On sap and blood: family trees, literary legacies and systems of kinship in contemporary representations of queer families

ii DIREITOS DE AUTOR E CONDIÇÕES DE UTILIZAÇÃO DO TRABALHO POR TERCEIROS Este é um trabalho académico que pode ser utilizado por terceiros desde que respeitadas as regras e boas práticas internacionalmente aceites, no que concerne aos direitos de autor e direitos conexos. Assim, o presente trabalho pode ser utilizado nos termos previstos na licença abaixo indicada. Caso o utilizador necessite de permissão para poder fazer um uso do trabalho em condições não previstas no licenciamento indicado, deverá contactar o autor, através do RepositóriUM da Universidade do Minho. Licença concedida aos utilizadores deste trabalho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Ana Gabriela Macedo, for taking me under her wing and assuring me that to become a PhD student was a wise idea. Thank you for the push into academia and for being a crucial part of all this. I’m grateful to Centro de Estudos Humanísticos for providing me with better material conditions that allowed me to carry on with my research and to my research group for their support. I would also like to thank my students, who, without knowing it, teach me as much as I teach them (or even more). The future will indeed be brighter – and queerer. To my parents and my brother, thank you for giving me a physical and metaphorical home. After writing and reading so much about families, one realises that one’s own is always, in its way and at the same time, both ordinary and unique. To my incredible (grand)parents, Carolina and Manuel: thank you for waking up, every single day and early in the morning, to feed me, dress me and take me to school, where this desire to read and write started, and for having taught me that perseverance is the force majeur . You have survived a dictatorship, adoption, emigration and the grief of losing your children and I owe you everything. To David and Eduardo, with whom I always feel at home. Thank you for listening to me for hours on end about this thesis and for pointing me in the right direction. To Adelina, “a gender mother of my heart”: thank you for showing me that one never stops learning, if only we are willing to. A mother figure as good, kind and generous as they come. My safe home: Sandra, Daniel, Luís, and Ricardo, with whom I shared the hardships of writing a thesis, as well as all the other challenges that haunt young academics. Our family has now been expanded through Laura and Luísa, who are sure to become as incredible as their parents and their adoptive uncles. To Andreia, for having been a teacher, a colleague and a friend, one after the other and all at the same time. You have been a part of all this from its early stages and it is a cliché, but hardly untrue, to say that everything would have been very different and a lot harder without your constant support. To Pedro, for wanting to make a home with me. I may know nothing about physics and you may know nothing about queer theory but seeing Faraday and Butler together on the shelf in our home is queer enough to me. We have survived going through a pandemic in the same home, each at their desk, writing our thesis – if we have survived to this, it is clear that this is going to last. iv STATEMENT OF INTEGRITY I hereby declare having conducted this academic work with integrity. I confirm that I have not used plagiarism or any form of undue use of information or falsification of results along the process leading to its elaboration. I further declare that I have fully acknowledged the Code of Ethical Conduct of the University of Minho. v ON SAP AND BLOOD: FAMILY TREES, LITERARY LEGACIES AND SYSTEMS OF KINSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY REPRESENTATIONS OF QUEER FAMILIES ABSTRACT Through a comparative reading of several literary works, while also evoking other art forms, namely photography, this thesis will address matters of queer kinship, inheritance and legacy in contemporary representations of families in the context of the United States of America, namely in two novels Middlesex (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides (1960-) and The Great Believers (2018) by Rebecca Makkai (1978-), a play, The Inheritance (2018) by Matthew Lopez (1977-) and a memoir, The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson (1973-). This comparative reading is established through a dialogue between a set of metaphors that permeate the case studies (ghosts, family trees) while also exploring how the discourses about queer bodies and families have been reshaped and challenged over the last twenty years. Looking at families, in the context of queer theories and kinship studies, is perceived as a way of analysing how heteronormative norms shape both the home and the social, as well as how queer individuals have been producing both alternative but also assimilationist kinship structures that guarantee structures for safety and care. Ultimately, this thesis intends to open up a discussion about how queer families have been represented in literature and other art forms, how these representations reinforce or challenge notions of nuclear families and how these are shaped by social and gender norms, and how one generation of artists can contribute, not only to the representation of their times but also to a transgenerational legacy of cultural references. KEYWORDS : families, genealogy, literature, memory, queer temporalities. vi SOBRE SEIVA E SANGUE: ÁRVORES GENEALÓGICAS, LEGADOS LITERÁRIOS E SISTEMAS DE PARENTESCO EM REPRESENTAÇÕES CONTEMPORÂNEAS DE FAMÍLIAS QUEER RESUMO Através de uma leitura comparatista de várias obras literárias contemporâneas, evocando também outras formas de arte, particularmente a fotografia, esta tese abordará questões de parentesco e afinidades queer , herança e legado em representações contemporâneas de famílias no contexto dos Estados Unidos da América, nomeadamente em dois romances, Middlesex (2002) de Jeffrey Eugenides (1960) e The Great Believers (2018) de Rebecca Makkai (1978-), uma peça, The Inheritance (2018) de Matthew Lopez (1977-) e uma memoir , The Argonauts (2015) de Maggie Nelson (1973-). Esta leitura comparatista é estabelecida através de um diálogo entre um conjunto de metáforas que permeiam os estudos de caso (fantasmas, árvores genealógicas), explorando ao mesmo tempo como os discursos sobre corpos e famílias queer foram remodelados e desafiados ao longo dos últimos vinte anos. Olhar para as famílias, através de teorias queer e affect studies , é entendido como uma forma de analisar como as normas heteronormativas moldam tanto o doméstico como o social, assim como as formas como pessoas queer têm vindo a produzir estruturas de parentesco, alternativas e assimiladoras, que garantem proteção e cuidado. Em última análise, esta tese pretende abrir uma discussão sobre como as famílias queer têm sido representadas na literatura e outras formas de arte, como estas representações reforçam ou desafiam noções de famílias nucleares e como estas são moldadas por normas sociais e de género, e ainda o modo como uma geração de artistas pode contribuir, não só para a representação dos seus próprios tempos mas também para um legado transgeracional de referências culturais. PALAVRAS-CHAVE : famílias, genealogia, literatura, memória, temporalidades queer . vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................. 1 1.1. SOWING ................................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2. QUEER ROOTS ........................................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1. ALL IN THE FAMILY: MAPPING THE INTERSEX BODY IN JEFFREY EUGENIDES’ MIDDLESEX ...............21 1.1. MIDDLESEX .............................................................................................................................................21 1.2. A GENEALOGY OF THE INTERSEX BODY ............................................................................................................26 1.3. TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA ......................................................................................................................37 1.4. FAMILY MATTERS: GENDER ROLES AT HOME .....................................................................................................49 1.5. CONTINUITY AND CONTINGENCY ....................................................................................................................70 1.6. MDLSX : QUEERING MIDDLESEX ...................................................................................................................76 1.7. A ROAD TO SOMEWHERE .............................................................................................................................88 CHAPTER 2. PHOTOGRAPHIC ARC(HIV)ES, MEMORY AND FAMILY TIES IN THE GREAT BELIEVERS ........................91 2.1. LOOKING BACK: 1985 ...............................................................................................................................91 2.2. STRANGE SOUVENIRS .................................................................................................................................95 2.2.1. Looking Back I: Jürgen Baldiga ........................................................................................................96 2.2.2. Looking Back II: Nan Goldin ............................................................................................................98 2.3. A FAMILY ALBUM .................................................................................................................................... 104 2.4. FUNERAL RITES ...................................................................................................................................... 112 2.5. FAMILY HEIRLOOMS ................................................................................................................................. 130 2.6. IN LOOP ............................................................................................................................................... 135 CHAPTER 3. GHOSTS, QUEER HERITAGE AND COMMUNITY IN THE INHERITANCE ............................................. 139 3.1. THE INHERITANCE ................................................................................................................................... 139 3.2. (IN)VISIBLE GHOSTS ................................................................................................................................ 140 3.3. TOBY’S PHANTOMS .................................................................................................................................. 150 3.4. A HISTORY LESSON .................................................................................................................................. 158 3.5. REBUILDING A RUIN ................................................................................................................................. 162 3.6. LITERARY LEGACIES ................................................................................................................................. 175 3.7. FANTASY MOTHERS .................................................................................................................................. 181 3.8. A HAUNTING .......................................................................................................................................... 187 CHAPTER 4. “IN DRAG AS A MEMOIRIST”: BODIES IN TRANSIT AND FAMILY-MAKING IN MAGGIE NELSON’S THE ARGONAUTS ................................................................................................................................................... 188 4.1 GENDERNAUTS ........................................................................................................................................ 188 4.2. THE ARGONAUTS ..................................................................................................................................... 189 4.3. I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU HETERONORMATIVE .................................................................................................. 194 4.4. THE ARGO: RECLAIMING THE QUEER ............................................................................................................ 218 5 fear, of remembrance, of the virus itself as it passes from one body to another), as well as family-making, from friends who take care of the ill, from gay men getting married to each other, to the inability to strive as a gay man within a heteronormative family and social structure. Once again, the image of the ghost is present, in the shape of a literary inheritance and the acknowledgment of those who were writing about being gay in the past, albeit with shame and secrecy, as the figure of the modernist writer, E.M. Forster materializes to confront the men with their past, the possibility of a gay canon and to be himself confronted with his inability to live openly as a gay man. The inclusion of two AIDS narratives in this thesis seems particularly relevant given the shift that the virus provoked in gay communities regarding matters of family and kinship 3 , as well as the way how the virus and its presence still haunt contemporary ideas of gay culture and sexuality. The last chapter of the thesis will analyse Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts (2015). Nelson’s book looks at queer family-making and Nelson’s own experience of having a child with her transgender husband. Pregnancy and same-sex marriage, and how easy it is to lose hard-won rights, are also brought into question while reflecting on same-sex partnerships and parenting, as well as on the achievements and setbacks of gender equality law-making. Again, queer commodification and assimilation, as well as matters of family-making, and particularly mothering and motherhood, are also questioned, showing, hopefully, the distance between the first work analysed, Middlesex , and this last one, as well as the way how every case establishes a dialogue with the other, either through dissonance or alignment. This final Chapter, more than engaging with queer matters, also provides a view of how motherhood is represented and dependent on normative readings of gender expectations, while also reflecting on how women are always perceived as caretakers – and failed mothers when they do not fully commit to the act of mothering. Spanning from two novels, a memoir, a play, and even photography, written and produced in different times and with very distinct political environments, marked by distinct feelings towards gender and queerness, and dealing with the complexity of transgender and intersex bodies, as well as the lives of gay men during the AIDS years and after, this thesis is a constellation of artworks that, in their own way, look at how families work as structures of caring and kinship or how they reject and fail queer individuals. 3 “In conversations about the changes in their midst, gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area sometimes linked the lesbian baby boom to AIDS by juxtaposing the two as moments in a continuous cycle of life's passing and regeneration. New lives replaced lives lost, implicitly reasserting "community" as a unit which, like the disease itself, spanned divisions of gender, race, age, and class. Children (whether biological, foster, or adopted) brought generational depth to this community, along with the promise of a future in what some saw as genocidal times” (Weston, 1991: p.180) 6 Moreover, the comparative aspect of this thesis intends to make clearer the invisible links between these texts, while also suggesting new ways of reading them in dialogue with each other as part of a broader context of queer production. Through a lens that looks at the implications of memory and queer temporalities 4 , this thesis intends to provide a new look at case studies that have already been discussed through another theoretical apparatus, with different conclusions. As Hirsch writes, “[m]emory signals an affective link to the past – a sense, precisely, of a material "living connection" – and it is powerfully mediated by technologies like literature, photography, and testimony” (Hirsch, 2012: p. 33); it is exactly this affective intersection between the past and the present, mainly in literature and photography, that this thesis will work with. Hopefully, the links between the texts, both visual and written, are clearer than muddled, and the conclusions that are intended to be achieved, if any are indeed achieved, may they be ‘queerer’ than solid. Even if this thesis follows a purely academic structure, with its well-defined chapters, a list of references that punctuate the text here, and there and an analysis of texts recognised as worthy of academic research, due to their accolades, reviews and financial success, in its writing there was an attempt to proliferate the intersections between texts and theories rather than narrowing them down, to expand the concept of queerness instead of delimiting it, by using it as a tool for analysis rather than purely as an identity category or a label in which to place each author and book, an attempt ‘to plant trees rather than cutting them down’, to borrow from Paul B. Preciado’s metaphor of the limitations of academic discourse – and the need to queer them with a “manifesto [that] could be understood as a counterclinic of queer and trans sexualities” (2018: p. 4), in order to avoid the enclosure of academic discourse while still using some of its critical tools to understand what had been excluded from it. Academic discourse and its grammar not only are like a forest that doesn’t allow us to distinguish between individual trees but also go a step further, forcing the researcher to cut the trees down in order to understand the forest. As the logic of the dildo proclaims, instead of cutting down trees, lives, desires, and sexualities, this book 5 is a call to care and proliferate, to connect and multiply (Preciado; 2018: p. 4) 4 In the article “Like Daughter, Like Grandson”, Moskowitz quotes both Marianne Hirsch and Ann Chetkovitch and the natural articulation between trauma, memory and queer studies, “to generations, time, temporality and the important ways of rethinking these that queer theory has brought us” (Hirsh in Moskowitz, 2021: p. 1), as well as trauma and queer studies as “they seek ways to build not just sexuality but emotional and personal life into models of political life and its transformation” (Chetcovich in Moskowitz, 2021: p. 1). 5 Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto . 7 There are many trees in this thesis and in the works analysed in it: many family trees, with more or less branches, all in different moments of blooming, trees that are food for silk worms ( Middlesex ), trees that men dying of AIDS grow in paper cups in the windowsill of the hospital where they draw their final breath ( The Great Believers ), a tree that is presumed to be magic and the cure for AIDS ( The Inheritance ), a Killing Tree in Cambodja that frightens a mother-to-be, and a boat named Argo, whose parts keep being replaced, the tree reshaped – queered? – into the body of a boat ( The Argonauts ). Hopefully, by the end of the reading of this thesis, the contours of some type of forest can be glimpsed. If “[i]n bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine” (Nelson, 2016: p. 81), in a thesis one must also give space for the case studies to dialogue, for the writer to find a space in which not to exhaust their future work, but still, undivine and certainly not spiritual, this thesis does intend to also make space for something somewhat innovative, while giving in to “[t]he queer impulse to forge communities between the living and the dead” (Love, 2007: p. 31). 1.2. Queer Roots To attempt a definition of ‘queerness’ seems to go exactly against its desire to disrupt 6 ; and yet, not to define it would be to betray the need for more queer discourses in academia and elsewhere, aware that these definitions often overlap but also distance themselves from each other 7 . If it started as an insult to define LGBTQI+ individuals, ‘queer’ has been reclaimed in manifold ways, from new political stands, to new geographies and even new temporalities. There has been, however, also a stepping back from LGBTQI+ individuals and a denial of being identified as queer, something perhaps more visible in the rejection of the label by transgender individuals. In this thesis, ‘queer’ is understood as a manner of making and addressing gender, as a way of describing anyone that does not comply with any normative discourses concerning gender roles and identities, sexual orientations, and gendered bodies, as an umbrella term that may give in to the pressure of trying to be too broad, too inclusive, too over-arching but always ambiguous 8 . 6 “[A]ttempting to define what queer is … would be a decidedly un-queer thing to do” (Sullivan, 2003: p. 43). 7 “[Q]ueer theorists are a diverse lot exhibiting important disagreements and divergences” (Seidman 1995: 125)” (Sullivan, 2003: p. 43). 8 “Two distinct (and seemingly contradictory) ways of thinking about the “queer” in queer studies have emerged in productive tension over the past few decades. In one use of the word, queer works as an umbrella term for a range of sexual and gender identities that are not “straight,” or at least not normative. In a second sense, queer functions more as a verb than a noun, signaling a critical stance – productively corrosive at times – that is skeptical of existing identity categories and more interested in understanding the production of normativity and its queer companion, nonnormativity, than in delineating any particular population” (Somerville, 2020: p. 2). 8 Moreover, if “queer theory has been defined not only as anti-heteronormative, but as antinormative” (Ahmed, 2014; p. 149), then it provides a productive framework in which to analyse matters of family-making, inheritance and kinship, parenthood and patriarchal family structures, all informed by myths of normalcy. For Sarah Ahmed, in the face of compulsive heterosexuality, “the failure to orient oneself ‘towards’ the ideal sexual object affects how we live in the world, an affect that is readable as the failure to reproduce, and as a threat to the social ordering of life itself” (2014: p. 145). Every sexual orientation, heterosexual or other, is informed by these “narratives of ideal heterosexuality in one’s orientation to others” (Ahmed, 2014; p. 146), narratives that mark and dictate every orientation that is not normative as deviant. This is also sustained by Butler, who address how marriage and kinship are thought of as equivalents, “that marriage is and ought to remain a heterosexual institution and bond but also that kinship does not work, or does not qualify as kinship , unless it assumes a recognizable family form” (2004; p. 102), and therefore implying that certain types of queer people will become legitimised through marriage, while others will be, again, left out of this new normative structure. In this thesis, kinship is perceived as a way of family-making, one that is not sustained by patriarchal and heterosexual structures, but by a horizontal matrix of caring and acts of mothering that takes into account “the relationship between marriage and “the reproduction of patriarchal relations” (Boellstorff, 2007:p. 227), and therefore questions how fitting marriage is as a social mechanism of legal recognition, how women engage with it only as mothers or wives, and what alternatives there may be to these structures through a queer and feminist analysis of the nuclear family. Given that “[b]odies take the shape of norms that are repeated over time and with force” (Ahmed, 2014: p. 145), these heteronormative narratives of familymaking also shape these bodies, restraining them to normative models of making gender and sexuality, establishing the family, through an emphasis on generation, as the foundation upon which culture is reproduced, therefore placing non-heterosexual families as potentially endangering this ‘progress’: The reproduction of life – in the form of the future generation – becomes bound up with the reproduction of culture, through the stabilisation of specific arrangements for living (‘the family’). The family is idealisable through the narrative of threat and insecurity; the family is presented as vulnerable, and as needing to be defended against others who violate the conditions of its reproduction. … heterosexuality becomes a script that binds the familial with the global: the coupling of man and woman becomes a kind of ‘birthing’, a giving birth not only to new life, but to ways of living that are already recognisable as forms of civilisation. It is this narrative of coupling as a condition for the reproduction of life, culture and value that explains the slide in racist narratives between the fear of strangers and immigrants (xenophobia), the fear of queers (homophobia) and the fear of miscegenation (as well as other illegitimate couplings). (Ahmed, 2014: pp. 144-145) 9 In the 1990s, when it was first used as a reclaimed term, ‘queer’ was meant to disrupt, to work as a contestation to the hegemonic effects of heteronormativity 9 , as a word “that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual subjects” with a commitment to interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality. (Eng, Halberstam & Muñoz, 2005; p. 1) As defined in Tendencies , in which Eve K. Sedgwick establishes the 1992 New York City pride march “as the moment of Queer” (1995: p. vii), something supported by David M. Halperin when the author writes “in 1990 came the “queer” moment, with its militant vindication of deviant sex and gender styles” (2003; p. 53), the term is perceived in a manner that shall also be used to think of gender in this thesis, one that, according to Sedgwick, was even used by other authors as a way of encompassing race and ethnicity as: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us (Sedgwick, 1995: p. 7). Queer may emerge as an intersectional promise to disrupt the hegemony of any identity category. Faced with the mainstream of gay and lesbian identity, queerness must then redefine and resignify itself so that it can encompass the complexity of identity categories and the spaces in which they overlap, becoming an area of studies and theories that is aware of the world in which it is being put into practice, “a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor with a fixed referent” (Eng, Halberstam & Muñoz, 2005; p. 1). Cathy J. Cohen also addressed the need for queer politics to leave myopic views of gender and sexuality, and a duality of heterosexuality and queerness, in detriment 9 “Judith Butler, and Monique Wittig argue (in slightly different ways) that heterosexuality is a complex matrix of discourses, institutions, and so on, that has become normalised in our culture, thus making particular relationships, lifestyles, and identities, seem natural, ahistorical, and universal. In short, heterosexuality, as it is currently understood and experienced, is a (historically and culturally specific) truth-effect of systems of power/knowledge. Given this, its dominant position and current configuration are contestable and open to change” (Sullivan, 2003: p. 39). 