pansy divisions

Happy late birthday Madame Mariah Carey! (March 27)

My spring break is almost over, and I’ve now lugged my fat ass up to New York from Philadelphia. I’ve just come back to the lovely home of my friend and comrade P (aka PP Greek Mama), from a night of attempted wilddancing at a certain guppie club in Hell’s Kitchen. Just for the record: the place: not my idea. I was meeting my friend EB, who is a very cute and petit Asian boy who seemed to be very popular—and deservedly so. EB danced very well, with his whole body into it. I, on the the other hand, was channeling my old grunge mosh pitting chick days, thrashing my hair about, doing the funky chicken only from the ribs up. Then I noticed that a couple different gaggles of several muscly fags pointed towards me and tittered. Was it my dancing—hearing the Darling Buds while Madonna is playing in reality? More likely it was my ensemble:

-a grey jersey tee with a v-neck so deep my breast bones are the star;

-dark Cheap Monday jeans rolled up...

-...to reveal striped socks and my new manga-monkey Vans slip-ons;

(By the way: who knew Philadelphia was such a shopping town? In addition to the shoes, I also bought a pair of Japanese jeans with the lovely name “good society,” a red resin/ plastic ring in the shape of an owl, and the sweater-subject of this post. By contrast, I had to struggle to find a fucking pair of jeans in New York.)

-...and my glunge (grunge plus glamour) piece-de-resistance: a vintage angora/ wool cardigan with pansies patterned along the shoulder.

To me, this cardigan made me a sweater-girl. I felt good in it. P's six-yearl old kid said to me, "You look like an old lady looking for stuff in her purse." And I was like, "Yes! That's what I am!" But who the hell knows what I looked like to the fags at this club. Failed tranny? Hopelessly unstylish? At this club, I felt a kind of femme-alienation I haven’t felt since my college days in Virginia, when my shaved head and doorknocker earrings used to get the same reaction. But I didn’t feel angry or sad or unwanted. (Well, maybe unwanted, but boys without messy facial hair, body odor, and messiness in general are not wanted by me anyways.) Rather, glunging around EB in my pansy-cardigan, I felt so like...a fag hag! Is that possible? Yes! And it feels kinda great: In the words that 19th Century African American writer Frances E. W. Harper put into the lips of her mulatta heroine Iola Leroy, “I am a wonder to myself.” I mean, I am a fag, and yet, I am a hag to another fag.

March 29: postscript about last night from EB: a guy who was interested in EB, who had seen him with me, asked him, after I had left: "Where's your girlfriend?"

low life in high jeans

Feminine frivolity and minimalism are not mutually exclusive. For a week-long trip to Philadelphia to visit my dear friend CM, I wanted to pack everything into one nylon over-the-shoulder weekend bag. Of course, by the time I was off to the train station, I the damn bag still felt like it contained a small overweight child, despite the fact that I had whittled everything down to a few tees and only two pairs of jeans. And which jeans? I knew I wanted the grey “lean bean” tsubi’s that make give my legs an extra inch or six. But the pinch-hitter jeans: I was torn. Picking a certain jean means picking a certain type of travelling body. So up to the last minute of the morning of my departure, I was trying to decide between two pairs of jeans: a regular-cut, cigarette-legged dark denim, or a high-waisted pair in black bull-denim.

I picked the latter, which I’m wearing right now as I type these words. They are Acne “Tube” jeans. I love them. They are uncomfortable. First of all, there is the fabric, which when I first bought them, was so stiff that wearing them felt like I was encasing my legs in butcher paper. Of course, with a couple washings (I don’t believe in “taking care of” or dry-cleaning, jeans—they ought to be worn and worn-down, molded to you, age with you, even if they cost $300) the fabric decided to give me a little give. But even the 2% elastin doesn’t give you much help, because I bought them in size 26/34. These jeans are true-to size—the waist of the jeans is actually 26 inches, which is the actual size of my waist (measured right below my navel—OK, I suck in a little bit under the regime of my tape measure). It is quite a labor to get into these jeans—I do have to hold in my breath to zip and button them. Then, with a rise of 10 inches (from crotch to waistband), my intestinal tract, and the area where my ovaries would be if I were female, are bound in zippered denim.

