I’ve spent the last couple months in the company of writers, mostly poets, mostly men. I am growing weary. The group I hang with is large and fluid—I’m not naming names, not pointing fingers, I like these people—and yet an issue I cannot ignore has begun to emerge: when it comes to many of the men in the company, mid-thirties and younger, making conversation, even with women present (older, younger, students, professionals, I’m a grandmother for Christ’s sake), the topics frequently revolve around who is sleeping with whom, which female is more fuckable, which poop or dog-cum reference is the funniest, and what is the latest text from “the Korean girlfriend.”

It’s not that I mind swearing, not that I dislike racy humor, not that I’m a prude—the more sex the better, I say—but self-aggrandizing dick jokes get old fast. At one point, just to balance the conversation, I suggested, loudly, to another woman in the group that we begin starting our sentences with “My vagina is so tight…”

After one poetry reading and various levels of alcohol consumption (not to offer mitigation, just setting the scene), two of the younger women in the group (younger than me, that is) were repeatedly propositioned and pawed by more than one man in our company, even though the men knew the women were in long-term committed relationships and, more importantly, were entirely uninterested in a bit on the side.

My personal issues with some male colleagues have been slightly different. On reminding a colleague about a deadline, he told me not to “scold” him. This, in spite of that fact that (a) I was the project manager, and (b) it was a simple deadline reminder. If I had wanted to scold, it would have sounded less like “We need X by Y date” and more like “You are consistently lacking in follow-through, and I’m getting fed up with your inability to make deadlines, so pull your thumb out of your ass and get it done.” Yeah. That.

On the night before a poetry reading I had arranged, I got an email from a young writer saying he didn’t think he could read the next day, as his girlfriend hadn’t brought her proper ID and so couldn’t get into the reading venue (a bar) and he didn’t want to leave her alone. My email response: “Alrighty.” This writer had cancelled on me before, so really, what was there to say? In response, I received a lengthy plea asking me not to be cold and to try to understand and Would you leave [name of my husband] alone in a hotel while you read? You bet your fucking ass I would—in fact, my husband was clear across the country at that very moment, taking care of all domestic matters including a new puppy who was shitting all over the house.

I have five children. That’s enough.

***

Back to the weeks of concentrated writer events. One man offered as a compliment “You look rape-able.” One man seemed compelled to check out and comment on the breasts and legs of all the women we passed (or perhaps it just seemed like all) on the street, at the bar, in the restaurants. One man I was talking to opened a conversation with “You know that chick…” It turned out he was referring to the late-thirties editor we had just been chatting with, but it took me a minute to figure it out, because not in my wildest dreams would I have referred to the mature, professional woman as a “chick.”

This kind of crap went on and on. It was exhausting. Exhausting to figure out how to respond to the relentless misogyny from men who are otherwise kind and educated, who would never think of themselves as chauvinist assholes. I have heard more than once from this crew, “Most of my favorite poets are women.” If I were to guess, I’d bet that the lot of them vote pro-choice, support the Violence Against Women Act, and consider women well capable of intelligent, complex thought. I certainly don’t assume that all men under 40 would engage in the kind of language and behavior described above; indeed, I know of many who would never do so. And yet, after the past several weeks, its frequency is far beyond what I thought possible.

What is up with all this dehumanizing language? Honestly, I have no idea. But I do know this. If “good guys” feel perfectly at ease using degrading language that objectifies women when talking not only to one another but also to women they purportedly respect, then the bullshit that came out of the GOP this past election cycle (vaginas that can tell the difference between consensual sex and rape, for example) can be explained. A big pile of reasonably aware and well-intentioned people doing thoughtless shit creates a solid set of stairs for unreasonable, ignorant assholes to say and do what most of us (men and women alike) would deem shockingly destructive.

The group I was spending time with recently was mercifully spared a flood of “That’s what she said” jokes, though I have surely been drowned in them before. The only recent instance went something like this.

Woman referring to her sandwich: “That’s too big for my mouth.”

One of the men at the table: “That’s what she said.”

Me: “That’s what he is hoping she said.”

***

So I’ll offer this: in addition to being exhausted and discouraged by the relentless barrage of bathroom humor and frat-party antics, I’m bored. I’m in this world of poetry and books for ideas and language and beauty. Seriously. So I’ll say to whoever needs to hear it, put your shit back in the can and let’s talk about things that might actually be funny or engaging or matter once the whiskey has worn off.

Last year, a good friend of mine was deeply injured by a woman he had been in a relationship with. For his birthday, which occurred in the middle of the mess, I gave him a vintage nutcracker in the shape of a pair of women’s legs. Was this me buying into the same bullshit I’m talking about here? I’m not sure.

While preparing an essay for VIDA the other day, I reviewed the guidelines and saw the following description of one of the essay categories: “For you alpha personalities willing to be bold and opinionated, for this feature we send you five to seven provocative questions about life, writing, or current happenings.” Huh. Are women who are willing to articulate their opinions automatically “alphas”? Perhaps that’s how we are currently characterized in our culture, but surely that will not be the case in a world where opinions are valued based on merit and not based on the gender of the speaker. Even VIDA, an organization working tirelessly to increase the awareness of women’s accomplishments in the arts, can fall prey to language that protects misogynistic tropes.

So, again, here’s what I say to anyone who needs to hear it: let’s get together, knock a few back, have an entertaining conversation about literature or human nature or something hilarious one of us saw on TV. But here’s the thing: the moment you start talking about the tits of the woman at the end of the bar, or referring to grown-ups as “chicks” or start getting me confused with your mother, that’s the moment I move on. Not because I’m offended or uptight or a bitch, but because I’m bored. Get interesting (and perhaps help shift our cultural consciousness at the same time), or get out of the way.

That’s what she said.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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What would it look like if male authors’ novels were treated like Bassist’s hypothetical feminine masterpiece All the Single Ladies Just Wanna Have Fun?

Author Maureen Johnson challenged her Twitter followers to gender-flip the covers of books like A Game of Thrones and Freedom. Some of the best results are gathered in this amazing slideshow.

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“It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the ‘American Novelists’ category to the ‘American Women Novelists’ subcategory.” –Amanda Filipacchi, “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists,” The New York Times, April 24, 2013

“Around 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men, and it shows.” –New Scientist

A lot of women people (as opposed to men people, or just “people”) are upset that Wikipedia editors have created a subcategory for “American Women Novelists.” But I’m not. I’m stoked! This could be the best thing that’s ever happened to women novelists like me.