10 for an intersectional view of queerness in relation to heterosexuality 10 , one in which “individuals who consistently activate only one characteristic of their identity, or a single perspective of consciousness” also understand “the multiple and intersecting systems of power that largely dictate our life chances” (1997: p. 440), something also supported by Nikki Sullivan, as the author explains how the gay and lesbian movements of the 1970s were often criticized by individuals of colour given the white focus of the movements, as well as the way how sexuality was perceived as the first and most prominent source or privilege or oppression. It is this renewed way of ‘queering’ that is demanded and needed when considering “the latetwentieth-century global crises that have configured historical relations among political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies” (Eng, Halberstam & Muñoz, 2005; p. 1). Therefore, queer studies are, now, more than a hermeneutics to read gendered bodies; they can also challenge the ways how categories of sexual difference are used to either privilege or oppress individuals and collective groups of people, aware of the oppressing forces that shape everyday life. As new challenges arise (from liberalism to terrorism, to climate change 11 , to name a few), so do queer studies adapt (or they intend to adapt) to all of them, becoming, at the same time, an umbrella term for every struggle, while becoming dangerously close to being devoid of actual force, with “so many portentous – weighty yet vaporous – significations” (Halperin, 2003: p. 339). For Susan Stryker, queer theory, in the early 1990s, had “a potential for attacking the antitranssexual moralism so unthinkingly embedded in most progressive analyses of gender and sexuality without resorting to a reactionary, homophobic, and misogynistic counteroffensive” (Stryker, 2004; p. 213). As Annamarie Jagose writes, looking back at how queer theory was perceived in its early stages, queer was seen 10 “Cathy Cohen challenged the tendency to understand “queer” in opposition to “straight.” This binary, she argued, overlooked the fact that not all heterosexualities historically have been afforded the privilege of normative status. Cohen urged her readers to consider how race has functioned to mark some heterosexualities as suspect, even criminal, pointing to the examples of the US history of legal prohibitions against interracial heterosexuality, and the stigmatization of unmarried women of color who receive public assistance to support their children. Cohen cautioned readers not to rely on sexual identity or practice alone for understanding how power is distributed. Instead, drawing on intersectional analysis from women of color feminisms, she argued for the importance of distinguishing heterosexuality from heteronormativity , which she understood to be as much a racialized concept as a sexual or gendered one.” (Somerville, 2020: p. 5). 11 “Such emergencies include the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of the welfare state; the Bush administration’s infinite “war on terrorism” and the acute militarization of state violence; the escalation of U.S. empire building and the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; the devolution of civil society and the erosion of civil rights; the pathologizing of immigrant communities as “terrorist” and racialized populations as “criminal”; the shifting forms of citizenship and migration in a putatively “postidentity” and “postracial” age; the politics of intimacy and the liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the return to “moral values” and “family values” as a prophylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent.” (Eng, Halberstam & Muñoz, 2005: p. 2). 11 not as a positivity but as a positionality, not as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm. These descriptions are typical of the many definitional sketches of queer that proliferated in the early to mid-1990s where identity is recognized as an artifact of the normalizing force of modern power, and queerness is therefore characterizable not in terms of any positive substance but in oppositional relation to normativity. (Jagose, 2015: pp. 31-2). When Stryker realised “that transsexuals were considered abject creatures in most feminist and gay or lesbian contexts” (Stryker, 2004: p. 213), she wrote “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”, an attempt at opening up a space for the re-configuration of transgender bodies, a creation of “new territories, both analytic and material, for a critically refigured transsexual practice” (Stryker, 2004: p. 213). Ten years later, in 2004, Stryker revisited her foundational text, a work that was to shape “an early formulation of transgender theory” that Stryker meant “to help define “queer” as a family to which transsexuals belonged” (Stryker, 2004: p. 213), only to conclude that the energy of the queer movement of the 1990s had been lost. While in the 1990s, there was a certain utopian feeling regarding the future of the community, Stryker seems rather disappointed about the failure of queer theory to fully operate changes: The queer vision that animated my life, and the lives of so many others in the brief historical moment of the early 1990s, held out the dazzling prospect of a compensatory, utopian reconfiguration of community. It seemed an anti-oedipal, ecstatic leap into a postmodern space of possibility in which the foundational containers of desire could be ruptured to release a raw erotic power that could be harnessed to a radical social agenda. That vision still takes my breath away. A decade later, with another Bush in the White House and another war in the Persian Gulf, it is painfully apparent that the queer revolution of the early 1990s yielded, at best, only fragile and tenuous forms of liberal progress in certain sectors and did not radically transform society – and as in the broader world, so too in the academy. (Stryker, 2004: p. 213) For Heather Love, ‘queer’ is, due to its origin as a slur, less respectful than ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’, a word that attempts “to counter the stigma by incorporating it” (Love, 2007: p. 2). If “[t]he history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants” (Love, 2007: p. 1), it seems appropriate to lean on the term ‘queer’ and how is seems to encompass the full injury made upon queer individuals: [w]hen queer was adopted in the late 1980s it was chosen because it evoked a long history of insult and abuse – you could hear the hurt in it. Queer theorists drew on the energies of confrontational, stigma- 12 inflicted activism of groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation who had first taken up this “forcibly bittersweet” term” (Love, 2007: p. 2). Therefore, ‘queer’ can be thought of as an operative term that brings together the traumatic past, present challenges, and future possibilities of thinking and doing gender. For Sedgwick, “[q]ueer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant … keenly, it is relational, and strange” (Sedgwick in Nelson, 2016: p. 35). “As stated by Love, the backward turn is neither a form of nostalgia nor a fetishization of queer melancholia; it questions the existing queer movement that only has a vision of the future and lacks a politics of the past” (Liu, 2020: p.10) and the case studies that are to be analysed establish a very strong link with the past as a way of addressing present struggles. Moreover, ‘queer’ can also be perceived as “a sort of vague and indefinable set of practices and (political) positions that has the potential to challenge normative knowledge and identities (Sullivan, 2003: p. 43-44). Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed write that “[t]he history of AIDS in the United States and the history of queer theory in the academy overlap almost exactly” (2012: p. 145), while claiming that, if earlier queer theory seemed to want to cut ties with the past, a second wave of theorists attempted at working the earlier trauma by turning back into the past “by temporal disorientation and “queer time” towards negative feelings, “such as rage, shame, and loss” that, for the authors, “are signs of a posttraumatic response to the first wave’s own traumatized forgetting” (2012: p. 146). This ‘queer time’, as theorised by Jack Halberstam, arises in alternative to ‘straight time’ and ‘reproductive time’ 12 , timelines “shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity, capitalism, modernity, and apocalypse, and that naming this temporality and speculating on possible alternatives might productively inform discussions of same-sex marriage” (Boellstorff, 2007: p. 228). It is with these “post-traumatic responses” that this thesis engages directly, through ‘feeling backward’, queer temporalities, the haunting of the past in dialogue with the present and the future, and reparative readings, in both the theoretical framework and the selected case studies. As Love writes, 12 “Any analysis of heteronormative temporalities must therefore incorporate not only straight time, but also reproductive time. Reproductive time is a cyclical imagined future of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death (Halberstam, 2005), most closely associated with womanhood (Freeman, 2010: 5). For women, marriage marks the temporal transition from Childhood into the sexualized and reproductive role of wife within the private sphere; from the wedding onwards, pro-natal sex, childbearing, and childrearing are not only sanctioned but expected of the wife. Entry into marriage thus marks the self as embodying a desire for futurity through the biological and social reproduction of the Child. The best interests of the Child, then, is not simply a fantasy of a desirable social order, but a fantasy of the Child growing up to enact that social order. The fantasy is not addressed universally to children in the present, but to the Child conceived as a future white, cisgendered, middle-class, and abled heterosexual self” (Stewart, C. 2019: p. 5). 13 [t]he emphasis on damage in queer studies exists in a state of tension with a related and contrary tendency – the need to resist damage and to affirm queer existence. This tension is evident in discussions of the "progress" of gays and lesbians across the twentieth century. Although many queer critics take exception to the idea of a linear, triumphalist view of history, we are in practice deeply committed to the notion of progress; despite our reservations, we just cannot stop dreaming of a better life for queer people. Such utopian desires are at the heart of the collective project of queer studies and integral to the history of gay and lesbian identity. Still, the critical compulsion to fix – at least imaginatively – the problems of queer life has made it difficult to fully engage with such difficulties. Critics find themselves in an odd position: we are not sure if we should explore the link between homosexuality and loss, or set about proving that it does not exist. (Love, 2007: p. 3) Queer theories and affect theories have also been walking hand in hand and more recent theoretical work on queerness has been informed by affect theory, away from psychoanalytical approaches to detriment of “frameworks that allow for looser, more descriptive accounts of psychic and corporeal experience” (Love in Chinn, 2012: p. 126). As Wen Liu writes, both “share equally ambitious goals in the initialization of the project of paradigmatic transformation beyond the linguistic or the cultural turn, shifting and troubling the boundaries, definitions, and approaches to identity, body, and matter” (2020: p. 1). To Love, the interaction between affect and queer theories allows for an understanding of oppression at a small scale, at how non-normative lives are daily affected by acts of homophobia and racism, by looking at “the ways that everyday experience is structured by inequality” (Love in Chinn, 2012: p. 126). Liu addresses what was termed as ‘queer turn’ as theorized by Jagose and Donald Hall and how it inspires antifoundational knowledge production that persistently challenges institutionally established identities such as “women” or “homosexual” and the biologically deterministic notions of the body as well as engages with various publics—mass media, science, medicine, religion, public policy, and so on—to trouble the fetishized normality and create alternative possibilities of politics and belonging. (Liu, 2020: p. 2) Queer affect, in the shape of the three strains that Liu identifies (queer negativity, queer temporality and queer as machinic body), is then a response to the “limited theoretical and political possibility of what Sedgwick terms paranoid criticism in the initial formation of queer theory”, proposing a conceptualization of “erotic life beyond the either/or thinking of normality and antinormality, relationality and antisociality, the public and the intimate, shame and pride, oppression and liberation”, allowing queerness to move beyond academia and into other realms, “to effect and provoke changes across established institutions and social life” (Liu, 2020: p. 2). As Ahmed writes: 14 [d]o queer moments happen when this failure to reproduce norms as forms of life is embraced or affirmed as a political and ethical alternative? Such affirmation would not be about the conversion of shame into pride, but the enjoyment of the negativity of shame, an enjoyment of that which has been designated shameful by normative culture (Ahmed, 2014: p. 146). This intersection between affect and queer theories intends to look at how “the noncognitive forces of the body and feelings matter and shape the social and political life of marginalized subjects across time and space” (Liu, 2020: p. 4) and this thesis is heavily informed by the two strains that Liu identifies as ‘feeling down’ and ‘feeling backward’, an articulation between feeling down as a method to look at how affect circulates around and forms attachment to the queer body and deepens queer theory’s understanding of the cultural process, 2) feeling backward as an epistemological reflection that expands the capacity of queer theory on a temporary scale (Liu, 2020: p. 4). By embracing feelings of shame ( Middlesex , The Inheritance ), ambivalence ( The Argonauts ), and regret ( The Great Believers ) towards one’s own body and others, these works establish a trans-temporal dialogue, with a strong attachment to the past but always hinting at a queer future, a queer utopia. These two strains of queer affect theory are used as a hermeneutics to analyse the case studies that were selected to be a part of this thesis, while also recurring to concepts borrowed from theorisations of queer time, to attest “that queers survive through the ability to invent or seize pleasurable relations between bodies … across time” (Freeman, 2005: p. 58) against the heteronormativity of time itself. As Richard T. Rodriguez points out, the concern of queer studies with kinship was already felt in the work of gay and lesbian scholars, the foundation for queer studies as they are now. For Gayle Rubin, in a clear separation between family and kinship, often considered to be the same, “a kinship system is not a list of biological relatives. It is a system of categories and statuses that often contradict actual genetic relationship” (Rubin in Rodríguez, 2020: p. 215). For Rodríguez, who states that “family diversity” is often equated with “marriage diversity”, there is a need for these “kinship practices that exceed genetic relationships and state-sanctioned bonds … when accounting for the communal networks that exist beyond biological ties” (2020: p. 215). These “‘chosen” kinships are not always independent or devoid of genetic relations” (Rodríguez, 2020: p. 215) and they do not necessarily and directly oppose to genealogical kinship, but they do pose a challenge to procreation as the origin of every kinship, leading it away from biological and heteronormative models of reproduction and Oedipal familial ties. Moreover, it 21 Chapter 1. All in the Family: Mapping the Intersex Body in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex They wished for ancestors like them: uncles who’d shaved their legs and squeezed their bellies into corsages and dresses at night, aunts with shingled hair and black lipstick, strolling through the streets in suits. None of these stories had ever found its way into the annals of family history, but they must have existed, so what was wrong with inventing them? 16 Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Beside Myself . 1.1. Middlesex Perhaps Middlesex could be described as the quintessential intersex novel 17 – or at least that is what Cal, its main character and narrator intends it to be, making of him the most famous intersex of all time, after Herculine Barbin. Written by Jeffrey Eugenides, published in 2002 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the book is narrated by Calliope Stephanides, a young woman born within a GreekAmerican family and who will soon find out that she 18 is intersex, leading her to start living as a stealth 19 man as he refuses to accept the fact that he is intersex. Throughout the rather long narrative, which encompasses three generations of the Stephanides family, one is told, by Cal, how his grandparents left Greece during the war with Turkey in the beginning of the 20th century and settled, as many others, in the United States, where they raised their own family, balancing the need to preserve their Greek origins while also being assimilated into the American culture. Cal narrates the story of his family as a man in his forties, in Berlin, where he lives, with a retrospective look that imposes upon the narrative of his family and himself a ‘straight timeline’ in which marriages and giving birth to children are perceived as the main milestones of life, something that may be explained by a need to represent matters of heritage and inheritance as part of the immigrant experience, while also using that to explain Cal’s condition. Being intersex is seen in Middlesex as the direct cause of the fact that Cal’s grandparents were brother and sister, and this consanguinity is used to explain Cal’s inheritance of what is taken to be as a defected gene, a mutation that has survived through three generations; inheritance is here deeply linked to matters 16 Beside Myself has been compared to Middlesex , for its narrative of a gender transition across borders: as the main character travels in a quest to find their body, their body transitions between gender spheres. 17 Other works that deal with the intersex experience is the novel Annabel , by Kathleen Winter, along with Foucault’s writings on Herculine Barbin and even Virginia Woolf’s Orlando that, although not intersex, poses a transition that echoes Middlesex ’s main character. 18 Since the process of Cal’s transitioning from girl to boy seems seamless and binary, the pronouns used in the text will also mirror those binary choices: “she/her” when referring to Callie/Calliope as a young girl, “he/his” when referring to Cal as a teenage boy and adult man. 19 Hsu refers to Cal as a “stealth man” claiming that it is “the term used by transgender and intersexed communities to describe individuals who do not publicly disclose the fact of their gender transition” (2011: p. 87). 22 of blood, legacy and predestination. By looking back at his genealogy, in a retrospective look at the history of the United States and some crucial events which mark that same history, Cal tries to make sense of his condition as intersex, while also coming to terms with matters of familial links and legacies, gender expectations that are brought upon him by his family, and acculturation, in a story “held together not just be the thread of Cal’s genealogy … but also of his genetics: the mutation … is in some sense the hero of this story, … as it survives atrocity, displacement and war” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 377). While relying “on the familiar model of the US immigration narrative to introduce an international readership to the decidedly unfamiliar voice of a narrator who is a “hermaphrodite” (Hsu, 2011: 87), Jeffery Eugenides juxtaposes the migrant experience with the one of the intersex individual, bringing together genetics and heritage in what is a problematic, often misleading and incomplete reading of both the immigrant experience and the intersex body. Many studies have focused on Middlesex as a groundbreaking work of cultural hybridity, an hybridity that was intended to be fully translated by the intersex voice that narrates the book. However, this chapter will solely focus on Middlesex as a reinforcement of the heteronormative discourse when dealing with the intersex experience. Moreover, the emphasis given to genetics and genealogy in Middlesex will be questioned and challenged while looking at the Stephanides family, their gender expectations and the gender roles that are mirrored in Callie, as well how heritage is deeply linked with the idea of nuclear families and blood relationships, here depicted as a single thread between past, present and future in the shape of shame embodied in Cal’s body, through the transgenerational inheritance of trauma and guilt. Moreover, the retrospective look that Cal uses to look back at his genealogy is informed by an idea of time as straight, in a logic of sequence, in which a generation follows another, in the same sense that Cal was first a woman and then a man, but never intersex. This Chapter thus analyses Middlesex in relation to family structures, straight time and gender expectations, while also providing an introduction to intersex theory as well as a comparative reading between Middlesex and MDLSX , (2015) a performance based on the novel. Moreover, through an analysis of the television series Transparent (2014-2019) and Fun Home (2006), Middlesex will also be seen as a narrative of transgenerational trauma, as well a failed attempt at writing an intersex history. Right at the beginning of the book, the reader is presented with the double birth of Cal, first as woman, then as man, but in neither as an intersex: I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal. (Eugenides, 2002: p. 3) 23 Cal is a sequence of first female, then male, implying continuity instead of duplicity, a clear contradiction of the middle sex promised by the title in favour of an either/or logic: “Callie is an evolutionary dead-end that Cal has passed through” (Lee, 2010: p. 39). This sequential logic also implies the existence of a single original sexual identity, of a heteronormative timeline, that is somewhat disrupted by intersex bodies which must be corrected and restored to an original form, an origin that precedes the intersex body informed. Cal’s “intersexed identity is experienced within a temporal and teleological structure, that is, as having a female ‘before’ and a male ‘after’ … endorsing a binary gender view as well as a binary narrative structure” (Antosa, 2012: p. 70). Later, Cal will mention a third birth, at the age of forty-one – “and so before it’s too late I want to get it down for good: this rollercoaster ride of a single gene through time” (Eugenides, 2000: p. 4) – which seems to be the birth of Middlesex itself, implying that the narrative is deeply connected with Cal’s reinvention, hinting at the performative power of gender, as well as Iain Morland’s (2005) argument that the intersex body is produced by the narrative that the surgically modified bodies have been inscribed with, a narrative of sexual difference. According to Olivia Banner, this third birth is the evocation of “another traditional American genre: the historical saga of the immigrant family” (2010: p. 851) and it crystalizes the novel’s intention to present biological determinism as intertwined with Cal’s experience, as “autobiography becomes a true “genealogy”: the gene’s story becomes a foundational locus for identity” (Banner, 2010: p. 851). Although these births could be perceived as disruptive of a time continuum that implies a single birth, Cal is born as one thing and then another, reinforcing what has been referred to as Middlesex ’s heteronormative timeline. Middlesex has been praised by critics and medical practitioners as having introduced intersex lives to a mainstream audience. Alice Dreger even implies that Middlesex has directly contributed to the revision of treatment by medicine of intersex individuals by giving a face to intersexuality beyond the time of their treatment (Banner, 2010). Other activists have, however, criticised Middlesex as being inauthentic, given the fact that Eugenides is not intersex, stating that “the novelist has claimed a space that should be reserved for authentic voices” (Banner, 2010: p. 861). It is no wonder that Middlesex appears at “the end of the 20th century” a time that marked a change in intersex representations: autobiographical accounts of intersex lives, conveyed from the perspective of intersex individuals, have appeared in considerable numbers and produced a new discursive space that has challenged the monolithic medical discourse on intersex (Amato, 2016: p. 55). 24 Eugenides’ authority to write a book on an intersex individual has been questioned 20 , especially due to the fact that sexually marginalized voices are scarcely featured in mainstream media and visual arts, a tendency which seems to be in decline, due to the efforts of queer and feminist movements towards equal rights and representation and “academic and activist work of and about genderqueer, transgender and other gender-nonconforming individuals and groups [that] has provided a ‘queer space’” for debate (Amato, 2010: p. 56). Ambiguity permeates Middlesex , not only when it comes to what can be seen as a failed attempt at a critique at the medical treatment of intersex individuals, ultimately enforced by the overpowering authorial male heteronormative, but also when it comes to the critical reception of the book, often applauded, due to what Banner refers to as a need for “a representative text that destigmatizes ambiguous sex”, other times criticized, for this representation is penned by “a heteromasculine-identified narrator and the fact that it was authored by a heterosexual man” (Banner, 2010: p. 862). Moreover, [o]n the one hand, Middlesex gains the intersexed increased exposure, and its narrative is empathetic to their plight; on the other hand, Middlesex presents the intersexed through a mode of fiction (as opposed to the category of autobiography, whose relationship to experiential truth goes unproblematized), raising the question of and provoking anxiety about who holds the claims to subjectivity and agency. Does such authenticity matter, though, if the novel promotes acceptance of intersex? (Banner, 2010: pp. 861-862) The metaphor of the ‘divided’ sexual body of Cal works to convey matters of belonging when addressing the duality felt by the Stephanides family, as they try to protect their Greek origins while also being acculturated by the American culture in which this family has lived in for three generations: the family roughly enacts the three-phase progressive assimilation that sociologist George A. Kourvetaris describes in such families: the first immigrant generation identifies with a Greek nationality; the second identifies with the Greek Orthodox religion and American nationality; and the third, most assimilated generation identifies with Greek-immigration status as a class. (Lee, 2010: p. 33) Their lives are all intertwined and “the title of the novel punningly links the history of the Stephanides family with the ambiguous sex of the protagonist 21 ” (Antosa, 2012: p. 63), providing heritage and blood 20 See Hsu (2011) and Banner (2010). 