hard white resistance

I have tiny red scissors, Japanese, made of stainless steel, red plastic handles that fit around my fingers like rings just one size too big. With their mean little points, they are for prying off bruise-blackened toenails or trimming long bangs. I was doing the latter last week when I sliced through the pad of my left middle finger. I cut myself quite often when trimming my hair because I cut my bangs vertically rather than laterally in order to create ragged ends. The blood flowed out crazily and for a moment I felt that old adolescent electric shock of my body coming together.

In Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, the husband tells his wife that he no longer enjoys sex with her because he is sick of fighting the “hard white resistance” emanating from her body. This hard white resistance, this feminine barrier, is how I’ve always experienced the rhythmic bloodpour of self-mutilation. I used to cut myself because I wanted to escape the tyranny of the visual. I hated seeing myself: mirrors. The pour of blood from blade is coming out of the girl in my head, from the prison of my imagination and taking glossy form in the oxygenated external world. But sometimes my gender dysphoria gets so swollen that I can’t stand it, and even the blood pouring doesn’t help. My body just starts spreading out evil and slow out like Exxon at sea. In my head, I am such a contained, specifically female thing—to confess, Angelina Jolie most of the time. I get up in the morning, put myself together to make my body simulate that specific female thing and I just shatter.

Now, I feel like the little outfits I put on are totally inadequate for containing the goo spilling around in myself. I hate skinny little jeans. I hate 70s hippie bellbottom jeans. I hate 50s rolled up jeans. I’m sick of seeing myself. I want to FEEL myself instead. More and more I want to be naked all the time, naked except for maybe the heavy metal bracelet I bought in Providence in May (the girl who sold it to me for $5 couldn’t take the price sticker off so inside the bangle it still has the sticker—except she added a zero to make it, as she says, “seem more expensive”). I want to be naked without mirrors, I just want to be naked in bed all the time, being caressed into Angie by the hands of a boy rather than the crackling zipper of jeans.

The last time this happened was last summer. Let’s call the boy Drew (not his real name): he fucked me into the girl in my head not because he fucked me like a man but because he fucked me like a lesbian. We would fall into bed kissing and he would put his strong arms around me (arms that were harder and bigger than his chest—the common mistake of boys who work out and not pay attention to body proportion work) and pressing down on me like a pin to specimen, he would fuck me not with his cock or even a finger or two but with his kiss. I’m not coyly describing analingus. We were naked, he was on top of me, but his hard cock was simply pressed into my tummy. Flattening me with his weight and muting me with his lips and tongue, he would just masturbate me while kissing me roughly and creatively, making me realize that kissing has like a hundred different positions. He was manipulating my sex organ by making me forget about it, so hard was the kiss and the body that was breaking mine in its embrace.

We stopped dating after a few dates. On one of those last few dates, we went to see the Angelina Jolie movie Salt. I was enthralled (as usual) by the sight of Angie kicking ass: no actress wears a dykey black pantsuit with crisp white shirt as well as Angie. Drew was not so thrilled. He kept cracking jokes about her big lips throughout the film, which irritated me. As we were leaving the movie, I went on about how much I loved it.

“You love these movies where chicks kick ass, don’t you?” he asked me.

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“Not really. Maybe if it was a really good-looking guy doing the ass-kicking I would like it.”

We went back to his place where he fucked me like a lesbian. He fucked like a lesbian but he certainly didn’t think like one. I don’t talk to him any more, and while I do miss fucking him sometimes, I don’t mind not talking to him anymore at all.

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.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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.

de profundis

I’m suffering the loss of my long long hair. Sixty days after the impulsively calculated moment with scissors, I am in full regretful mode, in the pain of waiting. I know it is frivolous and self-indulgent to plunge into mourning for long hair that you yourself willingly and willfully cut, but there it is. Suffering is one very long moment. I can’t divide it by seasons. I can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. It feels like time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Friends tell me it looks fine, but there it is and remains: the knifelike remorse I feel every time I pass the mirror. And I find myself counting the days to go by, obsessing over the fractions of inches pushing out of my scalp and measuring it against the days gone by.