First of all, I can stop competing with Jonathan Franzen. Franzen has been a real pain in my lady parts, and now that we’re not in the same category, I can stop feeling so awful about my writing. While I knew in my heart’s core we would never be in the same league, now we’re literally never going to be in the same league. Such a relief! I mean, for real.

B.) There’s also less competition within my segregated field. Because fewer books by women are published, I have a higher probability of success. (That’s how math works, correct?) Like my woman parent always says, “It’s easier to win when everyone else is losing. Now let’s go clean the toilet!”

Apparently the list of “American Novelists” is too long, so I see why subcategories are necessary. It’s like when my inbox is too full and I have to archive certain emails and forget about them forever. (I have email folders for “Etsy Sales,” “Sephora Sales,” “The Atlasphere: Ayn Rand News, Dating & Social Networking Newsletters,” and so on.) Organization and labeling are supreme virtues, above most other less supreme virtues like equality and fairness. I’d like to see Wikipedia continue this helpful sub-categorization. “American Women Comedians” is an obvious one.

I was immersing myself in women’s literature the other day—by that I mean I was reading a cookbook—and that’s when I knew what I should do. I will write the next Great American Woman’s Novel. It’ll be part romance fiction/journal/doodles/musings/sestina about kittens and friendship/an illuminating treatise about the way we live now/word cloud, and it will cover the typical subject matters women write about: marriage, motherhood, yogurt, dating as a competitive sport, emotional warfare, housework, tampons, rainbows, midwifery, gardening, hysteria, beauty products, weight gain, weight loss, the art of being shrill, divorce, magic, and light bondage.

One chapter will be an audio file of Taylor Swift songs.
One chapter will be just emojis.
One chapter will be my grocery list.
One chapter will be a link to my Pinterest page.
One chapter will be manufactured with drops of my blood, sweat, and tears.
One chapter will be me making a sandwich for all the “American Novelists.”

If I have any deep, universal, logical thoughts or opinions, I’ll write them down on Post-Its and then chew them up and swallow them to maintain the illusion women don’t write about those things.

Of course I’ll write TNGAWN with BIC for Her pens, designed to fit a woman’s hand. The XY pens I’d been using were heavy and obstructed my flow of words, but BIC for Her’s comfortable and innovative design makes writing a pure pleasure. The pink one is for writing thoughts I’m thinking and the purple one is for feelings I’m feeling. I’ve outsourced the typing to a man helper to whom I pay 30 percent more for the work than I would ask to be paid were I employed as an outsourced typist.

I’ll publish the novel via my self-publishing operation Books by Her, and some smart men in design and marketing will slap on a cover that my cervix can really identify with—like a canary yellow cover depicting high-heeled shoes atop a glistening martini glass made with bits of the glass ceiling we just totally cracked by letting it crash to the floor.

It’s true that books by women aren’t reviewed as often in thought-leader newspapers and magazines, and it’s a vicious cycle—women are systematically underrepresented in reviews, so they have fewer “credible source” citations on Wikipedia, so fewer wombyn are “notable,” so people who browse Wikipedia based on notability won’t readily see them—that I’d rather stay out of. And anyway, more women than men buy books; ergo, my novel will be a bestseller even if no one hears about it.

I could fight subcategorization—encourage writers of femininity to start editing Wikipedia, to create new entries and flood the system with new perspectives, maybe alter the way information is organized, possibly influence how a story gets told, just do tiny, fixable things that make it easier for women to gain equality—but that’d take me away from writing the next Great American Woman’s Novel—tentatively titled All the Single Ladies Just Wanna Have Fun!—so, you know, pass.

I guess what I’m saying is, maybe this is a high point. American Women Novelists are special. Chosen. In a category all our own.

Man, we’ve come a long way, baby.

***
[N.B. In “Yes, Wikipedia Is Sexist -- That's Why It Needs You,” Deanna Zandt offers resources available for beginners to get started editing Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia has a welcome library of resources that includes handbooks and videos on principles of editing and how to use the editing tools.
• WikiWomen is a collective of people interested in supporting women’s activities in the community. It’s both a rallying cause and resource for women’s participation, as well as a supportive environment in which to learn.
• The Teahouse is a community gathering spot on Wikipedia for newcomers (of all genders) to ask questions and get help with problems they might be having.
• Of course, [Deanna’s] own work: I teach introductory webinars and workshops on Wikipedia principles, tools and resources, and have tailored those workshops to primarily women-centered groups.]

***

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In the fall of 2002, I was a graduate student laboring over translations of the Hebrew Bible. (Sometimes I paused to ask myself why I was bothering to translate into English a book that existed in a perfectly good English translation in the majority of American households. Mostly, I didn’t pause. Or ask.) I had, at that point, been living as a guy since my seventeenth birthday, a little over seven years before. So I was comfortable, or at least relatively established, in my identity as a man.

But I was technically female. By “technically,” I mean “by some alchemical mixture of biology, law, and social understanding.” In a more precise manner, I mean that though I looked like a guy and had changed my name (from Alice to Alex), I hadn’t had surgery and I took no hormones. I had XX chromosomes. I had a uterus. I had breasts. Under normal conditions, none of these things were ever evident.

Owing to a fluke, my driver’s license said I was male. The day I’d gone to obtain the license, the clerk at the DMV had simply gone on the basis of what she saw in front of her (I’d left both sex boxes on the form blank) and put M.

I was dating a woman. We’d been together for about two years (though we had known each other much longer), and we were engaged. We weren’t quite sure what this meant. Or we were, but only in one way: we knew we were committed to each other and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. Hence, we would get married.

But how? The state we lived in didn’t offer any form of same sex marriage (union, conjoining, partnership, etc.), and to get married as an opposite-sex couple required birth certificates. Both of ours said female, so that wouldn’t work. That left two options.

1. Go to another state and get a same-sex marriage. This would be purely ceremonial and not recognized by any other nation, state, shoe store, etc.
2. Go to Vegas and get an opposite-sex marriage. I’d looked online: Vegas only required that both members of the couple produce driver’s licenses. Mine said M. Hers said F. It might work. But I suspected it might be illegal, or at least not fully legit. And I get nervous about things like that. (The very existence of my not-quite-correct license made me nervous.)

