this is me...then (Black Mistress Tina)

            I’ve been working out my body.  Not as in the 90s, when I believed that the thing to do with my femininity was to bury it under mounds of unnatural muscle.  No, these past twelve months have been about living in the 90s that I should have lived: working on getting my body to be the performative connector between my identity as girl and that as writer.  I am in the process of leaving Joony Schecter behind for a new identity that I’ve already begun building: A hausfrau and BDSM dominatrix of the emotions: BLACK MISTRESS TINA.  

            Black Mistress Tina is a hausfrau and BDSM dominatrix of the emotions.  The name is an homage to Debi Mazar’s character in Spike Lee’s 1996 film “Girl 6,” which is herself homage to Bettie Page and to the hard romantic pragmatism of a femme.  I have fallen in love with a man and we decided to cohabitate.  He is also a wonderful electronic musician.  One of his early gestures of winning me over was listing me as his “muse” in the description of a piece that he produced last summer.  But because my man Roddy is a modern man, he views “muse” as consonant with “partner.”  Historically, “muse” has been understood as a pure and passive body that exists solely to submit to the authoritative genius of the “artist.”  Of course, this history has been also used as a tool of the patriarchy, in which “muse” equals “woman” and “artist” is “man.”  From the beginning, Roddy saw me as a muse because he understood my femininity, but with a definite anti-patriarchal stance.  (This is partly why I love him.) 

I then worked as muse on his “Violets,” a nine-minute sound piece in which all the samples that Roddy used as raw material came from me.  I was a traditional muse insofar as I was literally objectified: Roddy recorded my grunts, whoops, hisses, wails, and even humming Culture Club’s “Miss Me Blind.”  This process made me feel simultaneously troubled and elated; I was cut up into voice samples, made into a thing.  It was cutting of a different kind.  I saw my body fluttering helplessly on the cutting board and watching Roddy transplant a different pulse into it made the heart still in my own body beat hard and happy.  A piece of my body—my voice—was ripped from me and snipped and pieced together like a rabbit fur coat. I just snuggled in the luxuriousness of it all.  And when it came for Roddy to present the piece, he insisted that I be given credit as a collaborator, and asked me to come up with a bodily performance to go with the piece.

            Which led to “The Rabbit Catcher.” This time, the work began with me: I’ve wanted to write a mourning piece for Whitney Houston ever since her untimely death last year.  But whenever I sat in front of my computer, all I could say was nothing.  I had the same reaction to her death as Mariah Carey: “I’m almost incapable of talking about it.”  So “Mourning and Melancholia: Whitney Houston” sat unfinished but for the quote from Mariah.  In the meantime, I got an idea to adapt one of my favorite poems, Sylvia Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher,” as a performance piece.  I became fixed with the gesture of singing a song while eating my own hair.  I wrote a score for it, and Roddy and I set about thinking about what sound should come out of me. My job was to again provide Roddy with a stockpile of sonic raw material.  Immediately, I felt that the sound should be a recording of me being possessed by Whitney Houston.  I decided that I would transcribe in textual form all the sounds—including not only Whitney’s voice but the instruments—in the epic 10 minute remix of Whitney’s cover of “I’m Every Woman.”  Roddy would record me doing a “flat” reading of those texts, which he would re-cut into what he calls an “aural bed” in which the audience—and I—can luxuriate.  As he played his sound piece, I would then perform live another version of the transcribed text.  We performed a sketch version of the piece this past December at the Apexart.  We’ll perform an expanded and fully formed version in May.  But in the meantime: enjoy my new body, al dente.  

The Rabbit Catcher from Roddy Schrock on Vimeo.

analog sex in a digital world

One of the things I promised myself when I fell in love this summer was that I was not going to look back. With my boyfriend, I didn’t want to be in love the same way I was in love in my twenties. This task has been surprisingly easy for someone whose idea of living in the present had been romanticizing/ regretting the past and idealizing/ dreading the future. It helps that my boyfriend is the kind of soulful being who would respond to an OK Cupid profile (mine) in which “Thinking about the past and the future” was the answer to the question “What are you mostly likely to be doing on a Friday night?” So yeah, I’m getting better at living fully fleshed in the present tense. What surprised me was how I—and my boyfriend—went back in time to construct a romantic sex life.

A couple weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were verbally horsing around, and because he is that delectable combination of tech geek and music geek (with an MFA in electronic music to prove it) we somehow came up with the idea of my being a cassette tape to his tape deck. Exactly how we came upon this metaphor I don’t quite remember. All I know is we’ve been using it like hell to flirt with one another. A week ago, we had the following email exchange (which has been redacted for love and modesty):

Me: “you make me feel like a cassette tape being slipped out of its case.”

