in the mirror of my mind, my drapes match my carpet

My facebook status from yesterday: “GIVING SOME BETTY DRAPER.” I don’t twitter, and I don’t like to use the facebook statussing to inform my meagre 219 friends the extremely boring activities of my daily life: like they need to know that I cleaned my sister’s apartment. But that’s just what I did yesterday (OK I just cleaned the dining area) but it felt significant enough to broadcast in the language of drag. I was “giving some Betty Draper,” as in, I was embodying January Jones’s character on the television series Mad Men. Betty Draper is of course, the 1960s iceberg of a spouse (now ex-spouse) of the show’s protagonist. (Betty is so glacial, when her widowed father and his new ladyfriend come for a visit, she puts them in separate bedrooms. LOVE IT!!)

But this is not a glorification of housewifery. I don’t find anything glamorous about being an indentured slave to some man, cooking cleaning and talking babytalk to an infant all day. I clean house in an old Skinny Puppy t-shirt. The only way I like crinoline is shredded and cigarette burned. But I do like the way the January Jones embodies the tenets of her enslavement: she’s angry. Jones plays a repressed housewife, but she practically seethes in every scene. She’s so tense and clipped that she might as well just wear a sign that says “I HATE MY LIFE.” Repression is the vase into which she pours the flower of her fury. I love Betty Draper not because she is a (gay) male fantasy of a sexy housewife, but because I love the way the female actor playing her embodies the anger of a woman forced to embody the male fantasy of a sexy housewife.

When I cleaned my sister’s apartment yesterday, I wasn’t seething at all. My lawyer sister is a working woman and a former tomboy to boot so domestic labor is definitely not her thing. But the night before last, she complained loudly, “God I hate how this house looks like a hoarder’s house! Stuff everywhere! The kitchen table is a mess!” Which it was: half of it was covered with expired vitamins, dead pens, old bills, court documents, make-up she was bored with. I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or thrilled, because even though she was just letting out the complaint into the air at no one in particular, she sounded exactly like some mid-20^th Century upper-middle class American husband. That’s when I decided I’d just take up her challenge and give (her) some Betty Draper.

So what does it mean that I want to embody this hybrid of sexist femme persona and proto-feminist performing female that is “Betty Draper”? Especially at this time in my life, when I have gone through almost a decade of giving various black ladies (Natalie Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Diana Ross, and of course, Mariah) as my everyday persona, I am suddenly wanting to embody...a white woman????

That I see an Aryan lady when I look in the mirror of my brain always gives me pause. It makes me think of Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, in which a little black girl loses her mind due to her consuming passion for Shirley Temple. But that is a novel that is seriously misread all the time. I’d love to explain more, but that is the last chapter of my old Ph.D. dissertation/ first book manuscript, which is still seeking a publisher home. So I’ll use instead a faster and more contemporary example: the film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. There is a scene in that film in which the dark-skinned, African-American heroine (who is also very overweight) is getting ready for her day in front of her mirror. We (the camera) are positioned behind her and we suddenly see what she sees in the mirror: not a dark-skinned African-American who is very overweight, but a slim, pale, blond, white girl.

The scene is presumably there to indicate to us the heroine’s lack of self-worth: she wants to obliterate her own body for a white one, which she believes will give her the happiness she desires. As Venus Xtravaganza famously said: “I want to be a spoiled rich white girl; they get everything they want.” In this way, the white reflection in the mirror is a symptom of Precious’s racial self-hatred: Precious wants to be a white girl. However, that is true only if she thinks that the white girl in the mirror as her reflection. But what if the white girl were not a reflection in the mirror, but the mirror itself?

Then we have to think about the mirror itself as a tool of self-creation. I’m not going to go into Lacan here. Instead, I’ll cite a white lady:

"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."