In the end, we opted for the ceremonial over the illegal and drove up to Vermont in December, eloping at a bed and breakfast with the dishwasher (the person, not the machine) as our witness. We signed the certificate for our same-sex Vermont civil union, went for a lovely snowshoe afterward, and drove home with a mix of feelings. On the one hand, I knew, internally, that I’d gotten married. Vowed to be with this person. On the other hand, externally, I didn’t know what that piece of paper meant at all.

***

Things change, sometimes, and sometimes not. I turned twenty-five. I still looked like I was fifteen. It got tougher to pass as a man. So I started taking shots of testosterone and soon enough looked, if not twenty-five, then at least not fifteen. We moved to another state. We told people we were married. We were. We weren’t. The state we’d moved to didn’t recognize Vermont civil unions as anything, but we did. And to whom does marriage matter anyway?

The state we moved to also had tougher laws for providing documentation in order to be issued an identity card, and I feared the days of my flukily obtained driver’s license M were numbered. So I asked my doctor to write a letter explaining that I had undergone medical gender reassignment because I took testosterone and that I should be considered male. I sent this letter to the Department of Human Services in the state where I was born, and a few weeks later, they sent back a new birth certificate: Alex Myers, male.

This felt odd. I was and I wasn’t. I was now, at this moment, male. Well, mostly, though I still hadn’t had surgery. But I hadn’t been born the way I was now. And so, though grateful for the ease that the document provided (it’s just smoother when the paper matches the appearance), staring at it—Record of Live Birth, Alex Myers, Male—it seemed to belong to someone else.

More to the point, the new birth certificate meant that my wife and I were no longer married. Our same-sex civil union was rendered void: we were no longer a same-sex couple, and Vermont did not validate opposite-sex civil unions. However, we happened to be living in one of only nine states that recognized common-law marriage. To have a common-law marriage, a couple had to meet the following criteria: live together (we did), have a joint bank account (we did), present to others as married (of course), and file taxes jointly (would happily give it a try). We went to a lawyer, just to be certain. “Sure,” we were told. “It’ll work fine, until you move to another state.” We were married again.

***

Years went by, and eventually, my passport expired. I’d gotten it before receiving my new birth certificate, so it still said F. I sent off an application together with my new birth certificate and asked them to adjust the sex on my passport accordingly. They replied, “We need a letter from a medical doctor.”

I replied, “My birth certificate says I’m male.”

They replied, “Your citizenship gender record says you are female. Only a letter from a doctor can change your citizenship gender.”

I had no idea that there was such a thing as a citizenship gender, but apparently we all have one, and it may or may not match the gender on one’s birth certificate. I sent off a new doctor’s letter. As I waited for the passport, I wondered if, like a birth certificate, a common-law marriage wasn’t good enough. (When I told this story to a friend, complaining of having to secure another letter, she told me I should be glad I’d changed my birth certificate when I had. Since that time, my birth state had altered its laws and it now required proof of surgery to change gender. How odd, how arbitrary. How could someone decide this is gender, this is sex, here’s the defining line?)

When the new passport did arrive, with its M, I realized that, until the blip of this passport on my life’s radar screen, I hadn’t given much thought to gender lately. Gender’s like that. I lived as a man, I remembered to give myself my shots of testosterone, it wasn’t an issue. And I hadn’t thought of marriage much lately either. Marriage is like that. I was married, I lived happily with my wife. Both entities simply were, no fancy verb needed.

But that simple existence occurred only in my own life. As I held the passport in my hand, I realized that both marriage and gender have a life beyond my own. Somewhere, my citizenship gender had been on file. Somewhere, a record of me existed that over-ruled my daily existence. Here, I was a man. There, I had been female.

I asked my wife if she would marry me again.

***

We decided to return to Vermont. Another elopement, I guess. Just the two of us, in the summer this time.

Everything’s different when you’re an opposite-sex couple. We went to the town clerk for our license (before, it was done in advance by mail). We each filled in identical forms at the counter. Midway down, our pens paused.

Question: Have you ever had a civil union before?

We both wrote yes. The clerk, a classic Vermonter with a home perm and tint, took our birth certificates and our licenses, examined them, handed them back. The she read over our forms. “Who was your civil union with?” she asked my wife.

“Him,” my wife responded, pointing at me.

She looked at me, and at my form. “A Vermont civil union?”

“Yes,” I said. “We used to be a same-sex couple. Now I’m male.”

“Oh.” She read through the rest of the form. “Can I see that birth certificate one more time?”

I passed it over, and she found the line she wanted. Male. Then she took a blank license form, cranked it into her typewriter, and began to clack at the keys.

For some reason, no witness is required for opposite-sex marriages, just an officiant. We held hands and vowed once more to become, to remain, to always be, married.

***

Maybe the day will come when my wife and I will need to get married again. Maybe there will be genderless birth certificates. Genderless marriages. Some category that doesn’t mention sex at all. Because, even with all my current identification, a perfectly matched set, I still feel that I am… and I am not…and I will be… and I have been… There’s just no noun and no verb tense. There is, however, one thing of which I am certain, regardless of what my sex might be today or have been yesterday or be regarded as tomorrow. We are, have been, will be, married, joined together in union—always.

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

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These issues are of particular interest to both of us because we are both writers. As new parents of a half-Indian daughter, we’re thinking not only about our individual experiences of the collision between American and Indian (or more accurately, Tamil) culture, but our daughter’s future experiences. We perceive issues of representation so differently at times that we seem to be talking about entirely different objects or events.

My husband is a fair-skinned Chicagoan writer of mixed Italian descent who feels comfortable voicing whatever is on his mind and does not worry about the reaction. Without speaking for him (his viewpoint is more sophisticated than I’m able to capture here), I gather he doesn’t find it offensive when Americans emphasize exotic aspects of Indian culture.

I am an Indian-American immigrant writer who often feels torn about whether my experience is too small, too unique, to have any bearing on what other people think or should think, but nonetheless feels a deep need to voice opinions no matter how unpopular they are. In my view, writing and other art forms that don’t conform to exotic stereotypes Americans have about India and its diaspora remain mostly invisible, creating a narrow public impression of Indian culture and people of Indian descent.

