SBB 173). In other words, for the world to feel like a safer environment, and for an orientation towards a safer future to be enacted, their past identity becomes buried beneath the surface. Over

time, their past identity is not only described as hidden but progressively erased. Their gradual loss of selfhood is described as follows: “when my alarm jangled in the morning…I couldn’t find myself in my own life—there was no memory of me that I could grasp” (SBB 209). Eventually, this bodily change completely erases their past identity. As Jess states, hormone therapy eventually results in them “bec[oming] a he—a man without a past” (SBB 222). Thus, their bodily change becomes a radical—but undesirable—act of forgetting that threatens their queer selfhood.

The fact that they that they want to reconnect with their past identity instead of erasing it further destabilizes Halberstam’s claims that forgetting is a desirable solution for queer rebellion.

Although their bodily change enables them to orient towards a different future, those futures are narrowly heteronormative. While they say that they “didn’t regret the decision to take the hormones” because they “wouldn’t have survived much longer without passing,” the future identity their bodily change allows them only amounts to “just barely exist[ing]” as “a stranger”

(SBB 224). Therefore, they decide to stop taking the hormones in order to reclaim their past identity that it had previously erased. Their decision to stop the hormones and stop the changes they have made on their body allows them to reclaim their past identity and orient towards a future that lies outside the bounds of heteronormative identities. Indeed, they say that they stop taking the hormones in order to “find out who I am, to define myself” (SBB 224). Their ability to establish such an identity is not predicated on forgetting, but remembering, as they say:

“Whoever I was, I wanted to deal with it, I wanted to live it again. I wanted to be able to explain my life, how the world looked from behind my eyes” (SBB 224). Thus, their ability to orient towards a queer future is dependent on their ability to remember and embrace their past self.

While Jess first undergoes hormone therapy and passing as male before eventually realizing that they identify with their more complicated gender identity, Ivan refuses to change their body for such a purpose. Although Ivan explains that their decision to have top surgery was

“the happy, healthy thing for [them] to do” (TBSG 70), they emphasize that further bodily changes would not be for their own happiness but for the happiness of heteronormative society.

As they say, “I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine…For me to be free, it is the world that has to change, not trans people” (TBSG 171). Thus, there is a limit to the amount of happiness that bodily changes can provide for Ivan. Their happiness is not dependent on their ability to shape their bodies into acceptable heteronormative identities but on the world’s ability to change and embrace bodies that complicate the gender binary.

While Halberstam claims that forgetting enables queers to “grow separate” from their traumatic pasts, these narratives suggest that forgetting trauma is easier said than done. Indeed,

Ahmed’s theorization of objects as feeling-causes demonstrates that new experiences of abjection in the present can remind subjects of similar experiences in the past. As a result, experiences of abjection result in the constant resurfacing of painful past experiences that is characteristic of Butler’s conception of melancholic subjects. Butler’s theory of melancholia additionally has allowed me to conceptualize trauma in terms of the repeated resuscitation of painful objects. Indeed, both Molly and Jess are repeatedly reminded of their past experiences of abjection when they face similar experiences in the present. Further, even though Ivan temporarily forgets their own sexual assault, such forgetting does not result in a successful

“cocooning of the self” (QF 84) as Halberstam suggests. Rather, the affective bond between experiences of abjection and the pain of trauma causes Ivan to continually relive the physical

pain of their assault when they encounter similar experiences in the present in spite of the fact that they temporarily forget those experiences. However, both Jess and Ivan’s narratives demonstrate how physically altering one’s body can transform the body from a melancholic vessel into a happy object in itself.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hopeful Collective Futures

Thus far, my thesis has focused on individual experiences of failure to orient successfully towards familial objects of happiness, and on the individual experiences of abjection and trauma that derive from those failures. In this chapter, I consider to what extent collective action is represented as a promising way for the narrators to surmount their traumatic experiences of abjection and to orient towards a queer future of happiness. Indeed, Butler, Halberstam, and

Ahmed all suggest that there is solace in collective action. However, Butler claims that collectives can promise change only when they do not claim to embody universal ideals or characteristics. As I explain in my first chapter, Butler argues that collectives typically form when individuals establish their similarities with each other and brush aside their differences.

However, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Butler connects the ideal of universality to her conception of performativity to suggest that, like gender, it can never be fully embodied. As she states, “a certain necessary tension emerges within any political formation inasmuch as it seeks to fill that place [of universality] and finds that it cannot”

(32). Butler’s theorization of universality fits with the temporality of Ahmed’s objects of happiness. As Ahmed states, “the happy object…is a gap-filler. The promise of the object is always in this specific sense ahead of us” (32). However, if happy objects are always ahead of us, we are never able to reach them. Thus, collectives can function as happy objects that promise universality in the future, but that promise can never be fully realized.