I lovingly wear these jeans, as painful as they are, because they make me a stranger to my own body. I am pretty skinny, but as you can see in this picture, these jeans give me a paunch-hang, that overspill of flesh that pour out over the waistline. They make me feel “fat,” especially when I’m feeling piggish for booze or bloat-inducing food. Yesterday for lunch, CM took me to a lovely space-agey Japanese restaurant called Pod, where I was planning to nibble on some nouvelle-japonaise caesar salad, but ended up hogging down on a kobe beef burger and half a basket of fries soaked in wasabi-soy sauce, while bound up in these high-waisted jeans. When we left the restaurant, I could feel my intestines rebelling against the tight waist and rise of my jeans, and I liked that. Feminine women—and even some masculine ones I know—no matter how thin they are, maintain a certain awareness of their bodily excesses, an awareness which often explodes into soul-killing paranoia. But a little feminine awareness of your body goes a long way in shaping an ethical self in a culture that privileges and rewards smug self-confidence and self-congratulation. It’s one thing to know who you are; it’s quite another to feel complete satisfaction in that knowledge, which to me amounts to arrogant fiction. When I feel “fat,” or, to quote the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, “a zeppelin in a condom,” I feel like I’m meeting my body for the first time.

In this way, these jeans are kind of like a corset to me. Valerie Steele writes in Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty From the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age, that “By emphasizing the essentially female characteristics of the body, the corset functioned as a sexualizing device. Yet corset wearing was also widely perceived as moral ; it was a necessity if a woman were to be decently dressed...the straitlaced woman was not loose.” This moral ambiguity that is at the heart of the corset’s symbology is transferred over to the life of the high-waisted jeans. Wearing them, I feel like I’m forced to grapple with this dichotomous discourse of sexuality and morality from which, as a biological male, I’ve been exempted. Steel goes on to suggest that “tight-lacers,” or extreme corset-wearers, “were not following fashion, but rather responding to their inner compulsions.” I’m a kind of modern (or lazy?) tight-lacer. My inner compulsion for a bound waist is tied to my inner compulsion as a femme, and the masochistic history of feminine beauty that every woman must deal with at some time in her life.

Like a lot of women, I bought high-waisted jeans inspired by fashion magazines—my first pair was a pair of Balenciaga jeans I saw in French Vogue in 2002 (I found them used—with amateurish-hemmed, thus “ruined” legs at Wasteland in San Francisco for $40 rather than their usual $1000 price tag). But wearing those—which were actually quite comfy and not so tight—led me to seek out more extreme examples, ending in these black corsety jeans. Wearing them made me think about the nature of jeans in general. Even though jeans are iconically androgynous, wearing these tight high-risers made me realize their essential femininity that belies their cowboy Levi’s origin. Think about the zipper-fly: it is a vagina dentata. Jeans are the one article of clothing that can give any body a toothed vagina. Why do you think that most boys wear their jeans loose? When you try to zip yourself into tight jeans with a long fly, you run the risk of zipping-nipping your flesh, or snagging your pubes if you happen to not wear underwear. Believe me, I have wounded my stomach with the fierce teeth of YKK. Zippered jeans can castrate, can feminize. And in their high-waisted incarnation, outwardly display that aggressively feminine potential.

So while I’m happy to be walking around in these tubular jeans, I do wonder about their viability among fags. It’s interesting that I’m in the “City of Brotherly Love”—“Philadelphia” is literally that: “from philos "love" and adelphos "brother.” Gay male courting is so often based on homosocial friendship: “buddies” or “brothers” become lovers. I am hardly either of those identities. CM and I are going to hit some gay clubs tonight. If my luck changes and I actually meet a cute boy and end up in his bed, what would happen when my t-shirt comes off and he sees that I have jeans that go up to my titties? Would he be turned off? Or would he lick and kiss the zipper and seam-marks that the jeans have made on my belly and hips?

some of my parts: mia kirshner as jenny schecter on "the l word"

So...why am I “Joony Schecter”?



(The following is a "Jenny Schecter" promo clip from Showtime--open in new window--sorry i don't know how to embed this yet!)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1304999811/bclid1338246334/bctid1454928114


Those of you out there who know me don’t need an explanation...didn’t that promo clip look like a compilation of my best (ok or worst) moments? ("I don't like that"; "Oh my God, I'm so excited!...Careful of the dress!!")

But those of you who don’t know me: Jenny Schecter is a character in the Showtime soap opera about upper-middle class L.A. lesbians (in a weird programming choice, immediately following last night’s episode, they showed the great 1983 John Sayles film Lianna, about the socio-economic consequences of coming out as a lesbian and refusing the patriarchal wrap that is your husband). And yes, I am obsessed with Jenny Schecter as embodied by the great Mia Kirshner.

