The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

  To be honest, however, I didn’t remember that the abuse continued until I researched it just now. As a child I stuttered out on just this one scene, so startled was I by the penis-corn.

  If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.

  In high school, a wise teacher assigned the short story “Wild Swans” by Alice Munro. The story blew through my penis-corn-addled mind and swept it clean. In just a few short pages, Munro lays it all out: how the force of one’s adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life. Munro makes “Wild Swans” more tolerable and interesting by having its protagonist get jerked off by a male stranger on a train (a traveling priest, of course) without her consent or protest, but also without her being forced to do anything to his body. In lieu of genital description, Munro gives us landscape: the view outside as the train hurtles forth, which the girl beholds as she comes.

  When Iggy was five months old, we took him with us to one of my best friends’ trapeze-burlesque shows, but were turned away at the door by a jovial Australian bouncer who told us that the show was 18+. I told him I wasn’t worried about exposing the five-month-old strapped to my chest, asleep, to my best friend’s foul mouth and naked body. He said the problem wasn’t my baby per se—it was that other people would see the baby, and thereby be reminded of the babies they might have left at home, and it wouldn’t feel to them like an adult night out. It would disrupt the cabaret atmosphere.

  I’m all for adult nights out, and for cabaret atmospheres. This isn’t a tract arguing for the right to carry a baby everywhere. I guess what annoyed me is that I wanted my friend to make the call, as she had invited us. Coming from the bouncer, I felt (paranoically? he was just doing his job) the specter of what Susan Fraiman has described as “a heroic gay male sexuality as a stand-in for queerness which remains ‘unpolluted by procreative femininity’”

  To counter this stand-in, Fraiman expounds on the concept of sodomitical maternity, described at length in a chapter titled “In Search of the Mother’s Anus,” which wends through Freud’s notorious Wolf Man case. A grown man in analysis (known to posterity as the Wolf Man) tells Freud about being a little boy—perhaps even a baby—and seeing his parents doing it “a tergo,” or doggy-style, on multiple occasions. “The man upright, and the woman bent down like an animal.” (It might be worth noting that this memory is pried out of the Wolf Man— it’s not his calling card of complaint.) Freud says that the Wolf Man was “able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance.” He also reports that that the Wolf Man “assumed to begin with … that the event of which he was a witness was an act of violence, but the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his mother’s face did not fit in with this; he was obliged to recognize that the experience was one of gratification.”

  When Freud goes to interpret the scene, however, the mother’s genitals disappear. The mother becomes the “castrated wolf, which let the others climb upon it,” and the father, the “wolf that climbed.” This is no real surprise—as Winnicott has noted (along with Deleuze and others), Freud’s career can sometimes seem a series of intoxications with theoretical concepts that willfully annihilate nuance. (Or reality: Freud later suggests that the boy may have seen sheepdogs copulating and hoisted the image onto his parents, and thus asks the reader “to join me in adopting a provisional belief in the reality of the scene.” Such freely confessed swerves into the provisional are the pleasure of reading Freud; the problems come when he succumbs—or we succumb—to the temptation to mastery rather than reminding ourselves that we are at deep play in the makeshift.) In any event, at the time of his writing of Wolf Man, Freud’s plat du jour was the castration complex. And this complex demands that the woman have “nothing,” even in the face of testimony to the contrary.

  Freud doesn’t disappear the pleasure the Wolf Man notes on his mother’s face, but he does twist it beyond recognition. He proposes that seeing the castrated mother get fucked in this way, and seeing her enjoy it, produces a primal, destabilizing fear in the Wolf Man, “which, in the form of concern for his male organ, was fighting against a satisfaction whose attainment seemed to involve the renunciation of that organ.” Freud summarizes the psychic knot as follows: “’If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father,’ we may perhaps represent [the Wolf Man] as saying to himself, ‘you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother; but I won’t have that.’”

  I won’t have that: for Freud, the “that” is castration—clearly too large a price to pay for whatever pleasure may be at hand. For some queer theorists writing in Freud’s wake, however, the “that” is something else entirely: the desire to be sexually satisfied by the father, in which case the penis is not renounced, but multiplied. This reading treats Wolf Man’s memory of his parents’ encounter “a tergo” as a primal, coded fantasy of gay male sex, a scene of proto-homosexuality. In which case, the Wolf Man’s subsequent fear of his father is a fear not of castration, but of his own homosexual desire in a world that “won’t have it.”