21 Banner (2010) addresses Eugenides’ decision to give voice to a family saga through the body of an intersex person as being a choice informed by a conception of sex as binary, as well as the use of the image of a single gene through time as a reductive view of what an intersex life consists of. In interviews, the author of Middlesex has referred to Cal as ‘hermaphrodite’, a word that the intersex community has rejected due to its connotations with fetishism. According to Eugenides, the word refers to the mythical literary creature that Cal is, reducing Cal to a literary motif, something sustained by his claim of using Cal’s single mutated gene as a means to portrait a single family over the years. Banner also critiques Eugenides’ approach to sexuality as binary when 25 legacies an overpowering and inescapable force. Later, Cal will embark on his own journey, leaving home when faced with the fact that he his intersex, and being unable to face his parents. On the road, which he starts to travel as a girl, his body changes, adopting characteristics that are socially perceived as male: After Ohio came Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. I rode in station wagons, sport cars, rented vans. Single women never picked me up, only men, or men with women. A pair of Dutch tourists stopped for me, complaining about the frigidity of American beer, and sometimes I got rides from couples who were fighting and tired of each other. In every case, people took me for the teenage boy I was every minute more conclusively becoming. Sophie Sassoon wasn't around to wax my mustache, so it began to fill in, a smudge above my upper lip. My voice continued to deepen. Every jolt in the road dropped my Adam's apple another notch in my neck.” (Eugenides, 2000: pp. 448-449) He experiences homelessness and, arriving in San Francisco, will take part in a peep show, in which his body is presented to an audience as a curiosity, enhancing the way in which the intersex body is here portrayed as a sexual fetish. When his father dies, Cal returns home, only to leave to travel expansively, since he claims to never be able to be at home or stay for a long time in the same place, eventually settling in Berlin, a city which reminds him of himself due to its once divided map, that he sees as home, as he struggles for a unification (which for him means fully erasing his intersex identity and living in a body that is unambiguously male): I’ve never wanted to stay in one place. After I started living as a male, my mother and I moved away from Michigan and I’ve been moving ever since. In another year or two I’ll leave Berlin, to be posted somewhere else. I’ll be sad to go. This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification, for Einheit . Coming from a city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here in Berlin.” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 106) Middlesex can be read as several genres, from a coming-of-age in the first person, a family saga to an historical novel: even though this analysis aims at a reading of the sexual bodies of Middlesex , and the role that genealogy and heritage take in shaping them, these sub genres will work together as forces for the determination of Cal’s identity, particularly in a novel which often recurs to biology and genealogy as forces of determinism through the enforcement of a heteronormative structure to a body that defies it. As Samuel Cohen writes, Middlesex is highly influenced and hostage of its own genre and its demands: addressing the author’s choice as one that would allow him to have a male and female view of the world through Cal’s eyes, revealing not only that Cal’s experience as intersex is only valid as a narrator or someone else’s story; he is also only perceived as his male and female parts, not as an intersex individual. 26 This novel displays a particular historical imagination, as all historical novels do; it depends on a set of notions about the relationship between past, present and future, about cause and effect, and about the possibilities and problems that attempts to understand and represent the past entail. (2007: p. 371) Although Middlesex might be perceived as a ground-breaking work of fiction, for its intersex narrator and for addressing matters related to the intersex body, as well as a portrait of The United States “from its immigrant roots to the present” (S. Cohen, 2007: 371), one must be aware of the duality that permeates the novel, as well as its heteronormative structure, one that shows “how a supposedly transgressive narrative can remain within the confines of a normative discourse” (Antosa, 2012: p. 65): Middlesex thus develops and problematizes a number of issues that intersect at different levels: biology and culture, nature and nurture, ethnic dislocations and ambiguous body formation, determinism and free will, the old world of the Greek homeland and the new American culture of the twentieth century. It is a novel about geographical migrations, narrative shifts, sexual transitions and self-redefinitions (2012: p. 64). Moreover, and even though Middlesex is indeed a work of fiction, one must be aware of the political implications of addressing matters of gender, sex, ethnicity and even class in fiction. Therefore, an introduction on the intersex body, drawn from crucial texts on intersexuality, is much needed, particularly due to misconceptions and misunderstandings that might exist about this sexual category which has only recently found its way upon the LGBTQI+ acronym. As Preciado writes: We live in a world where violent gender diagnosis is a legalized practice in every modern hospital, forcing gender assignment according to the binary; a world where in spite of the technical separation of heterosexuality and reproduction that the pill enables, heterosexuality is still declared the normal and natural form of sexual reproduction; a world where hormones, prostheses, and surgeries enable an embodied experience of gender transition but where normalization of gender is the political requirement for any gender reassignment process; a world where experiments with three-dimensional printing of skin and organs are already taking place but always within the framework of hegemonic gender and racial norms. And yet we – the intersexed, the crip, the gender-queer, the nonwhite, the trans – exist, speak, and act. (2018: pp. 5-6) 1.2. A Genealogy of the Intersex Body Candy says ‘I've come to hate my body 27 And all that it requires in this world’ Candy says ‘I'd like to know completely What others so discretely talk about’. The Velvet Underground, “Candy Says” Greek myths, besides the myth of an original, binary sexual order, permeate Middlesex . Perhaps in an attempt to bring Cal closer to, again, his and his family’s roots, “a simple result of his effort to be self-consciously Greek” (Lee, 2010: p. 34), Eugenides draws inspiration from Greek mythology and punctuates the narrative with these myths that, along with the use of the word hermaphrodite, point to a genealogy of the intersex body as mythical, belonging to fiction. Cal rarely refers to himself as intersex though he often uses the word hermaphrodite – perhaps as “a simple result of his effort to be selfconsciously Greek” (Lee, 2010: p. 34) – again reclaiming an existence back to the mythological Greek figure, establishing himself more as a myth rather than an intersex individual with a particular subjectivity; “protesters point out that foregrounding this mythic genealogy means perpetuating a form of recognition that has been identified as oppressive by intersexed people and as scientifically inaccurate by a majority of medical professionals” (Hsu, 2011: p. 95). As Merton Lee points out: Whereas “hermaphrodite” is still freighted with connotations of the unnatural, “intersexuality,” as a neologism, attempts to naturalize various sexes, which themselves are naturally occurring. In this light, Cal’s choice of “hermaphrodite” implies the conservative view that only the categories of male and female are natural genders. (33) The work of authors such as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Suzanne Kessler and Alice Dreger has been crucial to disrupt the image of the intersex body as mythological, while also implying that intersex bodies have always existed, creating a legacy for these individuals, a legacy that has been based upon a dual system of sexes, dedicated to maintaining that binary system through the discipline of the bodies, ensuring that a heterosexual matrix is also generated. According to Fausto-Sterling, narratives of progress must be abandoned when referring to the intersex body, as what was perceived as progress – the ‘fixing’ of the body in order to have a single sex – often resulted in repression of that same body: From the viewpoint of medical practitioners, progress in the handling of intersexuality involves maintaining the normal. Accordingly, there ought to be only two boxes: male and female. The knowledge developed by the medical disciplines empowers doctors to maintain a mythology of the normal by changing the intersexual body to fit, as nearly as possible, into one or the other cubbyhole. One person’s medical progress, however, can be another’s discipline and control. (Fausto-Sterling, 2002: p. 8) 28 While conceiving Milton, Cal’s father, Desdemona, Cal’s grandmother thinks of the Minotaur, half human, half beast, after having seen a play about the monster. Later, Desdemona will think back about this night and recall the image of the mythological creature as the reason why Cal is intersex, with a body also divided as human and something else. As Cal narrates the moment of his father’s conception, in another impossible omnipresent look at his family’s life – reminding the reader of Tristan Shandy – Cal reflects on the fate of his own sexual identity and how it has been passed on from the moment in which the Minotaur has set foot on stage up to the present. “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too.” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 4), says Cal, as if his powers for storytelling are also a matter of lineage, placing himself next to Homer and the great Greek authors, establishing a literary legacy. It seems then that there was no other possible future for Cal but to inherit the “motifs, scenarios, even fates” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 109) of his family. Moreover, this inheritance is also perceived as genealogical, biological, even mythological and therefore, inescapable: A momentous night, this, for all involved (including me). I want to record the positions (Lefty dorsal, Lina couchant) and the circumstances (night’s amnesty) and the direct cause (a play about a hybrid monster). Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates [emphasis added]. Wouldn’t I also sneak up on a girl pretending to be asleep? And wouldn’t there also be a play involved, and somebody dying onstage? Leaving these genealogical questions aside, I return to the biological facts [emphasis added].” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 109) More than the inheritance of fate, Cal seems to also inherit shame, the shame felt by Desdemona and Lefty and the fact that they are siblings, a shame made visible when the doctor tells them that birth defects may arise by consanguinity. “A word on my shame. I don’t condone it. I’m trying my best to get over it” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 106), writes Cal, although the narrative does not seem to move away from shame, as it settles it as a family heirloom. Cal grows up feeling ashamed of his body, as perceived in the comparison with the Minotaur, unable to have sexual relationships with women or to show them his body: When I meet someone I like and who seems to like me, I retreat. There are lots of nights out in Berlin when … I forget my physical predicament and allow myself to hope. The tailored suit comes off. The Thomas Pink shirt, too. My dates can’t fail to be impressed by my physical condition. (Under the armor of my double-breasted suits is another of gym-built muscle.) But the final protection, my roomy, my discreet boxer shorts, these I do not remove. Ever. Instead I leave, making excuses. I leave and never call them again. Just like a guy [emphasis added]. (Eugenides, 2002: p. 107). 29 Cal is exiled and isolated, a feeling that he expresses when explaining that he is not political and therefore does not participate in intersex movements, a statement that seems to expose Cal’s loneliness more than his refusal to be politically engaged, unable to speak about his own sexual identity: But we hermaphrodites are people like everybody else. And I happen not to be a political person. I don’t like groups. Though I’m a member of the Intersex Society of North America, I have never taken part in its demonstrations. I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s not the best way to live. But it’s the way I am. … I’m closeted at work, revealing myself only to a few friends. … Only a few people here in Berlin know my secret. I tell more people than I used to, but I’m not at all consistent. Some nights I tell people I’ve just met. In other cases I keep silent forever. (Eugenides, 2002: pp. 106-107) Cal refers to himself as an hermaphrodite but when addressing the fact that he is not political or that he does not get involved in intersex activism, he uses the term ‘intersex’, perhaps aware that intersex is indeed a political category, one that implies political agency and engagement, as well as a selfidentification and self-reflective action, and not a mere diagnosis. By engaging with activism, meeting other intersex individuals, disclosing his intersexuality or not living as a man, Cal would be turning into “one of them”: “Is it really my apolitical temperament that makes me keep my distance from the intersexual rights movement? Couldn’t it also be fear? Of standing up. Of becoming one of them ” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 319). Cal appears as a lonely and tragic figure, without a network of support in the shape of friends or a family of his own, as queer figures are often represented. Cal, due to his intersexuality, is prevented from forming meaningful relationships, having in constant movement, unable to make a home for himself, for he never seems to fit the world around him. This is also sustained by how Eugenides designs Middlesex through the insertion of a straight timeline that goes from Greece to The United States, from the first Stephanides down to Cal: After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-aunts and -uncles, long-lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or, in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those things in one. And so before it’s too late I want to get it down for good: this roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother’s own midwestern womb. (Eugenides, 2002: p. 4) 30 Cal knows the history of his family but he seems completely unaware of the history of intersex people, knowing that they have always existed but uninterested in engaging with that part of his life as only glimpses of his life as an adult are offered, many of them unhappy memories. The faltering in Cal’s story beyond the age of fourteen associates his later life with invisibility and difficulty … suggesting that … its intersexual aspect is unspeakable. Indeed, Cal makes clear … the urge to tell the story of his family and their legacy, not his own. (Graham, 2009: p. 9) At school, Cal studies Ovid’s Metamorphosis and even plays Tiresias, in a rather obvious and expected nod at the Antigone ’s gender bender figure, who was first male, then female. Side by side with these mythical evocations is the reminder that [i]ntersexuality is old news. The word hermaphrodite comes from a Greek term that combined the names Hermes […] and Aphrodite […] There are at least two Greek myths about the origins of the first hermaphrodite. In one, Aphrodite and Hermes produce a child so thoroughly endowed with the attributes of each parent that, unable to decide its sex for sure, they name it Hermaphroditos. In the other, their child is an astonishingly beautiful male with whom a water nymph falls in love. Overcome by desire, she so deeply intertwines her body with his that they become joined as one. (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p. 32) More importantly, the fact that this apparently impossible creature exists may also work “as the embodiment of a human past that predated dualistic sexual division” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p.32), with Plato writing on three original sexes, male female and hermaphrodite, and they are present, not just on Greek mythology, but also on religious texts – “the Talmud and the Tosefta list extensive regulations for people of mixed sex, regulating modes of inheritance and of social conduct” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p. 33) – as well as in ancient Rome, having been both persecuted (in Romulus’s time) and later eligible for marriage (in Pliny’s time). It is however relevant to think that, although featured in literature and the arts at large and for a centuries as a metaphor, symbol or pure myth, intersex is yet to be legally recognized as a sexual category in many countries. Fausto-Sterling writes expansively on the medieval perception of a sexual continuum, one which did not reduce sexual experience to two sexes, and that derived from classical theories on sex fluidity such as Aristotle’s take on the hermaphrodite as some sort of unfulfilled twinning and Galen’s understanding of the hermaphrodite as an intermediate sex (a middle sex ). However, even though these attempts at scientifically defining the intersex body did not necessarily translate into direct social acceptance and “[d]espite widespread uncertainty about their proper social roles, disapproval of 37 the same of cisgender bodies, at least grounded on the same systems of gender; women and men are brought up under scrutiny, encouragement, peer pressure and assumptions about sexual performance, as well as the size, shape and functionality of body parts. Looking at unchanged intersex bodies might as well be seen as looking at mirrored images of normal bodies , for they opened up possibilities of having a body in a patriarchal and heteronormative society, as well as a necessary challenging to the way how these bodies are designed by familial, medical, social and political discourses, given that, “[w]hen we look at hermaphrodites, we are forced to realize how variable even "normal" sexual traits are” (Dreger, 2003: p. 5). Stephanie Hsu puts forward a strong argument on the effect that Middlesex may have in the “increasing normalization of intersex in the world of the text’s reception” (2011: p. 88). Hsu’s thesis brings together what is claimed to be an often overlooked link between the “genealogy for intersex genitalia” and “the sexing of racialized or ethnic bodies” (2011: p. 87). Although the focus of this chapter is placed on Middlesex ’s sexual politics and not on the novel’s view of national identity, Hsu’s arguments are pertinent when it comes to analysing Middlesex ’s treatment of the intersex experience, particularly what she claims to be the erasure of the intersex identity in detriment of a diagnosis that brings with it techniques for the normalization of the intersex body, something that clearly figures in Eugenides’ narrative: [b]y normalization, I refer to the management of intersex through technologies of biometric standardization, including corrective surgeries, the DSD diagnosis, and the functional disappearance of intersex in the form of stealth culture. If the decline in the significance of intersex identity is related to finding a "cure" or otherwise eradicating intersexed people, however, intersex normalization is also a sign of the heightened regulation of gender norms and sexed embodiment. (Hsu, 2011: p. 88) 1.3. Transgenerational Trauma “My mother says there are no homosexuals in my family.” “Maybe there aren’t, but there might be a lesbian.” Malinda Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club As previously mentioned, Berlin is portrayed as perhaps the only space where Cal feels at home. Perhaps the link with the German city is fortuitous and solely established given the fact that its topography may work as a productive metaphor for a ‘divided’ body, but the link between space and queerness cannot be overlooked. As Silvia Amato writes: “[h]istorically, places and spaces played a significant role 38 in the social and cultural perception of intersex and functioned as the sites where the knowledge production of intersex was institutionalized” (2016: p. 187), and the spaces in which sexuality is practised (or censored) in Middlesex are a crucial part to understand how the intersex body is read, misread and contested, from the clinic where Cal is subjected to Foucault’s “instruments of disciplinary power”, to the pool in which Cal performs his peep show, to the openness of the road, to the city of San Francisco, the American capital for queer freedom and resistance, where Cal finally comes across a group of people that somewhat resemble him. Berlin is also featured in the television series Transparent , which is here evoked to establish a dialogue that can be productive to read Middlesex and its take on transgenerational trauma. Created in 1919, and located in Berlin, Magnus Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld’s Institute of Sex Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) was invaded by Nazi troops on May 6 1933, for whom the work of the sexologists, devotedly dedicated to the study of homosexuality and the protection of queer people was an offence to the ideals of family and nationalism perpetrated by Nazism. With the closing of the Institute, and the destruction of its library and a vast body of literature on same sex desire and nonnormative bodies, Hirschfield’s work was put on hold, a rupture in a pioneering and innovative approach to queer lives and their humane treatment. Moreover, the Institute was a safe haven for people who had been criminalized and prosecuted due to ‘deviant’ sexual orientations and identities (the Institute offered some of the first sex-reassignment surgeries and it was Hirschfeld who first used the word “transsexualism”), working as an early type of shelter that provided treatment and counselling and for LGBTQI+ individuals, one which allied personal histories and caring with scientific research. At the time of the second World War, Berlin enjoyed a significantly liberty when it comes to sexuality, proving that queer lives are not a modern invention while also attesting that the rights of sexual minorities are always at risk in times of conflict and crisis. The Institute of Sex Research was featured on the second season of Transparent . Created by Joey Solloway, the show was based on the author’s experience with the coming out of their father as a transgender woman, who started transitioning late in life. The show revolves around the character of Maura Pfefferman, the trans parent of the title, who finally comes out as a transgender woman at 60, after gathering up the courage it takes to share the news with her former wife, her three adult children, each of them facing their own plural sexual identities, and overall strangers who are now faced with the female body of Maura. The series has been highly acclaimed by its casting of transgender actresses (although it was also heavily criticised by the fact that the main transgender character is played by a cisgender man), as well as the exploration of several sexual categories and forms of gender presentation, while also 39 approaching the Holocaust, polygamy, white and male privilege, non-white and working-class transgender lives, queer feminism, transphobia, sexual assault, ageism, gay marriage 23 , the intersection between Jewishness and queerness 24 , and even the Israel-Palestine conflict. Family secrets are uncovered, the family’s structure is rearranged and questioned as Maura comes to terms with her own gender and her place as ‘Moppa’ (‘mother’ and ‘pappa’ in one word) within a family that is rather dysfunctional. The viewers learn about Maura’s wife’s past trauma as a sexual abuse survivor and they see Maura meeting her father, who abandoned her as a child to move to Israel, who tells Maura that one member of her family, who was also transgender, had died during the Holocaust. One of the most tender moments of the series is witnessed when Maura comes out as transgender to her own mother. The viewer also gets a glimpse of Maura’s life as a married man while also trying to explore her gender presentation, while Maura’s youngest daughter, Ali, tries to make amends with the family’s past as she wonders about the many ways in which it can affect the present, through transgenerational trauma. Josh, Maura’s middle child, finds out that he has a son, although he is unaware of how to be a father, finding comfort and guidance in his stepfather, while Sarah, Maura’s oldest daughter also deals with her bisexuality and how it is (or is not) compatible with a heterosexual marriage. As Maura comes out, the families secrets also come out as “the affective cost of silence and unacknowledged trauma is thematised through the ways in which past events still permeate the present” (Horvat, 2019: p. 2), while also disrupting normative timelines as it is up to “Sarah, Josh, and Ali … adults … who now have to renegotiate their parent-child relationship with their father” (Hess, 2017: p. 8). Transparent “both historicizes transgender identity and exposes the hidden transgender histories of the Pfefferman family, thus raising questions of memory and temporality” (Horvat, 2019: p. 2), something also sustained by Linda Hess, who claims that Maura’s coming out establishes a new beginning for the family as it: 23 Maura’s daughter Sarah, who is married to a man with children, starts a relationship with a woman, Tammy, who she is supposed to get married, but she does not. Afterwards, Sarah gets back with her husband, with whom she also explores an open relationship. For Hess, Sarah and Tammy’s wedding ceremony is a particularly elucidative moment of how Transparent defies family boundaries: “[o]ne scene that humorously marks the permeability of family boundaries in the show occurs at the very beginning of Season 2, when family pictures are taken at Sarah’s lesbian wedding. Various members of the wedding party keep interrupting the photographer in order to add more people into the picture, including two ex-wives of Tammy, Sarah’s new spouse. While the wedding planner pleads, “Only family,” an exasperated Ali finally asks, “Anybody else want in?” (2017, p. 8). Moreover, through Sarah’s “almost wedding”, another point of marriage is made – it is only a ritual. When Sarah is told by the Rabbi that without the licence, the marriage is not official yet, “Ali asks, dejectedly, “What is a wedding, then?” to which the Rabbi replies, “It’s a ritual, a pageant. It’s like a very expensive play.” Sarah chimes in, relieved, “It’s a play. And we’re just in costume” … The scene exposes social and cultural conventions (like marriage) as collective and performative constructions. … At the same time, the focus on Sarah’s sweaty skin, as well as the use of successive close-ups and an unsteady camera perspective (largely Sarah’s perspective on the scene) during the wedding ceremony, produces a stifling atmosphere that conveys Sarah’s fear of being confined by marriage, whether heterosexual or lesbian.” (Hess, 2017: 10). 24 For an analysis on the prosecution of queer people during the Holocaust see Jensen (2002). 