I draw on Butler’s theory of performativity alongside Ahmed’s conception of happy objects to argue that Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival Guide

demonstrate that a universal collective is a performative ideal that can never be fully internalized. The tension between an aspirational universal and a performative ideal can be examined in the historical contexts of lesbian, queer, and trans politics on which the three narratives draw. While Butler emphasizes that revolutionary collectives must not efface differences in the name of universality in the same manner as the oppressive hegemonic collectives that they attempt to dismantle, the tensions between straight feminists and lesbian feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s arose from the fact that lesbians saw women’s groups as participating in this oppressive universality. Although the 1960s has been categorized as a moment of “liberal and radical egalitarian” efforts in the United States for women (Rowbotham

371), these efforts were criticized by lesbian feminists as being largely heteronormative in scope.5 Indeed, Charlotte Bunch describes the oppressively heteronormative nature of the women’s movement: “In my own personal experience, I, and the other women of The Furies collective, left the women’s movement because it had been made clear to us that there was no space to develop a lesbian-feminist politics and life-style without constant and non-productive conflict with heterosexual fear, antagonism, and insensitivity” (“Not for Lesbians Only” 221).6

Several lesbian feminists, due to their “disillusionment with the homophobia of the women’s

5 See Dana Heller’s introductory chapter in Cross-Purposes, Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, where she states that lesbian feminists often criticized “dominant liberal feminism’s totalizing claims, its resistance to sustaining a critique of heterosexuality, its reluctance to address the confluence of sexuality, race, and class, and its failure to register the lack of continuity between the various theoretical cultural, and activist positions of feminism and the subjects who produce and are produced by these positions” (5).

6 For more context concerning Charlotte Bunch and her role in the founding of a lesbian-separatist movement, see

Heller’s introductory chapter in Cross Purposes, p. 1-18.

movement” (Heller 8), left the dominant feminist collectives and identified themselves as lesbian-feminist separatists. One of these women was in fact Rita Mae Brown. While writing her first novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown was a lesbian feminist who “was a member of the Gay

Liberation Front, Lavender Menace,” and the “Furies Collective” (Fitzsimons 2018). Thus, while such collectives may promise hopeful futures for straight feminists, Bunch, Brown, and other lesbian feminists’ decision to leave that collective demonstrates that they did not share such a perspective.

In this historical context, it can be argued that Molly’s resistance to join feminist movements suggests that she refuses to see such collectives as happy objects that promise a happy queer future. Further, I suggest that her perspective reflects the North American lesbian- separatist sentiments of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Additionally, while Molly makes a pointed critique of the exclusive heteronormativity of second-wave feminism, her own lesbian- feminist politics similarly precludes butch and other masculine women from finding a collective queer community in turn.

Next, I turn to Stone Butch Blues to suggest that Jess’s own ostracization from lesbian- feminist groups highlights the problematic nature of lesbian-separatist politics by women such as

Molly. Jess’s eventual ability to connect to a larger queer collective parallels their ability to envision a promising future, which demonstrates that they see collective action as a happy object which enables them to orient towards a hopeful future that was not available to them before.

However, the fact that Jess’s narrative ends as soon as they establish connections to a larger revolutionary body allows collectivity to remain an object that promises happiness without testing its ability to actually deliver such an ideal.

While Jess’s narrative ends as soon as they establish connections to a larger revolutionary body, Ivan’s narrative in Tomboy Survival Guide persistently focuses on their communal relationships. From a historical standpoint, Ivan’s focus on reaching beyond LGBTQ+ spaces and fostering relationships to people of a variety of backgrounds speaks to the new challenges facing North American trans and queer communities in the twenty-first century. As a result,

Ivan’s narrative does not hold onto universality as an ideal for a collective to pursue but illustrates the importance of maintaining and celebrating the differences of individuals that constitute a collective. Thus, I argue that their narrative exposes the impossibility as well as undesirability of a collective universality. Instead, they highlight that collectives do not lead to a universal ideal but instead require constant work to navigate the tensions and differences among the individuals that constitute them. While Rubyfruit Jungle and Stone Butch Blues are narrated in the first-person, Tomboy Survival Guide uses both the first and second-person narrative voice throughout the text. Ivan’s ability to harness the second-person narrative voice reflects their ability to successfully embrace a collective. I also suggest that their ability to harness a collective narrative voice pairs with their refusal to paint such collectives as embodying universal ideals.

As a result, Ivan’s narrative successfully fosters a queer collective by refusing to idealize collective resistance and instead acknowledges and navigates the tensions and differences that complicate them.

Molly’s isolation from heteronormative as well as feminist collectives echoes the struggles that lesbians such as Brown faced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Molly perceives her non-normative desires for her future as a significant explanation for her inability to belong to a heterosexual community. As she says, “for a future I didn’t want a split-level home with a station wagon, pastel refrigerator, and a houseful of blonde children evenly spaced through the

years. I didn’t want to walk into the pages of McCall’s magazine and become the model housewife. I didn’t even want a husband or any man for that matter” (RFJ 78). Molly not only sees her lack of desire for a heteronormative future as an explanation for her inability to belong to this group, but all collectives. She emphasizes her desire to remain an individual when she says the following: “I wanted to go my own way. That’s all I think I ever wanted” (RFJ 78).

Freedom to pursue an alternative future for Molly, then, lies in her freedom to not be tied down by a collective group. Thus, Molly does not long to embrace a group of people but expresses that it is necessary for her to maintain her individuality.

