elegy for elizabeth taylor

“Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii.” This was my childhood name for Elizabeth Taylor. It wasn’t because I didn’t know the name of this candy-eyed, black-haired, boom-busted film star. Neither was it that could not pronounce her name. “Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii” is not a complicated babyspeak for a future pornographic philosopher, but simply the Korean translation of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” This is how I first came to know Elizabeth Taylor in Seoul, Korea in the early 1980s: dubbed in Korean, the television station showed a film in which a beautiful girl in a skintight white slip prowled around a bed the size of a small island. I asked my mother what this was, and the words she spoke as answer were like a magic spell: “Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii.” I still remember the visceral shock of chewing those words in my own mouth while memorizing the image of the candy-eyed girl in the white slip. Why was a cat tipping around on a tin roof? Why was it hot? What did that have to do with the beautiful girl on television? My mother explained to me that the girl’s name was Elizabeth Taylor, that she was a great American film star, and in fact, one of her favorite film stars.

Even now, I can’t speak the words “Elizabeth Taylor” or look at a picture of her without having “Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii” pop in my head like a favorite song. Taylor was the first American film star I fell in love and obsession with. I was already obsessed with various American femme icons before this, but they were all small (great, but small) potatoes: Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman), Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman—in Korean, titled simply after her character’s last name: “Sommuzz (Summers).” But Taylor was something mythic. That slip, and the white chiffon dress she subsequently put on in the film, were nothing like the bellbottoms and wrap dresses that I associated not only with those television actresses, but my own mother. Plus, through Taylor I learned about the existence of something called “film,” which did not happen with reliable regularity every week, but flared up randomly one afternoon, never to be seen again. My brain didn’t know what to do with all this information, and I loved it.

But more importantly, Taylor was like a father figure to me. My own father was, to borrow the words of children’s book author John Steptoe, a monster...sometimes. My mother never regaled us with nostalgic tales of how beautiful and loving my father was or had been. But once she found out my hunger for this creature called Elizabeth Taylor, my mother fed my bottomless brain stories about her. We must have seen together Cat (my favorite Taylor picture—I know the above image is from Butterfield 8, but I just couldn’t do a slip justice. Better a [fake] fur coat and lipstick on mirror), and Cleopatra (my mother’s favorite) at least a couple dozen times. Watching these films, my mother and I had the same conversation together, each time as if for the first time: isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she kind of short-waisted, aren’t her breasts large, aren’t her breasts too large, isn’t her voice is a bit shrill, isn’t she so sensitive, isn’t she beautiful. Taylor was someone our mother remembered fondly, admired, criticized affectionately, worried over. I knew my mother didn’t love her husband, and in my eyes, for good reason. But I knew that she did love Elizabeth Taylor, as I loved Elizabeth Taylor.

Of course, Elizabeth Taylor died last month. On the day that she died, I texted my sister as soon as I found out. My sister got into Taylor much later than I, but this time it was I who introduced her, and Taylor was the means by which she and I grew close again after an icy adolescence. We texted back and forth like crazy, pouring out our sadness. After I finished teaching my first class that morning, I called my mother. When she picked up, even before I had a chance to say hello, she blurted out: “I was just going to call you to tell you that Elizabeth Taylor died. But I thought you might be teaching.” We both choked back tears. We choked them back because it seemed kind of silly for a mother and son to be crying over a dead film star as if the film star were a family member. But she did feel like a family member to us. “It’s like she was a part of our family,” I said to my mother. “Yes,” she agreed. Then we proceeded to have the conversation about Elizabeth Taylor/ “Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii” we always have, and always will have: isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she kind of short-waisted, aren’t her breasts large, aren’t her breasts too large, isn’t her voice is a bit shrill, isn’t she so sensitive, isn’t she beautiful.

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.

dissipation ball

The House of Schecter is a new house. In fact, right now, it’s less a house than an igloo. Still, a gal has to start somewhere. I’m usually inspired by Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about the Harlem drag ball circuit in the late 1980s, as I teach it each year for a course on conceptualizing race as a transsexualism process. But this year, I’ve been particularly obsessed with the scene in which the beautiful Octavia Saint Laurent shows off her own obsession: with the Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova. In the scene, Octavia is wrapped in a housecoat and radiant, face makeup-less and hair in soft un-dressed fluff. She’s wearing a thin black wrist watch. She stoops on a chair and glides her hand over images of Paulina, explaining what she loves about her (“The red hot fire of hair...”). Though she expresses her idolizing of the supermodel, hearing Octavia’s gently lilting voice and watching delicately cadenced wrist, I can’t help but idolize this Mother of the House of Saint Laurent.

