feminist art midwife: go perfectly limp

A few weeks ago, I modeled some work for Mariah Tuttle, who is an MFA student in the Jewelry and Metalsmithing Department at RISD. Mariah had created some amazing, aggressively lacy neckpieces made entirely of caulking (yes, caulking—the plumber’s and contractor’s delight). I was flattered to be asked, and totally enjoyed the process of modeling. Being a shy Virgo, I am not the most comfortable kid in front of the camera, but modeling for Mariah was great because I loved her work, and loved having them lay on my body, their weight and texture pressing into and challenging my own flesh.

But as I scanned through the images that Mariah forwarded me, I was struck by a weird contradictory emotion. I felt narcissistically happy that I looked so skinny (I forget I am that thin at times, and I do like to be reminded) but I felt a twinge of sadness about that pleasure. Mariah had created this beautiful body of work, and I was happy to be its hanger/ frame, but maybe I was too happy. I felt this because just a few days before I got the images, I also received from my dear comrade Minh-ha Pham her fabulous article, “Blog Ambition,” in which your true Joony Schecter is featured.

download article here

Reading this articulate, complex work which analyzed this blog was like wearing Mariah’s heavy jewelry. Minh-ha’s summation of my persona as Joony Schecter was so moving:

In forgetting gender, Lee/Schecter refuses to remember and thus refuses to reproduce the two-gendersystem of heteronormativity. Such queer forgetting, Hannabach explains in “Untimely Forgetting,” “is not a passive process, but rather an active venture of tracing the edges of that which must be forgotten in order for subjectivity to be established and maintained.” In the hands of Lee/Schecter, red lipstick is more than a feminine commodity; it is an instrument for making “gender trouble.”

Beyond flattering, Minh-ha’s articulation of my work gave me a fresh perspective of my body. But her words, like Mariah’s materials, and the extreme pleasure they gave me, made me ask myself: am I actually built more to be a model/ muse than maker? Am I too passive a work-maker? Do I enjoy doing nothing to actually making work?

In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the heroine Lily receives a warning from her friend (another woman, but one who is married), when she tries to hatch a strategy for landing a particularly rich husband: “Whatever you do, Lily, do nothing!” This is a caution not against the delicate minefield of gold-digging, but actually a dictum for feminine self-embodiment. Lily is directed not to be too intricate in her scheming because the very act of activity in fact will give her an aggressive, and thus masculine, aura. In other words: to “do” anything is to do oneself out of femininity.

This is why in feminist terms, bodily stasis (“doing nothing”) usually equals a passivity against which a woman must constantly and consciously rebel. But the pleasure of modeling, the pleasure of stilling your body toward the construction of a femininity, does not feel like passivity.

The grandest counterexample to what I see as the false equation between bodily stasis and political passivity can be found in the strategy of protest concocted by the civil rights workers of the 1960s against police brutality. Following to beautifully dogged extreme Martin Luther King’s interpolation of Mahatma Gahndi’s philosophy of nonviolent protest, civil rights workers went “perfectly limp” against the physical violence dished out by Southern police. The phrase “perfectly limp” I take from Nina Simone’s song “Go Limp,” a magnificent, complex anthem about racial protest and love. The song also begins with a scene of one woman (a mother) warning another (her daughter) into femininity:

Oh Daughter, dear Daughter,
take warning from me
and don't you go marching
with the N-A-A-C-P.
For they'll rock you and roll you
and shove you into bed.
And if they steal your nuclear secret
you'll wish you were dead.

As with Lily Bart, the daughter in “Go Limp” is warned against (political) activity (“go marching”) because to do so will lead to a loss of her virginity and thus her bounty as a marriageable feminine being. But like all good daughters, the daughter defies her mother—though softly: she will carry a brick in her handbag. Not only that, the daughter goes on to find that political activity, when fighting for desegregation, goes hand-in-hand with femininity-granting body stasis:

One day at the briefing
she'd heard a man say,
"Go perfectly limp,
and be carried away."
So when this young man suggested
it was time she was kissed,
she remembered her brief
and did not resist.

The good people at “the N-A-A-C-P” are giving instructions on how to get arrested while peacefully demonstrating: “go perfectly limp and be carried away”—by the police who attempt to obstruct peaceful protest. But this political pedagogy serves as a feminine one as well, for going perfectly limp and being carried away is in fact what she does to a cute boy with a beard who takes a fancy to her. What I love about the song is not just the complex ways in which it articulates the femme-centric core of the civil rights movement (at least the King, rather than Malcolm, faction) but also the ways in which a political commitment to peaceful protest grants a woman a different way to embody traditional feminine stillness that is not at all “passive” in a patriarchal sense.

I don’t have any urgent political activity in my life that requires me to “go perfectly limp and be carried away” by the police (I have a hard enough time as it is to find a cute boy with a beard for whom to go limp—although I’m getting close). But there is a major, and I daresay, political part of my identity which has everything to do with doing nothing: that of being a teacher. I love teaching my students at RISD. But whenever I get too much pleasure out of it, this old hackneyed adage tears through my brain: “Those who can’t do, teach.” As a professor at the college level, I am actually expected to do both: “do” (make my own work) and “teach” (help students make their work). And while I am constantly doing, there are days when I feel like my “doing” is growing smaller and smaller in comparison to the teaching.