Indeed, the queer community that Molly encounters seems to echo a similar heteronormativity to which she does not want to succumb. As a result, both queer and heteronormative groups are not represented as happy objects for Molly but only promise to restrict her identity. When she is in New York and meets Mighty Mo at a lesbian bar, she is confronted with the narrow possibilities of femme and butch identities. When Mighty Mo asks her if she is “butch or femme” (RFJ 131), her response reveals that she has not been exposed to such categories before, as she says, “I beg your pardon?” (RFJ 131). Further, Mighty Mo’s reply indicates that butch and femme identities create a division between lesbians, where butch women are masculine and femmes are feminine. Indeed, Mighty Mo tells Molly that, since Mo is a butch, “if [Molly is] butch then it’d be like holding hands with your brother now wouldn’t it?”

(RFJ 132). Since Mighty Mo operates according to this binary, she is only able to engage in a sexual relationship with a femme. Thus, from Molly’s perspective, butch and femme relationships are as restricting as heteronormative relationships between men and women.

Molly’s perception of Mighty Mo and butch-femme relationships echoes a popular perception among lesbian-feminist separatists during the time period in which Rubyfruit Jungle

was published. Since, as Rita Mae Brown argues, women cannot “liberate themselves if they are still tied to that male supremacist world” (“The Shape of Things to Come” 118), masculine women were seen by lesbian-separatists as people who mimicked the heterosexual gender relations that they wanted to dismantle. It is apparent that Molly shares similar sentiments as some lesbian-separatists of the time when she says the following to Calvin: “what’s the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?” (RFJ 132). She perceives Mighty Mo and other lesbians who operate in terms of femme and butch relationships as simply attempting to replicate the male-female binary. She sees the queer culture of the bar as too heteronormative for her desires and she decides to leave, telling Calvin “let’s split” (RFJ

133). Thus, even a queer collective threatens to narrow Molly’s possibilities for her own identity.

The isolation that Molly expresses from feminist movements causes her to see women’s movements as barriers to a hopeful future rather than vehicles for change. Indeed, she perceives the bourgeoning women’s movements of the 1960s as focused on inequalities that only affect straight women. She sees that her “bitterness” at social inequalities is “reflected in the news, full of stories about people [her] own age raging down the streets in protest” (RFJ 221). However, she emphasizes how her differences permanently separate her from others also looking for change when she states the following: “somehow I knew my rage wasn’t their rage and they’d have run me out of their movement for being a lesbian anyway. I read somewhere too that women’s groups were starting but they’d trash me just the same” (RFJ 221). In other words,

Molly thinks that women’s groups fighting for gender equality are not open to queer women such as herself.

Even though Molly does not see collectives as happy objects that promise a hopeful future for herself, she does try to individually fight for the future she desires. However, the fact

that she expects to face constant struggle emphasizes the futility of her present and future attempts. When she graduates from film school with top marks and still has trouble finding a job, she says the following: “no, I wasn’t surprised, but it still brought me down. I kept hoping against hope that I’d be the bright exception, the talented token that smashed sex and class barriers. Hurrah for her. After all, I was the best in my class, didn’t that count for something?”

(RFJ 220). Indeed, as the best in her class, she has demonstrated that she deserves to have a strong and promising future in the film industry. However, her post-graduate experience indicates that she is unable to dismantle sex and class barriers on her own. Thus, her failure to challenge the system in spite of her talent and drive highlights that fighting for change as an individual is extremely difficult.

Although Molly’s narrative ends with her assertion that she will tirelessly continue to pursue her dreams, the novel’s conclusion is not overly hopeful. Indeed, her final words are the following: “I wish I could make films. That wish I can work for. One way or another I’ll make those movies and I don’t feel like having to fight until I’m fifty. But if it does take that long then watch out world because I’m going to be the hottest fifty-year-old this side of the Mississippi”

(RFJ 221). Indeed, she refuses to give up in spite of the fact that she is constantly facing systemic barriers that prevent her from achieving her desired future as a filmmaker. While her declaration to continue fighting for the future she wants is admirable, there is no concrete sense that she will in fact achieve her dream. The only guarantee seems to be that she will continue to toil against the same sex and class barriers that she has encountered thus far.

Molly’s hostility towards butch lesbians parallels the relationships between lesbian feminists and butches in Stone Butch Blues. However, while Molly’s first-person narrative demonstrates how her lesbian identity separates her from straight feminist collectives, Jess’s

first-person narrative establishes how even lesbians such as Molly herself prevented butches such as Jess from joining a larger queer community in the late 1960s. Indeed, the perception that butches and other masculine women threatened the progress of lesbian movements meant that they were cast out of these communities. Jack Halberstam makes this clear in their work

“Lesbian Masculinity: or Even Stone Butches Get the Blues,” when they state that butches—and especially stone butches such as Jess— have “often been represented as the abject within lesbian history” (68). Indeed, if Molly and other lesbian-separatists perceive butches as imitation men, then they supposedly replicate the heteronormative binaries that lesbian movements were attempting to dismantle and where excluded from those collectives.

