Empathy

by Sarah Schulman

  She saw a gay man walking through the park in his little gym suit. He had a nice tan like Ann did and a gold earring like she did too. His t-shirt also had writing on it. It said, “All-American Boy.” His ass stuck out like a mating call.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Do you want to smoke a joint?” she asked very sweetly.

  He looked around suspiciously.

  “Don’t worry, I’m gay too.”

  “OK honey, why not. There’s nothing much happening anyway.”

  So, they sat down and smoked a couple of joints and laughed and told about the different boyfriends and girlfriends that they had had, and which ones had gone straight and which ones had broken their hearts. Then Ann produced two beers and they drank those and told about the hearts that they had broken. It was hot and pretty in the park.

  Ann mustered up all her courage and said.

  “I have a cock.”

  “You look pretty good for a mid-op,” he said.

  His name was Mike.

  “No, I’m not transsexual, I’m a lesbian with a penis. I know this is unusual, but would you suck my cock?”

  Ann had always wanted to say “suck my cock” because it was one thing a lot of people said to her and she never said to anyone. Once she and her friends made little stickers that said “End Violence in the Lives of Women,” which they stuck up all over the subway. Many mornings when she was riding to work, Ann would see that different people had written over them “suck my cock.” It seemed like an appropriate response given the world in which we all live.

  Mike thought this was out of the ordinary, but he prided himself on taking risks. So he decided “what the hell” and went down on her like an expert.

  Well, it did feel nice. It didn’t feel like floating in hot water, which is what Ann sometimes thought of when a woman made love to her well with her mouth, but it did feel good. She started thinking about other things. She tried to two-gay-men image but it had lost its magic. Then she remembered Jesse. She saw them together in Jesse’s apartment. Each in their usual spots.

  “What’s the matter, Annie? Your face is giving you away.”

  “This is such a bastardized version of how I’d like to be relating to you right now.”

  “Well,” said Jesse. “What would it be like?”

  “Oh, I’d be sitting here and you’d say ‘I’m ready’ and I’d say, ‘ready for what?’ and you’d say, ‘I’m ready to make love to you, Annie.’ Then I’d say ‘Why don’t we go to your bed?’ and we would.”

  “Yes,” Jesse said. “I would smell your smell, Annie. I would put my arms on your neck and down over your breasts. I would unbutton your shirt, Annie, and pull it off your shoulders. I would run my fingers down your neck and over your nipples. I would lick your breasts, Annie, I would run my tongue down your neck to your breasts.’

  Ann could feel Jess’s wild hair like the ocean passing over her chest. Jesse’s mouth was on her nipples licking, her soft face against Ann’s skin. She was licking, licking then sucking harder and faster until Jesse clung to her breasts harder and harder.

  “You taste just like my wife,” Mike said after she came.

  “What?”

  Ann’s heart was beating. The ocean was crashing in her ears.

  “I said, you taste just like my wife, when you come I mean. You don’t come sperm, you know, you come women’s cum, like pussy.”

  “Oh thank God.”

  Ann was relieved.

  Another morning Ann woke up and her fingers were all sticky. It was still dark. First she thought she’d had a wet dream, but when she turned on her reading lamp she saw blood all over her hands. Instinctively she put her fingers in her mouth. It was gooey, full of membrane and salty. It was her period. She guessed it had no other place to come out, so it flowed from under her fingernails. She spent the next three and a half days wearing black plastic gloves.

  The feeling of her uterine lining coming out of her hands gave Ann some hope. After living with her penis for nearly a month, she was beginning to experience it as a loss, not an acquisition. She was grieving for her former self.

  One interesting item was that Ann was suddenly in enormous sexual demand. More women than had ever wanted to make love with her wanted her now. But most of them didn’t want anyone to know, so she said no.

  There was one woman, though, to whom she said yes. Her name was Muriel. Muriel dreamed that she made love to a woman with a penis and it was called “glancing.” So she looked high and low until she found Ann, who she believed had a rare and powerful gift and should be honored.

  Ann and Muriel became lovers and Ann learned many new things from this experience. She realized that when you meet a woman, you see the parts of her body that she’s going to use to make love to you. You see her mouth and teeth and tongue and fingers. You see her fingers comb her hair, play the piano, wash the dishes, write a letter. You watch her mouth eat and whistle and quiver and scream and kiss. When she makes love to you she brings all of this movement and activity with her into your body.

  Ann liked this. With her penis, however, it wasn’t the same. She had to keep it private. She also didn’t like fucking Muriel very much. She missed the old way. Putting her penis into a woman’s body was so confusing. Ann knew it wasn’t making love “to” Muriel and it certainly wasn’t Muriel making love “to” her. It was more like making love “from” Muriel and that just didn’t sit right.

  One day Ann told Muriel about Jesse.

  “I give her everything within my capacity to give and she gives me everything within her capacity to give - only my capacity is larger than hers.”

  In response Muriel took her to the Museum of Modern Art and pointed to a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Ann spent most of the afternoon in front of the large piece, an angry ocean of black penises which rose and crashed, carrying a little box house. The piece was called “Womanhouse.” She looked at the penises, their little round heads, their black metal trunks, how they moved together to make waves, and she understood something completely new.