Our latest discussion, over candlelight and fondue, was about the American and British news coverage of the gang rape in India. Specifically, I was interested in an article called My life behind India’s Purdah that ran in Salon on January 4, 2012, in which Mira Kamdar wrote, “India’s purdah mentality permeates every level of Indian society,” as remarks made after the gang rape by members of Delhi’s police force and political leaders make abundantly clear.

Salon picked up the piece from Asia Society, retitling it to suggest (erroneously I believe), that Kamdar, who grew up in America like me, was writing as a voice for all Indian women in India. The piece is packaged as an inside scoop on Indian society, rhetorically connecting the fear of violence that Kamdar learned from her grandfather with the argument that India is in its entirety a rape culture, the worst culture in the world for women.

Later, Kamdar tweeted that she had asked Salon to retitle the article. They retitled it “Behind India’s cultural purdah”.

***

Following on the heels of the news about the horrific gang rape in India was a false news story accidentally spread by Alternet and picked up by Salon, “Saudi religious leader calls for gang rape of Syrian women.” I noticed this article on a friend’s post on Facebook. It received twenty-eight comments expressing horror.

The sole commenter who pointed out that the story was link bait put out there for the purpose of fomenting outrage, that this ‘news’ might be the result of Islamophobia rather than reality, was denounced and shouted down. To critically question the legitimacy of shaky news pieces about the Middle East or India is apparently to be a vile and reprehensible person in American culture right now.

By the time Alternet responsibly retracted the story about the Saudi cleric, the damage had already been done. As far as I could see, Americans read the original article and reinforced their stereotypes about brown people “over there” in those terrible foreign countries. There was no consideration about what it means when Americans react with social media outrage to a story about a Saudi cleric or an Indian physical therapy student, but virtually ignore similar violence at home.

I am referencing here an event from last August: the sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old by two Steubenville, Ohio high school football players that was followed with people urinating on her and dragging her around by the ankles and wrists, which was followed by onlookers sharing photographs of her and tweeting about the “drunk girl” and the “dead girl.”

The town, which reminds me of the one in Friday Night Lights, was reluctant to help in prosecuting this crime because of its potential to damage a chance to win the championships. It took the work of an industrious blogger, the hacker group Anonymous, and four months for The New York Times to break the news of this rape. There are many people who are as disgusted by the Steubenville rape as the Delhi rape, but the Delhi rape made global headlines almost immediately generating outrage, whereas the Steubenville rape, which occurred in August 2012, registered widely in American consciousness at the start of the new year.

***

With twenty-two mother tongues, twenty-eight states, and seven union territories, India is too heterogeneous a nation, and frankly too diverse in the experiences it offers, to argue with legitimacy from the personal, as Kamdar and other commenters discussing “the conspiracy of silence” in India do. Of course, all I can offer to explain the reason these articles hit me the wrong way is my own personal experience with India, which has been different, and less sensationalistic.

If I were to argue from my personal experience, I would reach an entirely different result from Kamdar. But you won’t see my viewpoint on this topic in a mainstream or even a progressive news magazine because my viewpoint doesn’t fit the sacred or profane dichotomy by which the West categorizes Indian experiences.

The Indian women I know are not silent, nor any more vulnerable than any non-Indian woman in the West. Whether they are children of the diaspora in California or Sydney or Johannesburg, or living where they were born in Chennai, they happen to be among the most outspoken of my friends. They happen to be the quickest to offer an opinion or give help or ask a question or participate in an event.

Kamdar talks about the fear her grandfather instilled in her in order to argue that the same fear permeates all of Indian culture. The first Indian man I ever knew (my father) encouraged me to feel comfortable dissenting from popular opinion and taking a stand against injustices. I do not believe he is unusual for an Indian man. Jyoti Pandey’s father, for example, described his daughter as courageous, not transgressive.

***

During my visits over a thirty-year period to Chennai, the most salient aspect of the culture I’ve encountered has been liveliness in both genders, not a pervasive silencing of women. Women talk over men to get heard. Women visit nightclubs. Women work out at gyms. Women work in positions of power. Women protest injustice in the face of rising violence. Following the rape victim’s death thousands of outraged women took to the streets of India to protest the government’s inaction toward the perpetrators of the gang rape.

It is fair to say that India is deplorably behind the curve when it comes to Indian women’s rights. Yes, misogyny and brutality exist in India. In the American rush to condemn a foreign culture, however, let’s not forget that women brave, bold, and strong enough to protest the rape exist in the culture, and are emblematic of India’s culture, as well.

There is a total silence in the West on India’s culture of dissenting women in the face of severe patriarchy and authoritarianism. It doesn’t quite fit, does it, into the dichotomy carved out for Indian women by Americans and the British, being neither sacred nor profane, but a bit heroic.

Discussion of the protests, if any, is embedded in articles about how India’s entire culture, one composed of multiple nations bound together by British colonialism, is a conspiracy of silence, all of which fits rather nicely into the stereotype of the “quiet, good Indian girl” that I experienced while growing up and while dating in my early twenties. I don’t know where this stereotype originated because Indian women were rarely seen in mainstream television or movies before the nineties, but it was an expectation of silent obedience I encountered regularly while growing up into my mid-twenties. A prime example can be found in Madhuri, an Indian woman shown in the first ten minutes of the pilot for the cancelled series Outsourced.

One literary representation of the quiet Indian woman is V.S. Naipaul’s portrait of Shama in The House of Mr. Biswas. Another literary line referencing the perception that Indian women are inconsequential is referenced at the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa calls Indian women “silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops”. After Mindy Kaling grew in popularity on The Office, Kelly Kapur transformed from quiet background character strategically placed to show what a bumbling politically incorrect guy Michael Scott was, to loudmouthed airhead in her own right.

***

Last year, a Bollywood actress, Sherlyn Chopra, decided to become the first Indian woman to pose for Playboy. She told BBC Hindi,

“I have become the first Indian to pose naked for Playboy, and nobody can take away that achievement from me.”

I don’t know why, but I feel a lot of sympathy for Sherlyn Chopra who thinks that being the first Indian to do something this banal and absurd and simultaneously this transgressive, is somehow an achievement. She has escaped the sacred and profane by being in Playboy.

Or is that still profane? Given the ubiquity of Internet porn and the rise of Hustler’s image via The People v. Larry Flynt, I don’t think that America still sees Playboy as profane, but the magazine is banned in India, which suggests that Chopra was seeking a way to make a name for herself by working within the sacred/profane dichotomy.