Molly’s perception of butch-femme relationships is problematized by the representations of lesbian-feminist-separatists in Stone Butch Blues. Theresa tells Jess that one of the new lesbian groups on campus “mocked her for being a femme” and told her that “butches were male chauvinist pigs” (SBB 135). When Jess asks why they would think that, Theresa tells them the following: “I think it’s because they draw a line—women on one side and men on the other. So women they think look like men are the enemy. And women who look like me are sleeping with the enemy” (SBB 136). Indeed, these sentiments have been experienced by Leslie Feinberg hirself, as ze states in hir collection of essays titled Transgender Warriors: “a view that the primary division of society is between women and men leads some women to fear that transsexual women are men in sheep’s clothing…or that female-to-male transsexuals are going over to the enemy, or that I look like that same enemy” (110). These are also the sentiments echoed in essays such as those by Charlotte Bunch, who argues that “the heart of lesbian- feminist politics…is a recognition that heterosexuality as an institution and an ideology is a cornerstone of male supremacy” (221). Further, Bunch argues that “women interested in

destroying male supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism must…fight heterosexual domination”

(221). Heterosexual domination was seen by lesbian-separatists as being endorsed through heteronormative male-female gender relations. Thus, Theresa’s confrontation with the lesbian- feminist group on campus emphasizes that butches, due to their masculine gender identity, were seen as the enemy and therefore ostracized from such collectives.

Just as Molly sees herself as permanently estranged from collective political action, so too does Jess initially feel the same. I suggest that Jess does see such collectives as happy objects, but she is excluded from them and excluded from the hopeful future they promise as a result. As they say, “revolution seemed to glimmer on the horizon” because “millions took to the streets in protests” (SBB 124). Although they observe that “the world was exploding with change,” they do not feel as though they are a part of it. Indeed, they remark that they could feel the effects of revolution “everywhere, that is, except in the factories where [they] worked” (SBB

124). The fact that the world is exploding with change means that the future on the horizon promises to be different in some capacity from the present. However, their working-class environment is not experiencing the same sense of a new future. Thus, since Jess’s immediate environment seems unaffected by the change that others are experiencing, they are excluded from that change as well.

Indeed, the intersections of class, gender, and sexuality are explored in all three of these queer narratives. I suggest that all three texts highlight how one’s lower-class status threatens one’s ability to orient towards collectives that promise a happy and safe future. Elizabeth

Freeman argues in Time Binds that “failures or refusals to inhabit middle- and upper-middle- class habitus appear as, precisely, asynchrony, or time out of joint” (19). According to Freeman, middle- and upper-middle-class individuals are members of a collective that are represented as

more modern and developed than those of a lower-class. Since, according to modern capitalist societies, “the state and other institutions…link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change” that is signified by the “accumulation of health and wealth” (4), lower- class individuals are not only “out of joint,” but they are literally seen as lagging behind notions of modernity. Similarly, Freeman draws on Sigmund Freud’s theorizations of sexuality to emphasize that queers, much like lower-class individuals, were seen as suffering from “a stubborn lingering of pastness” (8) through their sexual behaviour. These sexual practices were identified by Freud as “places that children visited on their way to reproductive, genital heterosexuality, but not places to stay for long” (8). Thus, both queer and lower-class bodies are seen as inherently barricaded from normative senses of futurity.

While Freeman places equal emphasis on how class and sexuality influence one’s sense of temporality, all three queer narrators emphasize that the class status of the collective to which one belongs is the most determining factor when it comes to one’s ability to pursue a happily queer future. Cat Moses draws on queer historical figures such as Radclyffe Hall, the author of

The Well of Loneliness, to suggest that upper-class individuals such as Hall were “tolerated as trendy and…constructed as icons of independence and inaccessibility,” while “working-class butches have long been objects of hate, scorn, and ridicule” (79). Moses uses Jess from Stone

Butch Blues as an example of how working-class butches “were more likely to be subjected to the ritual of violence, brutality, and humiliation that was the police raid” (80). Thus, while

“upper-class lesbians in this era tended to congregate in private homes rather than in lesbian bars” (80), lower-class lesbians could only congregate in public spaces that were easily infiltrated by the police.

Further, the fact that Jess feels outside of revolutionary change in the factories where they work reveals that, even though Jess has developed queer relationships, they are still separated from larger collectives due to their lower-class status and education. Moses states that “gay liberation movements of the seventies, eighties, and most of the nineties has effaced” the specific struggles of the working class (93). Indeed, Stone Butch Blues emphasizes the persistent exclusion of working-class queer people from gay liberation movements when Jess and the other butches who work at the factory hear “about weekly gay liberation and radical women’s meetings at the university” (SBB 135). Although they hear about these meetings, they are unable to access them. As Jess explains, “Theresa was the only one in [their] crowd who knew her way around campus. It was still another world to the rest of us” (SBB 135). Therefore, the promise of revolution is localized in places of privilege that people such as Jess are unable to access.

The significant influence of class on one’s future is also emphasized in Rubyfruit Jungle.

Although Molly is an intelligent woman who is capable of pursuing a career in the film industry, her lower-class status persistently threatens her ability to do so. Esther Saxey defines Molly as

“an athlete, a scholar, and an artist” (38). Indeed, Molly is offered several scholarships from different universities upon graduating high-school. However, in spite of her academic excellence, her scholarship is revoked once the university she attends discovers that she was having a sexual relationship with her roommate, Faye. Without financial backing, Molly is unable to continue her education and the future she desires as a filmmaker is threatened. Thus, her lower-class and precarious financial situation make it easier for social institutions to punish her for her sexuality and block her from the future she tries to pursue.