Recently, two of my former RISD students, Tara Perry and Greg Kozatek (as a part of the production collective Hunting Party), sent me a music video they created for a raptress. For the video, they created a fake magazine called "lipstickeater":

see the whole video here

So finally, here was the meeting point of "modeling" (Joony Schecter: Cover Girl!!) and "teaching." It encapsulated my relationship to bodily stasis and art making. I think of this teacherly “can’t doing” as going limp. I let myself be carried away by the exuberance and beauty my student’s making. It is always good to find shards of myself in the work of my students, but I feel like I’m truly doing my job, truly going limp, when I see that I’ve been able to assist/ affect/ nurture my women students to create work that challenges the patriarchal norms of femininity. Then, not only am I doing my work as a teacher of art makers, but I am also doing my work as my own cultural worker: a feminist art worker.

These are some of my women students who let me go limp for them:

La Invitación from Diandre Fuentes on Vimeo.

DIANDRE FUENTES’ video employs warped out pop music to give an aggressive, revolutionary aura to the scene of an adolescent girl’s play with traditional feminine trappings.

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JAMIE KRASNER’s words and videos conceptualize femininity as fragmentation (an idea which I share with her as a bedrock of my own self-creation these past threesome decades). But her embrace of fragmentation shockingly builds a tough carapace of tenderness.

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TAMARA JOHNSON’s performance transforms her petite self into a superwoman—able to hold up a beam that supports an entire building. (The beam is made of foam) Johnson erases her whiteness and blondness by not only shrouding it in masculine workwear, but by making her flesh merge with the “steel” of the scaffolding, she herself becomes the building.

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LEXIE XTRAVAGANZA (née Newman) created, for her senior degree project, a collection of knitwear inspired by Paris is Burning (which she viewed in my class). But this gorgeous work was but a material extension of a fascinating work she’s doing in the re-invention of herself as an “Xtravaganza.” In taking on the moniker (it’s her official facebook name) she is linking herself to the famous drag house, but also digitally re-calibrating the boundaries of her body, so that her femaleness becomes distilled to femininity.

I think (and thank) all of these women create femininities that rancor against patriarchal norms of how a woman ought to connect her body to the world. But I think about Lexie a lot these days because I’ve been trying desperately to grow my hair back out to its Medusa length. (And most distressingly, hair growing is not an act of will) Lexie’s most recent facebook profile photo is a beautiful showcasing of big hair. It looks as though the camera caught her mid-hair shake. I love this photo because it reminds me of my own past facebook profile photos.

Lexie is a twentysomething statuesque blond female. I am a thirtysomething flat Asian male. But we are both girls in t-shirts, luxuriating in our hair. This is how gender and racial bodies get crossed: bodies that create echo. I go limp for my students, but they also let me be carried away into my own body. I was reading over the student evaluations for my courses last semester, and I came across one that really tickled and touched me. After the positive comments about the content of my class and the style of my teaching, there was a wonderfully indulgent flourish: “Joon, if you read this let it be known that you have beautiful hair!” If my teaching, my not-doing, leads me back to this place, I am more than satisfied.

it takes two...

A couple Saturdays ago, my partner-in-crime Trace made this observation as if she were welcoming an old friend: “You’re wearing your favorite shirt!” So I was: an original, circa mid-1970s tee-shirt in glorious beige emblazoned with the image of one of my favorite records, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Or more accurately: so it seemed as though I were wearing my favorite shirt. In fact, I was wearing a copy of my favorite shirt. And when I say “copy,” I don’t mean “reproduction,” an icky knock-off with a computer-scanned image ink-jetted onto an American Apparel shirt. No, I mean a literal copy: I’ve been owning a 70s Rumours tee that I bought in Berkeley back in 1998, but the shirt I was wearing when hanging out with Trace was another 70s original that I recently bought on ebay by sheer dumb luck/ fated miracle. Yes, I possess two of the same old and used tee-shirt.

Hence the images above, which is actually not the same photo or even two photos of me in the same outfit but two different photos that look the same from afar. In the first photo, I’m wearing my first vintage Rumours shirt, the one bought in 1998. In the second, I’m wearing my new vintage Rumours shirt, bought 2010. Even though I do collect all kinds of Fleetwood Mac shirts, I love this specific model of shirt most of all because one, the image: the quasi-Victorian meets ballet meets sorcery: that’s me. Also, printed on beige, it’s roughly the tone of nude pantyhose. Wearing it, I feel chicly redundant, like I’m wearing my own skin over my own skin. The two shirts above are almost identical, save the idiosyncrasies of wear-and-tear of the decades. The Berkeley one was pretty worn when I bought it. It was already so soft from repeated wearing that for my “wild” twenties, it was my favorite shirt to wear on hangover Sundays: aaaahh the memory of sitting around watching old Joan Crawford movies eating pizza or Jack-in-the-Box while in a state of painful yet fuzzily comforting debilitation, snuggled against a solid sofa of a husband body, cocooned in a tee shirt that spoke to the unique alchemy of tee shirts: cotton can become silk through years of abuse. So now, having logged twelve years of wear on this war-torn body, it’s become almost transparent, the neckhole rib stretched beyond bounce.