Thus spoke Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. Substitute “Women” with “White Girl” and “man” with “Black Girl.” According to Woolf, the mirror is useful precisely for its distorting function. There is a difference between the material of the mirror and the phenomenon of the reflection. Being a mirror: you are the object with which the looker creates a certain (amplified) image of one’s self; being a reflection: you are a distortion that the mirror provides. I embody Betty Draper/ January Jones not because I desire to turn my yellow skin white, but because the white femininity becomes the hard glass with which I can make my flesh an unimaginable version of “girl.” “White Girl” can be a mirror rather than a reflection. It is in this way that the mirror scene in Precious is my favorite scene in the film. There is something weirdly punkrock, something subtly rebellious, about a 300 lb. black girl seeing herself as and through a 100 lb. white girl. Through the trick of fantasy (or psychosis, take your pick) the black girl has transformed the cells of her flesh into the cells of her imagination. She was saying a big FUCK YOU to biology. The image of white femininity is not an unattainable goal, but an attained one. The white girl in the mirror is not a glamorous ideal, but something so merely and importantly mundane: a white version of herself. Two girls, black and white, in the same black leather.

a tale of two sisters, part 3

My tough femme public defender sister and I had been waiting five months to see Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan, and we were not disappointed. Appropriately sandwiched by an opening title and credit sequence plated in Bodoni (the font that I would be were I a typeface), the film is not only an ode to femininity, it is a medium of femme-bonding. When I’ve talked to boys who’ve seen the film (OK I don’t know that many boys so it’s like three) there was a common denominator to their responses, whether they liked the film or not: they were grossed out by the scenes in which Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers tears into her bleeding fingernails and toenails to make them bleed more. Having been a cutter myself, these scenes were viscerally moving for me. But even my sister, who was far from a cutter as a teenager, did not find them “gross.” We understood as femme beings that tearing into the self is part of the pain with which the character creates herself as a specifically feminine artist. Funny that boys who usually have no qualms about blow-em-up action flick violence, were so disturbed by a close-up of a girl pulling at a loose skin of her finger till it snaps up like a fruit-roll up. This reaction to feminine self-mutilation is gendering in the same way in which Toni Morrison’s Sula powerfully separates her black girl self from white boys:

“She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in the cherry blood....Sula raised her eyes to them [the boys]. Her voice was quiet. ‘If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?’”

Similarly, Black Swan is a text of femininity that takes place at the very liminal regions of the female body. This is a film about girls, but not about their hair, their breasts, their hips, their reproductive organs, their heart, or even their face. This is a film about girls that is about their feet. Duh: it’s a film about ballet.

Early on in the film, Nina, superfrustrated by not being able to perform properly the role of Odile (a.k.a. the Black Swan Queen), turns to her security blanket of bulimia. The scene is blocked so that our view of Nina’s puking is blocked by the wall of the public toilet stall. We only see the base of the toilet, and the tattle-tale ballet-shoed feet: they face towards the toilet rather than away. After she retches, Nina flushes the toilet by stomping on the handle with one foot. This is one of my favorite moments in the movie. Kick-flushing the toilet is such a punk rock gesture, so there is a weird thrill in seeing the stomping foot covered in dirty pink satin rather than black Doc Martens: the pink doesn’t at all dampen the violence of the gesture. But at the same time, kick-flushing is also a gesture that arises from daintiness: you don’t want to touch with your hand the gross handle of the public restroom toilet so you touch it with your foot instead, because as a dainty being, you cannot leave a dirty toilet unflushed. The gesture, like the film, reveals the way in which femininity is a method of self-styling that combines blood-and-guts violence with balletic anal-retentiveness.

Which brings us to the real unsung supporting character of the film: knitted Ugg boots. From the beginning till the end, Nina bounds about, both on sidewalk pavement and backstage floor, in a pair of calf-length Ugg boots made of grey knit (I believe it’s their “Classic Cardy” style). I hate these Uggs, these socks masquerading as boots. I hate them for the same reason I hate flip-flops worn outside of a locker room. Because sloppiness is not the same as indifference. When you’re walking out the house with your hair teased and smashed for that just-rolled out of bed/ just-fucked look, that is not indifference; it is sloppiness. Putting on a dress with torn hems in homage to Baby Jane Hudson or 1991 Courtney Love is not indifference; it is sloppiness. Indifference is having such a big idea of yourself that you think the world ought to be your bedroom or bathroom: hence wearing your pajamas or house slippers outside the boundaries of your own home.