Ivan also emphasizes how the intersection of class, gender, and sexuality makes one more vulnerable to violence and thereby threaten one’s future. Although Ivan is from a working-class

background, they emphasize that their family’s persistent financial and emotional support helped them secure a happy future when they say the following: “I was one of the lucky ones. One of the lucky tomboys who, for the most part, was loved and allowed to pretty much be myself. At home, at least, if not at school or on the streets. Some of us are not so lucky. Some of us have that difference squeezed or pounded or prayed out of us” (TBSG 121). They further emphasize how their relatively privileged class status as a writer enables them to embrace a queer identity that makes them happy when they say the following: “I am grateful that I can now afford a well- cut shirt and a real silk tie, and a tailor. A good haircut once a month, a fancy jacket (TBSG 113) with these cool elbows on it. I know these things make me lucky. These things make me feel more confident, more myself” (TBSG 114). Thus, while Ivan has memories of abjection and trauma, the fact that they are now a part of a middle-class collective enables them to experience greater happiness and safety than other queer individuals who lack the same degree of financial support.

Just as Molly asserts that she does not need a collective in order to fight for the future she wants, so too does Jess attempt to display a similar indifference to collectives that they cannot join. When Theresa tells Jess that femmes and butches are not allowed to join gay liberation and women’s meetings at the university, Jess responds by saying “fuck those people. Who needs them anyways?” (SBB 136). Jess attempts to present herself as indifferent to their own rejection, which is very similar to Molly’s response to her repeated abjection from family. However,

Theresa highlights how problematic such responses are when she tells Jess the following: “I need the movement, Jess. And so do you” (SBB 136). Therefore, while Jess and Molly attempt to combat their own rejection by asserting that they do not desire to be a part of such a group,

Theresa emphasizes how crucial collective action truly is.

Jess’s inability to feel a part of this larger collective also leads to feelings of helplessness regarding the inequalities from which they suffer. The fact that their sense of helplessness stems from their individualism is emphasized when they state the following: “I knew there was a war. I wasn’t stupid. I just didn’t know what on earth I could do about it” (SBB 124). Their persistent feeling of futility is tethered to their feeling outside of a larger collective, which enforces how collective action is necessary in order for them to feel empowered to fight against systemic oppression. They say that they have “seen gay demonstrations in the streets before” and have

“always paused to watch from across the street, proud this young movement was not beaten back into the closets” (SBB 295). While they are able to observe these groups with pride, they have never joined and therefore “always walked away feeling outside of that movement and alone”

(SBB 295). Thus, while collectives are seen as empowering possibilities for change, not being a part of such a group results in feelings of isolation and futility.

Indeed, Jess argues that individualism is weak relative to collectivity when they give an impromptu speech at a rally in New York at the end of the novel. They address the necessity for collectives when they say the following: “I know about fighting back, but I mostly know how to do it alone. That’s a tough way to fight, cause I’m usually outnumbered and I usually lose” (SBB

296). In other words, the isolation that they have experienced on account of their butchness makes them more susceptible to homophobic and transphobic acts of violence. They further emphasize how revolutionary power hinges on the size of the collective when they assert that others outside of the existing group, including themselves, need to join for themselves but that the existing group needs them as well (SBB 296). Thus, not only do individuals such as Jess achieve a sense of safety when they are a part of a group, but the group itself becomes stronger

with the addition of more members. As a result, Jess’s speech at the rally highlights how isolating people on account of their difference can hinder the effectiveness of collective action.

Jess’s conviction regarding the mutual benefit that people outside and inside an existing revolutionary collective have in expanding that collective parallels Leslie Feinberg’s own beliefs regarding the importance for a strong relationship between women’s and trans movements. In

Transgender Warriors, Feinberg notes that, throughout hir nation-wide travels to talk about trans oppression, “women of all ages turn out, enthusiastically ready to discuss how the trans movement impacts women’s liberation” (109). While Feinberg finds it promising that women are seeking to find similarities between both collectives, ze emphasizes that both groups can draw on one another’s power, regardless of their respective differences. Indeed, ze states that “women don’t just need to understand the links between what they and trans people suffer in society, they need to realize that the women’s and trans liberation movements need each other. Sex and gender oppression of all forms needs to be fought in tandem with the combined strength of these two movements and all our allies in society” (109). Thus, Feinberg and Jess both emphasize that various oppressed groups can support one another while acknowledging and supporting their respective differences.

Since Stone Butch Blues ends as soon as Jess successfully joins a collective, their prolonged experiences in that collective are not described. In any case, it is clear that their hopes for this group rest on including and respecting the diversity of its members rather than universalizing everyone’s struggles. When they address the members of the rally, they ask them the following: “Couldn’t the we be bigger?” (SBB 296). The fact that they ask for the “we” to expand stresses that their ability to be included should not be predicated on their ability to assimilate to the group. Instead, they implore the pre-existing members to expand what

constitutes their collective in order to embrace gender-queer people who have historically been barred from such collectives. This is emphasized further when they also ask the following question: “Isn’t there a way we could help fight each other’s battles so that we’re not always alone?” (SBB 296). Here, they underscore that support for one another can exist even when one’s struggles are different from the struggles of others. Thus, collectivity can become a happy object for Jess when it revolves around embracing and supporting each other’s sociopolitical differences.