Because my hair has been my diary. Like a certain species of girl writers (Sylvia Plath, Anaïs Nin, Uma Thurman in the film Sweet and Lowdown), I’m never entirely sure whether I’m writing down the experiences through which I’m living or I’m actually living through specific experiences so I can have something to write down. That is why, right now, in the prison cell of my bobbed hair, I look back to that night I cut off the long braid of hair and wonder if I needed a reason to look forward to a day 365 or 730 days from October 10, 2010. Some people’s lives are a nicely projected vector: they know the exact temporal and spatial point of their destination, and the arc of that movement is like an aced geometry test. My life has always been a heat-seeking missile: I know where it needs to go, but unfortunately, the target keeps moving so my days keep hurling itself this way and that, getting lost, jagging up its path, knowing nothing but the sole certainty that it’s being pulled by the small but definite heat of a dream in the future.

Using the tiny movement of hair growth as the pages of my diary makes my days feel long and slow. But at least I know my hair is a ceaseless change; its growth is a fact of my body. Two years from now, I’m not sure whether I will have a published book, tenure at my job, or a husband. Waiting and working for those things make me tired, precisely because they are moving targets with vague body heat. But hair growth is inevitable: I just have to sit on my butt and wait. The rate at which the pages of my diary gains heft word by hard-earned word is the same one by which my hair will become heavy enough to pull my head back into its destined posture.

But waiting for the day when my hair can again cover my back is still painful; the viscerality of regret is real. The diary is a way to create my body without the benefit of the mirror: my flesh constructed solely through the puked word-particles of my immediate past. In this same way I will try to dissipate my body: to have a less visual sense of my body while I wait for my hair to catch up with my desires. Less mirror-reliant, and more tactility. A molecular sense of self. A more abstract, yet more material sense of my body: air hitting my stretched out neck; the bounce of a good handbag against the tops of my hips; the red warmth of my eyes when it traps the dust of raccooned black eyeliner; how my titties get excited under a soft old t-shirt; the masochistic crunch of toes squeezed into narrow hard leather loafers.

(This piece contains an interpolation of “De Profundis,” by Oscar Wilde, 1897)

bobby

So I bobbed my hair Saturday night. I could say I “cut” my hair, but because I just hacked off twelve inches without any further shaping or layering, it really was a bobbing. I had many bobbed hair ideals swirling in my head: David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, Gong Li in To Live (the female Maoist phase), Natalie Portman in Closer, Julia Fordham in the “Porcelain” video, the dancer Slam from Madonna: Truth or Dare, Louise Brooks, Renée Zellweger. So as the hacked braid sat on the table pulsating with its last breaths, I felt no sympathy for it and no remorse.

However, Sunday morning was a different story. I had a major crisis of regret because my hair suddenly felt too old lady: it felt less “bobbed” (as in flappers: Zelda Fitzgerald and Joan Crawford circa 1929), and more like “a bob.” Specifically, it was the hairstyle of my mother. When I want to look like my mother, I want to look like her when she was my age (in her 30s), not necessarily the age she is now (some years over her 30s). As it is with most girls, hair follicles are attached some major emotional circuits that are as yet unchartered by medical science. So near tears, I called my sister to wail: “I HATE MY HAIR! I HAVE MA’S HAIR!!”

But as soon as I started to tell her how depressed I was about this new hairstyle, I started cracking up and laughing. My sister joined in on my laughter, and after snorts and giggle tears, I hung up the phone no longer sad that I have my mother’s hair. Now I think: Jeez, there are worse things than having your mother’s haircut. After all, when Lenny Kravitz first cut off his dreads and looked in the mirror at his (chic) mini afro, did he think: “Do I have my middle-aged mother’s hairdo?” Which he does, by the way: in the years before she passed in 1995, his mother, the actress Roxie Roker (incidentally, I have the same birthday as her) also wore the mini-afro.

But even if he saw his mother’s middle-aged hairstyle in the mirror, I’m sure Kravitz was OK with it, because he’s an avowed Mother’s Child, which I am too. Is this not the ultimate achievement of an androgyne, when your mother possesses your head so that you may present a sleek, unexpectedly male physicality to the world? And while my mother may not be Roxie Roker, Jeung H. Kang is still a pretty chic lady. So why is it that Lenny Kravitz’s wearing the hairdo of his middle-aged mother looks automatically chic to me and my wearing the hairdo of my middle-aged mother makes me feel...like a middle-aged lady?