Roddy: “i’m slipping you out of your case so i can sound your ribbon with my magnet this weekend!”

OK, cue burlesque comic horns and please, gag if you want to. It could seem like we were making some kind of crude sex joke about a penis and a receptive orifice, but it sure didn’t feel like it. When I think about the cassette tape and the tape deck as a metaphor of our connective sexuality, I find that it resists cooption by human sexuality. Certainly, something is being inserted into another thing via an opening. But the cassette tape is hardly a phallic object. Not only is it not oblong in shape, the cassette doesn’t have the insistent willfulness of the phallus. The cassette is in fact a very coquettish object (even its name is a cute pink tease): it withholds the smooth brown thin ribbons of its voice within a tiny flat body. So traditionally feminine is the cassette that it must wait for a knob of magnet to push into its own slight opening and press its own magnetic skin down against a fairy bed of foam. But for the cassette tape to be invaded, rotated and read by the hungry knob, it has to first invade the bodily integrity of the knob. In their mutual invasion and caginess, the cassette and tape deck could be lesbianic...except that the two objects are totally different, physically.

This little mental exercise underscored for me how much heterosexuality structures the fantasy life of gay people: cock-dildo-tongue-finger up in the ass or vulva, the culmination of the sexual act is penetration leading to climax. Even when we reject it, penetration hovers above us like the patriarch we are rebelling against. Penetration hovers ever ready to invade all possible fantasy-representations of sex. But rather than creating a sexual metaphor out of the structure of human sexuality, what if we use a metaphor to re-structure human sexuality? What does sound-playback technology teach us about sexually connecting with one another?

The digital means—the mp3 and CD—are depressingly tautological. Operated by light, digital playback forbids touch and tactility and thus offers sexuality that is...well, digital (skype sex). So onto analog: the classic vinyl and turntable combo is, by contrast, depressingly too human. Pointed, mechanized metal probe pierces into the chasms a round object to make it produce sound.

This is why I find the metaphor of the cassette and tape deck to be such a functional conceptual tool for my sex life. It doesn’t shy away from penetration, but it refracts the focus of penetration in such a way that it is impossible to derive from it a phallic narrative. Penetrations cancel each other out, becoming pure choreography. Simultaneously, the mechanics of deriving pleasure emphasizes a gentle, tender tactility: if the magnet pushes down too hard, the tape will be ruined and silenced forever. My boyfriend and I have sex (and romance) like cassette to tape deck.

I always thought I was a girl, but maybe “girl” was just a placeholder in my child’s mind for the moment when I would learn about that glorious object of analog technology called “cassette.” Just hours earlier today, I went to the basement and pulled out a giant box full of my old cassette tapes. I was bummed that I couldn’t find my Mariah Carey “Emotions” cassette single, but I did find a bushel of old mix tapes, including one decorated with clippings from a 1992 issue of Vibe magazine: a tiny picture of Mariah and a caption that quotes Biggie’s “Dreams” (“Mariah Carey’s kinda scary.”) I had forgotten, but I also had multiple mix tapes that I had labeled, “My Girl Self.” This was back in the nineties, when I was looking desperately for love and having bad sex with bad men. In wanting a cassette to stand in for My Girl Self, wasn’t I really yearning for this inevitable moment in November 2011 when I would find myself fully upgraded in the technology of love and sex?

only doctors bleed

I was sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office. I was wearing my sensible jeans. A pair of soft black Levis that, instead of clinging to, tread around my hips: easier to zip them off when the doctor examines my rectum. All my life, I’ve been kind of preternaturally inclined to rectal bleeding. My little spotting had been diagnosed as nothing medically serious, merely the consequences of overzealous toiletry. So I’ve always shrugged off blood in the toilet with an ease that bordered on affection. Years ago, when I told my ex-husband about my spotted toilet paper, he replied: “You probably like that.” It wasn’t a recognition of my masochism (although he knew about my cutting past) but an affirmation of my desire to be a woman: mimesis of menstruation.

I went to the doctor this week though because my regular heavy flow days had gotten a little too heavy, a little too flowing, a little too regular. So I sat there waiting like a good little girl in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, reading magazines I’d never read (Newsweek: “Michelle Obama: My Fight Against Childhood Obesity”), being wan but aloof, waiting to hear my name called.

“Dr. Lee?”

Is that me? It is me. How strange it is to be called a “Doctor” in a doctor’s office. The young teenage girl with neon patent leather Nikes who was also being a good little girl, there with her mother or grandmother, looked a little surprised. But I was a little surprised too, though I shouldn’t have been. It was all my doing. I am a doctor (a Doctor of Philosophy) and I circled it as my title of choice on my patient survey.