40 interrupts ideas of “progression” and “continuity,” which characterize hegemonic concepts of family and temporality (Halberstam 70, 74). In Season 1, Josh, who finds it particularly difficult to accept or understand his father’s transition, asks his sisters in frustration, “So what does this mean? Everything Dad has said and done before this moment is a sham? Like he was acting the whole time?” Ali’s answer – “No. It just means we all have to start over” (“The Wilderness”) – underlines the significant impact that Maura’s transition has on her family, but it also interrupts the ideal of linear continuity proposed by the cultural blueprint of the heteronormative timeline. (Hess, 2017: p. 8). The Institute appears in the form of lyrical and complex flashbacks that are juxtaposed, and sometimes are even intertwined, with the narrative that takes place in Los Angeles in 2015, creating multiple timelines that defy linear time and a heteronormative logic, as well as a link between contemporary queer politics and earlier queer communities (Dempsey, 2018). Like Middlesex , Transparent is a family saga, one that explores the tight bounds of a dysfunctional but affectionate family as “the travel of unvoiced trauma from generation to generation of Pfefferman women plays a central role, and the series emphasizes the role of haunting in our perception of the present” (Horvat, 2019: p. 2). Anamarija Horvat sustains her analysis of Transparent through Carla Freccero’s ‘queer haunting’, a concept that will also be highly productive to analyse both The Great Believers and The Inheritance , that dialogue directly with the preoccupations explored in Transparent and these “legacies of affect” (Stratton in Horvat, 2019). As defined by Avery Gordon: Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. The ghost, as I understand it, is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we are notified that what's been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us. (Gordon, 2008: p. xvi) This ghost, who has a real presence and demands attention, appears in the life of Ali, Maura’s daughter, who is also questioning her gender, in the shape of her great-aunt, Gittel, a transgender woman who used to visit Hirschfield’s centre and who was killed at a concentration camp. The acknowledgment that Gittel was a woman will allow Maura and Ali to both engage with other ways of expressing her gender, while also recovering a story that was obliterated from both the family story and history books. As Gordon 41 writes, “what’s been concealed is very much alive and present” (Gordon, 2008: p. xvi), and both Transparent and Middlesex are massively haunted by the past and the hidden family secrets. Throughout the series, there are several flashbacks that provide glimpses of Maura as she attempted at exploring her female identity, while also preserving the figure of the male patriarch at home and at work as a respected professor, whose decisions when it comes to hiring women are often more than sexist. This retrospective look is an important part of the show, especially when reading it side by side with Middlesex : while Maura’s flashbacks often show the struggle of having to obey to social norms and gender expectations that are created by her family while living as a man, as well as the brief moments in which she gets to leave home and express her femininity, in Middlesex that same retrospective look that is performed by Cal over his childhood memories as a girl works solely with the purpose of establishing a non-existent continuum between his sexuality, biological determinacy and sexual identity. If Transparent and Middlesex approach sexuality from different standpoints (the first, in a queerer interpretation, the latter, through a more binary one), there’s an aspect in this particular season of the series that brings both together: the idea of a transgenerational trauma, and how families inherit the pain of previous generations, but also the existence of queer individuals throughout history as “transfeminine history emerges as precisely this kind of multidirectional, multifaceted relationship between past, present, and future” (Morse, 2016). Halberstam (2007) refers to Sedgwick’s analysis of paranoid reasoning as anticipatory and deeply linked with inevitability, establishing a structure of inheritance based on repetition, a structure in which what happened to a previous generation will also happen to the next and then the next, while queer models of transgenerational relations are not informed by this same paranoid reading. Since “the bourgeois family matrix, with its emphasis on lineage, inheritance, and generation, does tend to cast temporal flux in terms of either seamless continuity or total rupture” (2007: p. 318), Cal is destined to be the result of his past generation’s mistakes. But Eugenides puts the reader’s concern at rest regarding the possibility that a strange creature such as Cal may ever be born again, for the reader is told that Cal cannot have children, therefore bringing an end to the Stephanides’s generational mutation, breaking a cycle of possible gender multiplicity in detriment for a narrative in which every loose end is tied. Transparent seems to, although also engaged with matters of inheritance and lineage, offer not only a reparative link towards the past but also toward the future, for Maura’s children are also queer and challenging their own concepts of sexuality and gender identification, while also questioning what a family is as “personal bonds exceed the expressive possibilities of institutions like marriage or divorce, but also dissolves the heterosexual matrix of biological sex, gender, and sexual desire” (Hess, 2017: p.6), going 42 against the biological impulse that informs Middlesex and how “[c]hronobiopolitics harnesses not only sequence but also cycle, the dialectical companion to sequence, for the idea of time as cyclical stabilizes its forward movement, promising renewal rather than rupture. (2010: 5) Horvat argues that even the credits of Transparent , its visiting card, propose a queer lineage, by juxtaposing scenes from “a montage of grainy old family videos” (Horvat, 2019: p. 1) with scenes from the documentary The Queen (1968), which provides a look at the drag queen pageants: The recordings blend seamlessly one into the other—it is only after one learns where some of them are from that the presumed discrepancy becomes notable. At the end of the sequence, a date appears … the year in which the show’s transgender main character (Jeffrey Tambor) first started addressing herself as Maura instead of Mort (Stephen Vider 2014). As Stephen Vider points out, when “taken together,” these “clips could” easily “be the introduction to a gender studies course: What does it mean for the bar mitzvah boy to ‘become a man,’ and the drag queen to ‘become a woman’? (Horvat, 2019: p. 1) Moreover, Horvat also states that “while the opening credits do point towards the constructed nature of gender and subjectivity, their focus on how the past has been documented and (mis)remembered also highlights the temporal aspects of this construction” (Horvat, 2019: pp. 1-2). The credits then imply that the TV show will deal with queer temporalities, as well as matters of heritage and genealogy as “[b]y putting together recordings of the heteronormative family and of gender nonconformity, they comment on how these seemingly separate temporalities exist not only at the same time, but within the same person” (Horvat, 2019: p. 2) If in Middlesex the gene that creates a mutation in Cal was brought upon him by the consanguinity of his grandparents, and is revealed as the punishment for a family secret, in Transparent the viewer – and Maura – are confronted with the revelation that Maura’s aunt, Gittel was also a transgender woman as a way of both humanizing Gittel, and her tragic death at the hands of Nazi troops, as well as creating a familiar lineage of queer subjects. Although the identity of Gittel as a transgender woman was hidden away from her family, due to the rejection of her femininity by her father and the fear of her mother that she would be attacked, Maura’s transition will contribute to the revelation of this secret, in a restorative turn of attempting to build a queer familiar genealogy which will prevent forgetfulness and will hopefully open up the possibility for future generations to tackle their sexualities. Although Jewish suffering is always at the heart of Holocaust memory, the intersection between ethnicity and gender, and the fact that LGBTQI+ individuals were also sent to concentration camps and were victims of prosecution was often ignored. According to Horvat, “[s]uch deliberate forgetting [Gittel’s erasure from the family’s history] 43 mirrors the experiences of the real queer victims of the Holocaust, whose persecution under the Nazi regime did not become a part of even LGBTQ activist memory until the late 1960s” (Horvat, 2019: 7) while it is also used as a way of discouraging Maura’s transition, implying that the fate of a past generation of queer individuals will be the same as the one of future generations’: “when knowledge of the past is passed on in the family, it is wielded as a weapon against Maura’s transgenderism. In a particularly distressing flashback in the show’s third season, her grandfather threatens Maura’s with Gittel’s fate after discovering her wearing her mother’s clothes” (Horvat, 2019: 7). The discovery of Gittel’s identity is made by Ali, the youngest daughter of Maura who, after learning that Maura is transgender, embarks in a journey of sexual exploration, engaging in lesbian relationships and adopting a non-binary gender presentation, in a look at her history, the history of her family and the history of Jewish refugees, something which seems to enable her to, at the same time, project herself into the future as a different individual. Transparent not only contradicts stereotypical transgender representation but it also creates a transgenerational dialogue within the same family, a family that is also, in its way queer: according to Horvat, the television show does not represent “a lone queer individual in an otherwise heterosexual family, but rather … several generations of LGBTQ-identified women within the same familial unit” (Horvat, 2019: 2), a very different family photograph to the one provided by Middlesex , where Cal appears as a lonely being, unable to raise his one family or find a community of other intersex individuals. The past comes into the present not only through highly inventive montage and intercuts that juxtapose images of the past and the present, but also in the shape of a pearl ring, through which “progress and legacy are also visually depicted” (Hess, 2017: p. 13) that the Pfeffermans smuggled during the Holocaust into the United States and that Ali wears around her neck, which also seems to trigger a remembrance of the past for Maura’s mother, Rose, who mistakes Ali for her sister Gittel. Hess provides a relevant analysis of this piece of family heirloom, as being passed down not as a symbol of heterosexual love but as the connection between two women who are, in different times, exploring their gender identity, again engaging with but also challenging notions of family inheritance: But, even such presumably normative processes as inheritance (as a sign of generational progress) are imbued with a twist in Transparent . Gittel gives the ring as a present to young Rose, and her mother saves it by hiding all jewellery in chocolate bars during their passage to America. A generation later, Maura wanted to propose with this ring to Shelly, and she refused it, not wanting to wear the ring of someone who died in a concentration camp. Josh tries to propose to two different girlfriends with the ring, but is refused both times. Finally, Ali finds the ring and begins wearing it on a necklace. Interestingly the ring 44 never comes to serve as an engagement ring to a heterosexual couple, but is worn in the end by Ali, who has recently begun to explore her queerness and who can thus also be read as Gittel’s heiress. Hence, the ring comes to symbolize non-heterosexual inheritance and legacy as well as a connection between different Pfefferman generations. (Hess, 2017: 13-14). The scene of Maura presenting herself to her ageing and seemingly amnesic mother is particularly evocative of a restorative dialogue with the past, as Maura’s comes to terms with her own mother (Figure 1), while her mother also seems to evoke her own sister and the affection she has for both transgender women. Recovering the moment of Maura’s birth in the final episode of the season, in an inverted timeline, and after knowing that Maura is a woman makes the image of the doctor holding the new-born baby and claiming that it is a boy particularly strong, a statement how the body is defined by medicine but how gender can also be written upon the body by other discourses: the moment is the one “that Judith Butler has identified as the “initiatory performative” sentence that kicks off the process through which gender is continually produced” (Hess, 2017: p. 12). As Amy Villarejo writes “that is claimed to infuse Maura’s rebirth as a woman at age 70. Just as Maura’s mother Rose gives birth to a boy, so do television and this fantasy of history give birth to Maura, whose future is as transcendent as the sea before her eyes. (201: p. 20). Throughout the series, Ali and Gittel share the same spaces even though they are separated by time (Figure 2). Figure 1: Still frame from Transparent showing three generations of the Pfefferman women. 45 Figure 2: Still frame from Transparent showing Ali and Gittle. This collage of characters from different timelines is one of the devices used by Solloway to explore the presence of the past in the present and the intersection of multiple timelines as well as the double casting of actors and actresses, and reinforcing the close bounds between them, as well as a hidden genealogy, of either blood or queerness, as Nicole Erin Morse points out. By placing the body of Gittel inside the Institute, the TV show aims at reinforcing a queer history, by retelling the story of Hirschfield as a pioneering figure within gay and transgender rights, as well as creating a genealogy for the Pfeffermans, juxtaposing the personal story of this family against the historical context of Nazi Germany, the persecution of Jewish people, which would eventually lead the Pfeffermans to the United States (the parallels with Middlesex are many, including the link between ethnicity and gender) but also of queer people. When Maura and her daughters visit an only-women festival, they come across the resistance that has been defined as trans-exclusionary feminism, as the women in the festival claim that Maura is trespassing, bringing up her former male identity. In another transtemporal juxtaposition, that Morse analyses, in which both timelines are intertwined, the past and the present become one: by a fire, Maura is insulted by the other women, in a space that was expected to be inclusive for all women, while Hirschfeld’s centre is invaded by Nazi troops, who burn down the centre, which was also meant to be a safe space for queer individuals, implying that “the intrusion of fascism and the destruction of Hirschfeld’s work also emphasize that progress is indeed neither linear nor to be taken for granted” (Hess, 2017: p. 11), a disruption on the narrative of progress that marks queer history, that will also be subject of analysis later in this thesis, when analysing The Inheritance . This intersection between “the individuality of trauma, even in those cases in which it is communally memorialized” (Hess, 2017: p. 12) can also be found in 46 AIDS narratives, as it will be addressed when analysing The Great Believers , as personal story and collective history are placed side by side: in Transparent, the hyper memory of the Holocaust appears visà-vis the forgotten history of transgender individuals that is now being unearthed. If “[o]ne of the principal social units in which such memories are passed on is the family”, which, given the fact that most queer individuals are set outside their own families, “Rachel Gelfand is correct in pointing out how “queer scholarship troubles the frame of biological belonging that permeates key memory concepts such as generation, diaspora, and postmemory” (Horvat, 2019: p. 4). However, it seems productive to recover Hirsch’s postmemory 25 in the sense that, in Transparent , queerness is also deeply connected with the Holocaust and trauma does stay in the family. Again, the past is brought into the present in order to illustrate how queer individuals, regardless of the space or time they inhabit, face discrimination and are excluded from the spaces that are meant to provide security to them. “Just as the records from Hirschfield's Institute were destroyed, setting back global knowledge of transgender history and medical research, Gittel also disappears from her family's history” (Morse, 2016), leaving a gap in the family’s narrative that will only be revealed two seasons later, when Maura finds her father after decades, who tells her and Ali who Gittel was. “All my life, my whole life, I’ve been dressing up like a man” 26 , says Maura: the retrospective look goes in the opposite direction than the one of Middlesex : Ultimately, Transparent, and the case studies that are part of this thesis’s corpus perform a negotiation of generationality and legacy [that] not only takes these concepts beyond their heterosexual parameters, but also emphasizes that (queer) resistance to social norms is of course not without history either, pointing to forms of tradition and inheritance that are not anchored in the family. While the series thus does not discard or disavow concepts such as family or generation, it interrogates them and challenges their normative boundaries. (Hess, 2017: p. 10). 25 This concept will be also used to analyse AIDS narratives as dialogues of memory and postmemories, for, even if AIDS may not have been addressed within the context of the family due to shame, or as a way of shutting out queer relatives, it does seem productive to understand that the work that the gay community does in remembering past generation can perhaps be also understood as a postmemory, in the sense that it is inherited. Horvat seems to sustain this, when referring to the work of Rachel Gelfand, who “correctly raises the question of how queer families pass on postmemory to their children, and how this at once upholds and subverts notions of memory transferred along biological lines” (2019: p. 4). 26 “When Sarah, somewhat bewildered by this surprise, asks, “Are you saying that you’re going to start dressing up as a lady all the time?” Maura answers, “No, honey. All my life, my whole life, I’ve been dressing up like a man. This is me” (“The Letting Go”). While first of all providing an educational moment by questioning definitions of “dressing up” and “authentic identity,” Maura’s statement also emphasizes that she has endured many decades of closeted suffering while living as a heterosexual family father. Here, Transparent ’s narrative contests not only imaginaries of the linear life course but also a binary understanding of queer temporality vs. a heteronormative life course.” (Hess, 2017: p. 5). 53 Concerned parents will turn to medicine to cure any ailment that the child may have, including what they perceive as an unfinished sexual identity. In Middlesex , Cal states that “as for my parents, I held them blameless. They were only trying to save me from humiliation, lovelessness, even death” (2002: p. 446) against the blame that he places on Dr Luce, a doctor to whom Cal’s body “refuted nature in just the way his theory predicted” (Eugenides, 2002: p.408). Callie is raised as the girl that she is perceived to be and Tesse and Milton’s expectations, before and after Cal is born, are reinforced in her upbringing. Only when young Callie fails to correspond to the American beauty standard for girls, translated by what is perceived as a masculine face, and the natural changes of the cisgender female body, translated by the lack of her menstruation, does her female status is questioned: Callie’s conviction throughout her youth and puberty that she is a girl, despite obvious physical evidence to the contrary, supports the social construction of gender – how gender identity is learned in the family and society, and not simply acquired by the possession of the correct genitalia. (Vliet, 2011: pp. 133-134) It is not what her body tells her that bothers young Callie; it is the inability to correspond to society’s and her parents’ expectations that make her doubt her ability to be – and perform – as female, regardless of the fact that she was not a girl to begin with, reinforcing the theory that gender is a language acquired and learnt by repetition which can be learnt by anyone regarding of their sex. Moreover, what Cal defines as masculine traits (a hairy, masculine face, attraction towards women, certain acts) are no more than preconceived and stereotypical notions of femininity that are reductive for every person who identifies as female, by implying that there is only a way of being a woman. Middlesex is strongly infused by patriarchal gender expectations and these are clearly put into practise within the family. For Tess, Cal may be a man in the public domain but he is still, in relation to her, her daughter, as caring for a mother is perceived as the task of a daughter, not a son’s: Even now, though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter. I’m still the one who remembers to call her every Sunday. I’m the one she recounts her growing list of ailments to. Like any good daughter, I’ll be the one to nurse her in her old age. (Eugenides 2002: pp. 520-521). Vliet also writes that researchers have found that “parental expectations about a child’s gender may influence their construction of gender as much as the child’s natural inclination does; little girls get treated differently than little boys” (2011: p. 133). When Dr Luce is writing a report on Cal as he starts puberty but without the changes that would be expected for a girl, Cal gives in again to the gender role that he 54 has been assigned by the expectations for her family, although Luce is unware that Cal “was making up most of what I [Cal] wrote, pretending to be the all-American daughter my parents wanted me to be” (Eugenides, 2002: p.418). Even though he comes to the realization that he is not the girl his parents have raised, Cal still hides it from them, performing his female identity under a female name one last time, while writing them a farewell note before going on the road: “I am not a girl. I'm a boy. That's what I found out today. … Despite its [the note] content, I signed this declaration to my parents: "Callie.” It was the last time I was ever their daughter” (Eugenides, 2002: pp. 438-439). More than not being a girl anymore, Cal is no longer a daughter, reinforcing the argument that home dictates gender, that to stay at home would mean for Callie to keep being Callie. Moreover, Dr Luce’s report also looks at Cal’s parents to justify Cal’s upbringing: while the mother is someone who “avoided bodily matters … never spoke openly about sex” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 284) and “accedes to the subservient wifely role typical of women of her generation, Cal’s father “only came to the clinic twice, citing business obligations … a self-made man and former naval officer” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 436). These well-defined gender roles lead Dr Luce to believe that Cal will also be able to operate as a girl if only her body is changed to resemble the one of a girl. Eugenides compares learning gender to learning languages: gender identity is established very early on in life, about the age of two. Gender was like a native tongue; it didn't exist before birth but was imprinted in the brain during childhood, never disappearing. Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French. (Eugenides, 2002: p. 411) This comparison between learning languages and learning gender is in Middlesex obligatorily linked with the learning of English by Desdemona and Lefty, Cal’s grandparents, and the learning of maleness by Cal. The subject of learning and performing gender, as coined by Butler, has also been addressed by Preciado in Counter-Sexual Manifesto , who compares languages and sexualities due to their performative, plural and repetitive aspects: [s]exualities are like languages: they are complex systems of communication and reproduction of life. As languages, sexualities are historical constructs with common genealogies and biocultural inscriptions. Like languages, sexualities can be learned. Multiple languages can be spoken. As is often the case within monolingualism, one sexuality is imposed on us in childhood, and it takes on the character of a naturalized desire. We are trained into sexual monolingualism. … We entered that sexuality through the medical and legal acts of gender assignment; through education and punishment; through reading and writing; through image consumption, mimicry, and repetition; through pain and pleasure. And yet we could have entered into any other sexuality under a different regime of knowledge, power, and desire. Still, we can learn any 55 other sexual language with a greater or lesser sense of alienation and strangeness, of joy and appropriation. It is possible to learn and invent other sexualities, other regimes of desire and pleasure production. … Countersexuality is an attempt to become foreign to your own sexuality and to lose yourself in sexual translation. (2018: p. 8) According to Rachel Carroll (2012), the moment when the medical discourse of Dr Luce is confronted with the personal narrative of Cal is crucially defining of what has been described as Middlesex ’s heteronormative narrative and the reinforcing of the existence of a single, stable sex category determined by biology which can be pinpointed by science, something sustained by Fausto-Sterling: scientists create truths about sexuality; how our bodies incorporate and confirm these truths; and how these truths, sculpted by the social milieu in which biologists practice their trade, in turn refashion our cultural environment (2000: p. 6). Dr Luce stands as an authoritative entity in sexual studies, as the founder of the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic and the writer of a column on Playboy that replies to reader’s inquiries about sex, while Cal feels compelled, due to family expectations and Dr Luce’s confrontations, to correspond to the gender conformity that is expected of him, as a girl, creating a narrative that is defined by sexual expectation, medical binary constructions of sex and the normalization of Cal’s body through a diagnosis. As Carroll writes, “both authors falsify reality in order to preserve a culturally constructed ‘truth’ of sex” (2012: p. 193) and the narrative that Cal creates to convince Dr Luce that she is a girl, and the findings that Dr Luce draws from Cal’s narrative end up influencing each other (Antosa, 2012) perhaps because there are only two choices available for Cal to accept: if he isn’t he girl, like the one Dr Luce will create through surgery, then he must be a boy: That summer – while the president’s lies were also getting more elaborate – I started faking my period. With Nixonian cunning, Calliope unwrapped and flushed away a flotilla of unused tampons. I feigned symptoms from headache to fatigue. I did cramps the way Meryl Streep did accents. … my deception worked. It calmed my mother’s anxieties and somehow even my own. … I wasn’t at the mercy of nature anymore. (Eugenides, 2002: pp. 361-362) Callie fakes her periods not only for herself but also, and mainly, for her mother’s sake, who wants, like any other parent, for her daughter to be healthy and experience the normal changes that teenage girls experience. At the time she was born, Callie narrates how she could sense “all around … from the 56 beginning, the weight of female suffering” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 215), a legacy of “biblical” pain that women experience throughout their lives as a consequence of owning a female body, from puberty to motherhood. As it happens throughout the narrative, every event in the Stephanides family is framed by a crucial moment in Greek and American history and while Nixon’s political discourse becomes more fallacious, the female performance also becomes more believable for Callie, paradoxically through lying. The fakery of her sexual body raises the question of how “the social recognition of an intersexed body is connected with its visibility” (Antosa, 2012: p. 72), in the sense that the intersex body is only visible when it does not comply with male or female gender presentation. When she is born, Callie is “mistaken” for a girl by the almost blind doctor who, by not recognizing the difference in the intersex body of Calliope, defines her as a girl: “as long as it is hidden from view, the intersex body is deprived of its subversive potential (Antosa, 2012: p. 71). It is this subversive potential that Cal gives up on when choosing to adopt a male gender presentation and erase any type of sexual ambiguity from his body. As Antosa writes, there is “a general inability to read Callie’s body” as intersex since “the social normative gaze invests Callie’s body and condemns it to the invisibility and secrecy” (2012: p. 71). Callie passes for a girl due to her upbringing as one and for being read as ‘female’ by her doctor, her family and even herself. It is when Cal reaches puberty, and her body starts to ‘look male’, that Cal becomes visible as different, undermining “her desire to code her gender identity as female and to fit into the binary, heterosexual system of identification” (Antosa, 2012: p. 72). When Cal decides to run away from his family, and therefore, run away from the role as daughter, and assume his