It has something to do with the inherent chic of blackness. The afro itself is an androgynous style, but it wasn’t always chicly androgynous. On the scalps of women, it was the mark of a certain working class of people too busy for lye and hot irons. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the Black Power movement’s infection (some would say “dilution”) into mainstream African-American style, that the short afro became chic. The androgyny of the mini afro went chic because first, militant women adopted the hairstyle of their male comrades, and the resultant androgyny allowed “Black is Beautiful” to become “Black is Chic.” Thus, it took a bodily detour—men, Black Panthers, Black Panther women—for the middle-aged black women to rock the short afro as a carapace of femininity rather than the byproduct of work-weary bones. The men gave back to their mothers.

So maybe my bob, my bobby, is a similar opportunity to give back to my mother. As a fetus, I vampirically sucked energy from my mother from within, demanding strawberries in winter and raw white rice chewed through and through. Now, I have a chance to bare my neck so that she may construct a fun femininity for herself through the blood of mine.

The reason for cutting off my hair was, as Miranda Richardson’s IRA soldier declares of her own bobbed hair in the film The Crying Game: “I needed a tougher look.” Of course I miss my twelve inches, and the soft and intimidating aura I put out with hippy-dippy locks. But now I want to be something else. The long hair I had, a result of three years’ growth, had begun to feel slack and crumply. I wanted to be reconnected to my neck and shoulders, and the bobby does that: I’m stretching out my neck more, putting my chin up more, and my general slumpy posture feels slightly more balletic now. Monday morning, when I greased and my hair back and slung on my trusty biker jacket with my APC Petit Standard jeans, I felt feminine in a way I never did when I wore the same outfit with my long hair. I was somewhere between David Bowie and Wanda Jackson: I felt tough...and sweet.

In “How to Conceive (of) a Girl,” Luce Irigray writes: “mother-matter affords man the means to realize his form.” I want to do the reverse! Of course, not that my mother needs my help in realizing her form, but wearing the same hairstyle, I think of as gifting her with the aura of the Thin White Duke-meets-the Queen of Rockabilly. Maybe she can feel like she is turning into a slice of her androgynous son, and maybe it will make her feel unexpectedly tough, sweet, and ageless.

i am shelby lynne

The singer Shelby Lynne shocked the hell out of us when she came out on stage. In person, her body was smaller than the voice on her records would lead you to believe, and her voice was much bigger (not louder—BIGGER) than the voice on her records. She does with her voice what all great troubadours do: drug you into wanting things that you thought, or been taught, you’d never ever want. Like when she sings a sad lyric comparing herself to an old mangy dog: you want to feel love so hard that you feel that depressed. You want to be the dog she turns herself into with that song.

The desirability she produced on stage was something I haven’t experienced in a long time. That smaller-than-the-voice-would-allow body: it’s not just that at 42 years old, Shelby Lynne is so thin and fit that she embodies everything that I want to be in seven years. (In an interview a couple years back, she famously declared: “I wouldn’t trade my life for what Carrie Underwood has. I’ll be 75, and someone will ask me to sing. And I’ll still be cute.”) As a woman artist working in an industry that prizes toothless girlishness or over-the-top “artsy” femme decadence (you know the cultural perpetrators I’m talking about), Shelby Lynne is, right now, the kind of girl I want to be. Not just physically, but in work. No big hits, eight-album combined record sales that fail to add up to a million, yet she’s still working and working passionately at her art. I like to think that Shelby and I travel the same road: it takes at least three rough decades of work to become a proper girl.