Further, their eventual joining with a group of protestors in New York allows them to finally achieve a sense of hope for the future. During moments when they experience isolation, they are unable to visualize any potential future for themselves. For example, when they decide to try passing as a man in order to achieve a greater sense of financial and personal safety, they say the following: “Once again I couldn’t see the road ahead…but no such person existed in my world. I was the only expert on living my own life, the only person I could turn to for answers”

(SBB 224). In contrast, after they speak to the people at the rally, they are met with applause that they read as “an answer: yes, it was possible to still hope” (SBB 296). Their eventual ability to be embraced by a collective, then, allows them to have a sense of hope for the future. The fact that collectivity leads to an ability to visualize a hopeful future is further demonstrated in the final few sentences of the narrative, where they narrate the following: “I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar” (SBB 301). Thus, collectivity is represented as a happy object, and

Jess is able to visualize a promising future for themselves once they successfully orients towards it.

While Molly’s and Jess’s narratives end when basic human rights for LGBTQ+ people were still being fought for, Ivan’s adult narrative takes place in the twenty-first century and after such rights have been achieved in North America. Indeed, Thomas E. Warner explains that the feminist revolutions of the past have led to different LGBTQ+ political projects that reach beyond the fight for legal equality.7 While these laws promised an ideal of equality and queer happiness for those that fought for such rights, it is apparent that such a future is still not present despite the happiness that such laws promised. As Warner states, “lesbian and gay activism and organizing over the last three decades have achieved remarkable success, and have profoundly changed queer communities” (353). While improvements in the safety of LGBTQ+ people is marked by legislation such as “the equality rights established by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (354), he emphasizes that this does not mean that LGBTQ+ people are free from discrimination. Indeed, the fact that “homophobia and heterosexism remain pervasive and rampant” (353) in North America despite inclusive legal protection of all people means that the political projects for LGBTQ+ activists have changed. He suggests that the next step in protecting LGBTQ+ people involves “challenges to dominant values, traditional morality, and entrenched heterosexism” (357). In other words, queer activism is no longer focused on fighting for basic human rights for queer people. Instead, improving the lives of LGBTQ+ people revolves around developing understanding and acceptance between people both within and outside of queer communities.

7 These different political projects are sometimes contradictory in purpose. Warner claims that the increased legal protection of LGBTQ+ individuals “kindled a necessary debate over what the long-term objectives of the movement should be, and whether acceptance within the mainstream is desirable” (354). Thus, questions of assimilation and universality are especially prominent and contested among queers in the twenty-first century.

While Jess eventually joins forces with a larger LGBTQ+ collective, Ivan’s narrative project seems to be predominantly concentrated on creating a collective that includes but is not limited to members of the LGBTQ+ community. Indeed, Ivan reaches beyond LGBTQ+ collectives and attempts to unite with anyone who has ever been bullied (TBSG 115). They emphasize how much more damaging it is to operate according to exclusive and oppressive political agendas. As a result, Tomboy Survival Guide oscillates between universalizing and differentiating trans struggles in order to build a larger, stronger community geared towards combatting the oppression of a wide variety of people.

One of the ways in which Ivan is able to establish a strong sense of collectivity is through the temporal relationship between the text’s narrative voice and the reader. Jesse Matz, in ‘“No

Future,’” discusses the impact of narrative voice on narrative temporality in order to argue that queer narrative projects can successfully deploy second-person narration in order to queer narrative time. While he defines normative narrative temporality as that which supports “logics of sequence” as is ordered by a sense of past, present, and future tense, he argues that “the intervention of a narratorial presence” can destabilize that structure because “narrator and narration have different temporalities, disallowing any singular timeline” (240). Further, he suggests that a narrator’s direct address to their audience through second-person narration

“actually bring[s] that audience into being” (240). Thus, the fact that the readers are being directly addressed by the narrator gives them a greater sense of immediacy, collapsing the gap in space and time between them and creating a sense that both exist together in the narrative present.

In this context, I suggest that the narrative voice in Tomboy Survival Guide effectively draws the reader into the temporality of the text and creates ever-expanding collective as a result.

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While Molly’s and Jess’s narratives are in first-person narration, Ivan’s moves from first-person singular to plural, and even second-person narration. While the first-person narrative voice is used to describe Ivan’s particular experiences, the first-person plural is added in order to emphasize that many others, including the readers, have faced similar experiences. For example, when they begin to describe their experience of sexual assault and their decision to keep the anonymity of the man who raped them, they say the following: “let’s protect him even to this day, because this is what we do. We protect him as a means of surviving ourselves” (TBSG 46).

While the “I” of first-person narrative focuses on an individual’s story, Ivan’s deployment of

“we” draws the reader into the narrative and connects them to the experiences that they describe.

Thus, the use of second-person plural narrative voice is one way that the narrative transforms

Ivan’s experiences into collective ones.

Additionally, I suggest that the use of second-person singular narrative voice transforms the text itself into a happy object that invites a wide variety of people to orient towards it, which constantly works to expand its community by reaching out to new readers throughout space and time. Ivan persistently emphasizes that collectives can help ensure the survival and future happiness of anyone who is not considered normal. They address the reader when they state the following: “You are going to need to find your freak family. Your misfit soldiers and their weirdo army. Keep your eyes open” (TBSG 115). Their emphasis on the banding together of

“freaks” rather than specifically LGBTQ+ people broadens their narrative project beyond the

LGBTQ+ community. As a result, the collective that their narrative attempts to create is made up people from all backgrounds who have faced any form of oppression or discrimination.