The form asked me to choose: “Prefix: Mr. Mrs. Ms. Miss Dr.” I am all of those things but since discussing excessive bloodletting into the toilet is not an academic matter, I feel that I have to choose a “Prefix” that reflects, if not the accuracy, the inevitable outlines, of my flesh. Thank God then, for the gender-neutral “Dr.”

But I’m not so sure that “Dr.” is a gender-neutral prefix. For me, anyway. Even on the medical survey, the category of “Prefix” is an odd one because there is a separate section for indicating gender. So “Prefix” seems to ask for some other, more social information, even though it is essentially that of gender: one way to say “male” and three different ways to say “female”....then one way to say “post-graduate degree.” Thus, in picking the post-graduate degree, am I not saying that my education bears the same weight upon my psyche and body as my sex and marital status? To push that even further: I wonder if being a Ph.D. is some kind of gender for me.

Is being hyper-educated a gender? Not “gendered” but “a gender.” What I mean by that differentiation is, I’m not interested in how hyper-education is represented along traditional lines of masculinity and femininity. For example: being a bookworm means you are less muscular and able-bodied thus more feminine than masculine; or being learned means you are not a housewife thus more masculine than feminine. No, what I mean is the functionality of hyper-education as a gender.

Gender marks the fleshly plugs and sockets we use to sexually and romantically connect with other human beings. If we apply this formulation to “Dr.” what we are essentially asking is: How does your identity as it is comprised by what and how you’ve learned dictate a specific mode by which you become sexual? Does my Ph.D. in American literature really shape my sexuality? Is it that my expertise with words and books gives me a special nubbin and/ or dent that can be petted to orgasm? Or that the ease and pleasure with which I dissect the prose of Mary Gaitskill or Anaïs Nin constitute a body part that longs for a specific kind of spit-and-stroke rhythm?

I think so. Even if I haven’t figured out exactly how, I think so. Being a doctor as a type of girl doesn’t mean that I’m looking for my twin in educational degree. This is not a match.com profile. Rather, I think of this boy I’ve recently been in love with. He is not a Ph.D. in literature. But when he talks about writing and reading he talks in a way that puts his entire body into it. His hands have been trained to hold tools other than books but when he talks about books I love that he talks in a way that feels soft and firm at once. His desire to love and find meaning in words I love and find meaningful is so palpable it’s fingertippy. And when he talks like this he’s talking to ME, the Doctor of Philosophy. This is who defines my gender. Someone who knows how to touch my body of knowledge and education in a way that makes me feel more like a girl and less like a human.

the pleasures and functionality of forgetting

Such an underrated, or perhaps more accurately, unfairly maligned process: forgetting. Maybe I’m wanting to twist forgetting into a valuable feeling because I’m in love and the boy whom I love might forget me in the summer months to come. I might not have any control over his forgetting about me. I want to forget him too. But not forgetting as obliteration.

One always assumes that to love, you constantly have to be thinking about the love object. You have to keep saying “I love you,” you have to keep phoning them, you have to keep texting them, you have to keep emailing them, you have to keep reminding them that you love them, you have to keep reminding them to remind you that they love you. These are what Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, calls “the lunatic chores” of love. In order to love, you seem to have to maniacally guarantee against forgetting. It’s constantly bearing evidence of love. It’s burdensome.

Actually, what it may indicate is a kind of emotional misfit. You keep performing your love as a fight against forgetting because in the back of your mind, you might not really feel it.

So maybe forgetting your beloved can be a symptom of love. In forgetting the loved one, you integrate him into your emotionality, your material existence. The loved one is important enough to become a seamless part of your everyday life. Of course, this has to be a very specialized form of forgetting, because there is a thin but hard line of differentiation between this loving forgetting and taking for granted.

Which is why the above quote from Christophe Decarnin, the current designer for the French fashion house Balmain, is so resonant with me right now: “It’s a success when you forget what you have on.” The successful love is like a successful pair of jeans: in the morning, it makes your heart flutter when you see it, bunched up or folded up, but waiting, just waiting for you; it makes you jittery and charged when you’re out of the shower and naked and you touch it and hold it up and shake it out to prepare to put left leg in first; then you put it on and button it up close to your navel and get on with your day, and it is so beloved that even if it is not skin tight, its weft nevertheless fuses with that of your skin. And then you forget it as you’d forget that your muscles and bones and organs are covered by your skin; you forget it in such a way that if you ever lost it, you know you’d just die.