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Return to Mercer Street 2002 Table of Contents by Amalea Smirniotopoulos
Dear Patrick, I wake in the morning. I dress: khakis, black tank top, denim jacket. Leather belt hanging low on the hips. A pink scarf around the neck for a feminine touch. There is an exhibit at the Met I've been wanting to see: "Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed." I go, because I'm drawn to it, drawn to how we have altered our bodies throughout the centuries with fashion, flashing womanhood like a neon sign. How we have created ourselves through dress, over and over again. There is one piece in particular that catches my attention, a long gown sewn with scales and feathers, myriad, iridescent, with the torso sculpted as a snake's belly. I don't know what to make of it. There is something in me that resists. I cannot identify myself with her. It's like looking into the mirror, that moment of confusion. That's not me. There was a distance between me as a woman and the creature in the dress, even though I knew that under that dress she was just as solid as I am, just as warm. She was othered by that dress. Woman and not-woman, snake and Eve, both at once. Monstrous. You come by later to visit, and we sit down with the catalog and look. When I show you the picture of the snake dress, you say, "That's dead sexy." I was offended, initially. Confused. Looking at the photograph now, though, the catalog spread open on my desk, I can see what you mean. On a mannequin, as it was at the exhibit, the dress was just a curiosity, something by P.T. Barnum. The Incredible Snake Lady. On a real woman, it is transformative. She is exotic, terrible, powerful. Sexy. Sexy because she is powerful, because she stands with such command and ease. I want to beher, alien as she is, to own that alchemy of sex and authority. "al·che·my Pronunciation Key ( l k -m ) n. Alchemists saw in matter something indiscrete, something without boundaries. Substances were implicated in each other, irreducible. The difference between gold and iron was simply a matter of scale, one easily able to shift into another. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, her protagonist studied alchemy before creating his monster. The monster itself is a creation of alchemy, a "phantasm," in the words of Mary Shelley, caught between worlds: both living and dead, man and machine. Monstrous, because he is transgressive, because we cannot cleave his complexity into neat, even parts. When I was young, the notion of gender was easily divisible: girls played with dolls, boys with cars. Pink and blue in place of black and white. I loved my Barbies yet had no desire to play with trucks or run around the yard pretending to shoot people. I found an old box of clothes from my childhood over winter break. I wore a lot of pink; a mistake, looking back on it. At the same time, however, I transgressed that blue-pink divide; those cotton-candy sweatpants have grass stains from where I fell, chasing boys around the field at lunch. And I called myself a tomboy because I didn't fit my own definition of what a little girl should be like. Sometimes I wondered at the word. Tomboy. But I wasn't a boy, I wasn't trying to be a boy, I didn't want to be a boy. I was just playing. How did that transmogrify me into something both boy and girl at once? We went to Spain when I was eight. At the El Greco Museum in Toledo I saw a painting of a hermaphrodite, a man's bearded face above a woman's body, baring his/her breasts to feed a child. I had never seen anything like it before. As with the snake dress, I felt a moment of confusion as my mind tried to sort the image into its constituent parts. But the image couldn't be reduced. I couldn't even pick a pronoun to describe the figure. This was not the case of a bearded lady, a drag king, a sex-change operation. This was not a gender transgression, but a different framing of gender, the knife cutting the boundary between man and woman differently. The face of a man organically scaling into the torso of a woman breast-feeding, associating him/her with ideas of impregnation, fertility, childcare, concepts I normally coupled with women. I was repulsed because I could not comprehend it-yet, again as with the snake dress, I could not look away. Gender has become an even more complex topic-gender, which I see as something separate from sex, as something socially rather than biologically defined. Genetically, sexually, I am a woman-I have two x-chromosomes, I produce estrogen-I overflow the simple social definition of woman as child-bearer. Judith Butler sheds light on this matter of gender: Now, it seems to me that, although women's bodies generally speaking are understood as capable of impregnation, the fact of the matter is that there are female infants and children who cannot be impregnated, there are older women who cannot be impregnated, there are women of all ages who cannot be impregnated. . . .(6) Similarly, the Pill has given even me, a "normal," fertile woman the ability to control my reproductive capacity, of choosing not to conceive. Impregnation is, therefore, no longer "necessarily a salient feature of. . .being women." Conversely, sex-change operations have allowed biological men-i.e., humans who have both x- and y-chromosomes-to adopt the physical manifestations that I associate with child-bearing, and therefore women: breasts. Men have transformed into women in a very practical sense. "al·che·my Pronunciation Key ( l k -m ) n. I wake in the morning. I dress: pinstriped pants, white shirt:menswear. I like pinstripes. I look in the mirror. Is that me? The woman in the glass stands taller, easier. Dressed as a man but with the shape of a woman: a transmogrification. Like the snake woman. Is it the clothes that are alien or the way the woman looks in them? The way she carries herself. You come up behind me, looking over my shoulder into the mirror. "Sexy," you say. I ask you why. You say, "Attractive is just attractive. A woman is sexy when she knows that she is attractive." When she is confident, then. "Yes, when she is confident. When she owns the ground she walks on." Diane Torre is, perhaps, the most visible representative of the phenomena of drag kings. At a recent talk at NYU, she described the transformation that takes place when a woman dresses as a man. Her mannerisms, the performative clues that allow us to pin a gender to her, fall away. She no longer ducks her head, no longer nods in agreement or says, "uh-huh" to encourage or confirm. She no longer walks lightly, skimming across the ground, but moves heavily, owning