What shocked me about the knit Ugg boots in Black Swan was not so much that Nina wore them (I didn’t think that much about them at first) but that as we were leaving the theater, my sister, my platform-and-stiletto-heel loving lawyer sister, turned to me and said: “I gotta get a pair of those knitted Ugg boots.” I fought her (weakly) on her style decision but her reasons were simple and similar (I imagine) to Nina’s: preciousness about feet. My sister is not a ballerina. But in her work as a public defender, her feet have to have two personalities: sky-high heels for court appearances, but something cushier and kinder yet not trainers, for hoofing about the jails to interview her clients. So I understood her desire for them. Still, even as I agreed to buy her a pair (in black) for our Christmas “gift” trade, I was not convinced of their cuteness.

I’m still not convinced, although after my second viewing of the film last week, I might begrudge them a degree of cute respect. (WARNING SEMI SPOILER) Near the end of the film, when Nina discovers that she has stabbed herself rather than her rival, she slumps down on a chair in her dressing room, filled with the loud unutterable pain of regret. On her feet are those knit Ugg boots. But this time, the Uggs spoke to me in a different way. The boots’ soft knitted body reminded me of the army of stuffed dolls that lined Nina’s bedroom. And although she had just murdered those dolls just hours before, it’s as if they had wreaked vengeance upon her feet: the Ugg’s signature toe—round, hoof-like—renders Nina a kind of stuffed toy, and just as pathetic as that plush cow in tutu that was shoved down the trash chute. The pathetic little girlness of the boots made the scene even more wrenching to me, and actually pushed it to the brink of a classical kind of pathos, which is after all the etymological sister of “pathetic.”

I no longer thought of the knit Uggs as props of brazen, stupid indifference, but those of insulation. The insulation that Nina received as “Sweet Girl” not only of her suffocating mother, but that of her feminine art, which has always (and by “always” I mean historically) demanded a kind of imprisoning preciousness of its women. As much as that “Sweet Girl” persona—pre-lesbian experimentation, pre-masturbation discovery, pre-drug-addled sluttishness, pre-rebellious mother-beating—insulated her in a prison, we realize how its insulation was also protective. It allowed her to practice her craft, to aim towards that supposedly quixotic “perfection” of technique. And for all its apparent devaluing of “technique,” the film weirdly makes a case for the indispensability of technical perfection: because Nina is totally hungover on the day of her big opening, she would not have been able to physically perform the role were her body not trained to perfection. In other words: without her maligned obsession with technique that marked her as an underdeveloped “girl,” she actually wouldn’t have been able to perform in art the black womanhood she’d learned the night before.

a tale of two sisters, part 2

Effeminacy is NOT femininity. Effeminacy is embodying femininity without consciousness regarding the condition of females in a patriarchal society. I was an effeminate kid; after experience and feminism, I am a feminine adult. Femininity used to be a behavior I couldn’t control in spite of colossal effort. Now, femininity is a choice. Femininity is a behavior that demands not control, but thoughtful finessing and nurture.

This is a subtle fact that I recently found I’d been learning through my little sister...that is, if a public defender-trial attorney who makes almost twice as much salary as I do can indeed be called “little sister!” My sister has a unique relationship to footwear. Like a lot of stereotypical females, she is obsessed with buying shoes. Last summer, as a gift, I gutted and organized her closet. I had to empty out a small bookshelf of books left over from college to house her shoes. (Can’t run from blood: I have a similar bookshelf I use to store old t-shirts) But the funny thing about Meenha’s shoe-obsession that it is bipolar in gender. She collects, predictably for a thin gal with long hair and penchant for mod/ 90s raccoon eye makeup, interesting high heels. But she also spends equal time and energy (if not dough) collecting basketball shoes. And I don’t mean vintage high-tops in cute girly colors and dip-dyed in irony. I mean real baller shoes: she keeps up with whatever latest shoe Nike (or Reebok or whatever) brings out in homage to whatever basketball player is dominating the scene. It is the strangest scene: she has rows of towering 4 or 5-inch heelers next to clunky white leather court shoes that all look alike (to me).