  This interpretation has appeal and value. But if the woman’s genitals have to be willfully erased in order to get there, and her pleasure distorted into a cautionary tale re: the perils of castration, we have a problem. (Rule of thumb: when something needs to be willfully erased in order to get somewhere, there is usually a problem.) Thus, Fraiman aims to return the mother’s pleasure to the scene, and to foreground her access—”even as a mother“—to “non-normative, nonprocreative sexuality, to sexuality in excess of the dutifully instrumental.” The woman with such access and excess is the sodomitical mother.

  Why did it take me so long to find someone with whom my perversities were not only compatible, but perfectly matched? Then as now, you spread my legs with your legs and push your cock into me, fill my mouth with your fingers. You pretend to use me, make a theater of heeding only your pleasure while making sure I find mine. Really, though, it’s more than a perfect match, as that implies a kind of stasis. Whereas we’re always moving, shape-shifting. No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy. Sometimes words are a part of it. I can remember, early on, standing beside you in a friend’s cavernous fourth-floor painting studio in Williamsburg at night (she was out of town), completely naked, more construction workers outside, this time building some kind of luxury high-rise across the street, their light towers flooding the studio with orange shaft and shadow, as you asked me to say aloud what I wanted you to do to me. My whole body struggled to summon any utterable phrase. I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it. Now here you were, your face close to mine, waiting. The words I eventually found may have been Argo, but now I know: there’s no substitute for saying them with one’s own mouth.

  Sodomitical maternity was on full display in A. L. Steiner’s 2012 installation Puppies and Babies—an anarchic, colorful, blissed-out collection of snapshots, culled from Steiner’s personal archive, of friends in various states of public and private intimacy with the titular creatures. Steiner says the installation sta
rted as a kind of joke, the joke coming from “the fact that sometimes I’d find myself shooting puppies/dogs and babies and what for? Were they part of my ‘work’? How did/could they fit in to the highbrow genre of labels often attached to my work—installation-based, for mature audiences, political, etc?”

  These are interesting questions. They did not occur to me, however, while beholding Puppies and Babies. I’d like to think this is because the dreary binary that would pit casual snapshots of “adorable” puppies and babies and their myriad caretakers and companions against “highbrow” genres of art has come to strike me as a malodorous missive from the mainstream: at times unavoidable, but best left unsniffed. (See the 2012 Mother’s Day cover article in the New York Times Book Review, which began: “No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood…. To be fair, writing well about children is tough. You know why? They’re not that interesting. What is interesting is that despite the mind-numbing boredom that constitutes 95 percent of child rearing, we continue to have them.” Given that nearly every society on earth peddles the notion of having children as the ticket— perhaps the only ticket—to a meaningful life (all others being but a consolation prize)—and given that most have also devised all kinds of subtle to appalling ways to punish women who choose not to procreate—how could this latter proposition truly fascinate?)

  Puppies and Babies is a terrific antidote to such sneering, with its joy-swirl of sodomitical parenthood, caretaking of all kinds, and interspecies love. In one photo, a naked woman spoons two dogs at once. In another, artist Celeste Dupuy-Spencer squats with her dog at the edge of a lake, as if both are contemplating a long journey. Babies get born, cry, goof around, ride small tractors, pinch nipples, get held. Often, they nurse. One nurses—incredibly—while the nursing mother does a handstand. Another nurses at the beach. Alex Auder, pregnant and in leather dom gear, pretends to give birth to an inflatable turtle. A dog mounts a stuffed tiger. Another dog is festooned with orange flowers. Two pregnant women hold up their sundresses to rub their naked bellies together, a friendly frottage.

  Baby-lovers may gravitate to the baby photos, dog-lovers to the dogs, but the roughly equal wall space given to each places interspecies love firmly on par with human-human love. (Some photos feature both puppies and babies, in which case there’s no need to choose.) And while there are a lot of pregnant bodies here, this orgy of adoration is clearly open to anyone who wants to play. Indeed, one of the gifts of genderqueer family making— and animal loving—is the revelation of caretaking as detachable from—and attachable to—any gender, any sentient being.

  Beholding this celebration, I wonder if Fraiman’s sodomitical maternity needs revision. It has been politically important for feminists to underplay the erotics of childbearing in order to make space for erotics elsewhere (i.e., “I fuck to come, not to conceive”), but Puppies and Babies eschews such cleavage. Instead we get all the messy, raucous perversities to be found in both pregnant and nonpregnant bodies, in nursing, in skinny-dipping in a waterfall with one’s dog, in cavorting in crumpled bedsheets, in the daily work of caretaking and witness—including the erotic witness of Steiner’s camera. (If you share Koestenbaum’s happily prurient sentiment, “If I attend a photo show that lacks nudes, I consider the visit a waste,” then you’ve come to the right place.)

  Some of the subjects of Puppies and Babies may not identify as queer, but it doesn’t matter: the installation queers them. By which I mean to say that it partakes in a long history of queers constructing their own families—be they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals—and that it presents queer family making as an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset, rather than the other way around. It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.