the spot she stands on. This is not a conscious process. It's as if gender is a matter of scale, and fashion alchemy. Different clothes bring out different characters, one gender implicated in another, indiscrete. Writing is indiscrete. I write poems about women, through the eyes of men. I write them with care, with affection. With love. You teased me about being a lesbian once, and I pointed out that you, of all people, should know that that wasn't true. And I was offended by that comment. Not because it questioned my sexuality, but because it questioned the integrity of my work. It made it a cop-out. I do not write poems through the eyes of men because I am afraid to express my "true" sexuality. When I write, I have no sexuality. I have no gender. To write a character is to lower the barrier that I draw around my self and slip over the wall like a lover into another's garden. To become someone else. I have adopted a nation of personas, male and female, evenly divided. Yet I find my self inescapable. Though each character is a different person, every time you revise a new piece there is one place or another where you find me: a gesture here, a word there. Like a game of hide and seek I always lose. There is a play there between my identity and the identity of the character, a reciprocity. None of them are me, all of them are me, both at once. This is no less true of my male characters than my female ones. One comment that keeps resurfacing is that my men are too feminine, as if I have contaminated them, my gender rubbing off onto their skin. The women, similarly, are seen as too masculine, taking the "male" or dominant role in relationships. My women are like the woman in a Ronny Someck poem I read once, a woman whose "stiletto steps. . .will slice/Yehuda Halevy Road to smithereens," women whose femininity is implied in a character as muscular and aggressive as this verse. I write hermaphrodites not of flesh but of spirit. Nancy Etcoff said the body is "a temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope, a machine, a home." She, as I, sees the body, this gendered body, as something distinct from the spirit or self. There are expectations for this body, expectations I set myself: for it to be feminine and soft, for it to be confident and powerful, for it to have a career, for it to have children. This body is being caged by contradictions. I feel this cage about me, its invisible gold bars, silken walls, and the high window through which I can see the light outside. I am asked, I ask myself, to be not only a woman, but a feminist woman. In arguing for equality between the genders, feminists accepted that there existed such a thing as gender, called it into being. They defined themselves against tradition, as something apart from men and further apart from traditional women. There is a stigma now attached to the old tasks-sewing, cooking, cleaning, tasks that I enjoy-because they were tools for the oppression of women. Now that I am free to elect or refuse to do them, I feel a pressure to refuse. My enjoyment of them makes me feel backward, anti-modern. I carry the burden of a hundred years of female activism on my back. Yet the stigma is with me when I do other tasks, or a similar one. Women fought to be in the workplace, but not on the battlefield or in the construction yard; we left those intact as "a man's world." When I went to Montana two summers ago, I spent the better part of a month building fences at a national park. It was hard work, and hot, going out into the backwoods and hauling out logs, cutting them, stripping them of their bark. I envisioned lumberjacks in plaid shirts with large, handlebar mustaches; man's men, for man's work. Yet I took delight in the labor, in being stronger than many of the guys there, in working harder, longer. Even when I was sweaty and disgusting, I felt sexy. I was capable and confident in my own body. At my most masculine hour, I felt the most at home, and the most a woman. And I found it contradictory that I could be in love with labor and with cooking, both at once. But see these gold bars that bind me for what they are: as only smoke and ash. . . .There is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don't see it moving. You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently depending on how the knife moves. (66) Gender is much the same. I assume that man and woman are pre-existing and are named precisely, without fault. But both genders are cut from the same cloth. We do the cutting. The cloth is then used to make a costume, and in that costume we perform our genders out on this stage. And I do violence to myself, daily, cutting myself apart into one or the other: woman, separate from man. I am my own knife. You said to me once that I was not the woman of my letters. The comment has stayed with me, because it was one of the more hurtful comments you've ever made. You said it, and I rebelled.But I am, I thought. And I am. I, my self, is more the woman of my letters than the woman you see when we talk, or the woman I see in the mirror. Both are caged women, cut and bound women. In my letters, I am more honest. I climb out the window of my cage to where the sun shines; and I leave the knife behind. My contradictions are allowed to play. In my letters, I am monstrous. In Monster, a new adaptation of Frankenstein by Neil Bell, Frankenstein's creation is shunned not only because he is transgressive, but because he is unique, different. Consumed by loneliness, he hungers for a monstrous companion to fill him. Dr. Frankenstein refuses to build him one, fearing a world populated by monstrous progeny. But would the Monster have been monstrous if there were another like him, or a third, or a world of monsters? I do not hunger for companionship. I am in good company. And I am not too old to believe in monsters. Always, Amalea Works Cited "Alchemy."American Heritage Dictionary. 2000. Bell, Neil. Monster. Center Stage Company, New York, 14 Feb. 2002. Butler, Judith. Interview with Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal.Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler,Radical Philosophy 67. (Summer 1994): 93. Etcoff, Nancy. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. New York: Anchor, 1999. El Greco. Hermaphrodite. Museo El Greco, Toledo. Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Bantam, 1974. Someck, Ronny. "Punk Poem Beginning with Two Lines by Chekhov."American Poetry Review 29 (2000): 29. Torre, Diane. "Who Owns Gender?" Talk at New York U. 7 Feb. 2002. Return to Mercer Street 2002 Table of Contents
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