madame inkmouth

Lipsticks should be like Sharpies: psychologically indelible. I like newness, but not trends. And in lipsticking more than any other body-fashioning cosmetic process, it is important to find a shade-brand-texture so your “own” that it feels like, as Maybelline says, you were born with it. Lipstick as permanent marker for your brain: the color can be wiped off at night so you don’t stain your pillow, but the feeling that it produces when you see yourself in the mirror should cohere to the girl in your brain. You and your lipstick ought to be inseparable, even if the lipstick is unworn and just doing timeshare in your handbag.

This is how I feel about black lipstick. I love a good red, but a good, uncompromising black is my other lover. A few weeks ago, at the Shu Uemura store in the Fillmore in San Francisco, I admiringly picked up their black lipstick BK 099, which is not dark plum, not brown, not brick, but straight-up Sharpie-black. Immediately, my friend Claudelle scrunched her face disapprovingly and exclaimed, “Ooooh! Joon!” The “Oooh” slipping into “EWWWWW.” I didn’t tell Claudelle that I already owned this lipstick. Instead, I just dabbed some on my finger and put it on my mouth. It surprised her: “That’s pretty,” she said. I looked in the mirror and agreed. I love the way a black mouth looks on me, but I hadn’t quite gotten a handle on the goth-hippie look it produces on my body (Although the look is worth exploring and working on, I think). But that afternoon in the Shu store, I hadn’t caked on the black. The meek fingertip application produced the look that results at the end of a day’s wearing a single swipe of black lipstick without retouching. After leaving black imprints on cup-rims, lunch forks, fried-chicken-greased finger, napkin, back of antsy hand, collars of t-shirts pulled over and under my head, and if I’m lucky, boys’ lips, my lips bear just the trace of black. The pigments of the black lipstick pressed into the cracks and crevices of my lips rather than its flesh.

It kinda looks as though I’d spent the whole day drinking red wine. But to me, this look is not so much cabernet-mouth as it is ink-mouth. Drinking ink along with wine is appropriate because Fall signals my return to teaching after a lazy summer. Fall for me is not a season to recharge my makeup colors, but to read (and teach) again Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, whose heroine, Emma Bovary, is the original inkmouth.

(Isabelle Huppert as Emma Bovary in Claude Chabrol’s 1991 film)

Overcome with shopping-debt that she can’t repay, Emma Bovary impulsively shoves a handful of arsenic into her mouth. Her subsequent death is excruciatingly protracted over the last thirty pages of the novel. As she lies dying, her lips are dyed black by the poison—her mouth is described as a “black hole”—and eventually, “black liquid, like vomit, flowed from her mouth.”

A woman’s death by overactive imagination, swollen sense of romance, and rampant shopaholism: it seems like a misogynist’s idea of a woman’s death sentence. Yet Flaubert, who famously cried: “Emma Bovary, c’est moi! (I’m Emma Bovary!),” has a radically different motivation for killing off his heroine. He tells us that as her mouth is lined by the black residue of arsenic, a “taste of ink persisted.” Moralists can think Emma’s death is punishment; for Flaubert, her death is liberation. It is the transsexual liberation of both Emma Bovary and Flaubert himself. Emma’s body begins producing the very ink that was used to make the novel. In this, she leaves the two-dimensionality of her fictional world—the very provinciality that would drive her to death and fate worse than death (bourgeois marriage and motherhood)—and makes her true flight to freedom into the third dimensionality of us, her readers. Black-inkmouthed, Emma realizes her true identity: novel. Emma Bovary is neither man nor woman, but book. She is a book trapped inside a woman’s body. Writing the death scene allowed Flaubert to make sense of his own inhibited transsexualism. His male flesh made thick and uncomfortable padding around the “Emma Bovary” that he felt himself to truly be, an “Emma Bovary” whose spine is not made of female vertabrae but glued and stitched sheafs of printed prose. In this same way, I may finally be realizing my own true sexual orientation as girl: I’m a book. (Probably more a short-story collection than a novel, though.)If we feel ourselves to be objects trapped in the body of fleshly human beings, what are we to do? There is an alternative to suicide: to take up femininity, fully embracing all the toxic risks that such an existence will bring in a world which denigrates both objects and feminine beings.