male identity, he is often surprise by the fact that no one seems to notice him or to look at him as different: his male body, with its short hair, male clothes and a posture that Cal thinks of as male is not sexually visible for others for corresponding exactly of what is socially expected of a man. And yet, even though he tries to escape, “running away didn’t make me feel any less of a monster. I saw ahead of me only humiliation and rejection, and I wept for my life” (Eugenides, 2000: p. 449); Cal seems to be unable to overcome shame, alluding to the fact that the intersex body, due to its inability to correspond to a dual system of sex, will always be perceived as shameful. After having an accident and being taken to the hospital, Callie’s body becomes readable as different, to the medical eye that, upon the theatrical revelation of her genitals, reacts in awe, in a scene crafted to resemble the moment of the reveal of something monstrous: The doctor bent closer, mumbling to himself. The intern, rather unprofessionally, raised one hand to her throat and then pretended to fix her collar. Checkov was right. If there’s a gun on the wall, it’s got to go off. … but in the emergency room things were different. There was no smoke, no gunpowder smell, 57 absolutely no sound at all. Only the way the doctor and nurse reacted made it clear that my body had lived up to the narrative requirements. (Eugenides, 2002: p. 396) Through the hiding of these ‘different characteristics’ and through the narrative that Callie makes up at Dr Luce’s office, she attempts at presenting her own body as normative as the one of any other cisgender girl, passing as girl, and later, as man, even hiding from Dr Luce that she has been in a same-sex relationship, in order not to raise any questions about both her sexual identity and orientation. As Morland writes, what lies at the core of the surgeries that redesign intersex genitals is the intention to make these bodies readable and intelligible to a binary structure of bodily signification, “a narrative, whether presumed to originate in patient or clinician, which produces what it narrates” (2005, p. 338). As Cal narrates his experiences as a young girl through the retrospective look that orders his life according to the heteronormative authorial gaze, his male body is produced, in an account that is often marked by a shift from “I” and “Callie”, a device that makes Callie in the past othered to present day Cal. Gender is only read when set against the backdrop of the normative gaze and sexual normative discourses, in a twofold action of both normalizing the ‘normal’ bodies while differentiating the ones that do not fall within the spectrum of the ideal sexed body. This act of falsifying her experience through narrative is linked to the writing of Middlesex itself, in the way in which Cal narrates her story through the voice of a “gene-body-text” (Banner, 2010: p. 13), as well as the story of her family, through the retrospective look that reshapes his experiences as a girl, conferring them with the patina of abnormality and almost rejecting them as true, as if Callie was not Cal. From the future, Cal looks at Callie and narrates her story with the estrangement and distance reserved for a stranger, hiding away any clues that might authenticate her female identity, giving meaning and sequence to a story that is not, at all, sequential or coherent. Even if Cal rejects Dr Luce’s findings, perhaps because he is aware of the fact that he lied in order to convince the doctor of his ‘authentic female self’, he ends up giving in to Dr Luce’s binary approach, even if paradoxically by rejecting it: “this treatment provokes Cal to accept Luce’s binary model of sex/gender: he rejects two viable queer identities – lesbian and intersex – in favour of a yearning for unequivocal heterosexual maleness” (Graham, 2009: p. 14). While Cal says ‘no’ to the surgery and the mutilation of his body, he does however “undergoes a process of heteronormative change” (Antosa, 2012: p. 71) and even if he rejects medical discourses by rejecting the surgery, “Callie remains imbedded in such discourses, since she decides to construct her new gender identity starting from Dr Luce’s definitions of masculinity” (Antosa, 2012: p. 75). Carroll (2012) draws attention to an interesting detail of Cal’s discovery of his condition as 58 intersex; although having been diagnosed as a girl, according to Dr Luce’s medical report Cal’s body has undescended testes and a hypospadic penis, determining that Cal’s body is not fully male, neither fully female and only his upbringing as a girl could explain the need for him to identify as one, given that his body isn’t the one of a girl as medicine and society define it. Besides the presence of these male organs, Cal also finds out that Dr Luce’s surgery would most likely devoid him of sexual pleasure, in what Carroll and advocates of intersex rights have described as IGM (Infant Genital Mutilation), sometimes even equating it with FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), due to the fact that these surgeries often take away the possibility for intersex individuals to live a healthy sex life and, given that these surgeries are performed without the consequent of the children that undergo them, define the parents and doctors as the legal authority the determines the characteristics of someone else’s body. Dr Luce writes, in line with medical practitioners of the time in which this particular part of Middlesex takes place, that “sexual pleasure is only one factor in a happy life” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 437) in detriment of being able to pass and act socially as woman. Moreover, the criteria used to define which sex the undetermined body must be is highly biased and susceptible of criticism, one purely based on the body’s ability to reproduce: doctors faced with uncertainty about a child’s sex use different criteria. They focus primarily on reproductive abilities (in the case of a potential girl) or penis size (in the case of a prospective boy). If a child is born with two X chromosomes, oviducts, ovaries, and a uterus on the inside, but a penis and scrotum on the outside, for instance, is the child a boy or a girl? Most doctors declare the child a girl, despite the penis, because of her potential to give birth, and intervene using surgery and hormones to carry out the decision. (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p. 5). Many are the reports on the violence, flaws and even the lack of sexual arousal that these surgeries originate in intersex bodies and “medical literature is rife with evidence of the negative effects of such surgery” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p. 85). Moreover, there’s “strong evidence that early genital surgery doesn’t work: it causes extensive scarring, requires multiple surgeries, and often obliterates the possibility of orgasm … the only criteria for success are cosmetic, rather than later sexual function” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p. 80) and many adults that have been subjected to this type of treatment as children have been open about the psychological damages of having their bodies exposed to doctors and to a constant invasive scrutiny of their sexual organs. Morland writes on the fact that intersex surgery is mainly cosmetic and not exactly functional, that “[p]erhaps their post-surgical anatomy ‘resembles’ only a ‘resemblance’ of sexual difference” (2005: p. 343), a “nostalgic genitalia” (Morland, 2005: p. 339). In the sense that these new genitals are often designed to look male or female and not to work as male or female, again 59 implying that it is the ability for these bodies to be read by others that turns them into signifiers. Moreover, even if Cal’s genitals had been fashioned to look like what is commonly accepted as ideal female genitalia, the lack of breasts, period or public hair provokes heavy anxiety in teenage Callie, a fear that arises with the failure of recognizing that a plurality of bodily configurations exist. “Hierarchies exist everywhere, but especially in locker rooms” (Eugenides, 2000: p. 295), claims Cal – “the locker room, that site of prepubescent anxiety about impending gender developments” (Butler, 2004: p. 63). As both intersex but also as a teenager who has been raised as a girl, and therefore ready to embody and perform every detail of femininity and womanhood, Callie is fearful that her body will be read by all the other girls as different. While Cal is used to hide his body – in the dark with Julie, his girlfriend in Berlin, under the covers of sleep with Obscure Object of Desire, the girl with whom Callie has her first sexual experiences – in the locker room she would be exposed, her body a dissonant discourse against the other girls’ bodies, inscribed by all American notions of beauty and femininity. When Dr Luce claims that Callie will lose the ability to experience sexual pleasure but she will be able to pass as a girl, he is also implying that the modification of Callie’s body will not exactly mean that she will experience her body as woman but she will socially function as one, and her bodily experience will be defined by her enactment of femininity through her gender presentation, the redesign of her genitalia and her performance of female gender roles such as getting married to a man. If the intersex body is modified based on idealistic images of genitals, can the post-surgery intersex body be perceived as not intersex anymore? Morland implies that these bodies work as simulations, that through these mechanics of transformation only “damages genitals” are produced: Once one focuses on the formal property of repeatability required by surgery as an act that never stops acting, one also confronts the intersexuality of atypical genitals as a sexual difference that never definitively stops resisting the surgical project—irrespective of who is authorizing the genital modification, whether patient or clinician. Surgery never stops being a euphemism for violence, a figure of the failure of violence to make literal its claims. (2005: p. 344) Paradoxically, a surgery which intends to correct abnormal sexual organs is the same surgery that strips them away from their functionality; by being concerned with the way sexual organs look , instead of the way they work , corrective surgery is another product of social anxieties regarding the aesthetics of the body, and their ability to fit in, rather than the healthy and pleasurable sexual lives of intersex people; as Preciado writes “[t]he different body is not eradicated but physically transformed in order to be included within the heterosexual visual regime” (2018, p. 114). 60 According to Dr Luce, “[t]he ability to marry and pass as a normal woman in society are also important goals” (Eugenides, 2000: p. 437), a statement which embodies many of the matters here discussed: the heterosexual behaviour that is expected of Callie, even though she feels attracted to women, the anxiety that, by correcting the intersex body homosexuality is also avoided. Heterosexuality and marriage are here presented as the ultimate and only goal for Cal, as marriage acquires a status of legitimizing Cal’s female identity, and again, the focus on genealogy and family as it permeates the entirety of the narrative. This link between Callie’s sexual orientation towards women and her male identity is so entrenched in Cal (instead of being a lesbian intersex who presents as girl, she must be a straight man) that he claims, at the age of forty-one, that he cannot get married as he cannot have children, unable to break the narrative that is enforced by straight time and reproductive futurity, one that perceives marriage and having children as the only way of conceiving the future. “Like most hermaphrodites but by no means all, I can’t have children. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve never married.” (Eugenides, 2000: p. 106): for Cal, both actions are intertwined and are co-dependant, which is not surprising for a person whose life has been highly defined and informed by such strict family and gender roles based on heteronormative ideas of heritage and inheritance. As Antosa points out, the tendency during the 1950s of correcting intersex bodies is deeply linked to the fear of homosexual desire itself, “a hermeneutic challenge to the hegemonic discourses of sexual difference of the social normative order” (Antosa, 2012: p. 70). By providing intersex individuals with “an unambiguous gender identity” (Antosa, 2012: p. 70) through corrective surgery, normative sexual desire can also be developed and these bodies pose such a threat to heterosexual systems of sexual difference that “it is precisely because its disruptive potential has been grasped only too well by those who diagnose it that intersex has been made to disappear so thoroughly through material and medical discursive practices” (Holmes, 2009: p. 7). This is sustained by Fausto-Sterling, when addressing the right to marry, for instance, and the fact that, before same-sex marriage, the legal system also required a binary sexual identification: As usual, the debates over intersexuality and inextricable from those over homosexuality; we cannot consider the challenges one poses to our gender system without considering the parallel challenge posed by the other. In considering the potential marriage of an intersexual, the legal and medical rules often focus on the question of homosexual marriage (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p. 112). Therefore, by correcting the body of intersex individuals and offering them only two possible sexual categories, medical practitioners were also correcting possible deviant sexual desires, enhancing the 61 imaginary link between sexual identity, sexual orientation and even sexual acts: this “medical management of intersexed bodies can be seen as a model of heteronormative imperative. Intersex bodies have genetic, hormonal, and anatomical configurations that cannot be adequately apprehended by hegemonic discourses of sexual difference” (Antosa, 2012: p. 70) and to correct that difference is to enforce a compulsive heteronormative system. As Dreger writes, the erasure of intersexuality over the correction of the intersex body stems from “the desire to keep people straight. That phrase – keeping people straight – should be taken figuratively, but literally as well” (2003: p. 8) and the writer even points out that it is the existence of two stable sexual categories that allows to define heterosexuality and homosexuality as such, the former as the original one and the latter as deviation. Dreger provocatively asks if one can still talk of homo or heterosexuality when the body is not fully male or female. To assume the role of a woman within the heterosexual system would be a way to consolidate Cal as a functioning woman, and the mimicry of heterosexual living would erase his intersex ambiguity. It is also interesting to note that even as a man Cal does not have a fulfilling sexual life due to the shame of revealing his body to his prospective girlfriends and even other men, for his body is always marked as different. One could then conclude that neither Callie after the surgery, or Cal performing as male would actually find sexual and bodily experiences that are successful and fulfilling. If Tiresias was turned blind from having enjoyed sexual pleasure as both man and woman, it is clear that Cal could hardly be compared to Tiresias in this particular aspect. Although Middlesex may delve into gender performativity and body ambiguity, it fails to fully address the complexity of bodily experience and the corporality of intersex experience, particularly because Middlesex is ultimately a book about growing up as the grandchild of immigrants in a changing America and not about the intersex experience. At best, the novel revolves around the intersex experience only to use the mythical world of hermaphrodites and metaphorical binary oppositions to expiate the guilt and shame of one family. Cal is more of a symbol than an effective character; its omnipresent narrational voice closer to the prophetic, all knowing Tiresias than an actual intersex individual who experiences both pain and pleasure, shame and pride. According to Carroll, when Cal flees from Dr Luce’s and his family’s expectations in order to keep living through his intact body, he escapes “the medical establishment and its management of intersexed bodies” (2012: p. 195) but it is that same medical report, written after the extensive scrutiny of his body by someone who is virtually a stranger, that Cal’s male identity is defined and even though Middlesex does criticize modern medicine’s response to intersexuality through Cal’s treatment … the novel nevertheless remains complicit with its epistemologies. … while the novel critiques the brutal treatment of intersex subjects by the medical profession, its implicit confirmation of a binary sex/gender model 62 effectively validates that treatment. (Graham, 2009: p. 14) Cal’s identity isn’t defined by his own experience of the world but by what the medical report finally brings to light as being parts of his body there were previously unknown to himself, re-establishing the retrospective logic that Carroll writes on: [i]t is Luce’s case notes and their record of genitals palpated and examined which forms the origin of Cal’s newly sexed identity, rather than his own corporeal experience. Moreover, it is this medical history which inaugurates the retrospective logic which dominates the text we read. The adult Cal lays claim to an unequivocal maleness decreed by his hormonal constitution; in the earlier stages of the narrative, and in anticipation of events yet to unfold, he asserts, ‘‘To the extent that fetal hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I’ve got a male brain. But I was raised a girl’’ (19). Retelling his life for his imagined avid reader, Cal rewrites his past desires as anticipating the male heterosexual destinations with which he later identifies [emphasis added]. (Carroll, 2012: p. 195) This retrospective logic has been questioned by theorists such as Judith Butler, who writes that this same logic established dangerous claims for the idea of original sexes and the perfect harmony between anatomy and hormones, in “support to the idea that gender has to be borne out in singular and normative ways at the level of anatomy” (Butler, 2004: p. 63). Biology isn’t the sole reason for a certain sex or gender, neither is hormone counting the solution for gender determination because “[a] body’s sex is simply too complex. There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: p.3). The idea of male and female brains must also be contradicted for, as Fausto-Sterling claim based on studies on both the shape and size of the corpus callosum of men and women and the use of testosterone and/or estrogen on older women in order to prevent the advances of menopause, indicate that there is a lot more to sex than hormones, implying that, more than sex, hormones are linked to aging and growing. Callie then concludes that she must be a man because she felt attracted to girls in school and her “desires are placed firmly within a heterosexual matrix” (Carroll, 2012: p. 195), and even when Cal is living as a man, who claims to have always liked girls, even when he was one, again firmly assuring that he is male in a problematic and illogic direct link between gender identity and sexual orientation, a statement only made possible by Cal, in Berlin, at forty years old, looking backwards and placing his ‘confusing’ life within a straight timeline. By discovering that he’s biologically male, it makes sense for Cal that he is attracted to girls, suggesting such a direct relationship between sexual identity and sexual orientation (as by extent, heterosexuality and reproduction) that makes it seem even almost impossible 69 order for his father’s ghost to be unable to return home; in this ritual, Cal is therefore recognized, at the same time, a man and as the patriarch of the house, his face a palimpsest of his family’s Greek heritage and his American upbringing: And so it was I who, upholding an old Greek custom no one remembered anymore, stayed behind on Middlesex, blocking the door, so that Milton's spirit wouldn't reenter the house. It was always a man who did this, and now I qualified. … The mulberry tree had no leaves. The wind swept over the crusted snow into my Byzantine face, which was the face of my grandfather and of the American girl I had once been. I stood in the door for an hour, maybe two. I lost track after a while, happy to be home, weeping for my father, and thinking about what was next. (Eugenides, 2000: p. 529) And yet, even though Milton’s father did not enter the house, Cal is still haunted by his past, particularly by Callie, who appears as a ghostly reminder that the intersex body, regardless of being constricted, is able to encompass several timelines at the same time as “Cal presents himself as “possessed” by the girl he was raised to be … “like a childhood speech impediment” (41) a simile suggesting … a disability or a flaw” (Graham, 2009: p. 10): I’m not androgynous in the least. … In other words, I operate in society as a man … I’ve lived more than half my life as a male, and by now everything comes naturally. When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed. Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp’s feet through the trousers of my legs. (Eugenides, 2002: p. 41–42) Calliope haunts Cal’s body, which seems to echo Holmes’ statement that the terrain of intersex studies is also haunted and haunting. In the context of the clinic where parents confront the unexpected, there is a gender haunting that conjures up all the performative efforts required to shore up the traditional sex/ gender divide, and which repeatedly collapses inward when we feel ourselves to have ‘failed’ at what was supposed to come naturally. For those of us who have rejected assertions regarding the naturalness of sex, and its effect as gender, such collapsing may become a welcome part of the performance, or even a logical impossibility in the face of a more fluid conceptualization of sex/gender. That is, when all things are possible and welcome, the idea of a collapse ceases to make sense. (Holmes, 2009: 6). 70 1.5. Continuity and Contingency There is an anxiety regarding ambiguity and the lack of closure in Middlesex : its ending, in which every loose end is neatly tied, has been critically contested as the desire of post 9/11 literature to stay away from what is contingent and unexpected, and to recover a narrative of triumphalism and closure (S. Cohen, 2007), a narrative that seems to fit exactly in what Halberstam defines as straight time, both regarding the individual body (from female to male) and the nation (a long line of triumphs rather than a series of steps forwards and backwards). Moreover, the omnipresent metaphor of the link, symbolised by threads, can be read as the dominance of genealogy and predeterminism in Middlesex (Graham, 2009), as if Cal’s life has been the spinning of a single thread over time, one that defines exactly how his life must take shape. Between these two concepts, continuity and closure, this part of the chapter aims at looking at the images of threads and the images of doors in Middlesex within the context of post 9/11 literature and the genres of the family saga, a coming of age (perhaps even a coming out) tale and even historical fiction. S. Cohen (2007) writes on Middlesex as being a result of its own time: while looking at past, present and a possible future, the novel hints at the historical imagination of its own time. This retrospective look into the past as a direct influence on the present, and even on the future, for Cal presents a tragic past in order to imagine and reshape his future into a brighter horizon, entails a necessary notion of continuity, something sustained by the novel’s concerns with historical fiction. Moreover, the discourses around September 11 “were full of signs of heteronormativity”, as “[t]he rhetoric of the loss of “fathers and mothers”, “sons and daughters”, and “brothers and sisters” attempts to trace the smooth alignment between the nation-state and the nuclear family, the symbolics of blood relations and nationalist domesticity” (Eng in Ahmed, 2014: p. 157). This desire to impose a sense of continuity through historical veracity and family genealogy also “imposes a false closure on its narrative of the main character’s gender crisis” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 372). Cal’s 600-pages-long saga of gender-bending and failure in connecting with other people comes to an abrupt end in which he seems suddenly happy as a man who has finally found a matching partner in a Japanese girl who also seems to have a body that is, to Cal’s binary way of perceiving bodies, only barely feminine. This enforced ending seems to be a rushed aesthetic choice but, more than style, it “depends in part on how contingency existence feels and how public discourse and constructions of history deal with that feeling” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 327), a reflection of the moment when it was written: 71 the way it imposes a false closure on its narrative of the main character’s gender crisis. This closure represents something other than a poor aesthetic choice. Rather, its falseness – the unearned, unwarranted character of the novel’s ending – is unintended, and so it represents a failure that is especially indicative of the unconscious effect of its historical imagination. The way Middlesex ends is in part due to, and thus can tell us something about, the way history felt in America in 2002. (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 372) Although Samuel Cohen refers directly to terrorism and its volatile nature, and the inability to trace it or predict it, one could also argue that the intersex category (and every other category that is gender nonconforming) in itself also entails some degree of contingency, disruption, uncertainty. Like any type of ambiguity, sexual or national, an enforced closure seems to be the pacifying end that these narratives need. Even though Cal’s narrative “challenge(s) already constructed narratives” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 372), there is only as much leeway to rewrite the historical background in which Middlesex takes place, “for historical literature … whose focus is explicitly on the past and always implicitly, as a result, on the way that history “ends” – on the way the past leads to the precarious present and, ultimately, the future (S. Cohen, 2007: pp. 372-373). While Middlesex presents a linear timeline in which things succeed each other neatly (first female, then male), aimed by the structure of the family saga (a generation follows another generation), the other case studies that were chosen to be a part of this thesis have different ways of engaging both with time (straight time/queer time) as well as the past, the latter being perceived not only as a site of shame (although it is there) but also of a collective enactment of memory that is passed on to the next generation of queer individuals, in the same way that a family inheritance (as well as their trauma) is passed down from parents to children. Cal does not erase the past, as he tells it with the utmost detail, but in the process of retelling this past, he actively intervenes upon it, marking it by the present knowledge that, whatever he was doing at a particular time, he was doing it with the knowledge that he was a man. Moreover, while Cal’s shame seems to have followed him into the present and the future, and still haunts him, texts like The Inheritance , as will be seen in Chapter 3, take that shame from the past and turn it into something else; while in Middlesex the past has an overpowering force, and Cal narrates it with the distance of an authorial voice, works like The Great Believers and The Inheritance actively engage with the past, dialoguing with it, taking lessons from it. Eugenides also needs some type of a symbolic ending for Cal, one that fits comfortably on the