In my replication of this scene, I am stooped over inelegantly on a chair, my hair in post-run-shower lank, gliding my splintery wrist (note thin black watch) over my idol: Butterfly McQueen. I have a huge pantheon of female idols, but I’m not a big believer in walls so their images recline in magazine pages and clipping boxes. The images I’m gesturing towards in this photo are three paintings I made of Butterfly McQueen back in 2002 or 2003. Butterfly McQueen was the film actress best known for playing the slave Prissy in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind. With that voice pitched into Mount Everest, she uttered the classic line that became a pivot for many critical examinations of race, racism, and cinema, theses that were often critical not only of the film and the Afro-American stereotypes it espoused, but critical and perhaps even hostile to the woman who uttered those words for a salary: “I don’t know nothing about birthin’ babies.”

I saw Gone With the Wind as a teenager, and I became instantly obsessed with Butterfly McQueen. Or perhaps, it began as fascination that volupted into an obsession. Perhaps it was because as a feminine boy and Virgo at that, I actually felt as if I were “Prissy.” My fascination with McQueen indicated an idiosyncratic response to her performance. I didn’t see what everyone else saw, I didn’t hear what everyone else heard. Of course I understood her to be enacting a racist caricature, but I was struck by the deep force of that body wiggling beneath the role, as if she were a human cosmonaut trapped in the slimy spew of a monstrous alien creature. The wiggle felt like a struggle, supreme. The voice didn’t sound funny to me: it was mystical, androidal. She didn’t look like a buffoon to me: her eyes were like black cut-glass beads mistakenly jabbed into a child’s soft toy. Her body didn’t seem bojangly; it seemed slender as a switch, jointed not like a puppet but like a ballet dancer. When I researched her life, I learned that the woman who iconized the dim-witted slave on screen had indeed begun her career as a classical dancer. She got her stage name “Butterfly” from a dance she performed in a production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. She didn’t lead a dancer’s life, but then, neither did she lead the life of a desperate Hollywood hanger-on. She grew up. As an adult, she mundanely managed her own life along its line, which she had drawn. She owned property in both New York and Georgia. She earned a B.A. in political science from the CUNY. She became an atheist. And in that last incarnation, she uttered the contents of her own true brain that furiously ripped through the slime of words stuffed into the mouth of Prissy:

They say the streets are going to be beautiful in heaven. I’m trying to make the streets beautiful here. At least, in Georgia and in New York, I live on beautiful streets …When it’s clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell.

I painted three pictures to try to embody that Butterfly McQueen. In the big green painting is a simple act of glamorization: Butterfly McQueen is a fashion model. My Paulina. The two tiny ones re-imagine one of her “maid” roles, in Duel in the Sun, in which she keeps refraining the words which the screenwriter obviously took to be the buffoonery of a flighty maid: “I have so much to remember.” But voiced through McQueen’s trembling, fairy-whistle timbre, the line sounded to me like a lament, and spoke to the heaviness of memory, the burden of remembering. It spoke to me of wanting to float off, to be snipped away from the balloon-man of your history. So in one image, I painted her as she appears in the film: hoop skirt, tears. In the match of the pair, I painted her as a frilly French maid: servitude is only a role, a fetish costume. She leans back and closes her eyes, relaxing from the demands to keep remembering. As an academic and an apprentice of language, “I have so much to remember” is a complaint, an excuse, a badge of honor, a motivation to work. As a girl embodied in a male body, “I have so much to remember” is a necessary formula for living. I’ve been working it all these years through that utterance. Even though we had radically different physical lives, I think Butterfly McQueen understood that feeling.