Here is a season-by-season summary of the character that viewers love to hate:

-season 1: Aspiring writer Jenny moves to West Hollywood from the Midwest with her big muscled boyfriend and discovers—angstily—that she prefers women.
-season 2: Jenny’s boyfriend moves back to the heartland, Jenny stays behind and becomes part of the dyke community. She reveals all of her childhood trauma, cuts her hair, becomes a cutter.
-season 3: Jenny spends some time in a mental instiution, and comes back to LA with a butch dyke girlfriend, who then decides to transition into becoming a man. (The underlying narrative: Jenny would turn any dyke into a man)
-season 4: Jenny finally writes a book—about her experiences in self-mutilation entitled Some of Her Parts—and works on another book, Lez Girls, a thinly-veiled novel about...the first season of The L Word. The book alienates everyone around her. In the season finale, Jenny is seen floating out to sea by herself, wrapped in a chic long cardigan, in a raft...
-season 5—the current season: Jenny returns, and muscles her way into becoming the director of the film version of Lez Girls. Unbeknownst to her, she is starring in a real-life remake of All About Eve, and she’s playing Bette Davis: a fan becomes her assistant, jockeying for her director job.

Why do I love Jenny Schecter? It’s not because she’s the most “femme” lesbian on the show (with a show with no real butches, that is not a title hard-won). It does, however, have something to do with her hair...as “Jenny” she weirdly resembles the “Jenny” dolls (a Japanese version of Barbie) that I loved as a kid and try to hunt down on e-bay as an adult.

So it does have something to do with her femininity. (And now—don’t I look like Jenny—the doll and Schecter—with my year-old long bangs?) While all the lesbians of The L Word are fairly feminine (even the “butch” newcomer, Rose Rollins, an officer and a gentleman, is not “butch” by any means) Jenny’s femininity, while perhaps co-concocted by the show’s stylists, seems to be operating on a completely different realm of desire and self-expression.

The first clue-display of her weird feminist femininity (f-f) came in the second season, when Jenny shows up at a party wearing...a DOILY.




That is not a metaphor: the dress is literally made up of tiers of white doilies. So crazy is this outfit that a season later, a character even refers to it as a sign of Jenny’s unreliability as a person. What the fudge? I love it that a doily-dress becomes a sign of personal and dykey dis-integrity. Wearing the doily, Jenny is citing a history of traditionally, stationary femininity: both as a creative process (ladies crocheting “useless” doodads) and its final product. Because ultimately, what is a doily for? Edge valentines? To put things on top of. And yet, Jenny’s wearing them on her body displaces their traditional non-function (she wears it as a dykey-coming out, thus as a barrier against men who’d want to get “on top” of her) and appropriates the passivity of its process for a decidedly un-passive dyke femininity. Jenny’s femininity is much like a doily: kinda whiny, her gaze in a perpetual, dreamy glaze, as if she wants to occupy a different timespace; kinda like a doll. But a doll made out of titanium. A few years ago, after seeing the doily episode, I went out to meet my then-boyfriend at a fag bar in SF wearing my approximation of a doily dress: this eyelet-apron over my tee and jeans.


Ooh I wanted to be Jenny!

I think most viewers hate Jenny because her weird tin-doll femininity spins off into two main hate-justifications: 1) she seems like a fakey-kind of dyke; 2) she seems a fakey-kind of human. But I think those are precisely the reasons that Jenny is the best dyke on the show. I suspect that much of this has to do with Mia Kirshner herself.

It might be easy to say that Jenny is “not really” a lesbian: that she’s somehow a “fag in a woman’s body.” But this would be a boring misdiagnosis. With all of her doll-doily femininity, Jenny has emerged, weirdly, as the voice of lesbian separatism, making fun of other dykes’ efforts to become, to use that infamous and heinous phrase of the 90s, “virtually normal”: she bitchily denounces a character’s whining about her childcare responsibilities, puts down an FTM ex for wanting to get a sex change, etc. The truth is, I identify with Jenny because Jenny is more like a straight girl in a lesbian’s body.