  They got together the next day in a bar. As soon as she walked in Ann felt nauseous. She couldn’t eat a thing. The smell of grease from Jesse’s chicken dinner came in waves to Ann’s side of the table. She kept her nose in the beer to cut the stench.

  “You’re dividing me against myself, Jesse.”

  Jesse offered her some chicken.

  “No thanks, I really don’t want any. Look, I can’t keep making out with you on a couch because that’s as far as you’re willing to go before this turns into a lesbian relationship. It makes me feel like nothing.”

  Ann didn’t mention that she had a penis.

  “Annie, I can’t say I don’t love being physical with you because it wouldn’t be true.”

  “I know.”

  “I feel something ferocious when I smell you. I love kissing you. That’s why it’s got to stop. I didn’t realize when I started this that I was going to want it so much.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “Why is that a problem? Why is that a problem?”

  Jesse was licking the skin off the bone with her fingers. Slivers of meat stuck out of her long fingernails. She didn’t know the answer.

  “Jesse, what would happen if someone offered you a woman with a penis?”

  Jesse wasn’t surprised by this question, because Ann often raised issues from new and interesting perspectives.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, Annie, I’ve never told you this before, actually it’s just a secret between me and my therapist, but I feel as though I do have a penis. It’s a theoretical penis, in my head. I’ve got a penis in my head and it’s all mine.”

  “You’re right,” Ann said. “You do have a penis in your head because you have been totally mind-fucked. You’ve got an eight-inch cock between your ears.”

  With that she left the restaurant and left
Jesse with the bill.

  Soon Ann decided she wanted her clitoris back and she started to consult with doctors who did transsexual surgery. Since Ann had seen, tasted, and touched many clitorises in her short but full life, she knew that each one had its own unique way and wanted her very own cunt back just the way it had always been. So, she called together every woman who had ever made love to her. There was her French professor from college, her brother’s girlfriend, her cousin Clarisse, her best friend from high school, Judith, Claudette, Kate, and Jane and assorted others. They all came to a big party at Shelley’s house where they got high and drank beer and ate lasagna and when they all felt fine, Ann put a giant piece of white paper on the wall. By committee, they reconstructed Ann’s cunt from memory. Some people had been more attentive than others, but they were all willing to make the effort. After a few hours and a couple of arguments as to the exact color tone and how many wrinkles on the left side, they finished the blueprints. “Pussy prints,” the figure skater from Iowa City called them.

  The following Monday Ann went in for surgery reflecting on the time she had spent with her penis. When you’re different, you really have to think about things. You have a lot of information about how the mainstream lives, but they don’t know much about you. They also don’t know that they don’t know, which they don’t. Ann wanted one thing, to be a whole woman again. She never wanted to be mutilated by being cut off from herself and she knew that would be a hard thing to overcome, but Ann was willing to try.

  From the Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1993

  “The Anomie Within: Empathy by Sarah Schulman”

  by John Weir

  If personality is just an adjustment to stress, we may all be the result of the crises we survive. The characters in novelist Sarah Schulman’s fiction struggle to come to terms with their identity in a contemporary urban landscape that has grown increasingly apocalyptic and implausible. They grasp at love as they watch their friends and lovers die. They strain to understand their lives in the context of global changes and local upheavals. In four previous novels and her current, Empathy, Schulman has articulated an ongoing dialogue in which her fictional stand-ins, most often young gay women obsessed with cultural and political concerns, yearn to speak the language of their time, and to learn what actions will suffice in a chaotic world.

  “I mean something different in the World than I mean in my world,” says Anna O., whose fractured identity is scattered in shards throughout the poignant self-analysis that comprises Empathy. She seems to exist only in relationship to her surroundings, or other people. Living in a New York City neighborhood left in disarray by the combination of partial gentrification and increasing poverty that overtook it during the Reagan-Bush years, she is acutely aware of herself as a child of middle-class Jews, “the kind that could pass up just as easily as down.” Her word-processing job and visits to her parents help her maintain an illusion of tradition and stability.

  She is, after all, an American in whom certain advantages are supposed to inhere automatically. But she is also a gay offspring of vaguely gay-baiting parents, and a woman conditioned from childhood to conceive of her beauty, her sensuality, and her intelligence wholly in comparison to men. Furthermore, she is a child of the ’60s, raised to believe in a future that has long since passed into history.

  Wondering “what happened to the world I was promised back in the first grade in 1965,” she describes what she grew up to expect: “successful middle-class romance, the Jetsons, robots and the metric system.” That her life now consists of AIDS, reluctant lovers, crack babies and the homeless is the irony she strives to resolve.

  Being able to listen to others and identify with their concerns is Schulman’s understanding of empathy, an emotional receptivity that provides Anna with the key to the eventual reintegration of her initially fragmented personality.