But back to that body that houses and manufactures that voice. That night, Shelby wore, without a bra, a simple black lycra camisole (Probably Victoria’s Secret. My little sister and I too wore black tank tops to the show that night, except ours were Rick Owens. This is the only night when Victoria beats out Rick for coolness and beauty), black Rock & Republic jeans (tight, but not too tight: wrinkly calves) and black buckly boots (“Like you buy on Polk Street,” my sister assessed). The ensemble was apt uniform for the booming femininity she projected on stage. Her interaction with her band (well, a guitarist and a percussionist) and audience revealed a femininity that was stretchy and tough as that black lycra tanktop. Bossy (getting pissed at her guitarist for changing keys: “It’s in G now, Ok?” followed by angry silence. Was she joking? Hard to tell!), gracious (“I appreciate your lovin’, I really feel it in my bones now” she said before her encore), never pandering or cutesy (Never a flirty sexpot, she scowled and worked her way through her guitar playing and communication with her guitarist. Lynne’s reaction to some male geek audience member who yelled out at the end, “Don’t be a stranger!!”: SILENCE). “She’s so hard!” my sister whisper-exclaimed to me moments after Lynne took the stage. She was right. Sensitivity that shoots through a perforated black carapace: that is Shelby Lynne’s femininity.

At the San Francisco Yoshie’s where my sister and I saw her this week, we were seated at our table with a cheerful middle-aged middle-class couple from Concord who had just discovered Shelby...through NPR. “I’ve been following her since the 90s!” I snottily and warmly offered. And while I’ve been co-opting her voice to blow up my own little heartaches since 1993 when I bought a tape of her Nashville album Temptation, Shelby’s look has never compelled imitation in me. Until now. Not because she’s not pretty (she is very pretty) but because she’s always been a bit too pretty (blond, blue-eyed, blah blah blah). But Wednesday night, she showed up with short hair and made me want to crawl inside her black carapace. Her hair was pitched—and I mean, pitched, like a bale of hay or a wall of Phil Spector strings—somewhere between a Teddy Boy’s ducktail, Morrissey’s flop top, and Etta James’s peroxide poodle cut. The hair could have gone so wrong (i.e. small town white dyke) but instead it went so right. (And note: the short hairdo was not a Rihanna ‘do. Rihanna cut her hair to be a “good girl gone bad”; Shelby Lynne has never been a good girl. Plus, Lynne’s hair is not ironic/ flamboyant/ science fiction. Instead, it’s historical fiction that is indecisive about the particular decade. Rihanna’s hair poses aggressively towards the future; Shelby Lynne’s hair muscles aggressively into the past. Shelby’s short hair is definitely retro—but it decreates itself and its human source.)

For the first time in many years, I felt not only a bit dowdy but downright boyish in my scraggy long locks. Shelby Lynne made me believe I could achieve a better kind of femininity if I chop my hair off short. It gives some hoping room for the futurity of a girl whose male genetic destiny may include a receding hairline. I haven’t taken up the scissors yet, but I’m not afraid to think about it. I don’t know if a floppy beehivey ducktail will work with my hair, but Shelby made me want to find out.

big bangs theory

I’m writing these words through the worst jet lag I’ve ever had, composing an introduction for a performance theory course I’m teaching this semester at RISD, and the fog of my freshly growing out bangs. When I decided to grow my bangs out a couple months ago, I wasn’t sure how far I’d let the hair go: would the bangs become long enough to no longer be bangs, or would I miss its tips hitting my brow and chop a trim not two weeks in? Well, three weeks into the growing and my special tiny red bang-cutting scissors not beckoning me, I had truly let the bang grow out, but not completely out of its identity as “bangs:” I’d eventually prune them once they became “big bangs.”

“Big bangs” is not the same thing as “long bangs.” To me, “long bangs” is a bang that hits right around the bridge of your nose, and still covers your forehead. “Big bangs,” on the other hand, is a bang that extends to the jaw and beyond; bangs so long that in its natural state, will not only cover your brow but most of your face. Big bangs actually necessitate hairspray: you have to spray their roots so they stand a bit. Then you can do practical things like walk, read, drive, type.

My decision to grow big bangs was made not because of boredom, regret, or repulsion. Rather, there were three magazine covers from last summer still floating around inside my wintering brain: Julianne Moore on British Vogue, Penelope Cruz on W , Lindsay Lohan on British Elle.