In the first season and a half, Jenny is so...earnest. She cries a lot, she’s very angst-ridden. Her wardrobe reflects this: the first season especially is filled with prairie/ boho smocks and, in one particularly sadistic episode, a sweatshirt with kitties on it. (of course, I have one just like it) But beginning with the doily episode, it feels like the costumes for Jenny merge with what I imagine to be Mia Kirshner’s wardrobe. So, lots of goth-doll dresses and leggings, odd trenchcoats, and a Luella carry-all. If you’ve seen Kirshner’s film work—most notably her vampy-entrepreneur-bitch in Party Monster and her torn-stocking’d Betty Short in The Black Dahlia—you know that there is a certain continuity of style that runs through: her acting style—the high, possessed Jenny-voice, the broken-doll movements—all seem totally harmonized with the costumes of each film.

So it is with Jenny; it feels like the writers have caught up with Mia Kirshner rather than Kirshner’s being “disciplined” by the writers. In the last season and the current one especially, Kirshner runs wild with Jenny: she seems to be acting in a totally different show. While her co-stars are busy trying to enact “genuine” emotion (of being rich lesbians in Los Angeles) Kirshner’s Jenny breezes through each scene, chomping on nicotine-gum, limbs akimbo, very much like Bette Davis were Bette Davis cute.

I find it strange (and fun) that the major plot of the show now is itself: in the scenes depicting the filming of Jenny’s movie we’re seeing season 1 enacted by actresses employed by Jenny to play the cast. Not only that, we have Jenny, while she’s directing the film, making fun of precisely the angst-ridden moments that made up the dramatic bulk of the show’s first season. The L Word has become a burlesque of itself! The fact that as the show prepares to wrap itself up (the next season will be its last...sob...) it’s turning into burlesque is to me a sign of Jenny’s co-opting of not only the show’s plot but its aesthetic.

In last night’s episode, Jenny’s Bette Davis plot came to a head as her assistant finally overtook her as the director of her film. But more than that, the episode was an episode about PMS, and more than that, about bleeding. As the women sit around accusing each other of cranky PMS-induced behavior, Jenny pipes up as the doll-feminist: “Ladies, please don’t fight. I can’t stand it when sisters do that.” To which another crabbily retorts, “This is not your film, Jenny, you don’t have to direct.” But this is Jenny’s film. The militancy of Jenny’s female homosocialism combined with her utterly twinkly, het-norm-derived and deformed femininity is the essence of Jenny's doll-feminism.

Later on in the episode, while Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed” plays in the background, Jenny and Shane, her roommate/ best friend, and resident lothario, bond over Jenny’s career over the last four years: all the shit/ hardships of her past. Jenny then references her phase as a self-mutilator (massive feminine bleeding) by burlesquing slicing motions on her wrists while making a mock-grimace/ horror face. This is a new kind of dykey femininity: not entrenched or enbalmed in “melancholia” or “abjection” or “shame,” but turning the trauma that causes all those seemingly “queer” feelings into a burlesque that can be integrated into a weird aesthetic of feminine survivalism. I loved watching this scene, remembering myself in high school, when I used to walk around wearing a meat skewer on a string around my neck. (I wanted to wear an icepick as an homage to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct but that seemed a tad too dangerous) I was totally depressed then—and wearing a necklace that could possibly accidentally impale me (or another) at any moment was a symbol of all the bad things in, and I was doing to myself in, my life. But looking back, I feel all warm and fuzzy at my proto-Jenny self: even before I was over it, I was turning my pain-sadness into a doily-dress.

eat your lipstick

Yesterday, I taught Madame Bovary to a bunch of my lovely students at RISD. It's a book I read every year, a book I love, but never taught because I love it. I feel very possessive about certain books, but that's old age for you: I'll pimp out my books now. In any case, I'd been exhausted all week and had a shitty day on Wednesday so I was kind of dreading teaching a three-hour seminar about my favorite book. But things actually went alright, and I credit my lipstick.

Because I was feeling shitty, I decided to put on a bunch of my favorite things on my body for the Thursday seminar. Here is what I wore:

-My current favorite T-shirt: Echo & the Bunnymen (pink Bodoni lettering!) so old that the black has been re-named grey, seams are rolling off, and so soft you can call it Charmin and wipe your butt with it;


-Acne Hep jeans in "Raw": dark indigo that leaves blue stains everywhere, skintight but not peg-legged: very off-duty Bettie Page;

-More on the 50s pin-up-Rockabilly tip: vintage black women's cardigan with jet beading.