binary logic of sexual spheres and that sustains Cal’s argument that there is nothing ambiguous about his body or identity: Cal as a man on the doorway of the home in which he grew up, the same Cal that a few pages before was writing about the desire to move freely across national borders and performing as a mermaid in a freak show. According to Lee, this ending 72 enact[s] the neutering of the queer that Halberstam says is so comforting to a conservative ideology. It is true that throughout the novel, the underlying ambiguities always threaten to irrupt through the conciliatory surface, but the fact that these undercurrents are invisible, and by definition below the surface, serves to preserve the inoffensive hierarchy of a queer coming of age in which the teleological destination, and what is most desired, is normalcy. (2010: p. 45) This seems to be the “way of telling American history older than the nation itself” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 374) while describing narratives of triumphalism and their retrospective look over history in order to consolidate national images and identities, from the early European settlers, to the Reagan years (which will be analysed in Chapter 2, while looking at depictions of AIDS), and up to 9/11, a time to “introduce a new enemy to the West’s superior way of life in the amorphous and shape-shifting form of Terror” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 374) as well as “a different kind of terror – the terror caused by the recognition of contingency” that “informs a view of the course of human events as not chartable along the upward line of humankind’s inexorable progress toward liberal democracy but rather as heavily featuring randomness and vulnerability” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 374). This reading and interpretation of history demands a solid structure defined by continuity and sequence, by binary oppositions of what must be defeated and the one that defeats; Middlesex is, after all, part historical novel and the same sequence that links the Ottoman war to the Race Riots, is perhaps the same logic that Eugenides feels obliged to follow from baby Calliope to adult Cal. As Lee writes, Cal narrates his grandparents struggle to arrive in The United States having already informed the narrator that his sole birth is the proof that his grandparents were successful, and the same can be applied to his former female self, long gone. This retrospective look ensures that “all manner of heterogeneous, unruly past events, can be tamed and assimilated such that the smooth, uncontested surface of the present, or the null ethnicity of white America, contains the only relevance” (Lee, 2010: p. 40). Even though Cal’s story could be perhaps contemplated as a counternarrative, as many novels have by looking at “events and facts that are concerned with loss and wrongdoing” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 375) through historical trauma, Middlesex seems to want to fall over the triumphalist discourse that marks most literature. While aware that intersex lives must also be allowed to enjoy triumphalist discourses, one must also be aware to the way in which endings may be enforced or simulated in literary narratives, if these endings are true to the struggles of these characters or aesthetic choices to please a solid and continuous narrative structure. Cal’s trauma is vividly present in Middlesex : the invasive study of Dr Luce, acknowledging and immediately ignoring his intersexuality, the escape from home, the degrading 73 experience as part of the freak show only sustained with drugs and alcohol, the constant fear of being exposed as intersex, the inability to sustain relationships. All these traumatic experiences are closed up neatly by Eugenides by providing him with a final closure – “imposes healing closure on what beings as a more open-ended story” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 376) – that promises a time of future happiness, one that seems to arise from the closing of these wounds rather than the problematization of these traumatic events resulting in a “traumatic narrative too quick to heal the wounds it uncovers … through the magic or eliding and forgetting” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 376). While this closing of the wound can be purely an aesthetic choice and authorial decision, for Cohen it encompasses a broader sense of national narratives that marked American discourses after 9/11 and provided: a model of narrative closure difficult to resist. A history whose tragic losses and dark secrets can be uncovered and healed is not as opposed as it might seem to a history in which those things stay hidden, a history that's all about victory and righteousness, a history where everything turns out all right for America in the end. The events of 9/11, which some have found a fit for a narrative of America as innocent victim (and then righteous avenger), have been for others a model of an open wound that needs healing-or closing. (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 376) Eugenides “resolves his hero’s conflict too quickly and too neatly” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 377). The decision to live as a man seems rushed, unproblematic, even betraying of the intersex category that seems to work only as a temporary stage that can be fixed if not by surgery, at least by the performance of gender: “this section of the novel is rushed and haphazardly plotted, and the ideas that animate the story earlier are lost” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 377) and a whole novel on gender troubles and uncertainty becomes solved through a quick decision of switching genders. Middlesex contradicts its own premises when taking the turn towards an ending that is very much determined in presenting that, after all, and after so many traumatic turns, any of them actually matter for Cal was able to define himself as something, even if this moment of self-realization is informed by misconception and denial. S. Cohen writes on the “simplistic” ending of the narrative sustained by Eugenides’ own words: After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found out that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood (Eugenides in S. Cohen, 2007: p. 383). Several earlier arguments of Middlesex are debunked in a single paragraph: a family like the Stephanides, with its solid gender roles, sexual secrets and untold stories becomes, all of a sudden, open to gender 74 possibilities and their variations and gender doesn’t matter anymore to them, while also going against the grain of popular opinion. Vliet hints that “Callie’s transition to Cal is in some ways harder on his family than it is on him” (2011: p. 134) but it seems that this concern is directly linked to the fact that Cal runs away, and the uncertainty regarding his whereabouts and less with the fact that he his intersex. Moreover, the Stephanides do not show any concern about Callie as a girl and then her return as a man; it is the inbetween stage of Cal as an intersex person that is unspoken, kept secret, ultimately shamed. His return to the family is made as a man, also implying that while his identity is unclear, so is his role within the household; when he returns, he can assume the role of “the man of the house”, left empty by his father. Vliet implies that Milton’s death disrupts the family equilibrium, a balance that seems to be regained by Cal’s return and that, had Milton been confronted with Cal as a boy, “there would have been an entirely different sort of emotions upheaval within the family unit” (2011: p. 135). “In the end, the middle of its title, which it had so promisingly staked out as its territory early on, is abandoned” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 384) while the past is healed and presented as “a closed book” (p. 384) that Cal reinvents in order to reimagine a present and perhaps a future free from trauma and hurt. It is, however, debatable if the rushed closure of the wound, which is equated with the anxiety to provide a happy end to Cal does more harm than good. As S. Cohen points out, the past is “domesticated” and even though the choice to deal with the past and then put it away may seem productive, for it allows Cal to, apparently “escape its power to determine the future … with the reforgetting of the traumatic event, its potential us lost” (p. 384). When Cal stands on the doorway, not wanting to talk with the ghost of his father, he is expectant of what will come next: given that he is narrating his story through a retrospective look, “this optimism relies on the teller’s already knowing what is next (as we do, from the frame story)” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 387). This romanticizing of the past is possible due to Cal’s knowledge of the present; the trauma of the past in therefore reframed and retold taking into account the outcome in the present. Cal is happy for the future on the day of his father’s funeral, a detail which can probably be read as a result of the over dominating power of the optimism of closure and an hyper-romanization of the past, one that tends to overlook trauma and repression in detriment of the happiness found in the present, a past which is “constructed optimistically” (S. Cohen, 2007: p. 387). Cal no longer fears the future for he is sure of who he is; there is no fear of the unexpected because the past is solved and closed, Cal is unambiguously male and the mutant gene seems to have found a dead-end since Cal cannot have children. He is indeed, “the last stop”, as the title of the last chapter of the book indicates. Cal is therefore happy and expectant of the future for he is sure that the is the last intersex person in his family, therefore bringing this deviant 75 line of sexual identity to a stop. The fact that Cal cannot have children works for Eugenides as an effective literary device: the closed end. Adoption is not considered, neither is IVF, as it happens in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts : with this ending, Eugenides guarantees that the Stephanides will not have any more intersex children, relying solely on Cal’s brother to carry on with the family’s legacy. Graham points out the link between the Minotaur and the image of the thread, in the sense that Theseus is helped by his sister Ariadne who gives him a ball of thread in order to kill the monster and leave the labyrinth. It is the thread that brings death to the Minotaur and it works as a recurrent image to define the fate of Cal as the direct result of his ancestors’ actions, as a link that is spun throughout almost one century of history over two continents, surviving war and riots: “[t]he motif of the thread runs through the novel, emphasising that Cal is a product of his ancestors’ transgressions and reiterating his connection to the Minotaur” (2009: p. 8). Besides the mythological Minotaur, Desdemona is also linked with the image of threading, in the shape of the silk that she grows in Greece, in Mount Olympus and later in The United States, in a factory; when moving across the Atlantic, Desdemona takes the silk worms with her, a clear metaphor for the desire to establish a link between what’s left behind and her new home, taking her “across boundaries of place and race, representing both the narrative itself and the flawed genetic thread that links her to her grandchild Cal” (Graham, 2009: p. 8). Another image pointed out by Graham is the one of the boat in which Desdemona and Lefty leave, referring to an old tradition 30 : “[a]s it leaves the dock, balls of thread connecting those on board to those left behind onshore unravel, filing the air with lines which symbolize the ties of ethnic origin that are stretched and broken by the process of migration” (Graham, 2009: p. 8). As suggested by Graham, the mulberry tree is another image connected with the network of threads: silk worms feed on the leaves that grow in Greece and also in the Stephanides’s home in Middlesex, the name of the road where they live, bringing the two distinct and distant places together as the food that feeds those that produce the silk threads. However, by the end of the novel, as Cal stands in the doorway preventing his father’s ghost from returning, the tree is bare, implying that Desdemona’s silk worms won’t be able to eat and therefore, perish, symbolising the death of the links that connected the Stephanides to Greece. Graham points out that this means that the narrative has come to an end, something sustained 30 “It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn’t remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.”(Eugenides, 2002: p. 64). 76 by another image of Greek mythology: Ariadne, whose thread is also linked to the unravelling of stories. One is also reminded of Penelope, weaving the epic story of Ulysses over a tapestry or even Louise Bourgeois spiders named after her mother. Weaving and the images of threading are interlinked not only with the shaping of narratives but also to womanhood and the domestic: the lack of leaves in the tree where Cal goes back to symbolises the end of his own narrative, as well as, perhaps a closure that also symbolises a break from the world of women and weaving, an argument that seems to find echo in Cohen’s arguments on the rushed ending of Middlesex . The tying of all the loose ends and the lack of leaves on a tree, which could also be read as a family tree, now striped bear by the death of Cal’s father, crystalizes what has been previously written on the need for closure for Middlesex and for Cal: nothing can be ambiguous, not even the end of the novel. Without leaves with which to feed the silk worms, there are no more narrative threads to spin. 1.6. MDLSX : Queering Middlesex MDLSX is a solo performance by Silvia Calderoni, directed by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò that premiered in 2015. Like Middlesex , MDLSX is anchored in several texts, besides Middlesex itself and Orlando , as well as critical works by Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and Paul B. Preciado’s on gender and queer studies. The result is a pastiche of pop songs that a teenager Calderoni must have grown up with, juxtaposed with autobiographic videos of a young Calderoni with her family, creating an ambiguous personal account through the ventriloquism of other works, where it is difficult to understand where fiction ends and reality begins, what words are Calderoni’s and what words were borrowed from the many texts that inform the performance, what experiences are Cal’s and which ones are Calderoni’s, juxtaposing severa timelines that intertwined, bringing together past and present, self and other. While recurring to domestic videos – the chapter in which Callie is born, and Dr Philosobian declares her female, is appropriately entitled “Home Movies” – Calderoni impersonates the role of a VJ/DI, as she chooses songs, recites texts, points a camera to herself, undresses and redresses as another. While addressing the prejudice and confusion that Calderoni’s ambiguous body has provoked over the years, MDLSX also delves into the freedom that comes from accepting that same ambiguity, addressing gender with a playful tone: “the happiness that attends disaster”, says Calderoni. MDLSX oscillates between moments of comedy – often the effect of the use of fake beards and prosthetic breasts that echo drag performances and ridicule of gender stereotypes – and tender moments of empathy towards Calderoni when she appropriates Cal’s words in Middlesex , like the moment when Callie looks 77 for the meaning of ‘hermaphrodite’ on the dictionary (in Fun Home , Bechdel does the same, looking for the meaning of ‘lesbian’, as seen in Figure 4). The dictionary, in which the words ‘hypospadias’, ‘eunuch’ and ‘hermaphrodite’ follow each other, with MONSTER being suggested as a synonym for all of them, is yet another text that constitutes the myriad of authorial texts that compose the novel, both present directly and the ones to which Eugenides has recurred as part of his research. Something similar happens in MDLSX , in the sense that it is also composed of several texts: songs, literary works, critical works, domestic videos, and the body of the performer. This also happens in another case studies selected for this thesis, as intertextuality, as it will be analysed, composes a network of references and voices with whom the authors dialogue, creating a genealogy of queer heritage. 78 Figure 4: A page from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home . 85 After a monologue on Buñuel’s Obscure Object of Desire , a comparison between the burden that the man in the film carries around and the burden that Cal seems to carry around 32 , an interview between Paul B. Preciado and Alejandro Jodorowsky on what queer theory encompasses plays in the background. These moments, in which other texts intersect the passages that were selected from Middlesex inform these same excerpts with new ideas and concepts that seem to lack from Eugenides’ text, while also serving a pedagogical purpose of providing the public with a theoretical framework in which to place the performance. In the interview, Preciado defines queer theory as “teoria bolleras, maricas, trans, mestiza 33 ”, clearly indicating a plural, intersectional view of this particular theoretical lens that, according to Preciado, has been appropriated by micro groups in the United States in 1980s as a space of political fight against the politics of integration of gay and lesbian individuals within the heterosexual society. When placed within the text of the performance, and side by side with the excerpts from Middlesex , this particular view of queerness as resistance to assimilation enforces a different reading of Middlesex , one that criticizes exactly what has been discussed in this chapter as the heteronormative transformation of Cal, from female to stealth male. MDLSX is a self-criticizing text, one that reshapes Middlesex , readjusting it to the time not of its production but of the staging of the performance, while also criticizing Cal’s need to assimilate, to pass for man. Preciado states that before having defined himself as “lesbian”, the ones around him, in a very catholic Burgos, had already felt the need to define him, often through insults. When asked how he defined himself at the time of the interview, Preciado claimed to be “transgender”. Just like Cal, the need for Preciado to identify himself stemmed from the imposition from the outside of a certain sexual category. Unlike Cal, Preciado’s sexual identification changes from a non-normative identification to another, without the assimilation of heterosexuality and gender conformation that Cal endures. The moment that follows recovers the moment in which Cal is confronted by his father’s disclosure of his intersexuality and the reading of the file written by Dr Luce that has served as a way for the Stephanides to confirm their son’s sexual identity: on stage, Calderoni wheels around a suitcase – Buñuel’s burden? – while a video of herself as a teenager is projected. The reading of the doctor’s file, with its complicated medical terms and the conclusion that Cal must endure a “feminizing surgery along 32 Cal explains that what interested him the most in Buñuel’s film “was the surrealist touch ... In many scenes Fernando Rey is shown holding a heavy sack over his shoulder. The reason for this sack is never mentioned. (Or if it is, I missed that, too.) He just goes around lugging this sack, into restaurants and through city parks. That was exactly how I felt, following my own Obscure Object. As though I were carrying around a mysterious, unexplained burden or weight. (Eugenides, 2002: p. 325). As Cal explains, he watched the film long after meeting Obscure Object, naming her after the event, an “anachronism” as he claims, again reinforcing the fact that the narrative is written backwards. 33 Roughly translated as “dyke, fag, trans, mixed” 86 with corresponding hormonal treatment” contrasts with the video of a playful young Calderoni dancing and using her body to project shadows over a wall. The heavily charged moment of the discovery of “monster” on the dictionary follows, as well as Cal’s escape from home and his female identity. Calderoni wears a suit and carries the suitcase over her head, while reciting excerpts from the novel that describe Cal’s life on the road, trying to mimic a man, while Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere plays and a video of a younger Calderoni, hair cut off, is projected (Figure 6). Figure 6: Calderoni in MDLSX The song, along with the images of the road intertwined with images of Calderoni wearing boxer shorts and short hair, and the text that describes the transformations that Cal’s body endures, reinforce the idea that to do gender is to travel, a process of transformation of both map and body, a recurrent metaphor in queer literature. “It was in those motel rooms that I learnt about my new body” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 452), recites Calderoni from Middlesex : it is in these fleeting, temporary spaces that Cal’s body develops, once away from home, from gender norms and expectations imposed by his family and his doctors. Calderoni then recites: We are the black and faggot Jacobins, the red dykes, the green evicted, we are the undocumented trans, labs animals and animals in slaughterhouses, the virtual sex works, the landless, the migrants, the autistic, the ADD, those suffering from a thyroxine excess, a serotonin dysfunction, we are the handicapped, the old living in precarious conditions. We are the failed reproducers of the earth, those bodies that cannot be valued in an economy of knowledge. We are the rabid diaspora. (Nicolò, D & Caldeironi, S.: 2020) 87 Again, the input of intersectional queer theory against the backdrop of Middlesex results in a plural text that is informed by a queerness that is aware, besides the multiplicity of gender identifications, of colour, class, age, disability and even green politics, a “rabid diaspora” or people that, not belonging in any category of an heteronormative structure, find solace in the nomadic, the outside, the non-belonging, besides also finding a kinship amongst them, as unreproductive bodies: “Bodies are recognized as human only as they are potential producers of ovules or spermatozoids to be located within a Fordist-family chain of production and reproduction” (2018, p. 12), writes Preciado. This moment of political engagement gives place to oneiric space of the Octopussy’s Garden, where Cal performed in a peep show, as images of water are projected and Calderoni struggles to fit inside a mermaid’s tail; this is the same water that kills Milton, Cal’s father and allows Desdemona and Lefty to cross the Atlantic and change their identity, a space of transformation, deeply linked with mythological creatures such as sirens and nymphs. Calderoni looks directly at the audience, transformed in a mermaid, while images of herself with short hair and wearing tennis shoes and sweatpants swirling underwater are projected, in the first clear moment of a gender duality in which the performer appears in two different spaces, at the same time, with distinct gender presentations: it is also the first time in the performance that the word “intersex” in enunciated. A video of a younger Calderoni, head shaved, dancing with her father is then projected, over the appropriately titled Imitation of Life by R.E.M.: the video ends with the two embracing. Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want by The Smiths plays, the song that, earlier on the performance, Calderoni, as a teenager, had requested her parents to play on her funeral; as in Middlesex , a death takes place at the end of the narrative, although Calderoni reacts the moment of death through the use of a song. Although in MDLSX the death is metaphorical (perhaps of gender itself), in Middlesex it is the death of the father (both physically and philosophically) that allows Cal to fully take the role of man of the house. If Cal is born twice, perhaps he can also die twice, as suggested by MDLSX , in which to return home is to kill off Callie in order for Cal to become the man that he feels that he has always been. Perhaps the biggest difference between Middlesex and MDLSX stems from their narrators: while Callie perceives, first, her attraction to girls as unnatural and her masculine traits of her body as unwanted, and then, as Cal, a need to suppress every feminine traces and pass exclusively as male, a behavior that must be practiced side by side with heterosexuality, in MDLSX , the ambiguous narrator of the one-(wo)man-show never gives in to either fully female or male presentation: while Cal binds his chest and wears what he defines as an overcompensation of masculinity through suits and cigars, always hiding 88 his naked body in shame from being mistaken for something else other than a man by a lover, in MDLSX the body of the performer appears unapologetically naked, in full display, right before being covered by wigs that mimic beards and public hair or augmented by the insertion of gym clothes in a bra as fake breasts. In MDLSX there is no shame of the naked and ambiguous body, nor is the display of femininity or masculinity taken seriously: via techniques that mimic drag, Calderoni parodies gender presentation that ironizes Cal’s own anxiety of always looking like what he presumes to be a man. About fifteen years separate the novel from the play: what lacked in Middlesex when it comes to the celebration of ambiguity and acceptance of intersexuality is present in MDLSX . Perhaps the gap between both texts is explained by the recent developments in queer theory and gender studies, as well as in the treatment of intersexuality and the change towards its consideration as a sexual category. Whereas in Middlesex intersexuality is monstrous, rejected and perceived as illness, in MDLSX ambiguity is monstrously celebrated, reclaimed and open to possibility. The juxtaposition of texts, from the heteronormative Middlesex to ground-breaking queer texts, informed by new views on gender, makes of MDLSX a unique and highly insightful view of not only of gender ambiguity but also gender plurality, a seamless collage of voices embodied by Calderoni in an account which is as biographical as othered, but that recreates Middlesex as if the novel was reanalysed and recreated through the lens of queer theory and the enunciation by a narrator which is not a male. Moreover, MDLSX also addresses how productive a transmedia work can be, particularly one that is already informed by a multiplicity of written texts that is then layered upon video, music and performance, showing that to compare is to establish dialogues between texts and theories, often resulting in a plural hypertext, one that opens up instead of closing in, that challenges rather than enforcing, that provides questions rather than neat endings that betray their own characters. Like the performance itself, gender is playful, changeable, a multi-layered text written over a body. 1.7. A Road to Somewhere The ambiguity of Middlesex can and must be celebrated; however, it is crucial to understand the limitations of that same fluidity, as well as the binary, heteronormative structure that encompasses the many crossings of Cal and his family and “the anxiety about sexual ambiguity” (Graham, 2) that the novel expresses, as well as what seems to be a fear of taking a strong stand against the medical treatment of intersex individuals but also to pose a challenge to binary sexuality. Both heavily praised as a hymn to hybridity and criticised for its need for closure, continuity and stability, 89 Middlesex may be read as a valuable attempt to make visible a lived experience that is rarely represented ... through its descriptions of Cal’s negative self-perceptions and experiences, [the novel] acknowledges the ways in which intersex people have been represented and understood in the past – as dysfunctional monsters – and seeks to counter that depiction (Graham, 2009: p. 17). It is certain that it can be argued that Cal does have the right to self-determine his own gender presentation and sexual identity and the free will to live as he desires; on the other hand, the choice of a single gender identity over fluidity seems to be more of a choice based on external pressure, mainly from a doctor for whom intersexuality is to be eradicated and a family that deeply reinforces gender roles, rather than on an informed view of the many possibilities provided by a plurality of sexual identities, something that is sustained by his own view of himself as a myth as well as a freak show attraction, placing himself on the realm of the oneiric. Perhaps Cal could be read as a mirror image of a society’s own lack of acceptance and Cal is a product of his time, an embodiment of the general perception of “other” bodies, in a book that “offers its readers the same opportunity to view the “Other” from a safe distance and find reassurance” (Graham, 2009: p. 16). However, by giving in to a need for dramatic effect (the shock of seeing the intersex body) as well as the recurrent use of myth and allegory, as well as the portrait of Cal as unhappy in exile, alone in the world with a lack of positive models or other intersex narratives and individuals makes of Middlesex more of a fable in which ambiguity is a stage which can be cured if one is willing to take the road to somewhere, instead of nowhere. The retrospective look that has been analysed in this chapter works as a way to reinforce what the Stephanides have been imposing on their family relatives for generations: well defined gender roles, with no leeway for sexual ambiguity, which is in Middlesex equated with assimilationist desires expressed by Cal of being the “all American daughter” that his parents desired, questioning then if national identities are also meant to be as crystalized as a binary sexual system. Intersex bodies challenge what was thought of as unquestionable: that bodies are female or male, that these bodies must interact accordingly to what is expected of social femininity and masculinity, that ambiguity must be fixed in order to prevent the collapse of a binary heterosexual system sustained by idealistic notions of gender configuration and presentation, that marriage or relationships must necessarily produce children, that queer people are unable of having networks of support. As Holmes writes, these bodies work critically “as a tool for interrogating heteronormative and bionormative presuppositions about proper embodiment” (2009: p. 7). Owning a gendered body is to accept what is expected by families, friends and lovers: to have an intersex body is to question those same expectations 90 for “‘intersex’ is not one but many sites of contested being, temporally sutured to biomedical, political and social imperatives in play in each moment” (Holmes, 2009: p. 2). While the family in Middlesex was marked by well-established gender roles to which Cal’s intersex body had adapt itself, the following chapter will address a new configuration of familial liaisons and queer kinship, in particular during the AIDS years, and how in this particular time, family structures were questioned and rearranged, through the creation of alternative ways of ensuring care and security for those afflicted by HIV/AIDS. Perhaps a new genealogy of intersex texts is needed, one that is plural, that represent intersex people not as exiled but as part of a community and capable of establishing healthy structures of kinship, leaving shame behind. As Zora tells Cal when he asks her why she would want to disclose her intersex status to anyone, since she could easily pass for a cisgender woman: “[b]ecause we’re what’s next” (Eugenides, 2002: p. 490) pointing out to a future that Middlesex does not allow Cal to dream about. 