Last month, I wrote about wanting to collect children for my house; now I will start. Traditionally, one becomes a child of a house—is given the new family name—when one walks at a ball and snags a trophy in a category. But the kind of ballwalking I need for my house doesn’t call for sashaying or stilettos or even military realness. Not literally, anyway. Part of why I chose “Schecter” as my house name is to honor not only the feminine feminism of Jenny Schecter, but to honor her hyperbolic, performative embodiment of the art of writing. The shade of my pancake foundation is the English language. I vogue to the rhythm of syntax. I tuck my tool into the crevices of my sentences. So my ball has to take place in the digital field. The bodies-in-realness are fleshed out at a level both deeper and shallower than the epithelial: at the molecular level, at the level of emotions that comprise those molecules. I want to dissipate into fabulosity.

The ball:
DISSIPATION BALL/ PROVIDENCE IS BURNING.

Location:
“The Imperial Elks Lodge” of the internet, which is right here, now, where your eyes are bearing down, where your fingertips are transforming and moving your digitalized flesh.

Time:
Whenever you want.

Entry:
I will post the categories as individual comments in the “Comments” section of this blog, and all you have to do is write one thought and crafted sentence (or two) that is the embodiment of your walking in that category.

Categories:
REALNESS IN THE DAYTIME
UPCOMING PRETTY GIRL
BUTCH QUEEN FIRST TIME IN DRAGS AT A BALL
LUSCIOUS BODY
VOGUING

One rule:
Post with your name or email address. Posting anonymously is like walking without the body.

Another rule:
The sentence should cover over the body that people and see and understand through the seeing, “you.” The sentence will look like fiction but will really be a truth that’s deeply embedded in your cells.

mother of the house of schecter

That voice drops out of that body: I get the sense of trying to hold a whole birthday cake on a single-ply paper napkin.

The limbs of that body are sticks. If it were a boy, it’d be told to lift some weights and gain more muscle. If it were a female, it’d be told to eat some food and get some curves. I know that that grey sweater is a cashmere Marc Jacobs sweatshirt (even on 60 percent off sale, cost a pretty penny) but on that body it looks like what I was afraid it would look like, a cross between a wimpy football player and Warner Bros. era Joan Crawford. Which would be fine except I was going for the look I always go for: Bettie Page in repose had she been 28 years old in 1994.

That voice is so low, lower than I remember it. I know I have a low voice, the voice I was genetically programmed for, and I’ve not been unhappy with it. When I was a DJ at the University of Virginia’s student radio station (for a whole month: my show was the unwanted early Sunday morning slot and I couldn’t get up at 7:00 to save my life: an hour of dead-air time: I was fired—from a volunteer job!), the woman who trained me said I had a “Venus Flytrap” voice. “Venus Flytrap” was the character played by Tim Reid on the late 70s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati.

see and hear the original Venus Flytrap

How perfect is that: a man named Venus! I love that compliment still not because my voice sounded like the race I most closely identify with (African-American) but also because it got linked, through that character, to the kind of femininity towards which I strive: a bizarrely beautiful flower that eats little bugs that try to eat it.

But loving that voice is one thing; seeing that voice is another. The voice and the body together formed a drag queen. As soon as that vision hobbles over to the stage, it begins to whooping and kvetching sugary tourettes. For the next half hour, it’s like the voice is the body’s muppeteer, the femme cadencing of the unobviably deep male voice snapping the neck into endless hair-tossing, yanking the hand to hair-swiping, and at one point, even pulling up the mini Bardot-bump at the back of the head. My mother, who recently watched this video, said, “I didn’t really get the content of what you were reading, but it was so chic when you kept touching your hair. Your hand moved really elegantly.” In fact, she did get the content of the words that my deep drag queen voice was puking into the coiled microphone in front of me. This is my mode of femme realness performance: eyes cast down, reading into the microphone, fingers in hair: the shy book-obsessed kid who turned his shyness into a career and gender. With that voice and the body, my presentation of work at an academic conference turns me not into a scholar but as writer-as-drag queen.

The complete video of my draggy reading:

I wrote the story “Gertrude Ederle,” last spring in California, during my half-sabbatical from RISD. It’s one of four stories I wrote during those five months. I hadn’t written fiction since my second year in graduate school, when I was so unhappy and disillusioned that I had to punch out a 300-page novel in a three-month spurt. The unpublished novel now sits like a miscarried fetus in the back of my hard drive, and my Ph.D. was finished and received. But just when I was materially settled, I began feeling the same kind of desperation again, and so I had to go back to writing fiction. Not necessarily to build a new offshoot of a career, but just so I can live.