***

In a back issue of an Indian-American magazine I read regularly, I notice that one of the reviewers of books and films is white. I am irritated when she says, in her review, that she wishes she were Indian, too, that she would change her name to sound like an Indian writer, because it would be easier to get published by one of the big six—Indian fiction is hot right now!

Um, no, not unless you want to write sari and mango novels. Not unless you want to play into the stereotypes of what American people seem to want to read about India and Indians: that it’s all rape, poverty, plucky slumdogs, arranged marriages, mystical, yoga retreats, spiritual revelations, corruption, and elaborate descriptions of North Indian food. A hodge-podge of the sacred and profane packaged for easy consumption, rather than serious consideration.

Later, I’m surfing the Internet again, and stumble upon an essay in The Millions about Indian fiction gaining popularity and mainstream acceptance. I read an Indian writer’s comment to the article: “not writing about my grandmothers reminiscing about baking chappatis in some dusty back court in India, has made some of my work a very difficult sell.” I’m divided. Me, too, I think. I relate, and yet I don’t want to relate because it seems ungenerous and presumptuous to think that readers are motivated to read a book or watch a movie solely by how well it conforms to stereotypical images of my culture that seem “authentic” to them.

Surely those of us Indian-Americans who feel this way have sour grapes? Maybe our work just isn’t good enough to pique interest, having nothing to do with what kind of imagery is expected of us. If Mindy Kaling can write and star in the ultra-popular The Mindy Show without a whiff of exoticism, doesn’t that disprove that you need to write about India or the Indian-American experience in a particular way in order to be successful as an Indian-American writer?

I read interviews with Mindy Kaling in New York Magazine and The Boston Globe. In the latter she says,

When you’re a minority and you’re writing a show for yourself you don’t know that people are pinning hopes and dreams on you in a way and, like, if this fails, does this mean they won’t take chances on Indian-American actresses?

And then she says,

That would be a bummer. I’m not one of these people that’s like, ‘I didn’t get into this to be a role model.’ . . . We’re all role models to a certain extent. You have that responsibility to not do things or say things that you wouldn’t want to perpetuate. But at the same time it’s like I didn’t go into politics, I came out to Hollywood to write and act in earnest. I feel it’s a balance.

She didn’t ask for the responsibility—as she says, television is not politics, though it also functions on popularity—but she has it. When you’re a minority who is not as successful as she is in her field, you see that opportunities are few and far between for minorities in the arts.

It also turns out Kaling’s writer’s room is mostly men. And then I see the show a bit differently, thinking that what Kaling seems to have intended as part-homage, part meta-romantic comedy is being scripted by a bunch of men who are probably mocking, who don’t love romantic comedies at all, who are doing what Jane Austen and Henry Fielding did with sentimental fiction, punishing their heroines for being girls.

Before I learned those factoids, I thought The Mindy Project might counterbalance the whiteness of Girls. Unlike some other writers of color, I didn’t have a problem with Lena Dunham not casting nonwhite women in significant roles in Girls. It’s her fictional world and she should write it how she believes it should be written, I said to myself.

The responsibility lies with networks like HBO or Showtime to green-light projects that are closer to the experience most of us have—a real world in which (gasp) even women of color have bodies that are imperfect and egos that are even more imperfect, who say stupid, earnest, funny things. Mindy Kaling says she isn’t interested in having ethnic humor, or her skin color, or her gender define her: “I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists…I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?”

At the start of the day all writers face the same problem: how best to express what you want to express, which might prove to be inexpressible, in the face of a glaringly blank page and an audience that doesn’t care (hopefully, yet). The tick-tick of the clock, the patch of the great green outdoors you can see from your window, the siren song of the Internet or the television. The experiences that have shaped your ontology.

So although I am an Indian-American woman who loves stupid romantic comedies and finds Kaling very funny, I find it troubling that she separates herself from other Indian American women writers because she can compete in a bigger pool. Not because she’s wrong. She can compete outside her racial group, so why shouldn’t she? But so can many other Indian women writers whose voices must fit into the sacred-profane paradigm in order to be published in mainstream outlets at all. Would Kamdar’s essay have been picked up by Salon if she articulated that no, the stereotypes about India are not true? I don’t believe so.

Maybe Kaling wants to separate herself because she doesn’t want to fall into a race trap, the trap that you are a writer who, in writing for Indian-Americans, writes only for Indian-Americans or for people who see India as a bit of a promised land (a land of yoga or spiritual retreat), whose concerns are only racial or ethnic, as opposed to  the broader human experience.

How a writer asks and how she answers questions of race and identity and gender and culture are crucial in a time when the vast majority of women of color working in entertainment, literature, or the arts still have to package and commodify their “exoticness” or experiences of “otherness” as an “Indian-American writer”, a “black writer”, “a Chinese-American writer” etc. in order to have anyone even be interested in what they have to say.

As Kaling seems to realize, there’s a trap here, which she dodges. If you choose to market yourself this way in America, you are only that. You are the writer or artist or entertainer that many people still elect not to read because your experiences are too exotic, too alien, too other.

“I’m not really in the mood for an Indian novel,” I’ve heard readers say. And I am ashamed that I have been guilty, too, of choosing not to read particular books that I have ethnically pigeonholed without reading word one of them.

What would be the cost to me of pretending I am not an Indian-American writer, but just an American writer? Having taken my husband’s name, I might get away with that.

But a heightened experience of otherness is what I’ve experienced. It’s part of my artistic makeup, not only because I grew up learning Tamil, going to Bharatanatyam classes every Sunday, eating thair sadam and lime pickle at dinner each night, reading Hindu mythology comic books, visiting India as child, but because of how other people have responded to me.

No matter how many Babysitters Club books I read to fit in as a child or the law degree I acquired or other markers of social acceptance I’ve sought out in the hopes of belonging. I was always other in American society. I could not help it. My otherness has become part of my ontology.

On the other hand, if I chose to pull a Lena Dunham in reverse, writing only about Indians, is my work automatically to be sneered at (as the writer of The Millions article on the New Wave of Indian fiction put it) as “ethnic fiction”? As fiction that is assumed to have no value to broader America except to the extent it addresses the sacred or the profane?

***

My daughter is half-Indian, but like her father has fair skin and the question for me everywhere I go now, from pizza parlors to doctors’ offices is, “Are you her nanny?” or “Is she yours?” When I told my husband about the latest episode at a pizza parlor, he was quite surprised. From his perspective, most people don’t talk like that anymore.