  If Schulman’s structure is complex and sometimes abstruse, her style is refreshingly colloquial. “Simple words are best,” the narrator notes, and while Schulman is occasionally guilty of oversimplification, she is most often the master of a gorgeous simplicity that is resilient enough to encompass everything from recipes for Three Musketeers Treasure Puffs to lyrical passages and intimate bedroom chatter. Her gift is her characters’ capacity for grace under pressure, and her special charm is her generous, sensual and quite exhilarating observations of women. “Her orgasm was square,” Schulman notes, when Anna O. awakes from a sexual dream. “A pink star, a spider web, a dancing star too and a point and a shadow.”

  Schulman’s voice is comic, engaging, alternately hectoring and caressing. It is a New York voice, struggling to liberate itself from received notions about love and identity picked up from Sigmund Freud and Saturday morning cartoons. At times it reminded me of one of Schulman’s literary precursors, Delmore Schwartz, a lifelong tortured and effusive New Yorker, a Jewish secular humanist with a broad streak of tenderness beneath his cynicism. “Existentialism means that no one can take a bath for you,” Schwartz famously opined. The cosmic loneliness he suffered, comically expressed, reverberates throughout Schulman’s writing. But while Schwartz withdrew from the world, retreating into madness, Schulman affirms her connectedness to life, stepping gracefully and conscientiously through the great disorder whirling forever around her.

  Excerpts from ‘A Person Positions Herself on Quicksand’: The Postmodern Politics of Identity and Location in Sarah Schulman’s Empathy

  by Sonya Andermahr, from ‘Romancing the Margins’? Lesbian Writing in the 1990s, edited by Gabriele Griffin (Harrington Park Press, 2000)

  Since the advent of the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s, fiction produced by feminist and lesbian writers has provided a powerful engagement with the politics of gender and sexuality. During this period, however, feminist fiction has registered transformations that have affected the theory and practice of feminism more widely. A major shift, dating from the late 1980s, names the theorization of location and the radical rethinking of theories of identity and difference as one of its main concerns. It suggests a reconceptualization of identity, particularly gender identity, from a relatively homogeneous model to a more unstable and heterogeneous conception of what identity means. This requires that feminists take the notion of intrasexual difference - that is difference among women - seriously. All three - theory, politics, fiction - endeavor to offer women ways of simultaneously articulating their differences and challenging inequality. Importantly, they attempt to register both the diversity of women’s experiences and the multiplicity of identities within each woman. As a result, the subject fragments, frequently (and sometimes painfully) traversing borders and boundaries, moving across and within culture, history, ‘race’ and, sometimes, even gender. In this article I want to examine one example of contemporary lesbian feminist fiction - Empathy by the US lesbian writer Sarah Schulman - in light of contemporary feminist debates about the politics of location.

  In common with much recent feminist fiction by American and British writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Alice Walker, Michele Roberts, and Angela Carter, Empathy employs a number of techniques and devices associated with postmodernist and anti-realist aesthetics in order to explore the politics of gender, sexuality, and identity. These include hybridization or the mixing of genres; metafiction, which comments on its own fictional status; self-reflexivity; intertextuality, in which the text draws on other texts; fantasy; pastiche; and irony. While postmodern devices are not in my view inherently radical, their use by Schulman facilitates the deconstruction of the narratives of (hetero)sexism and imperialism. Like many contemporary feminist novels, Empathy combines postmodern stylistics with a feminist critique of postmodernism, sharing its central theme with contemporary feminism: the possibilities of political solidarity and resistance in the postmodern world.

  Sarah Schulman’s Empathy gives a fictional treatment to many of these issues. The novel’s theme is precisely that of feminism in the 1990s: the possibilities for political resi
stance across multiple and shifting identities. It asks the question of how we can empathize in a confusing postmodern world in a way that is politically and psychologically enabling. As such, it deals with the so-called big issues, thereby confounding the view that lesbian novels are particularist and lacking in general significance.

  The novel operates a double gesture, deconstructing and simultaneously inscribing the political meanings of identities. It does this not in the ‘add-on’ manner of identity politics, but in a radically intersectional way, recognizing the ‘multiple locations’ of contemporary subjects. In the rest of the article, I want to discuss Empathy’s treatment of postmodernism and diversity in terms of four major critiques that it undertakes: a critique of the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference; of heterosexism as implicated in women’s subordination; of the politics of representation; and of ethnocentrism and American imperialism.

  The themes of psychoanalysis - sexuality, identity, the unconscious, and psychic pain - are central to Empathy. The novel represents the psychoanalytic view of ‘identity’ as a kind of psychic violence which is based on the repression of unconscious desire. The aim of psychoanalysis, the novel reminds us, is to help people who suffer by listening to them through a form of empathy. The concept of transference, the psychoanalytic term for this, is integral to the cure. However, the novel highlights the historical role of psychoanalysis as a regulatory and normalizing technique with the aim of reconciling subjects to their ‘correct’ gender identity. It explores the psychoanalytic account of the acquisition of femininity which constructs female identity as lack, and asks ‘how can I be a woman and still be happy?’ Moreover, in focusing on lesbian identity, Empathy foregrounds the double erasure of the lesbian subject within a heterosexist society.