Walking around with black shit coating the cracks and dead skin on my mouth while pretending to be Emma Bovary may be a bit mad, and a bit ugly, but it makes me feel like a freshly-wiped intaglio plate of femininity: I want to be a reproduceable agent of renegade femininity. Actually, I probably am more low-tech than intaglio printing. I’m more like a pencil rubbing. You know: you write a message on a pad of paper and tear the secret sheet away, forgetting about the fact that a sneaky reader can rub some pencil over the next blank page and discover where you’re off to, who you’re seeing, who you are. Wearing black lipstick as a pencil-rubbing gives the feeling of being marked by femininity, by the risks of being a woman in a patriarchal society. And marked in such a way that all the next gal has to do is rub some BK 099 over me to find out the secrets of my successes and failures.

7286: feminine anger

“There’s not much you can do with leggings, but I’m doing everything I can.” -Lindsay Lohan

As I face another New England winter, I decided to try a little experiment with hosiery, taking inspiration from one of my favorite sculptures, Snore, by Bruce Conner. (Some of my biggest style and role models have been, not stars, but artwork.) The piece, which lives in San Francisco’s De Young Museum, is a body created out of splintery boards, nails, red thread, and wads and stretches of used / dilapidated pantyhose. I love how Conner turns the symbol of feminine delicacy and propriety—perfectly maintained nylons that are supposed to cradle perfect female legs—and turns them into bulbous tumors worthy of the Alien movies, and coverings for bodies that can be the foundation of a house, or mafioso weapons of intimidation.

I’ve written here a few months earlier about the joy of run-pantyhose, in its affront to traditional femininity. Shortly after I wrote that entry, I was walking with my sister in the Castro wearing black run pantyhose when some North Face fleece-wearing white faggot walked by me and yelled out sneeringly, “You have a run in your hose!” Why did a faggot feel like he had to call out a mark of punk femininity? Why was he so threatened when clearly he had no physical relationship to femininity, holding hands with a similarly fleece-wearing white faggot? The manifestation of his threatened feeling was confounding to me. So I was like, Whatever. But my sister turned around and barked, “Yeah it’s called style, asshole!”

If the faggot was responding aggressively to my particular femininity, I loved it that it brought out my sister’s own mastiff-like feminine aggression. This notion of feminine anger is something about which I’ve been thinking a lot lately. This semester at RISD, I taught a class called “thingamajigirl: objects, humans, femininity,” which explored the conceptual crossings made between the idea of “girl” and the idea of “thing” in patriarchal societies. As I worked through my syllabus, I realized that I put together some texts that were PISSED—even though that was not why I chose them. In Flaubert, Terry McMillan, Natsuo Kirino, Toni Morrison, week after week I found myself reading—and reveling in—instances of feminine rage, feminine anger.

Feminine anger is often marked (by men) as hysteria or loss of control, when actually it is an emotional strategy of dealing with the frustration that is the world of men. Teaching the course, I happily got to read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for the second time in one year. This time, it is the following passage that glowed neon-red at me:

Providence, she thought, was intent on hounding her, and drawing strength from pride in her own conduct, she was, more than ever before in her life, filled with a sense of her own worth and of her contempt for others. She felt ready to take on the whole world. She wanted to lash out at men, to spit in their faces, to crush them, every one....

Previously, I’d loved Emma Bovary for the faggoty drama of her shopping-addiction and sexual frustration. But now, I saw a whole new side of her: this rage, this laser-focused force of anger that gives engine to her life. In its own time, Madame Bovary was considered a dangerous book for female readers for the female sexual desire that it portrayed. But now I wonder if the real dangerousness of Emma lay not in her horniness, but in her anger.

Recently, I came upon a beautiful persona that synthesizes what I’ve been thinking about with Madame Bovary and Snore: Diane Lane as a 15-year old pissed-off-proto-punk girl in the 1981 film, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. (Thanks Tara J for telling me about this!) In the film, Lane plays Corrine “Third Degree” Burns, whose memorable uniform is: see-through blouse, vintage cardigan, panties, pantyhose, ankle socks, and booties.