My mother told me to ignore it. For some reason, perhaps because it is my daily experience, perhaps because I’m sensitive, I can’t. Every incident reverberates, vibrating with every other experience of otherness I’ve had.

When I was a teenager, a boy I liked who knew that I liked him compared my skin to the color of shit as the reason he didn’t find me attractive. Five years later, I learned that my brother had the same experience with some elementary school bullies. Ten years later, a half-Iranian male reading some of my fiction mentioned the experience of being called “sand nigger,” while growing up in Arizona.

What does it mean that this is not the unique experience of a few kids in the suburbs, but also the experience of our president? President Obama had the skin color publicly compared to shit by Lesley Arfin, a writer for the popular television show, Girls. For me, this is something we shouldn’t ignore about American culture: that people of color are compared to waste products and very few people are outraged. Bullies who talk trash like this are not boycotted and shunned and fired; instead, people of color are expected to stay quiet and ignore it.

When I talk about a racist episode, people assume it is limited to one instance with an ignorant person—one instance in a pizza parlor or one instance at the doctor’s office where somebody assumed I was the nanny. However, in my experience, it is a lot of instances, with a lot of ignorant people.

I can’t help but think that these instances are connected to the issue of representation in art, film and literature. The more we see life from the perspective of someone outside the majority culture, the more empathy we are likely to have for the targets of this kind of abuse and the more likely we are to talk differently ourselves.

Girls is a show I enjoyed last year and now feel maybe I shouldn’t. A show that feminist writers gush over as “honest” and “realistic”, comparing it to Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines.

Women writing about their experiences in their own form, women writing about their experiences in the face of a world that wants them to be quiet, women writing in a world that trivializes the seriousness of writing about one’s personal experience when the writer is a woman like Sheila Heti or Kate Zambreno, but elevates that same ambition when the writer is a male like Philip Roth. However, nobody to my knowledge suggests that Girls, How Should a Person Be, or Heroines is actually interchangeable with the other and that you only need consume one to consume them all. Perhaps you’ve noticed, too, that this cultural conversation about silencing, which takes place in both alt lit and mainstream publications, is almost entirely silent on women writers of color.

Zambreno’s book, which I liked a lot, contains a line that scorns a woman who suggests Zambreno write a “multicultural novel.” I’ve heard that scorn from many fiction writers not of color over the years: that to write a book that is actively multicultural (which registers to me as a simple fact about American society today) is not to write seriously, but to write to a trend that will pass. I think this opinion is motivated by the same thought process that motivates the woman who wished she had an Indian name because Indian fiction is hot, just like vampires, BDSM, and post-apocalyptic dystopias.

For some of us, however, multiculturalism is not merely a trend; it is not written because it is hot; it is a serious engagement with our reality.

***

In a smart essay for The Millions, Thea Lim wrote that,

Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color.

She goes on to mention two white writers, Mary Gaitskill and Alice Munro, as female writers that write as gracefully as Diaz about their own lives. Then notes that Zadie Smith and ZZ Packer are also possible counterparts.

Within this mainstream literary fiction, there is also Jhumpa Lahiri, a writer who somehow manages to break free from the sacred/profane dichotomy, but winds up writing books in which the saris could be exchanged for jeans, where the Indian-ness is frequently bound up in name brands rather than Bengali culture per se. And yet after three such books, a common criticism of Lahiri (that I find annoying) is that she only writes about Bengali-Americans: why doesn’t she write about something else?

Other Indian-American writers who are far more prolific than Lahiri are sidelined for their social engagement in the same way that Barbara Kingsolver is, as described in a 2011 essay on Slate by Michelle Dean: not taken as seriously in the literary world. Chitra Divakaruni. Bharati Mukherjee. There are more.

Part of their relegation to a literary status below that of Lahiri’s might be bound with literary merit and use of language, but another part, from my perspective, is that these “multicultural” or “ethnic” writers write to Indian-Americans familiar with Indian culture about the Indian-American experience. I don’t think they write only to that audience, but that audience is included. Whereas Lahiri’s work, brilliant and graceful as it is about the Bengali-American experience, does not really require the reader to adopt the same familiarity with Indian culture(s). By not making that assumption, by not being “ethnic,” Lahiri more properly takes her place in the pantheon of literary greats.

***

Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton is told in the third person, which does not satisfy my hopes of getting closer to a real person in his situation, but which produces an interesting literary effect. The third-person device forces me to think about how a fatwa forced Rushdie to assume another identity that made him foreign to himself.

I relate enormously to Rushdie’s account of his life in the 1960s at boarding school in England, which weirdly enough, sounds in some respects not all that different from life for an Indian girl in secondary school in Palo Alto in the 1980s and 90s.

At the end of Rushdie’s time at Cambridge, someone throws gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture of his room. He is held responsible and told that unless he pays for the damages, he won’t be allowed to graduate. He pays. Then, when he wears brown shoes to his graduation, he is ordered to change to black shoes and also required to supplicate himself to the vice chancellor, begging in Latin for a degree that he earned.

He obeys.

He writes in third person,

Looking back at those incidents, he was always appalled by the memory of his passivity, hard though it was to see what else he could have done. He could have refused to pay for the gravy damage to his room, could have refused to change his shoes, could have refused to kneel to supplicate for his B.A. He had preferred to surrender and get the degree. The memory of that surrender made him more stubborn, less willing to compromise, to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons.

The insight that I like there is that these personal experiences of abjection and passivity turn him into someone who eventually does fights—with his whole being—for his right to speak the truth as he see it.

Some people might laugh at my juxtaposition. Rushdie? That’s who makes things bearable for you? Mindy Kaling, not the feminist icon Jezebel makes her out to be? What?

But Rushdie’s personal passages contain a level of fight born of supplication, that I think has something important to say to me as a female, as a woman of color, as a writer. And maybe he can get away with talking about this because he is not a woman and because something so profoundly political and disturbing happened to him that nobody (except perhaps Zoe Heller) can trivialize the fact that he is writing about the personal aspects of the crisis now.

Maybe, also, he can write these personal passages because he didn’t grow up in America, believing that he’s supposed to be able to succeed at whatever he wants, but unable to, and because, in fact, he has succeeded by all measures. As someone who does not find herself in a post-racial America, I take solace in a passage about Rushdie’s tendency to supplicate himself as a youth finally turning into a refusal that launched one of the most powerful battles of free speech of our times.