  Homonormativity seems to me a natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality: once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way. That’s why nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far as to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality, or why outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson seek homosexual adventures in countries such as Romania, where one can still be imprisoned for merely hitting on someone of the same sex. “I still see homosexuality as a narrative of urban adventure, a chance to cross not only sex barriers but class and age barriers, while breaking a few laws in the process—and all for the sake of pleasure. If not, I might as well be straight,” Benderson says.

  In the face of such narrative, it’s a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade, or to hear Chaz Bono cluck-clucking with David Letterman about how T has made him kind of an asshole to his girlfriend, who still annoyingly wants him to “process” for hours in that dreaded lesbian/womanly way. I respect Chaz for many things, not the least of which is his willingness to speak his truth to an audience ready to revile him. But his eager (if strategic) identification with some of the worst stereotypes of straight men and lesbians is disappointing. (“Mission accomplished,” Letterman declared sardonically in response.)

  People are different from each other. Unfortunately, the dynamic of becoming a spokesperson almost always threatens to bury this fact. You may keep saying that you only speak for yourself but your very presence in the public sphere begins to congeal difference into a single figure, and pressure begins to bear down hard upon it. Think of how freaked some people got when activist/actress Cynthia Nixon described her experience of her sexuality as “a choice.” But while I can’t change, even if I tried, may be a true and moving anthem for some, it’s a piss-poor one for others. At a certain point, the tent may need to give way to field.

  Here is Catherine Opie, talking to Vice magazine:

  Interviewer: Well, I think you going from the SM scene to being a mom, and all your new photos are these blissful domestic scenes—that’s shocking in a way, because people want to keep those kind of separate.

  Opie: They do want to keep it separate. So basically, becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me. Ha. That’s a very funny idea.

  Funny to her, maybe, but to those who are freaked out about the rise of homonormativity and its threat to queerness, not so much. But as Opie here implies, it’s the binary of normative/transgressive that’s unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.

  The other day I heard a guy on the radio talking about prehistoric homes, and the particular way humans make home as opposed to, say, birds. It isn’t a penchant for decoration that differentiates us—birds really have a corner on that—it’s the compartmentalization of space. The way we cook and shit and work in different areas. We’ve done this forever, apparently.

  This simple fact, gleaned from a radio program, suddenly put me at home in my species.

  I’ve heard that, back in the day, Rita Mae Brown once tried to convince fellow lesbians to abandon their children in order to join the movement. But generally speaking, even in the most radical feminist and/or lesbian separatist circles, there have always been children around (Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Karen Finley, Pussy Riot … the list could go on and on). Yet rather than fade away with the rise of queer parenthood of all stripes, the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other has lately reached a kind of apotheosis, often posing as a last, desperate stand against homo- and heteronormativity, both. In his polemic No Future, Lee Edelman argues that “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the childre
n,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.” Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Is and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. Or, to use a queer artist friend’s more succinct slogan, Don’t produce and don’t reproduce.

  I know that Edelman is talking about the Child, not children per se, and that my artist friend is likely more concerned with jamming the capitalist status quo than with prohibiting the act of childbirth. And I too feel like jamming a stick in someone’s eye every time I hear “protecting the children” as a rationale for all kinds of nefarious agendas, from arming kindergarten teachers to dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran to gutting all social safety nets to extracting and burning through what’s left of the world’s fossil fuel supply. But why bother fucking this Child when we could be fucking the specific forces that mobilize and crouch behind its image? Reproductive futurism needs no more disciples. But basking in the punk allure of “no future” won’t suffice, either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet, crowing all the while about how lucky the jealous roaches are to get the crumbs that fall from their banquet. Fuck them, I say.

  Perhaps due to my own issues with reproductive futurism, I’ve always been a little spooked by texts addressed to or dedicated to babies, be they unborn or infant. Such gestures are undoubtedly born from love, I know. But the illiteracy of the addressee—not to mention the temporal gap between the moment of the address and that at which the child will have grown into enough of an adult to receive it (presuming one ever becomes an adult, in relation to one’s parents)—underscores the discomfiting fact that relation can never be achieved in a simple fashion through writing, if it can be achieved at all. It frightens me to involve a tiny human being in this difficulty, this misfiring, from the start. And yet certain instances have undeniably moved me, such as André Breton’s letter to his infant daughter in Mad Love. Breton’s hetero romanticism is, as always, hard to take. But I like the sweet assurance he offers his daughter, that she was “thought of as possible, as certain, in the very moment when, in a love deeply sure of itself, a man and a woman wanted you to be.”