...and lathered on the lips of my open mouth that was spewing theory ( "erotics and epistemology of shopping...feminine materialism....structure of tabloid discourse...") like black ink vomit of Emma Bovary herself, was...

-..my favorite red lipstick: Shu Uemura RD 134--the champion of all red lipsticks, with just the right balance of red and orange with no pink in it, for that perfect Stop-sign red.

These things I put on my body were not pre-made talismans for me--it's not like I won the lottery or found the love of my life in them--in fact, I don't even remember when I last wore the shirt or the sweater. But wearing them let me come into the skin of my dreams: it's femme realness in the daytime. So I'm not a MTF tranny; I'm still a girl, despite my penis. The clothes had no meaning before Thursday except that I loved them for being themselves: now they have a narrative, which I'll forget eventually, too...(probably too soon!)

Men use symbols, and women create them. And they create them every day. That's kind of what this blog is about. The only thing I wore on Thursday that was iconic was the red lipstick. But I didn't feel like I was citing big red-mouthed dames of the past or nostalgic chicks of the present. Coupling my Shu lipstick with my old tee, and using it as the poster-paint for my lecture on Madame Bovary, I hope I'm giving a different life to the red lipstick that builds upon all that is empowering about red lipstick, and shiftingshakingmixing all that is regressive about red lipstick.

So yeah, I'm a femme fag, but as someone whose male homosexuality was crystalized at age 12 not by any boy-neighbor or pirated gay porn but a ragged copy of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, I'm a feminist (and to me, in America, feminism is black feminism), and that means my femininity has to do with everything that is "fluffy" and rigorous and rebellious about women.

Like Emma Bovary, I was a "wife," for nearly ten years (cue my friends: "Gawwwd please don't talk about him again!"). There were many problems with our marriage/ domestic partnership, but one thing I'll say for my ex-husband: he helped me become the girl I am today. Being with him, his loving me in that particular way, with all my woman's insanity, let me shed all the "expected" male trappings that I felt I had to perform as a fag. With him, I grew my hair long, wore Mod-Siouxsie eyeliner to go teach, learned to love lipstick for everyday use. But when we divorced, and I was single again, I cut my hair: I felt like I was at a loss. Yeah, I lost my man but also I lost my sense of femme self. I thought: Shit, if I'm to get another boyfriend, I have to become more "boy" for who else but **** would put up with my femme shit?

Who cares? But to come back to my femme feminist faggotry has been a bit of a detour. Besides waiting for the hair to grow (I missed it instantly; My mother put the braid in a ziploc bag which creepily began to steam up like a hothouse plant) I had to figure out how to be a femme on my own. My ex and I always felt a bit lesbianic because we were basically a male butch-femme couple, but now I had to figure out how I was gonna be femme without hanging on the butch's arm. And I found it's quite fun. And a little bit of an archaelological project. Because most fags' relationship to femininity is so appropriating and campy and..."performancy" I felt like I wanted to start compiling stuff to put under this f-f-f heading, so I can have a language, a syntax of my body at least. (But I hope I'm not the only one out there!)

So: lipstick eating: to be a femme feminist fag isn't simply about wearing the lipstick, it's about ingesting it, taking it into your organs and fibers. It's to be a boy who makes girliness but also incorporates that into his creative process of daily living. It's not enough that you make dresses or make-up or other "things" for or about girls: the feminine and feminism has to inform how you create, and thus think, live, feel.

The first time I ate rabbit, off a beautiful plate with beautiful wine at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco, I felt a weird kind of love. I thought I'd get grossed out because bunnies were my favorite animals as a kid. But there's a way in which ingesting bunny, I was putting the bunny into my blood, flesh, bones. So that's why I'm gonna go chow down on some disopropyl dimer dilinoleate, hydrogenated polyisobutene, polyglyceryl-2, diisostearate, polyethylene, octyldodecanol, bis-diglyceryl polyacyladipate-2, squalane, simmondisa chinesis, jojba seed oil, ozokerite, butyrospermum parkii, shea butter, vp/hexadecene copolyner, ectoin, 2-oleamido-1, 3-octadecanediol, disteardimonium hectorite, calcium aluminum borosilicate, calcium sodium borosilicate, methicone, propylene carbonate, bht, isopropylparaben, isobutylparaben, butylparaben, benzyl benzoate, limonene, citronellol, germoniol, linalool, benzyl alcohol, and fragrance.