All three women had bisexual bangs—long enough to be either bangs or not-bangs, and all three had the bang parted, roots stiffened, and the tips swept down and over to cover half of their faces. I wanted my hair to look like this. But because I am who I am (OK, an academic trained in literature) I was not content to just accept “beauty” or “trend” as reason. I wanted to know why I wanted look like three women from magazine covers six months old. In Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, the Countess Gemini declares: “... one should like a thing or one shouldn’t.... But one shouldn’t attempt to reason it out—you never know where it may lead you.” I agree that we don’t know where reasoning out a love for a thing may lead, but I disagree that one oughtn’t do it. It’s a compulsion with me.

So I began a mental list of big bangs to compose my big bangs theory: what femininity is created from the act of turning a bang into a hair curtain? But where that led me was a place I didn’t necessarily want to go: the past. I thought of big mall hair of the 80s, big 90s supermodel waves. These are images of big bangs just felt wrong. Not because they didn’t have meaning for me, but because they had too much meaning for me. They seemed laden with cultural “meaning,” coated stiffly as the hair spray that the style sometimes requires. Did I really want to figure out what the 90s glamazon mashed with the 80s mall chick meant upon my own big skull? For once, I became Countess Gemini and the resounding answer was FUCK NO.

This conclusion was initially depressing to me whose favorite question had always been “Why?” But perhaps it’s time for a new question—“HOW?”—and with that, a new way of theorizing. History is important for sure, but I feel no longer so invested in decoding the symbolic or even metaphorical weight of things. This is in fact an aspect of critical thinking I encourage in my students: to look for meaning in a text, but that to be vigilant for the effect it produces is even more interesting and important. If having big bangs makes me feel better and more feminine, is it really that interesting to ask if that is so because it is a citation of Cindy Crawford circa 1992? Not really. More interesting: if big bangs make me feel better and more feminine (and they do), how is the material structuring of the hair style contribute the structure of my emotions?

As a girl living out life in a male body, my physical self has always felt ephemeral to me. By now, it is common to think and talk about cross-gender identification in terms of “performance”—whether you want to talk through the discourse of RuPaul or Judith Butler. But for me, “performing” is not just about acting out a fantasy. It has something more to do with the feeling of desperation: how often the “girl” I feel myself seems to be so utterly and self-defeatingly intangible. This is the sense of “performance” that critic Peggy Phelan writes about:

“Performance’s only life is in the present....[Performance] becomes itself through disappearance....The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.”

This is why I’m obsessed with absorbing images—not just of women I love like Julianne, Penelope and Lindsay. I also obsessively catalogue the days when my affinity to such women feel particularly perfect. The following digital selves are the very spurs to memory that Phelan talks about:

These images were taken on days when my hair performed well: I felt like “me.” These photos were not immediately deleted from the hard drive because they actually matched the image of “girl” in my brain. These are images of myself as Julianne, Penelope, and Lindsay (respectively) not because I was successful in looking like Julianne, Penelope, and Lindsay (clearly I wasn’t) but because looking at them, I become successful in feeling like Julianne, Penelope, and Lindsay. And it is a rare day indeed when the girl in your brain matches the girl that gets mapped out on your skin.

It’s like the idea of having a “good hair day,” which is a bit like winning the lottery: you repeat your daily hair care and prep regimen, but it is that unknown force beyond personal control—atmospheric, astrological, gravitational, divine—that gives your pile of beloved dead cells that precise lift and pull of perfect form. And it is a form that you cannot willfully reproduce, no matter how hard you try. But you try. And I try. Again and again I try. But the day’s do must always disappear into the cloud of hairspray and smoothing serum dust that covers your pillow at bedtime.

Hair is the ultimate performance because it gains identity by disappearing. But hair also complicates Phelan’s contention that performance and reproduction cancel each other out. The perfect hair do/ day does not need documentation to become a spur to memory—which I do not consider to be so incidental—“only a spur to memory.” This spur is quite necessary for living, especially for gals like me. The intense joy that the perfect hair brings—that insistent serrated blades of emotion itself is the spur digging into me, to remember. And in my case, encouragement not only for memory to become present, but for present to never become memory: for the present to immediately become the future.