91 Chapter 2. Photographic Arc(HIV)es, Memory and Family Ties in The Great Believers William S. Burroughs said cut into the present and the future leaks out When I cut into the past what leaks out is you. Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon 2.1. Looking Back: 1985 At the height of the AIDS crisis, a young man named Adrian goes back to his parent’s home in conservative Texas to celebrate Christmas and tell his parents that he is gay and to disclose an HIV positive diagnosis; his return home is, essentially, a farewell. He leaves without being able to tell his parents either of his two secrets 34 . But before leaving he records a tape for his younger brother Andrew, a boy who listens to Madonna 35 and has quit sports in order to take part of the drama club in school, and to whom his older brother, without ever mentioning his sexual orientation or the presumption that his younger brother is also gay, states that there the young boy should not be afraid of his desires or deny who he is. The young man, who walks around with a death sentence over his head, leaves town before the young boy listens to the tape on his Walkman, a voice which the viewer can assume to come from beyond the grave, surpassing death. The tape becomes a queer temporality, one that can be played in loop, that connects both men to each other, but also to the inheritance of a gay culture. If the dialogue with his parents proves to be impossible, there is a dialogue that is somewhat possible with his brother, due to the sharing of a mutual culture reference: the music tape. 1985 is a “stylish and heartbreaking” (Hans, 2018) independent film directed by Yen Tan in which the narrative relies as much on moments of honest exposure – when Adrian shows his friend his chest marked by Kaposi lesions – and somewhat clichéd and not so subtle suggestions – Andrew, the younger brother, has every trait that is expected of young gay men, who are stereotypically taken to be 34 As Weston writes “[a]side from AIDS, no other topic encountered during my fieldwork generated an emotional response comparable to coming out to blood (or adoptive) relatives. When discussion turned to the subject of straight family, it was not unusual for interviews to be interrupted by tears, rage, or a lengthy silence. "Are you out to your parents?" and "Are you out to your family?" were questions that almost inevitably arose in the process of getting to know another lesbian or gay person” (Weston, 1991, 43). 35 Besides being thought of as a gay icon, Madonna has been the target of controversy regarding “Vogue”, as the song is a reference to the drag culture of New York that was immortalized in the film “Paris is Burning”. (1990) The singer is either celebrated for having given a platform to an underground subculture or condemned for having appropriated it and turned it mainstream. The film also provides a complex insight into matters of family, as well as intersections of race, class and gender. It has been analysed many times, with Judith Butler and bell hooks writing crucial insights about it. 92 effeminate and prone to like pop music and performing. There are also moments that attest for the crushing unspeakably of being both gay and HIV-AIDS positive in the 80s, as when Adrian’s father, a war veteran, realizes his oldest son’s sexual orientation but is unable to talk about it. In the four-star review of the film in The Guardian , it is written that “[s]et against the backdrop of Reagan’s America, the Aids epidemic looms large over the film, though it is never mentioned by name” (Hans, 2018). The delicate, at times melodramatic film is particularly touching during its final moments, when Andrew, without realizing that this was the last time that he saw his older brother alive, listens to the tape that his brother recorded for him, in a loop of acceptance and encouragement that will, hopefully outlast the plague and infuse the next generation of gay men with self-acceptance instead of shame. Adrian’s family’s gender roles are well defined: the young man does not feel at home when at home: his father is silent, masculine, a war veteran that drives a truck with a Reagan sticker, and yet loving towards his son even if unable to communicate with him, and his mother is nurturing, a homemaker and yet hides from her husband the fact that she votes for the Democrats. Adrian’s homosexuality seems incompatible with such a family picture, whose tensions arise from a need of acceptance and understanding and the incapability of the coexistence between a conservative milieu, a deep devotion to religion (Adrian’s parents give him a Bible, his last Christmas present ever) and homosexuality. 1985 is shot in black and white, which seems to intend to crystalize Adrian’s story, and AIDS, in the time when the virus took away many gay man. The film could easily fit within the aesthetic and atmosphere of New Queer Cinema that often dealt with AIDS and HIV related issues in a similar honest fashion: “[t]he lighting, clothes, and production design all further the sense that we're seeing a missing artifact from that era” (Seitz, 2018). “A missing artifact” seems to be a rather fitting description of most queer narratives that have been created over the last years which often look back at this particular time in an attempt to recuperate personal narratives of both disappearance and resistance. In the figure of Andrew, and the cassette that Adrian records for his brother, one finds a possible future for a new generation of homosexual men, a possible existence for a group of people whose lives were prematurely brought to an end during the AIDS crisis. Adrian records the tape against forgetfulness, thinking of the future, a last moment of resistance from a dying man, a love letter from brother to brother, from a gay man to another. The Great Believers 93 Written by Rebecca Makkai (1978-), the highly praised and awarded The Great Believers is one of the first narratives to document the AIDS crisis from its early stages. Interestingly, the book was published in 2018, the same year that the film 1985 was released, and its narrative starts in 1985 as well, a coincidence that does not stop there: both address matters the AIDS years and the articulation between family and AIDS, disclosure and shame, the core themes of this Chapter. The Great Believers is among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present — among the first, that is, to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early years as well as its course and its repercussions over the decades. Makkai puts the epidemic (which, of course, has not yet ended) into historical perspective without distancing it or blunting its horrors. (Cunningham, 2018) As Monica B. Pearl writes about the early texts to address the AIDS years around the beginning of the 1990s, these texts were already working in retrospect, often looking back at the AIDS years and going even further back, to Stonewall, for instance, indicating a “transition” in theme, in which loss is a part of narrative but not their only feature: there should now be historical novels of gay life implies some sort of closure, or at least transition in narrative and experience a transition to what is still uncertain, though certainly to a life that incorporates, but no longer dwells on, the losses incurred by AIDS. There is a gay history now [emphasis added], the appearance of gay epics such as these imply, an era that closes with the advent of the AIDS epidemic. (2013: p. 5) Perhaps one could imply that The Great Believers also does something similar to AIDS narratives, by adding a future to them, juxtaposed to the AIDS years, with characters that mediate these times, adding to that same gay history. The text goes back and forth between 1985 and 2015, queering time, between the early AIDS years and the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan. Makkai’s narrative weaves through the lives of young Yale Tishman, a young curator, and his group of disappearing friends in 1980s in Chicago and Fiona, the younger sister of Nico, a man who died of AIDS. Fiona, who took care of the men who fell ill and worked as a mother figure for them, finds herself in the other timeline that is part of the book’s narrative, in 2015, in Paris, looking for her own daughter of whom she has become estranged. In the meantime, she attends the opening of the exhibition at the Pompidou of Richard Campo, a photographer who has survived the AIDS epidemic while documenting it and how was close to Fiona and her group of friends, documenting them. This trip to Paris forces Fiona to confront her past, her loss, her inability to move on due to the trauma of having lose her family of friends, besides coming to terms with motherhood. 94 As Makkai writes, regarding the photographs that Richard took of the men who were rapidly disappearing, and the ability that photography has of preserving time: “[a]nd what had started as a strange quirk had become, in the past few months something essential. Yale would hear the camera click and think, “He got that , at least.” Meaning: Whatever happens – in three years, in twenty – that moment will remain.” (2018: p. 9). Photography takes centre stage in Makkai’s novel, as well as in this analysis of the narrative, in a comparative reading with Nan Goldin’s work, as a look at how the memory of traumatizing events is passed on from a generation to the next, whether mediated by personal and collective memories, through the making of a photographic archive, one that is also collective (museum) as well as personal (family album), bringing past and present together, disrupting timelines. Richard’s photographs can be perceived as family photography, in the sense that they portray dynamics that resemble the one of a family, and also how “[f]amily photography can operate at this junction between personal memory and social history, between public myth and personal unconscious. Our memory is never fully ours. Nor are our pictures ever unmediated representations of our past. (Jo Spence and Patricia Holland in Hirsch, 1997: pp. 1314). Photography survives time and fills in absences while working as individual and collective souvenirs that resist amnesia, while also playing a close relationship with death, “the eidos of that Photograph” (Barthes, 2000: p. 15): ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death. Because an image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens, photographs were superior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past and the dear departed (Sontag, Pain, 2003: 21). The boys that Richard immortalized with his camera may be gone, but their images are part of a queer archive, one that is exhibited decades after, far away from the place where they died, disrupting time and space. When she first meets Richard in Paris, Fiona is immediately reminded of the AIDS years and although this was a particularly hard time for her, it is implied that at least through that time she felt needed and loved by the men who would soon find their end, unlike her own daughter who seems to have been escaping from her ever since she was a child, resisting Fiona’s will to mother her. The 1980s were a time when she’d been optimistic and unencumbered. Granted, she associated him [Richard] with the next years, too, the ones with Nico gone, with Nico’s friends, who’d become her only friends, dying one by 101 flesh that disappears into the water, its edges melting into the substance that surrounds it. “Ryan in Tub” seems to envelop the themes that are to be explored while looking at Goldin’s photographs: a genderless body, between life and death, between the presence of the latter in the photograph itself for, as Ruddy writes, this photograph is already Ryan’s “half-death”, or Sontag’s understanding of a photograph as a token of absence: We can barely tell if Ryan is female or male, nor can we decipher what comprises her surroundings other than the chipped enamel bathtub. We cannot know who Ryan is or what she does, and yet it is of fundamental importance that Goldin captures her as a semi corpse, disappearing into the dim reaches of the water and her exhaustion dissolves into and infuses the air of the frame. It is tempting to say that Ryan is sick because she appears pale, thin, discolored, and half-conscious. She may be. (Ruddy, 2009: p. 347) Ryan is already dead, through their representation with the look of a dead body (the posture, the colour of the skin, the framing of the body within a confined space made of a concrete structure) and the crystallization provided by the act of suspending them in time and inscribing them in a certain place (Provincetown, 1976) by recurring to the crystalizing that is made possible by photography. As many other subjects that Goldin has photographed, one is almost drawn to assume that Ryan no longer physically exists; and yet, they are here, permeating the photograph’s frame, “her very un-life suffuses every corner of the image” (Ruddy, 2009: p. 347). Moreover, one could identify Ryan’s decaying body as a testimonial object, “[e]xtending into the future, the photograph, which tells us nothing about the individual Pat Ryan, is instead a vessel for the sadness, exhaustion, and gradual disappearance of an entire world” (Ruddy, 2009: p. 348), the collective absence of an entire group of people and a certain time embodied by the body of Ryan. Ryan works then as a synecdoche for every other subject that Goldin has photographed, in the sense that the photographs that she has taken of those who died of AIDS, extend into the future, while attesting for the loss of the past, a device for the persistence of memory used “to trace people's histories before I [Goldin] lose them” (Ruddy, 2009: p. 348). Ruddy defines Goldin’s work as an “affective documentary” (2009: p. 349): a record of things that, although having happened to Goldin personally, are also happening to a particular world, her photographs “her prosthetic memory, literally a defense against death and symbolically a resistance to the loss of memory” (Mirzoeff, 1999: p. 82). On the particular subject of “people living with AIDS or HIV” who “lacked in relation to history”, Ruddy writes that Goldin’s photographs open new possibilities for the subjects that are represented, for “[S]o afraid were Americans of AIDS that those with the disease were, and frequently are still, only 102 represented as passive participants in space; effectively, they are always already dead” (2009: p. 372). Goldin’s photographs also contributed to a humanization of bodies affected by AIDS at the time of death, particularly through the series of Gilles and Gotscho (Figures 9 and 10): “Gilles passes from a healthy, confident man to an emaciated victim of AIDS” (1999: p. 87), writes Mirzoeff, who also claims that although dying, Gilles “retains his personality even in hospital, that most depersonalizing of locations. Death can no longer be denied or displaced to the photograph” (Mirzoeff, 1999: p. 87), neither do these fragile bodies are hidden from the public. “AIDS changed everything” (Goldin in Mirzoeff, 1999: p. 88) writes Goldin in the afterword to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency , beside also claiming that photography is unable to preserve memory as effectively as she had expected, given that the people that she had photographed had mostly been taken away by AIDS. Presuming that, if she took a photograph, she could never lose those people, Goldin eventually realizes that it is exactly by having taken the photograph that the loss is so acute, so vivid. Figure 9: Nan Goldin, “Gilles and Gotscho at Home”, 1992. Figure 10: Nan Goldin, “Gotscho Kissing Gilles”, 1993. 103 The passage of time becomes then the motion through which Goldin’s work takes place, as the spaces in between each of the images that she juxtaposes become as important for the understanding of the narrative that Goldin intends to weave as the images that are shown. What is there is almost as important as what it is not, and each time these photograph are publicly displayed, time and space are disrupted by being re-enacted, for [A]s much as it looks backward into the past, it also looks forward, into the space of its own becoming. Always, at the instant a photograph is shot, the necessity for the shot's development. And it’s deployment. For as the shot is contextualized, takes its place among other shots, it voices itself, discovers its tone, its tenor, its resonance, like a word extending out itself into the field of the sentence (Sayre, 1994: p. 71). Goldin’s language of affection “speaks the crumbling of borders between subject, artist, and audience, each crossing and intimacy for forming the interstices of incorporation” (Ruddy, 2009: p. 352). One could perhaps hint at notions of private and public spheres and spaces when it comes to Goldin’s work; when exposed, those rooms, often attached to the notions of domesticity and closeness become somewhat public, as the viewer is invited to occupy and read them by being invited to fill in the gaps between one image and the next with a narrative which will link the fragments presented before them; between the photograph of Gilles and Gotscho at home and the photograph of them at home, the viewer can only presume that there lies a long story of pain and the decay of the body. To understand a photograph (here understood as a memory-object) as a visual, accurate, truthful transcription of a remembrance would be a naïve assumption that the process of ‘creating’ a photograph is not artificial and mechanic. Cameras, “clocks for seeing” (Barthes, 2000: p. 15), expand time and mediate past and present, while mediating the relationship between artist and subject, as the former decides what will and what will not be found within its frame, clipping what they consider to be superfluous and unnecessary for the desired result. Hence, a photograph is already a polished memory, an adulterated remembrance; the photographer chooses what she wants to remember (and by its direct counterpart, to forget). It is through the intersection between her own story and the story of the world that Goldin writes “a specific history”, in which Goldin takes the debris of society, one that is meant “to be hidden or forgotten” and represents the “waste products of late-capitalist America … those whose histories ‘eluded legibility’ or were ‘daily and inevitably other’ to traditional historical representation” (Ruddy, 2009: p. 358), making a (queer) ‘counter memory’, “a competing narrative of the past composed of memories that exceed official public history” (Ruddy, 2009: p. 360). “This is the history of a re-created family” (Ruddy, 2009: p. 360), as well as the work of “family photographer of a generation that redefined family” 104 (Ruddy, 2009: p. 350). For Goldin, her subjects are her family, a group of individuals that, see kinship as defined not by blood, but a need to find individuals that share, more than blood or heirlooms, a communal sense of morality, provided by a disbelief in the future and a past marked by grief and loss: In my family of friends, there is a desire for the intimacy of blood family, but also a desire for something more open-ended. Roles aren’t so defined. There are long-term relationships … We are bond not by blood or place, but by a similar morality, the need to live fully and for the moment, a disbelief in the future, a similar respect for honesty, a need to push limits, and a common history. We live life without consideration, but with consideration. There is among us an ability to listen and to empathize that surpasses the normal definition of friendship. (Goldin in Mirzoeff, 1999: pp. 82-83). 2.3. A Family Album As previously mentioned, photography plays a crucial and central role in The Great Believers . Richard’s show, entitled Strata , consists of rewriting old photographs from the 1980s, of Fiona and her group of friends, and juxtaposing them to more recent photos, in a clear intention of imagining a possible future over a tragic past, emphasising that “photographic images … now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present.” (Sontag, 2008: p. 4) 36 . A tryptic of Julian, a friend of Fiona who was thought of as dead from AIDS, only to appear in 2015 at Richard’s house – a hint to a spectral, ghostly and always present fear of AIDS that comes back from the past but also an image of resistance and survival – gains a fourth image of himself in the twenty first century, next to the ones taken during the 1980s: “the first photo when everything was great, … the second when Julian was freaking out because he knew he was sick … the third when he weighted like a hundred pounds (Makkai, 2018: p. 165). 36 In 2010, Goldin spent months in the Louvre in Paris after the museum was closed to the public in order to photograph the artworks that one has access at the museum, creating a meta-artwork, a photograph of a photograph - or a painting, or a sculpture. Afterwards, with the help of a personal assistant who went through boxes of photographs taken over the years, Goldin juxtaposed the photographs she had taken at the Louvre with ones that she had previously taken of her friends, surprisingly achieving uncanny similarities between her artworks and the ones exhibited at the Louvre regarding themes, aesthetical and formal aspects of composition. Adequately named Scopophilia - the love or pleasure of looking, gazing and watching, often linked to a sexual connotation - the resulting exhibition was shown to the public in several cities, such as her own New York, at Matthew Marks and in Rome, at Gagosian Gallery, questioning altering the plasticity of the Louvre’s walls, displacing the museum from Paris and bringing it through the photographs to other cities. Not only is the work disruptive of the authoritarian space of the art gallery and the museum, a space “in which time never ceases to pile up and perch on its own summit” (Foucault, 182), Scopophilia also brings together other spaces like the ones in which the works were produced and/or consumed. Jack, in Paris (2010), photographed by Goldin is juxtaposed to a portrait by Bronzino (1503-1572), bridging the gap between Renaissance Italy and contemporary France, in a disruption of the time-space continuum by establishing a cross temporal dialogue. 105 While describing the show to a journalist, Richard finds himself at a loss for words, even decades after losing his friends, and especially because he understands what these images would mean to Fiona, given that she is also a carrier of the same memory of Chicago in the 1980s in the same way that he has recorded that time in film. Again, Richard claims to having edited the photographs with “a contemporary eye” establishing a dialogue with the dead. The photographs have do what Richard cannot: narrate a time that is too hard for the spoken word to narrate: “They’re optimistic, I believe. They’re full of life. I’ve edited them with a contemporary eye, but the subject is twenty-five, thirty years ago. The –” He faltered … He said, “you should interview Fiona while she’s here. You can interview me anytime. But her brother and those boys, they’re –” and he stopped, blinked rapidly, waved a hand in front of his face. He went into the kitchen, called from behind the counter, “”Who’d like apple tart?” (Makkai, 2018: p. 114). With the revelation that there is footage of her brother and her friends, “Fiona felt her pulse in her cheeks” (Makkai, 2018: p. 114), and even though she was in Chicago, witnessing the events that Richard had recorded first hand, the footage becomes a souvenir, a way of experiencing, again, the same event, through the eyes of someone else, in a nostalgic recollection of the past: The photograph … is a logical extension of the pressed flower, the preservation of an instant in time through a reduction of physical dimensions and a corresponding increase in significance supplied by means of narrative. The silence of the photograph, its promise of visual intimacy at the expenses of other senses (its glossy surface reflecting us back and refusing penetration), makes the eruption of that narrative, the telling of its story, all the more poignant. For the narration of the photograph will itself become an object of nostalgia (Stewart 2007: p. 138). As Makkai writes, Fiona “had come here to find Claire, but a recovered minute with Nico, with Nico and Terrence, with – That was something. Wasn’t that a rescue too, of some kind?” (Makkai: 2018: p. 114). Again, Fiona seems to dwell into the past with the same urgency with which she faces the present, even though she claims, to perhaps convince herself that “[s]he wasn’t meant to go in there and dwell on to the past. She was here for Claire, not Nico” (Makkai: 2018: p. 186). Fiona seems entrapped as Benjamin’s angel of history: unable to move forward, but forced to by the force of the wind, yet still transfixed by the past, paralysed by melancholia 37 . 