Her Louboutins next to her Lebrons:

What’s more interesting, she follows an interesting sartorial philosophy centered on these shoes: unlike most gals, she wears the heels in the daytime and basketball shoes in the night time. Meenha will wear these outrageous designer stilts—like the Louboutin “Declic” or the Jil Sander pumps with pyramidical heels (first pic)—to work. She hobbles about expertly in unforgivingly tailored skirt-suits and 5-inch heels, all the while providing due process to keep the U.S. justice system functioning. Then, when she’s getting ready to go out to a club or dinner with friends, she’ll change into a Castro fag uniform—fitted leather jacket, Rick Owens tank, trousery jeans—and top it all down with her Lebrons.

Now, this is a look I would never rock for myself, but it has, weirdly enough, influenced my own feminine style. My sister refuses to do corporate power drag for her day-job as a lawyer. For her, dressing close to androgyny is not a magic skin to force and power. Instead, she piles on a pound of eyeliner and steel-black eyeshadow. She’ll rarely wear her hair up—it’s always gently teased and flowing out like Cindy Crawford circa 1992. And then the stilettos. I’ve watched her in action in the courtroom and it’s pretty impressive: she is a sharp and thunder-voiced woman who displays great poise, calm, and logic in face of her opponents. When she combines these traditionally “masculine” traits with her overly feminine style, what you get is not androgyny but a dark, empowering femininity. Her Louboutins are a different kind of court shoes, for a different kind of court. Meenha’s courtroom skills are not undercut by her femininity. Rather, femininity forces observers to re-think how we gender certain skills in the first place. You have to start thinking: perhaps logic mixed with guerrilla aggression has always been akin to beige lipstick, dominatrix pencil-skirts and high heels.

Conversely, I love that my sister does not feel the need to “dress up” to go out at night: no leg-baring skirts, no strappy shoes, never a plattered cleavage (neither front nor back). You could throw her going-out outfit onto a twenty-year old babyfag and he’ll look quite smashing. But on my sister, the outfit doesn’t look like male drag; its potential masculinity is subsumed by her femininity. This is how I learned femininity should be worn: thrown-on, casual, but always overpowering.

The opposite of femininity is masculinity, but aggressive power is not the opposite of femininity. A couple Friday nights ago, my friend Tara J. and I were leaving Daddy’s (a bear-leather bar in the Castro, now known as 440 Castro) when a scruffy old fag sneered after us: “There’s a lot of women in the gay bar tonight!” As Tara said: “Yeah, like two of us among 200 fags is a lot.” Our anger at the guy’s sexism made me think about how this fag viewed himself when he drew such a heavy identity-wedge between himself (the rightful occupant of a “gay bar”) and women: does he think that his facial hair and lumberjack clothes and pathetic Caucasian machismo automatically makes him the opposite of “woman”? It seemed funny to me that he made his sexist observation in a high, nasal, faggy-affected speech? How could he be so unaware of his effeminacy, and how that links him to the very femininity that is a major cultural-historical component of the idea of “woman”? At his age, he ought to know better.

Effeminacy is an ultimately infantile stage: you do what you do without realizing what it is, and how it accrues and radiates meaning in the world. Obviously, it is not a bad thing, but it is a preconscious state...and consciousness is always a better thing. So I don’t feel like I need to wear heels every day to feel more aware of my femininity. My stand-by shoes are not Louboutins but worn-torn Converse high-tops. I wear them and feel like I’m wearing ballet slippers, or a corset made for my feet. I wear them and feel like my sister, gliding around the nightlife in Lebron stompers.

The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle. If she herself should ever fall in love with a man, she, like Helen, would proclaim it from the house-tops, but as she only loved a sister she used the voiceless language of sympathy. (E.M. Forster’s Howards End)