The second copy of the shirt is in a weird condition. Textile-wise, it is in much better shape—the cotton is soft but not thin, not near translucence. Judging by the length of the torso, the crispness of the tell-tale 70s tag and the intense black of the silk screen, it was worn but hasn’t been washed and dried. It probably spent most of its life in storage. Yet it has strange black-edged holes all over that look like cigarette burns. And there is one particular hole that punctures the “O” in “Rumours” that Trace said is “shaped like a heart.” Weirdly, the hole goes all the way through the back of the shirt, as if someone really did put out a cigarette on the shirt while it was lying helpless on a table. The cigarette hole is, appropriately enough, on the left side, so the hole is literally over my heart. So when I wear it, I feel all cheesily romantic—like someone put a cigarette out on my heart. (Awwwwwww)

Some people buy two (or three) of the same piece of the clothing for practical reasons: it fits so well, why not have a back-up, to rotate or replace? I do this too. But mostly I buy multiple copies of clothes to protect my heart against loss. My fear of loss borders on neurotic. As a child, I used to spend half my allowance in dime form, not at a candy machine but on the Xerox machine at the public library. I made endless black-and-white photocopies of pictures I loved from books I loved—starting with Joan Walsh Anglund and Dare Wright books of cute doll-girls, then moving on to stills of Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Cary Grant, and Johnny Weissmuller. The piles and piles of photocopies were a poor kid’s way of owning books that he couldn’t buy. But as I grew older, it became a process of the way my heart worked: it became a delusional insurance against loss. If I copied these books that I knew couldn’t be mine, I could always have them with me even when the books got checked out or lost. They were poor copies (although Crawford and Davis in particular retain shape well in Xerox) but they were mine to keep with me, between the pages of the math textbook, in my underwear, as the backside of my own drawings. As I aged, I didn’t stop copying, and I’m still a bit copy-crazed. I copy Mary Karr and Sylvia Plath’s poems, passages from Mary Gaitskill and Toni Morrison, memoirs of Judith Jamison, because they are words sure to produce feelings that I knew I wanted to keep forever: love.

The copier in the Liberal Arts Division office of RISD was broken the first week of classes this semester, so I had to hand out course syllabi to my students that had black carbon crud all over them. I apologized to my classes, but secretly I kind of liked it that I was getting all sooty because it was a distilled version of my compulsion to copy. It’s how I want to exist as a human, emotionally speaking: constantly stained by the granules of my feelings. I fear the loss of love like I fear the loss of my Rumours shirt: as an inevitability. If boys can always turn around and leave, so can shirts.

Here is how I used to experience love before I met my now ex-husband: I’d fall in love with boys as not a gay boy but as a girl. This kind of love didn’t take too long to implode because regardless of their sexual orientation, the boy preferred either a real live (genetic) girl to one whose femaleness was merely emotional-psychological-political (me) or a male homosexual who was a real boy inside (not me). I guess this actually did lead to masochism, and a lot of bad behavior in the way of dramatically self-hating girls whose self-hating was often a form of glamour. But then, in 1997, I met a bona-fide faggot who truly loved—or rather, and this is an important and beautiful specification, tried with all his might to love—a boy who was really a girl inside. He promised he’d love me forever and the Xeorx-crazed kid in my head fought like crazy against the lifeguard, but soon got fatigued and relaxed into his rescue.

We got hitched and went on a real Elizabeth Taylor-and-Richard Burton-esque ride that lasted basically a decade. The self-hating and self-laceration at not being a “real girl” stopped, and I fully embraced being a wife. But the marriage itself eventually fell apart. Why, who knows. But I think it had something to do with what J.L. Austin said: “to promise is not to try to do anything.” So now that I am back to being a single girl, once again I find myself falling back into that old feeling of ecstatic disintegration. In my teens and twenties, I thought that my body would hold its outline together and make sense if I just had enough sex with boys. I admit, I didn’t have all that much sex, but each perverse action would bring me closer to recognizing this squishy sausage of bones as “my body.” Now that I am in my thirties, things are different. While I have a comfortable sense of who I am, I now have a hard time even imagining sex with boys I love. When I try, I can’t see or feel my body. Sexual fantasy doesn’t happen because my body has become nothing.

I think I need two of my favorite tee-shirts, like I need two’s of my favorite jeans or sweaters , for this reason: because the truth is, using my feelings to connect with people often makes me feel like I don’t have a body at all. With these copied clothes, it’s like I’m Xeroxing myself over and over, but this time I’m not insuring against the loss of library books but against the loss of myself.

I think I’m in love again because he makes me feel like nothing. Not in a masochistic way of “I’m nothing” but “nothing” as in “nothingness.” My body rattles with such uncertainty of itself that I’m afraid my cells will rattle right out of their skin and I will disintegrate into a pile of slimy, granular stuff.

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.