The use of second-person narration also frequently accompanies statements that emphasize that the text is not dealing with specifically trans or queer struggles but the struggles

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of anyone who suffers at the expense of class, race, gender, and sexuality barriers. As a result, they transform traditional objects of happiness that embody heteronormative ideals into unhappy objects by exposing the pain that such objects inflict on the readers. For example, Ivan reaches out to the reader when they narrate the following: “The world will be full of messages telling you to be something other than what you are. Telling you that you are too skinny or too fat or too dark or too hairy. Too poor for pretty. Low fat hide your belly quick loss how to love less and find a man map to time machines that only ever go backward. The magazines are full of this nonsense” (TBSG 115). Indeed, Ivan deploys the “you” of the narrative in order to reach out to readers of a multitude of backgrounds. As a result, their text highlights how everyone suffers in some capacity from narrow conceptions of gender, success, and happiness. Thus, their text emphasizes that heteronormative ideals are harmful to everyone, not just trans people.

Ivan’s desire to unite people from a wide variety of backgrounds in order to spur change is further evident when they describe a memory of one of their anti-bullying shows at a public school in Oregon, U.S. They explain that they “don’t say the word queer or trans unless it comes up in a question from one of the students” (TBSG 176). Instead, their talks are geared towards fostering a meaningful and “often very moving discussion about high-school bullying and its consequences” for everyone (TBSG 176). They note that they have received “thank you letters and emails from marginalized kids, bullies, former bullies, future bullies, teachers, counsellors, principals, and even a used-to-be bullied kid who now works as a janitor in an inner-city school in Toronto” (TBSG 176), which conveys the breadth of people that their talks have affected.

When a student asks them why they “didn’t say anything gay” during their talk, they respond by emphasizing that they are “actually here for every single kid in this gym today…because [they] think we all deserve to be able to go to school and get a public education without fear or

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harassment or emotional, physical, or spiritual violence. No matter what race you are, or your gender, gender identity, or sexuality” (TBSG 182). Thus, their mission is not only to create a safer future for trans youth, but for anyone currently suffering from oppressive social forces.

Further, their encounter with a parent after this particular talk at the Oregon public school emphasizes how their strategy of focusing on the general dangers of bullying allows them to connect with people that they would be unable to encounter otherwise. A large number of parents attend the talk because they are concerned “about the horribly queer things” Ivan may say to their children (TBSG 177). After the talk, a father introduces himself to Ivan and tells them that some other parents as well as himself “came here because [they] were pretty convinced [they] would disagree with most of what [Ivan] had to say” (TBSG 184). However, he tells Ivan that, although he was “expecting to be offended by what [they] had to say,” he was “moved” instead

(TBSG 185). He adds the following: “the good Lord brought you to teach me, and I thank you”

(TBSG 185). Indeed, he makes it clear that if Ivan had discussed specifically LGBTQ+ issues, then he and other parents would have openly protested their presentation. Thus, their decision to focus on bullying in general rather than specifically trans struggles enables them to reach a broader audience. As a result, their capacity to foster understanding and create change for trans youth revolves around their capacity to universalize their struggles and simultaneously attempt to better the lives of all youth.

Ivan proposes that collective action should be all-encompassing rather than exclusionary by describing memories where exclusionary queer politics hurt them as well as others. They recall when they first came out as a lesbian and severed themselves from certain friends because of their differences as follows: “I told her I couldn’t spend too much time with her and all her straight friends anymore lest I be homogenized by their infectious heterosexuality. My politics

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didn’t leave anyone, including me, a lot of room for nuance, or grey areas” (TBSG 62). Indeed, they emphasize how such politics harm both parties involved when they state that their politics prevented both themselves and others from inhabiting identities outside of the hetero-homo binary. The divide that Ivan notes between heterosexual and homosexual groups results in similar exclusionary practices that Molly and Jess also experience in their narratives. Thus, in all three narratives, collectives that strive for universality and exclude difference are represented as participating in harmful and isolating practices.

While Ivan attempts to reach out to a wide variety of individuals and simultaneously maintain and respect differences, it could be argued that their narrative nevertheless risks trivializing the struggles that trans people go through by universalizing those struggles. For instance, they attempt to maintain the universality of their struggles with their relationship to their body and their gender identity by stating the following: “I like to think that I suffered the same as every teenage girl does in her changing body. I don’t think that trans people hold the monopoly or wrote the only book on hating their bodies” (TBSG 111). Indeed, it may be true that young girls go through periods of change and difficulty with their bodies. However, Ivan’s determination to group trans youth with every other young person prevents them from emphasizing the specific difficulties that trans youth go through. As a result, Ivan’s narrative project is a difficult one: they aim to universalize their struggles while still emphasizing the vulnerability of trans people.

However, one of the ways that Ivan avoids erasing the specific struggles of trans people through universalizing their experiences is through the narrative’s structure. The fact that

Tomboy Survival Guide consists of vignettes enables them to oscillate between moments of universality and moments that emphasize the specific struggles of trans people. For example,

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while the above passage focuses on the similarities between trans and normative youth’s struggles with changing bodies, there are other passages that highlight specifically how trans people suffer on account of gendered bathrooms (TBSG 129-133). Therefore, although there are some passages that universalize the suffering that trans youth experience with their changing bodies, there are other vignettes that focus on the oppressive violence that gendered bathrooms have on trans youth who have to “go outside and…pee in the willow bushes…because this is easier” (TBSG 130) than facing strangers in public washrooms. Thus, the fact that their narrative consists of vignettes enables them to include a wide variety of perspectives, which simultaneously builds a collective of diverse individuals fighting for inclusivity and equality while also respecting the specific needs and vulnerabilities of trans people.