Yesterday, I did a trial run of a new hairstyle: a parted and scraped-back look. It’s a look I love and used to pull quite often when I was a boy with a boy-shag, but have never had success with the style once I grew my hair out. The ponytail always felt messy and uncomplimentary to the slick front, and I could never get the bun right. Then the front: the physics of pulling the hair back would inevitably flatten out the top too much and make me look more like a greasy melon than a chic Helmut Newton chick. But I’m planning a very specific look for the first day of my performance theory class on Wendesday: I want to present myself then as a specimen of a performative object to get my students to start thinking deeply about performance as a process. So I thought I’d try out the hair style on a lazy, no-activity Saturday afternoon. And bingo: it worked! Just enough combination of hair products (put gel into relatively dry hair) and choreography of styling (doubled ponytail instead of a traditional knot in the back) and the parted-and-scraped-back style worked. I was so pleased I immediately set out to document it. But none of the photos were successful: they didn’t at all resemble the happy image in the mirror. Or rather, the feeling produced by my narcissistic examination: my eyes felt blacker, bigger, brighter; my cheeks felt flusher and razor-sharp; my neck felt Audrey Hepburn-long. I felt like a greyhound.

But none of the photos made me feel like this. So I deleted all the images and drew a picture in my diary instead. Of course I don’t look like the image below, but looking at it, even now, the emotion produced is closest to the small joy of yesterday. It makes me more determined about the future of my own theoretical work: to discover or invent a process by which the ephemeral pleasure of perfect self-admiration can be embedded directly into the flesh. And these bangs: they will be done, when they are long enough for me to chomp on, snipped to just the tip of my nose.

a new me (not really)

OK, so, as a part of my sabbatical project in San Francisco this spring, I decided to become the little match.com girl. It has been a bit demoralizing. First, the medium of internet search engine does not stoke me erotically: I don’t really know what height/ weight/ income/ religion/ eye color I would like my man to have. As Barbara Stanwyck says in The Lady Eve, I’d like my future husband “to sort of...take me by surprise...like a burglar....” Then, this morning, as I rolled down to the bottom of the profile of some boy whose picture was kinda burglar-cute, I found something a smidge abusive to my self-esteem:

Turn-ons: Brainiacs, Dancing, Erotica, Flirting, Money, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping.

Turn-offs: Long hair.

I know you’re not supposed to create a self-portrait based on the tickings of a match.com survey, but really, how can you not? What is this guy saying about me? That boys with long hair (like me) are dummies with no rhythm and no sexual or flirty or sarcastic sophistication who are on welfare and like to jump off naked into the Bay?

A bit dejected, I trolled a bit longer, eating my split ends between gulps of coffee and cigarettes. (Smoking is not popular also among internet daters, by the way.) Then I started encountering more and more of these long-hair-haters. The long-hair-phobic bachelors I’m going to share with you are actual profiles of gay men on match.com. I wish I made them up. There’s a lot more of them than four. But anyway, here’s Bachelor #2:

Turn-ons: Boldness/ Assertiveness, Brainiacs, Candlelight, Dancing, Flirting, Power.

Turn-offs: Body piercings, Long hair, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping, Tattoos.

And yet again, long-haired boys are dummies who can’t dance or flirt. What is it about long hair that signals automatic dumbness? With this guy, since I am tattooed, I am even less matched. For him, having long hair goes along with having tattoos and body piercings and kissing in public. Of course, this is another instance of gay men’s femmephobia. The femmeness of long hair is yoked to traditionally non-normative styles of body mutilation (piercing, tattos) and body exposure (PDA, skinny dipping--again). It’s no coincidence that out of the gazillion faggots on match.com, I’ve seen only a handful—OK make that three, including myself—with hair down past the ears. What’s crazy is how the simply physical aesthetic of femininity that is long hair is then set in conceptual opposition to these socially (over)valued qualities: “Boldness/ Assertiveness,” “Brainiacs,” “Power.” This is standard issue sexism operating as sexual preference among gay men. This is no surprise. Here is the surprise: Bachelor # 3:

Turn-ons: Body piercings, Erotica, Tattoos, Thrills, Thunderstorms.

Turn-offs: Long hair, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm.