***

Back in the nineties, my first boyfriend, an Israeli-American, mansplaining that being a Jewish male in America is much harder than being a woman of color, finally threw up his hands in exasperation saying, “But you were just born in India. You’re American. You’re not really Indian. You don’t know what racism is.”

It is twenty years since that invalidating conversation. We have a black president, and Indian women are marching against misogyny without applause, but the most popular progressive magazines are not fact-checking stories that perpetuate lies about foreign brown people and publishers are reluctant to put teens of color on the front of YA books because those books won’t sell as well. Shortly after the Delhi gang rape in 2012, a thirty-one year old woman pushed a Hindu man onto the tracks of a subway stations in Queens, New York later saying, “I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

Ignore it. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

If I must ignore these disturbing facts; or produce writing about Indian culture that fits into the sacred and profane dichotomy such that my words are familiar to everyone but me; or worse, never engage in conversations about these facts for fear of being disliked, the answer that comes to mind nowadays is different from the silent acquiescence or self-directed anger I experienced twenty years ago. I would prefer not to. 

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Didn’t enjoy your weekend? We have just the thing to cheer you up: weekend Rumpus features.

First, we have a Saturday Rumpus essay on the link between 9/11 and gender and fabulist fiction. Here’s a nice juicy chunk to get you started:

My own creative writing students at UC Santa Cruz didn’t write about The World Trade Center or the war on terror, but more of them started writing about zombies, apocalypses, zombie apocalypses, fantasies about wars between good and evil, anxious stories about our threatened world and the dangers of the enemy within. Then, a few years after 9/11, I began noticing that many of myundergrads had started referring to themselves as “girls” instead of “women”; some began to dress like little girls as well, in high-knee socks and short skirts.

Then, writer, traveler, and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Aleksandar Hemon talks about the effect of culture shock and politics on his work:

When [Professor Koljevic] was a teacher, he was apolitical. His approach was that we were all doing what we were doing in a safe zone, safe from politics and the various ugly things that were available at the time. I thought of it as ennobling, as in, If I keep learning this, I’ll be safe from all the shit, but it turned out he was a spy in that safe zone all along. Or at least the way he thought and talked about it did not in any way prevent his becoming a fascist. And then what is the purpose of it at all?

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“Anna is probably not a likable character. This is because of her choices and because they don’t make a lot of sense.” “Bad things happen to Anna and Anna does bad things in turn. Do you think Anna feels bad for any of it? No, she doesn’t.” “Anna sort of made these decisions herself spur of the moment not taking into consideration, the repercussions after, so you can see why I had no sympathy for her.”

Today is grey and cold and, unseasonably, snowing, and I am sadder than I ought to be about various things of no consequence. I have had some version of this piece sitting on my desktop for months. I hover the mouse over the “publish” button and then I move it away again. I wanted to tell you about something else instead, like how last night I told my friend over the phone you can never admit in public that you find Infinite Jest boring, because people just think you are too stupid to get it, and then this afternoon on the train I saw a man who looked exactly like David Foster Wallace, and it seemed like a sign, but of what I don’t know. I don’t want to write about rape anymore. But here we are.

“My biggest misunderstanding was in that the blame seemed to be placed more on the boys and less on Anna making poor decisions and her mother’s inability to lovingly care for her daughter.” “I kept expecting her to eventually make better choices or at least learn from her mistakes. But hello, who gets raped and doesn’t even realize I mean not fully.”

I was unaware of what had happened in Steubenville until relatively recently, when, in a tire store in Park City of all places, the story came on the news while I was waiting with a friend for his car tires to be changed. Without warning, the YouTube video was on the television screen. I went into the bathroom and threw up. When I came out of the bathroom the story was still on and so I went into the bathroom again and locked myself in the stall and cried—this is what I do, I guess, go into bathroom stalls and cry—and the image of that girl’s body, swinging between two boys, their faces blurred, is one that I can still see, even now, three months later. The knowledge of not just what was done, but of how many people watched. Somewhere else, that is happening again now. My friend got his car and we drove away. “Are you all right?” he said. “Sure,” I said. “Fine.” Park City is lovely in the winter.

“I also wasn’t a fan of how Anna’s promiscuity started. Anna had a choice from the moment she was on the bus to make very different decisions than she did.”

Slutty, unlikable, passive, drunk, poor decisions, doesn’t make a lot of sense, dirty, has too much sex, has sex, is probably thinking about sex, poor, brown, wrong body, wrong gender, at the wrong party, didn’t say the right kind of no, couldn’t say no, didn’t know how to try. What are we talking about, here? A book? A girl? A human body? One another? Me? It gets harder and harder to tell.

“Here’s the part that really made me wanna smack the girl. Anna goes out to a party, gets drunk, and this post-high school guy spends the night pinching and twisting at her nipples. She doesn’t want him to, but hey, it seems to be a normal occurrence for her, so the most she does is flick him off for doing it. So it’s no wonder the guy finds her drunk @ss later to rape her. He pins her down and covers her mouth, and when he’s done, casually asks her not to say anything to anyone. ‘Okay,’ is her reaction.”

There is more than one way to survive.

“I didn’t like her at ALL. I kinda want to punch her in the face. I don’t really want to go slut-shaming and all that. But seriously.”

If language wounds so well there is hope in the thought that it can also bring us together, mark us out as warriors, as kin. That we can build bridges out of our scars.

“I’m sorry, but this girl truly is a slut with major mental issues, with no one to blame but herself.”

I want to write the thing that will make it all make sense because I don’t want to write about this anymore. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Do you understand? Walking through the park a few nights ago, not that late. I have an old, bad back injury; every now and then, the muscles seize up, and I walk with a noticeable limp. Past a group of men. The algebra you do: how many of them there are factored by do they mean me harm times how fast can I run. “Why’s she walking like that?” one of them said to the others. “Sweetheart, you hurt? You want me to help you?” My heart stopped. I’m sure he meant well. In the wild, a wounded animal is often left to die. Last night watching an old episode of Buffy. Some cheesy biker demons rampage across the town. They corner all of Buffy’s most annoying friends. “Some of us have anatomical peculiarities,” sneers a demon to Buffy’s witchy bestie. “They tend to tear up little girls.” Well, I tell you what. Picturing that really fucked me up for a while.