Third Degree Burns’ outfit is interesting because it is not symbolic of her anger at the world: there is no safety pin or metal spike in sight. But what it does is provide a medium in which to explore her anger, by turning the submissive sexuality of “good girls” inside out. The softness of the 50s cardigan, offsetting the hard eye-makeup and hair, provides a strangely perfect frame for her angry self-presentation. Emma Bovary and Third Degree Burns have a lot in common: they do not sublimate their anger into softness, they allow feminine softness to serve as a language with which to express their anger. Men expect angry girls to look angry: they don’t expect softly feminine girls to express switchblade anger.

LOOK SOFT, BE HARD.

In our culturally paranoid age in which teenage anorexia is thought to arise from reading too much Us Weekly and In Touch and their toothpicklimbeddrugaddled starlet-heroines, is Lindsay Lohan our Emma Bovary, the worst role model a girl can have? Rehabed twice before legal drinking age, decadent shopper, graffitting public restroom walls with messages that equate Scarlett Johansson as a vagina, becoming a lesbian in act if not in name: yup. In a recent interview, Scarlett Johansson said that she doesn’t understand Lindsay’s “anger.” LL may not be a great role model for the daughters of middle-class suburban families, but that’s precisely why I love her, why she is my role model of feminine anger.

Lohan gives a totally underrated performance in Robert Altman's last film, Prairie Home Companion. Playing the Plathian nihilist (someone asks her, "What kind of songs do you write?" Her answer: "Suicide.") daughter of a country singer, Lindsay takes the stage for an impromptu version of "Frankie and Johnny" that reinstates anger as its rightful place in the song:

LL demonstrates precisely the kind of look-soft-be-hard ethos of feminine anger: wrapped in a granny shawl, singing an old bluesy tune about a woman betrayed, she replaces the desperation of the original lyric--"she shot him once, twice, three times" with a succinct aggression (not to mention a surprisingly powerful Garlandesque belting): "she shot the bastard in the heart." This is the LL I admire, I long to become.

This is a kind of love letter to LL, so I’m not going to delve into all the Dostoevskyan specifics of her private life and public trials (Except I do think that her referring to Barack Obama as “our first colored president” is not a racist gaffe as some have simplistically and unfairly labeled it: how can it be racist when she spends the rest of the interview singing her love and praise of him? Clearly, she meant to refer to him as ”a person of color,” [rather than “black” or “African-American”] to refer to the kind of post-racial blackness his election represents. Syntactical slip-up!!). Instead, I want to think about the dangerousness of the idea of “Lindsay Lohan” in a culture that still desires its girls to behave a certain, prescriptive way.

I’m the girl that censorship laws try to protect and cannot: I will try anything I read. Including spending $100 on a pair of leggings. I’m waiting with Buddha-like patience for two presidential things: for Barack Obama to be officially sworn in as the President of the United States, and for my 6126 by Lindsay Lohan leggings in “Mr. President.” One of them is a sure thing, the other depends on my status on the waiting list, and both will affect the way I carry myself through the world this winter and spring. Until I get my own knee-padded black leggings, I will make do with my layered ripped hose—which I will christen, in honor of LL: 7286.

Lindsay christened her leggings line “6126” as an homage to her idol Marilyn Monroe (MM’s birthday: June 1, 1926). What do leggings have to do with MM? Nothing. But I like that: Lindsay is seizing upon the masochistic myth of Marilyn and injecting it with a new feeling—ANGER—of which Marilyn could have used a healthy helping. The leggings I’m on the list for cites Marilyn’s famous breathy-sexed up rendering of “Happy Birthday Mr. President” (Or rather: “Mr. Pwesident”) to John F. Kennedy. Marilyn famously sang the song in a wiggly white gown studded with curve-accentuating crystal beading. LL’s “Mr. President” leggings refuse the coy, fleshy sexuality of Marilyn in favor of something harder. Compare the dress to the leggings:

The“legging” version of Marilyn is black lycra, with black quilted leather knee-pads. It’s naughty for sure: rather than swathing female sexuality in infantile translucency, the “Mr. President” leggings are built for a girl ready to kneel to give head. But oral sex is not necessarily passive (teeth!) just as it is not necessarily male-servicing. Moreover, its sharp black color and the utilitarian, race-car driver aesthetic of the knee-pads also grant its wearer an athleticism that doesn’t imply a supplicant kind of femininity. The leggings suggests that feminine sexuality is a dangerous sport that requires strength, audacity, and fearlessness on the part of the girl who will practice it.

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.