These narratives demonstrate that collective action in itself does not necessarily lead to a happy future for everyone. Indeed, Molly sees both straight and lesbian collectives as unhappy objects that do not celebrate her difference but reject it. While Jess perceives collectivity as the happy object that gives them hope for equality to come, Ivan’s persistent navigation of differences within a collective demonstrates that becoming a part of such a community is not an end-point for happiness but an object that requires constant revision and expansion. In that respect, universality is as much of a performative ideal as are normative conceptions of gender, happiness, and success. As a result, these narratives demonstrate that universality should not be a goal for queer collective action. Not only do universal ideals cause collectives to appear inaccessible to certain individuals such as Molly, and temporarily so for Jess, but Ivan’s narrative demonstrates that effective political change can only occur when a collective is able to embrace individual difference.

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CONCLUSION

Then and Now: Reflections on Research as a Window into the Present

My thesis unveils compelling answers to my initial queries regarding Molly, Jess, and

Ivan’s temporal relationships to heteronormative conceptions of gender, failure, and happiness.

Not only are Rubyfruit Jungle, Stone Butch Blues, and Tomboy Survival Guide replete with the queer narrators’ memories of failure, but these memories are intimately tied to their painful experiences of abjection. Further, memories of abjection not only keep the narrators stuck in a sense of pastness, but they also threaten to take away their sense of time. Additionally, my comparisons between these three texts illustrate how difficult and ineffective it can be for queers to repress their feelings surrounding these memories. Indeed, Molly attempts to hide her shame associated with her abjection, but she nevertheless exhibits shame at their recollection. While

Jess similarly attempts to forget their painful memories, they eventually realize that they can only move on if they embrace them. While Molly and Jess fight to forget their memories, Ivan does not shy away from these painful memories and emotions but openly acknowledges them.

Additionally, these narratives demonstrate that collective action can operate as a happy object that enables those who orient towards it to envision a hopeful future. However, collectives that are constituted through similarities prevent certain individuals from embracing them and thus preclude a sense of hope for the future. Molly feels excluded from straight as well as lesbian collectives, and therefore does not perceive such groups as happy objects. As a result, her narrative ends with a relatively hopeless prospective for a future of isolation and struggle.

Similarly, the majority of Jess’s narrative consists of their exclusion from lesbian-feminist collectives due to Jess’s butchness as well as class status. Their exclusion from these collectives

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prevents them from envisioning a hopeful future as a result. Although Jess eventually manages to join a collective, the abrupt ending of their narrative enables them to preserve hope for a collective ideal without testing how realistic such an ideal actually is. While Jess’s narrative ends as soon as collectivity is established, Ivan’s narrative describes their persistent attempts at expanding their collective in order to embrace new, diverse members. Thus, belonging to a collective group is not the end-point for Ivan but marks the beginning of new challenges that involve embracing the differences of its members while still maintaining solidarity. While Ivan respects the differences of everyone’s struggles, they attempt to achieve unity by describing happy objects that promise heteronormative ideals as the root cause of the many different forms of oppression faced by marginalized people both inside and outside of the LGBTQ+ community.

While my research took into account that these three narratives were written during their own specific moment in queer history and politics, and that they reflect the tensions characterizing that particular time, it also encouraged me to reflect on the relationships between queer subjects and normative ideals of gender, happiness, and success in my own sociopolitical moment. In 2019, Gay Pride has increasingly become a shared experience for LGBTQ+ people and their straight allies. Indeed, it fills me with pride to see queer people being acknowledged and celebrated in public. However, Pride parades have also been criticized for assimilating to dominant capitalist values, which continue to exclude marginalized individuals who fail to embody those ideals.8 Further, LGBTQ+ people are still facing daily experiences of violent

8 David R. Morse reflects on the history of Gay Pride, stating that, while it used to be an event of protest and resistance, it has progressively drawn more “corporate sponsorships” that “represent a sellout, even the assimilation of queerness into mainstream” (“Has LGBTQ Pride Lost Its Way?” 2017).

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abjection on account of their failures to embody normative identities.9 While expressions of queer pride can be liberating, these narratives emphasize that it does not always lead to positive changes for the safety of LGBTQ+ individuals. On the contrary, my analyses of these texts suggest that our ability to connect with various people on account of our experiences of pain rather than pride reveals that we all suffer on account of heteronormative ideals of gender, happiness, and success. In focusing on experiences of pain, abjection, and trauma, my research exposes the ideals of gender, sexuality, happiness, and success as harmful fictions that must be challenged. We can work across more social and political barriers to build a community that aims to do just that.

9 The Human Rights Campaign’s 2018 LGBTQ Youth Report includes statistics that reveal that “these teenagers are not only experiencing heartbreaking levels of stress, anxiety and rejection, but also overwhelmingly feel unsafe in their own classrooms” (“2018 LGBTQ Youth Report”).

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