I presented “Gertrude Ederle” earlier this month at Princeton as a part of a conference called “Too Cute: American Style and the New Asian Cool,” and watching the video of my reading is like, PRINCETON IS BURNING! If drag queens crystallize their identity through lip-synching diva songs, then I become a drag queen by lip-synching my own piece of fiction. I’ve lived with my femininity for so long I forgot that I only know how this femininity feels against the underside of my skin; I didn’t really know its performative force. At first I was horrified, but gradually it sunk in, and by the end, I was quite tickled by this femme monster before me. I actually felt as I did the first time I saw Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning.

Paris is Burning documents black and Latin transsexuals and drag queens in late 80s Harlem, and the kind of nurturing underground community they created as a permeable but steely barrier to the racism and homophobia that was the material reality of their daily lives. One of the most important aspects of this community was the idea of the “House,” which is described in the film by the late great Dorian Corey, alternately as “a gay street gang” and “family.” The leader of such a house is a “Mother.” But the Mother does not become the Mother through democracy—not the traditional kind of democracy, anyway. The houses get started by drag queens who “make a name for themselves” in the ball circuit: she is a great voguer, an extradecaden self-presenter, a hyperreal femme: she is one who overachieves in the discipline of drag femininity. She becomes Mother because she votes herself as Mother. I say she “votes herself” rather than “declares herself” because her creating her house is an act of faith: her self-naming, and naming her house after that self-naming, is a performance of the faith she has in collecting the “children” who would vote for her.

So today, humbly following in the grand tradition of Saint Laurent and Xtravaganza, I’d like to announce my candidacy for Motherhood. I am the Mother of the House of Schecter. I know there are children out there. Formal recruitment will begin soon, but in the meantime, if you are reading this and like it, click on my haggy picture on the sidebar to my facebook page and fan up! I’ll be adding recruitment info about the House of Schecter...as soon as I figure it all out!!!! The shade of my pancake foundation is the English language. I vogue to the rhythm of syntax. I tuck my tool into the crevices of my sentences.

As the legendary Mothers transformed their bodies through performances of femaleness, I do so upon my prose. In my teens, I was frightened of transsexualism surgery. In my tweenties, I couldn’t afford transsexualism surgery. In my twenties, I got married and didn’t need transsexualism surgery. Now in my thirties, I know that the best transsexualism surgery for me involves not the technology of knife, laser and silicone, but the prosthetic technology of prose. I cut and inject my body with my words, and with that embodiment comes dissipation. Dissipation, blissful dissipation. With my prose, I dissipate my physical body into emotional and conceptual molecules; when I don’t feel my body, I know my words are working. They shatter scatter my fleshly body. When that’s done, I know there’s a boy out there who will see my body and want to hold it because he will see not maleness, but what I see, a hollowware for femininity.

mother stands for comfort

My mother shocked the hell out of me this Christmas: she actually gave me a present that I love and will love to use: a vintage 80s Calvin Klein coat: thick black wool, heavy satiny lining, delicately padded drop-shoulders. Her act of gifting was shocking because Christmas is usually a time for her to assert her maternal domination.

Her Xmas presents to me and my sister are always things of comfort—thick socks, booties, pajamas in soft loud colorful stuff. This is not so unusual; plenty of mothers give ugly Xmas gifts. But the difference with my mother is that her gifting is not a result of cute motherly oblivion. My mother, my sister and I are all quite obsessed with clothes and discourse about it with each other all the time. Thus, her buying her kids ugly pajamas or bathrobes is not from some dottily misguided sense of cute clothing: she knows better. Besides which, this is the carol I sing every Christmas morning: “MA I HATE PAJAMAS AND I DON’T WEAR THEM STOP BUYING ME GIFTS I DON’T WANT BECAUSE IT’S A WASTE OF MONEY ANYWAY!” She ignores this and trudges over to the Macy’s sleepwear department, which might as well be Siberia to me. For my mother, Xmas gifting is a performance that completely ignores her children’s desires as individual adults. The gifts allow her to render her weird, unwieldy kids into manageable pocket-sized tots. In her mind, the ugly warm gifts function quite effectively as textile reincarnations of breastmilk.