“I honestly and truly believe that Anna had something wrong with her.”

I chose not to link directly to any of the reviews; I have no interest in summoning the short-lived Internet vengeance machine. They’re real. You can find them for yourself, if citations are important to you. I will tell you that every single one of them quoted here, except for one, was written by a woman.

“Had the author just given me that last scene where she proved that Anna was going to become something better than she was, I could’ve give this novel at least three stars. Now… I hate even giving it one. It disturbs me that much that this girl slutted around, got high, got drunk, and didn’t change anything about herself moving forward.”

I didn’t change anything about myself, moving forward. “Okay” was my reaction, too. This body, this heart, the same old fucking stories. I still drink too much sometimes and sometimes I don’t. I went to a lot of the wrong parties. I tattoo my own history on my skin but I’m starting to forget it anyway. Am I becoming something better than what I was? Should I be?

I don’t know. You tell me.

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Though it may help some cis people start to understand the basic concept of trans-ness, it’s not always very accurate. In a blog post on the subject, Janet Mock explains why she doesn’t identify with the body-as-cage narrative:

Why don’t I like it? Because it places me in the role of victim, and to those who take mainstream media depictions as truth I’m seen as a human to be pitied because I’m someone who needs to be saved, rather than a self-determined woman with agency and choice and the ability to define who I am…

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What’s wrong with you? Why do you hate yourself so much?

Most days, I like myself, and most days, I try very hard to get along with people, but I can’t deny that my relationships with women are much more complicated than they are with men. They are, honestly, so much more frequently unpleasant. I have left groups of women disliking myself, feeling sad and upset, in a way I have never felt leaving a group of men. A man wants to sleep with you or he doesn’t. If he wants to sleep with you, and you reject him, things can become tricky, though this is usually easily solved. He will want to be your friend, despite your disinterest in him, or he won’t, and he’ll make this clear.

I am friends with a number of men that I’ve turned down sexually, and these relationships are easy. I go to their homes and eat dinner. We go out drinking and they pass out on my couch and do not stumble into my room on accident. (Are the women in the audience thinking how full of myself I am? Do I need to say that men want to sleep with everyone, all of the time, and I’m nothing special?)

Oh, women. I am having such a hard time with you right now.

I am having such a hard time with myself.

I should mention that it’s five o’clock on a Friday and I’ve been drinking since noon. I had a bad time with a woman today. This has been brewing for some time. But, really, I just felt like drinking.

I digress.

With men, there is no subtext beyond sex. I can sit and talk with a man and not wonder whether he thinks I’m aiming to steal his lover, whether he thinks I’m smarter or more talented or more capable than he is. Whether he is more popular, younger. And, perhaps, more importantly, I don’t wonder about the path he has chosen, and how it differs from mine. Many of my friends in Mississippi married early, had children, joined country clubs and the Junior League. They have fake breasts and gigantic houses. They have husbands who ask me, every time, without fail, whether I am dating someone. I drink their beer and hate myself and feel like a loser because no matter what I tell them, they will think I’m a loser. My friends, their wives, dye their hair platinum and spend their days buying things and working out. When I go to their dinner parties, I hate them, and I hate myself, and I hate myself for hating them and I hate myself for not being what other people wanted me to be. And I wonder if I have failed or succeeded and I just don’t know. I have no idea.

All I know is that that isn’t my path, that I would not be happy with their lives, and yet I hate myself for not being able to be the kind of person who could be happy with that life.

There are so many ways in which I have failed to be what other people wanted.

Most days, I don’t think about it. We make choices. This is my choice and I wouldn’t change it and I’m okay with it, but then I talk to my mother and feel like a failure all over again.

I am attractive and unmarried. My looks could have bought me something I’m not cashing in on and looks don’t last forever. I am a bigger failure because I am divorced, and it was my decision to leave. I had everything a woman should want—money, a kind and attractive husband, a comfortable house—and none of it was enough. Not nearly enough.

I should add that I grew up in Mississippi, earned a BA in Psychology, and got married at twenty-two, which is to say I had no context, was unemployable, was a baby.

We were married on April Fools’ Day.

Perhaps this is simply a personality issue, or I am mentally unstable.

I’m a writer.

Have you seen the statistics? Fucking brutal.

What do you want, woman?

I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore.

I’m sorry.

God, I’m so frequently sorry.

Are the women in the audience doubting my attractiveness? Perhaps they’ve seen photos on Facebook and would like to disagree?

I’m not gorgeous or anything.

I am sorry, women.

This isn’t really about you.

And I swear if I read another essay about how your life is hard because you’re female and men yell at you out their car windows and honk their horns and you feel objectified and silenced and marginalized, I am going to feel very, very violent. I don’t want to write one of those essays. I don’t want to talk about these things because I want to pretend they don’t exist. I want them all to go away. I want to insist that life has been good to me, that men have been good to me, that no one has ever hurt me.

But here I am writing one. Or a variation of one: why it sucks to be female. Why females have it so hard. How we hate each other and make our lives harder.

This is what I want to tell myself: GO FUCK YOURSELF.

It is true, then.

At a reading recently, my boyfriend had this conversation with multiple people:

Person at reading: So, you’re dating Mary Miller?

Boyfriend: Yes.

Person: Have you read her stories?

Boyfriend: Yes.

Person: [Walks away shaking head, feeling very sorry for boyfriend.]

People are uncomfortable with people like me, those who want to tell everything. Those who can’t keep quiet. You can do these things, and you can feel them and talk about them, but you can’t write them down. Just don’t write them down.

I don’t know what this essay is about anymore.

I am sorry.

***

Rumpus original art by Rachael Schafer.

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In Anne G. Sabo’s essay, “When My Husband Came Out as a Woman,” Sabo reveals the struggles and mixed emotions she experiences as her husband makes the transition to become her soon-to-be wife.  Similarly to Butler, Sabo believes gender is variable and fluid. But when forced to confront the fluidity of gender firsthand, she discovers her “politics” were in some ways at odds with her feelings. Sabo says:

“If I’d been free to write about this in July, this would have been a quite different post; an exuberant one! And not one about groundlessness and grief. But if my politics at first got ahead of me, I’m hoping that my personal might eventually catch up with it. Because I don’t want to lose this big love, my best friend, my child’s other parent, my spouse, my lover.”

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