Gone are the traditionally masculinized qualities of power, brains, and assertiveness. In this guy, they have been replaced by the fetishized markers of marginalization that were a "turn-off" for Bachelor #2: body piercings, tattoos. (For good measure, this one adds “Thrills” and “Thunderstorms.”) But now even these historically marginalized qualities (including bad weather!) are set as erotic against long hair, which is still linked in erotic negativity with “Public displays of affection.” What is that about? That femmes want you to kiss them in public? (We do of course—you better prove your fucking love!!) This guy, while seeming to be a rough-and-tumble thrill-and-twister seeker, still has a closet in his brain: to be seen kissing another male in public is a turn-off for him, and one that is linked to male femininity. At least this time, I am granted sarcasm.

But lest I begin to feel more justified in myself as some symbol of renegade sexuality, I encounter Bachelor #4:

Turn-ons: Body piercings, Boldness/ Assertiveness, Brainiacs, Candlelight, Erotica, Flirting, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping, Tattoos, Thrills, Thunderstorms.

Turn-offs: Long hair.

This guy loves everything, in everyone...except faggots with long hair. At this point—having run through too many profiles whose “Turn-ons/ Turn-offs” were exactly like Bachelor #4, I thought, Shit, is growing my hair long really worth the trouble?

Well, fuck yeah! I love my hair! But then I thought: Well, since my sexuality is, after all, homosexual, maybe I should start compromising a teensy bit, right? So in that spirit, I’ve created (as you see above and below) my new look for the new year:

-Hair pulled back: I’m not going to cut my hair. But I will scrape some Kiehl’s Clean Hold Styling gel (it has silk powders and Vitamin E, and has no alcohol but still holds like Elmer’s glue) through my hair, tie it in a knot and call it a day. Besides, when you combine it with...

-White t-shirt and light blue jeans: ...it’s very inmate in a medium-security prison, no? The shirt is vintage Meatmen concert tee. I’m usually decked out in black tees worn with dark indigo or grey jeans, so it feels fresh to do a white and light combination. These jeans are Acne Hep in “Beyond,” but I also have been loving Earnest Sewn Harlan in “Morrissey.” I’ve really been feeling light denim these days, ever since I saw a great picture of my friend Jackie H. as a teenager in the late ‘80s, with crazy Kate Bush-y crimped hair and white t-shirt with high-waisted light jeans. So inspiring. I want my future to be the vast history of girlhood.

-New tattoo: Bettie Page memorial:

I just got this tattoo over at Everlasting Tattoo. It’s my own design of Bettie Page that I drew early last year. This month, I added the tiny “B.P.” in her pubic area to memorialize her recent passing. All my tattoos are of girls I feel myself to be, but this one is the first girl who is topless. It feels quite sailor-macho to have bare breasts on my bicep, but not macho in a male way. I just finished reading Thing of Beauty, Stephen Fried’s surprisingly well-researched biography of the 80s supermodel Gia Carangi, and it was quite a style inspiration. In the book, Gia, who was a dyke, is alternately described by friends on one hand as “androgynous” and “boy-girl,” then as “the perfect homosexual” and “the purest lesbian I ever met.” I want to be the purest lesbian you have ever met.

-Dark brown/ plum lipstick: Because after all, a girl can’t compromise her femininity that much. It will be hard to give up, or at least timeshare, my regular Bettie Red. But this new shade—Shu Uemura BR 798—is so perfect. It’s certainly very goth, but also almost the same shade of lipstick my little sister wore in the nineties (she lined her lips with almost black lip liner of course). I love the idea of being in my thirties and looking like my sister at age 18. More of my future as the history of girls. Also, I saw a beautiful series of photographs of my living idol, Lindsay Lohan in the upcoming February issue of Interview magazine, in which she is wearing the darkest, plummiest lipstick ever. The pictures are in black and white, and her lipsticked mouth reads as black. I wanted lips that read as black if I were rendered in black and white.

I want to look like I drank goat’s blood. I want to look as if I drank a whole bottle of a 2005 Reynolds Family Winery Merlot in one sitting. I want to look as if I’d been gorging on chocolate covered cherries...or really dark, pretty poop.

So here I am, my long hair tamed and tucked under! Maybe now I don’t look as sarcastic-rhythmless-skinny-dipper-homeless-airhead! Come and get me boys!!!!!!!