I’ve hated those pajama gifts not only because they were ugly but because they didn’t represent the mother I know and love. My mother is not a typical Korean mother, and in many ways, not a typical mother, period. She is not, and has never been, the kind of cookie-baking, stay-at-home mother who micromanages her kids’ psyches. She has always been interested in perfecting her own psyche (As every mother should be, I believe). Having no room or time here to catalogue my mother’s feminine-maternal idiosyncrasies, I will only say that she is an artist who welcomes being called “Mommie Dearest” by her children (fully aware and proud of the Joan Crawford reference...although I think she thinks of herself more Faye Dunaway in the film rather than the character of Crawford), and give you this description of Mrs. Yepanchin from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot as proxy portrait:

Looking at her daughters, she was worried by the suspicion that she was continually ruining their future prospects, that her character was ridiculous, disgraceful, and unbearable, for which, of course, she incessantly blamed her daughters and her husband, and quarrelled with them for days on end, loving them, at the same time, to distraction and almost with a passion....What worried her most was the suspicion that her daughters were becoming almost as “eccentric” as she, and that there are not, and ought not to be, girls like them in society. ‘They are growing into nihilists, I’m sure of it!’ she kept repeating to herself every minute.

My mother is a self-aware and proudly nihilistic woman who worries that her daughters will become nihilists, gloriously denying her own part in creating those nihilistic daughters. But perhaps this is why she goes a bit crazy with crazy-printed flannel come December: it’s her time to be a normal kind of mother.

But this year, giving me the gift of the vintage Calvin Klein coat that made me look like the babynihilist that I dream of becoming, she was able to be a normal kind of mother in her own abnormal way. A week before Xmas, my mother and I were elbow-deep in musty old clothes at a particular charity shop in San Francisco. This store is a favorite of my mother’s because they sell hoards of old designer duds from rich bitch closets at tax-free cheap prices (they benefit some Catholic school or another). I’ve grown to love the shop also, because on that particular day I’d found a wool Ungaro jacket with little gold buttons in the shape of beans.

The Calvin Klein coat that became my Xmas gift was purchased at this very same shop. In reality, I’d found the thing myself, last summer. I loved that the coat was big but rounded, and with its dropped shoulders, did not give such a boringly masculine, military silhouette. But it always feels weird buying a winter coat in summer, and its tagged price being a bit too high ($175!!) I let it go, but asked my mother to keep an eye out for it during the shop’s mega-sales: “Buy it if it comes down 70 percent,” I ordered. “It’s the one with the drop-shoulders!!” In the interim months, my mother lost sight of it and we figured, that was that. So it was a little Christmas miracle when the coat reappeared during our jaunt. I bought the Ungaro, my mother eyed a narrow mink coat, but we left the Calvin Klein on the rack. Its price was still $175, and the sale was only 50 percent. The old Korean lady in me came out and I refused to buy it for 80 some dollars.

So when my mother surprised me with the coat it was touching because it was an acknowledgement of my desire to create my own idea of my bodily self—drop-shouldered and all. For once, she thought about my body as I thought about it rather than her uterus thought about it. But I realize that it was still a kind of a maternal assertion, because the thing is a coat. It is a thick motherfucker, so thick that wearing it just over a t-shirt makes me break out into a bit of a sweat. She still wants to stand for comfort after all.

maternamorphosis

The four scariest strung together words in the English language: “I’M BECOMING MY MOTHER.” Lately, I’ve been thinking without fear about becoming my mother, and not for the usual boring Oedipal reason. I’ve been having some trouble this year trying to get my book of gender-race theory published. While wallowing in frustration, I found that my mother was going through a parallel pain, trying to sell huge oil paintings in this particularly nasty economy. Before I think of this woman who birthed me as my mother, I think of her as an artist. She is a woman who has a degree in textile engineering, who married and gave up a career, followed her future ex-husband to America, then with a couple of weird kids in tow, went to graduate school, got an MFA, and followed her dream of becoming a painter. But my mother was never headhunted by major New York galleries, and making a living as an artist has been a tenacious crazy-quilting of teaching and self-promotion. For years I’ve watched her struggle, and actually be happy in this struggle. Now it’s hit me that I’m doing the same thing she is, except my paint is the keypad of a computer.

The protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy says of his mother: “I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. All I need now is a son.” With me, of course, my mother is still very much living, and to be completely “her” I would need a daughter as well. But I like this idea that becoming your mother (no matter your gender) occurs way before you become a parent. In the above picture, my mother is about the age as I am now, except that she already has two children, the elder of whom is 9 years old. In my mind, this is how I always see my mother: arms crossed in defiance, hard eyes, jeaned legs in battle position. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to become, considering that physically, it is what I’m destined for anyway. Looking at this picture of my flannel-and-jeans clad mother, I realized that I already dress like her: I am a flannel-and-jeans clad mother-minus-son-and-daughter.

I want to turn genetic destiny into a personal style. Lacking a uterus, and determined that my sperm will remain deadstock in this world, I want instead to dress like my mother in her 30s. But in copying her look, I don’t want to turn to any recognizably symbolic or iconic pieces of traditional femininity. For instance, I’m not going to do anything with her long-sleeved, high-necked dark butterfly print chiffon dress except keep it hung up like a painting. The femininity of my mother that I want to locate for myself is a less intuitive one. One that I know is there but was not always an apparent part of her life as “Mother.” I like to think about my mother as she would have been if she’d never married the man she didn’t like, if she’d aggressively used birth control nine months before my birth. My mother if she’d never been “mother.” I like to think about my mother as never needing to protect and swath her procreative areas with soft skirts, but pack them into a pair of hard tight jeans. I want to wear my mother’s jeans. Not “mom” jeans but “mother” jeans.

Not that “mom jeans” and “mother jeans” are unrelated. Mom jeans connote those jeans produced in the late 70s and most of the 80s, with a singular cut: high waist, give in the hip, restraining at the butt and thighs. The curvy silhouette that their seams suggest led to these jeans being named “Mom”—cuddly, nurturing, soft, feminine body. But the historiography of mom jeans is a little misleading, because they were actually not made for bodies intent on being comfortable as pie-baking moms. Look at this priceless instructive label from a pair of mom jeans made by Levi’s (from my personal collection):

What a cute text. The girl puts the jeans on and is sweating-crying in flabbergastation because they fit so ill; she looks like she’s wearing a barrel, an extra in a Loony Tunes cartoon. But never fear: the jeans themselves tell her to “wash ‘em HOT inside out” and tumble dry them until they have a HOT fit: “the MORE you wash ‘em the better they look and fit!” The “after” picture shows the same crying girl now all in smiles, with jeans tightly hugging her curves. This arduous process of making your jeans look HOT with hot water and air seems akin to churning butter. In this age in which elastine has invaded the jeans world, gals hardly need to go through a particular process in order to get the tight femininity they want from their jeans. But if this anachronism is what makes these particular jeans maternal, they are hardly “Mom.” “Mom” implies familiarity, ease, mundane comfort. These jeans are not actually that. These jeans are a process of becoming intimate with an unyielding and unfamiliar object, to make it get to know your body, to get your body to get to know the breathing pattern of a textile. So let’s give due dignity back to these kind of jeans, which were not always soft and comfy, but only became that way because their original identity is hard and unyielding: “MOTHER JEANS.”

The Welsh singer Duffy says of her own mother: “Always a good pair of tight jeans—that’s what she taught me. She used to sit in the bath for hours trying to make them fit.” I like it that maternal pedagogy here doesn’t have anything to do with nurture, kindness, or warm milk, but crafting the perfect denim pedestal for your butt. My mother never gave me this lesson explicitly, but I like to think that a woman who wore tiny miniskirts in 1960s Korea and fearlessly yelled back profanities to boys who made lewd insults would have gone in for some hard jeans that required hot water baths to grow accustomed to her body. The fabric of my mother’s jeans in that defiant photo doesn’t look particularly hard but I like to imagine that they once were.

Even if “Mother” is an identity that is granted by the use of one’s uterus, why should it automatically have a “soft” cultural identity? I never thought of the womb as a squishy place anyways. It seems less like a warm wet cavern and more like an industrial workshop in which fetuses are stamped out. Like the reverse of a callous: a hard skin that becomes soft with use. Mother jeans are hard jeans designed to give a hard outline to a soft shape. My mother may not have worn hard jeans, but she’d weathered enough shit in her life to give meaning to their designation. Mother jeans should produce hard femininity. After all, my mother expelled her children not through soft natural childbirth but a caesarian. Every time I put on my hard jeans, I’m stepping into the depths opened up by a gaping sliced mouth on my mother’s belly, and her legs are my legs.