37 “Wendy Brown warns against the potential dangers of such an orientation in her essay "Resisting Left Melancholy." Brown discusses the pos sibilities for sustaining hope after the "death of Marxism." In a reading of Benjamin's article "Left Melancholy," Brown attempts to make a dis tinction between productive 106 With the prospect of “rescuing” the boys, even if virtually and through images, Fiona’s trip to rescue her own daughter becomes something else, a recovery of the past: although Claire herself has escaped her, the photographs of the boys somewhat belong to her, for “[t]o photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed” (Sontag, 2008: p. 4). The images of the boys become as present as the body of Claire, which, for being alive and able to move and hide, seems even more unreachable than the images of Nico and the boys. Rescuing the fire, rescuing the boys; AIDS narratives always look at what was lost in an attempt at bringing it back, even if briefly, to life, and to give a present to those who were deprived of the future. The perseverance of the past does seem to contaminate the present, through the trauma that Fiona carries from the past, as well as genetics and familiar traits: Fiona’s granddaughter looks exactly like Nico, when he was her age: “[t]his child: If you cut her hair, if you dressed her in the boy clothes of the 1960s, she was Nico” (Makkai, 2018: p. 202). It is through Richard’s photographs that this group of friends is evoked, years after their disappearance, in a collective act of remembrance, a family album in which “a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze” (Barthes in Hirsch, 1992: p. 6). For gay men during the AIDS years, funerals were a time in which family dynamics were especially questioned, due to the absence of the blood family in this time of need. On the other hand, according to Pearl, “the repetition of burials for the gay community during the time of AIDS had the effect of cementing the community as a common community” (2013: p. 8). Nico’s parents had expelled him from home and Fiona worked as a “his accomplice, his thief, his occasional mother” (Makkai, 2018: p. 202), providing for her brother, something which goes from bringing him food, when their parents cut Nico off at 15, when Fiona was 11, to being the one who holds power of attorney over Terrence, Nico’s partner, his belongings and his body: “[w]hen Nico introduced Fiona, he always said, “[t]his is the lady that raised me”.” (Makkai, 2018: p. 4). This is supported by Weston, who describes this phenomena has having happened: Contesting definitions of family can become all too evident in conflicts over a course of medical treatment or hospital visitation rights. Some people had drawn up powers of attorney authorizing persons they and paralyzing forms of political melancholia. Left melancholy is a form of nostalgia for an expired past-a way of clinging to a broken and outdated dream of class revolution. To this form of melancholy she opposes a productive clinging to historical loss, which is what she sees in the allegory of the angel of history. Brown asks a series of questions about how to imagine the future after the breakdown of historical master narratives. She considers our feelings about the future when we no longer believe in the inevitability of historical progress and when our dreams for a global revolution have died. What do dreams of freedom look like after the ideal of freedom has been smashed? Brown diagnoses a pervasive despair on the Left, a melancholic attachment to earlier forms of politics that has proved disastrous for responding to contemporary political conditions.” (Love, 2007: p. 149) 107 considered gay family to take charge of their affairs in the event of incapacitation or death, but these documents sometimes do not hold up under legal challenge by blood relations. When a gay man or lesbian dies, disputes over whether families we choose constitute "real" or legitimate kin can affect wills, distribution of possessions (including property held in common with lovers, friends, or housemates), listings of survivors in obituaries, and disposition of the body. (Weston, 1991: 186) As Sarah Schulman 38 writes on familial homophobia, gay oppression calls for intervention, for a third party to intervene and stop the process of violence or discrimination and to hold the perpetrator of such acts accountable. This is what Fiona does within and outside her own family, by cutting ties with her parents as well as making sure that her family of friends is well taken care of: What makes gay people so ideal as the scapegoat in a family is that they are there alone. Sometimes no one else inside the family is like them or identifies with them. They become a projection screen, the dumping ground for everyone else’s inadequacies and resentments. In addition, no one else is watching. No one from the outside will intervene because of the perception that family matters are private and untouchable. The family structure and its untouchability predominates. Then, because gay people do not have the full support of their families, they in turn become an ideal social scapegoat. For, in society, just as in the family, no one will intervene. Society will not intervene in the family, and the family will not intervene in society. It’s a dialogic relationship of oppression. (2009: p. 20) With the lack of a supportive family, it is not just affection that is erased from the lives of these men; financial stability, job security, medical care and the right to be with a loved one in the time of death are all at risk without law making that protects same-sex couples. As Fiona explains, without knowing that Julian has actually managed to survive, without job security or the safety net of a family, it was extremely hard for ill gay men to overcome the virus, find medical support and material safety. Julian’s example is also used as the inevitability of death when falling ill of HIV/AIDS during of the AIDS years: He was an actor with no family and no health insurance, and he could have gotten some decent support if he’d stayed in Chicago, if he’d stuck around till the drugs came out, but instead he took off and died alone and I don’t even know where. (Makkai, 2018: p. 166) 38 Fink provides a relevant analysis of Schulman’s AIDS novel Rat Bohemia “which represents HIV as the result of not viral pathology but parental cruelty. Schulman’s queer characters exhibit a variety of emotional and physical symptoms in response to homophobia and gender correction from their parents” (2020: p. 77), something that Schulman as engaged both in her fictional and non-fictional work. 108 Fiona, or Feef the Thief, as Nico’s friends call her, would take Nico and his friends food, objects and money that she would take away from her family house, even if they did not need them, as a symbolic way of caring for a family member to whom one provides both care and material security. While in Paris, Fiona looks back at that time, when AIDS was still named GRID 39 and young men started dying unexpectedly, at the way in which her mother left her bag unattended so that Fiona could take some money for Nico, pretending that she did not know that Fiona was visiting her brother, but never taking an active effort to protect or care for her son, perhaps moved by the shame of Nico’s sexual identity and the inability to deal with it, not realising that to cut her son away from the family would have serious consequences to both Nico and her: After Nico died, their mother spent years drinking. Fiona knew she was crushed, but she couldn’t forgive her. They had done this to Nico, her mother and father. Her mother had stood there, crying, arms crossed, the night their father kicked Nico out, but she hadn’t done a thing to stop him. She hadn’t even given him any money. (Makkai, 2018: p. 151) While acknowledging the importance of a stable and caring family in the upbringing of gay individuals, Fiona also wonders if Claire herself, who, according to her child psychology, thinks that Fiona’s affair has stemmed from Fiona’s desire to be “looking for another family, a better family” (Makkai, 2018: p. 346), could have benefited from having a solid family structure, if “Claire would have been better if she’d had grandparents, a safety net, extended family” (Makkai, 2018: p. 151), since Fiona herself gradually stopped seeing her parents and prevented Claire from doing it too. This guilt will follow Fiona throughout her life, only seeming to ease when she finally meets her granddaughter and makes some sort of reconnection with her daughter; years of hardening for feeling anger towards her parents, and the grief of losing her brothers (both by blood and by affinity) seems to have made Fiona unable to connect to others. After seeing Nico’s parents preventing Nico’s friends and partner from attending his funeral, Terrence, Nico’s partner, decides to give Fiona power of attorney over his body and belongings; jokingly kneeling down as if proposing to a bride, Fiona, barely legal, takes the responsibility of taking care of Terrence: It made sense. Nico’s parents had botched his medical care horribly – moved him to a hospital that didn’t even want him there – and then they’d claimed the funeral too. Terrence’s family, Yale understood, wasn’t 39 Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, the first name of AIDS, which emphasised the fact that the virus was ‘a gay disease’. 109 one he’d want making his medical decisions. Terrence hadn’t seen his mother in years, hadn’t been back to his childhood home in Morgan Park, on the South Side, since he graduated high school. Still it seemed a lot to put on Fiona. She was just a kid. (Makkai, 2018: p. 75) While at the hospital, it is Nico’s parents that are allowed the most amount of time with Nico, not Terrence or Fiona, who refuses to share a room with her parents: “Yale and Charlie and Julian and Teddy and Asher and a rotation of Nico’s other friends filled in the gaps” (Makkai, 2018: p. 126). It is Fiona that the nurse informs of Nico’s moment of death, not Terrence, Nico’s partner, and when Fiona asks the nurse to take Terrence with her into Nico’s room, the request is denied. Terrence voluntarily steps away so that Nico’s parents can stay with his body, carrying a devastated Fiona away in his arms, causing “someone, concerned that a black man was carrying a sobbing white woman around the parking lot, called the police, and an officer showed up and trail them slowly” (Makkai, 2018: p. 127). On the link between AIDS and family, Weston writes [t]he number of PWA 40 s without homes, family, or resources has grown year by year. When people told relatives and friends they had AIDS, kin ties were reevaluated, constituted, or alienated in the act, defined by who (if anyone) stepped forward to offer love, care, and financial assistance for the protracted and expensive battles with opportunistic infections that accompany this disease. (1991: p. 186) To Ahmed, “[t]he debate about whether queer relationships should be recognised by law acquires a crucial significance at times of loss. Queer histories tell us of inescapable injustices, for example, when gay or lesbian mourners are not recognised as mourners in hospitals, by families, in law courts.” (Ahmed, 2014: p. 155) . Weston was also questioning this need to ensure that partners who were not legally recognized as such could be by their loved one’s side back in 1991: Who will be authorized to make life-and-death decisions when lovers and other members of gay families are hospitalized or otherwise incapacitated? Will court rulings continue to force some parents to choose between living with their children and living with a lesbian or gay partner? Should a biological grandfather who has never spoken to his grandchild because he disapproved of his daughter's lesbianism retain more legal rights vis-a-vis that child than a nonbiological coparent who has raised the child for ten years? Will the phrase "related by blood or marriage" be allowed to stand as a justification for refusing lovers public accommodations; denying them visiting rights at nursing homes, prisons, and hospitals; disqualifying gay families for family discounts; or withholding the right to pass on a rent-controlled apartment after death? 40 People With AIDS 110 How will conflicting conceptions of kinship play themselves out during disputes over death or inheritance, which are so often complicated by strained relationships with blood or adoptive family? (1991, : p. 5) Not all parents in The Great Believers are absent or reject their children: Charlie’s mother, Teresa, treats Yale as her own son, caring for him and standing in for Yale’s biological mother, who left Yale when he was three to pursue a career in acting. It is Charlie’s mother who takes Yale for an HIV test, when Charlie contracts the virus. This particular moment in the narrative, roughly halfway through it, marks a shift, and a downfall, in the action and course of the novel: Charlie, the owner of a newspaper in which he advocates for safe sex, AIDS activism and medical care, is now HIV positive, meaning that Yale may have also contracted the virus, and what seemed like a promising future for both – the collection at Northwestern for Yale, where he is a curator, the house they were going to buy – is now obliterated by the diagnosis, in a cascading effect: “[t]hose were the dominoes that had fallen: Julian, and then Charlie. And maybe Yale” (Makkai, 1918: p. 175). If children were often expelled from home by hateful parents, some are estranged from them due to an inability to communicate and to verbalise a sexuality that was, at the time, not only perceived as non-normative but one whose status as different was also further intensified by AIDS. Yale’s father does not seem to reject his son and yet they fail to address Yale’s sexuality or to establish a bond. Yale’s father is speechless when talking with Charlie, like the family in the film 1985 , a symptom of the unspeakability of being gay (as well as having AIDS): Yale’s father always phoned within the first few days of the month – regularly enough that Yale assumed it was something he scheduled, an item on his to-do list, like checking the batteries in the smoke detectors. It wasn’t an insult; it was just the way his father’s accountant brain worked. But if Charlie picked up, Leon Tishman wouldn’t leave a message, would just stammer that he must have misdialled. Five years ago, when Yale was so newly in love with Charlie that he couldn’t help shouting it from the rooftops, he’d tried telling his father he was in a relationship. His father said something like “ Bop bop bop bop bop ,” a sound effect to cover Yale’s voice, to stop his talking” (Makkai, 2018: p. 82). And even though Fiona is estranged from her own daughter, who seems to have been distant from her mother from an early age, she flies to Paris as soon as she finds out that she may be in danger after joining a cult. While Fiona has worked as a mother to all the men who died of AIDS, she is unable to reach her daughter, who seems to be running away from her in the same way that Fiona herself had ran away from her own family, as her husband points out, a “genetic” tendency to run away: 117 home means to accept the gender roles and expectations defined by a family and the household. As expected, by being cut from their families, it is Fiona and Yale’s family of friends that gets together to celebrate the holiday and not their blood family: Guys with families flew home for Thanksgiving to play straight for nieces and nephews, to assure their grandparents they were dating, no one special, a few nice girls. To assure their fathers, who had cornered them in various garages and hallways, that no, they weren’t going to catch this new disease. … Yale wound up cooking Cornish game hens for himself and Charlie, plus Asher Glass and Terrence and Fiona. Teddy and Julian would drop by for dessert. (Makkai, 2018: p. 68) At Nico’s farewell party, Richard shares a slideshow composed of images of Nico and their friends; the first photograph, of Nico and Terrence, is shown over the song “America” by Simon and Garfunkel, Nico’s favourite song, an act that “creates the scene of mourning shared by those who are left to look at the picture” (Hirsch, 1992: p. 6). The choice of the song is not arbitrary and it reflects Nico’s feelings towards Reagan’s election and the lack of government support to AIDS related health care (Reagan’s first speech addressing AIDS was given six years after the first cases were reported), in an America that these men don’t recognize as their homeland: Nico’s favorite song, one he saw as a defiant anthem, not just a ditty about a road trip. The night Reagan won re-election last year, Nico, furious, played it on the jukebox at Little Jim’s again and again until the whole bar was drunkenly singing about being lost and counting cars and looking for America (Makkai, 2018: p. 9) Reagan’s face became the synonym of government neglect over AIDS related issues, as well as discriminatory law making and overall lack of care. This is also addressed by Makkai, in the shape of a series that Richard created titled Defiling Reagan . Considered to be the direct result of homosexual desire and misbehaviour, along with the neglect of governments to address and direct funding for proper medical research, AIDS was then conceived as an individual responsibility instead of a matrix of oppressive forces and hierarchies that dictated and confined an already oppressed community to a higher level of exclusion, placing the blame on individual rather than the collective, an emphasis that intended to isolate these individuals rather than finding a collective treatment: The fact that President Reagan and then-Vice President Bush emphasized antibody testing over medical research reflected this fantasy: The aim was not to treat or cure, but to identify, isolate, and ultimately 118 eradicate the moral dangers of AIDS. As a result, those who had historically already been marginal in American society—gay men and lesbians, sex workers, and intravenous drug users—were further marginalized by the advent of AIDS because they symbolized a threat of physical as well as moral contagion. (Huebenthal, 2017: p. 4) Yale also reflects on the lack of attention provided to anonymous people dying of AIDS vis-à-vis the much mediated and discussed death of celebrities; Rock Hudson’s death contributed for a change in AIDS related deaths visibility, making it finally palpable: Charlie had been right; he’d said what they needed was one big celebrity death. And poof , there went Rock Hudson, without the courage to leave the closet even on his deathbed, and finally, four years into the crisis, there was a glimmer of something out there. Not enough, though, Charlie had once sworn that if Reagan ever deigned to give a speech about AIDS, he’d donate five dollars to the Republicans. (“And in the memo line”, Charlie said, “I’m gonna write I licked the envelope with my big gay tongue .”). (Makkai, 2018: p. 58) And yet, this type of visibility and public presence will not result directly in understanding or aid; “Yale, because the street was completely empty, swung Charlie around to kiss him” (Makkai, 2018: p. 122), away from the eye of hate and prejudice, and the fact that a public AIDS death had happened did not prevent hate speech or an awareness of what it meant to live with AIDS or as a gay man, enlarging yet again the gap between straight and gay worlds, and the fact that visibility that was brought by the AIDS years does not translate into acceptance: But at least now Yale was overhearing the word on the El. He’d heard two teenagers joking about it in a hotel lobby where he went to pick up a donor. (“How do you turn a fruit into a vegetable?”) He’d heard a woman ask another woman is she should keep going to her gay hairdresser. Ridiculous, but better than feeling like you lived in some alternate universe where no one could hear you calling for help. Now it was like people could hear you and just didn’t care. But wasn’t that progress? (Makkai, 2018: p. 58) The slideshow that Richard has created for Nico’s memorial – “Nico laughing … Nico up close, teeth shinning” (Makkai, 2018: p. 10) – contrasts heavily with Yale’s final image of Nico at the hospital “unconscious with foam … oozing suddenly from his mouth and nostrils” (Makkai, 2018: p. 10); one is reminded of Goldin’s sequence of Gotscho and Gilles. Makkai also tackles the fear of contagion felt by the nurses who took care of Nico, who, after Terrence injures himself by bumping his leg on a cleaning cart “were more concerned about whether or not Terrence had shed blood that about what was happening 119 to Nico” (Makkai, 2018: p. 10) or the nurse who reads a menu aloud to Nico from the door, fearing having to share the same hospital room as him. The same fear of contagion can be seen when Nico’s father uses rubber gloves to clear out his own son’s apartment. Perhaps more than in any other time, the 1980s marked a polarization between gay and straight worlds, with a few allies from the latter, like Fiona, aiding the endangered group of gay men who were being taken away by the virus. As Castiglia and Reed write: De-generational unremembering was at the heart of the culture of the sex panics—the systematic assault on sexualities that diverge from the interests of the privatized and heteronormative reproductive family— that reached a fever pitch in the United States in the final years of the twentieth century. (2012: p. 40) At a fundraising, Yale notices that the event is being attended by “the regular crowd mostly”, something “comforting but always a bit disappointing. It would be nice, one day … to see an alderman, a straight doctor or two” (Makkai, 2018: p. 101). But in a tragic way, and through the virus, these two worlds are brought together, as men who live their sexuality openly and those who hide find themselves ill and, as Charlie claims, both deserve attention and care: Charlie was saying: “The reason we don’t know all the names, the hundred and thirty-two who’ve died in Chicago, is, listen, half were married, closeted blokes from the suburbs. They picked it up at, you know, the bathrooms at the train station. Commuter gays. They convinced their doctor in Winnetka to tell the wife it’s cancer. Okay, we don’t know them, and me personally, I’m fine with that. They’re hypocrites, yeah? They vote against their own bloody interest. But they’re still dying. Suffering is suffering. And they’re still spreading it.” (Makkai, 2018: p. 107) Yale cannot bear to see the slideshow at Nico’s memorial and heads upstairs to try a breathing technique for calming himself while making mental lists of sick friends. After a while, he climbs back downstairs only to find an empty house: Yale thinks that “the world had ended, that some apocalypse had swept through and forgotten only him” (Makkai, 2018: p. 13), a somewhat prophetic feeling for his life was indeed being swept through their own personal apocalypse. The empty house seems to symbolise the imminent departure of every man who is close to Yale, as well as his own death which will occur soon. Yale wanders around town, visits the places he usually goes to but there are no familiar faces around. This would be Yale’s life during and after AIDS: a city that is anonymous, with everyone who he has ever met gone. While wandering, Yale comes across a house that is for sale, a house that Yale dreams of buying with Charlie; again, the image of a house as a home appears as a way of protection and 120 validation, as well as genealogy, as it will be discussed while analysing The Inheritance . To buy the house would mean to buy a future, as well as protection from eviction. “To own a piece of the city” would be to inscribe them upon the city’s map, making them part of it and not only of its margins, to testify for their ability to own property and to, most importantly, inscribe a future over the death of a close friend, to think of a home with Charlie, and to create a family with him, was to resist to the loneliness felt by these men in a time when they were witnessing the loss of so many close friends and lovers. Even after dying, the house would still be there: the envisioning of a future with a home becomes more tragic when looking at the young men early demise: To own a piece of the city, to have something that was theirs, that no one could kick them out of on any pretext – that would be something. It might start a trend! If Charlie did it, other guys who could afford to would follow.. … Yale could memorize the real estate agent’s number … And then this wouldn’t just be the night they didn’t go to Nico’s funeral, the night Yale felt so horrifically alone; it would be the night he found their house. (Makkai, 2018: p. 21) When Charlie gets to the apartment they share, Yale finds out that the men have gone to Nico’s house to take away all his belongings, which would be given to his blood family, who intends to take them away from Terrence, in a clear reference to a family heirloom that is passed on from generation to generation but only to those related by blood, as well as a refusal to let a neglecting family to keep what was by right of those who were close to Nico while he was alive, a souvenir of a loved one whose absence is minimized through their objects that seem to work as familial testimonial objects: Yale wished he had been there. Not to wind up with some keepsake necessarily but just to touch everything, to think about Nico, to learn things about him he’d never known. If you learn new details about someone who was gone, then he wasn’t vanishing. He was getting bigger, realer (Makkai, 2018: p. 26). Later, Yale will break down and cry expansively at a fundraising; at this particular moment, Yale is utterly overwhelmed by loss, wondering “[w]asn’t this why he’d gone upstairs the night of the memorial in the first place? To keep from crying?” (Makkai, 2018: p. 105). At times, the title of the book seems completely ironic: through so much grief and loss, the characters of The Great Believers often find themselves overwhelmed and the prospect of being alone and ill becomes a reality and a realisation for all: when asked if he is feeling sad for having missed the raid of Nico’s apartment, he explains that he is upset not because of that but “because I’m thirty-one and all my friends are fucking dying” (Makkai, 2018: p. 106). 121 Makkai lengthily details not only the massive amount of lives that were lost during this time but also the rejection by their families that these men felt when it comes to both their homosexuality and HIV status, how they would be expelled from home and die alone in hospitals, if it wasn’t for their friends. “There is nothing on earth that could kill us more efficiently than parental indifference” (2020: p. 78) quotes Fink from Schulman’s Rat Bohemia , referring to the lack of care that people with HIV/AIDS suffered from their immediate family, having to rely on friends or the strangers from associations and charity groups to ensure that same caretaking, while also implying that it is not AIDS that kills but the lack of care, family support and appropriate medicine. Moreover, Schulman also addresses the “historically entrenched medical narratives that position homosexuality as an inevitable cause of physical decline” (Fink, 2020: p. 78); if “cultural narratives of HIV are informed by epidemiologists, doctors, and scientists” (Fink, 2020: p. 78) so are, as previously stated in this thesis, intersex narratives, as Cal’s body and the bodies of the men in Makkai’s novel can be read side by side as ‘unproductive’ bodies within a structure based on heteronormative capitalist reproduction sustained by the figure of the nuclear family 41 , as the disabled body (both as HIV positive or intersex, perceived in Middlesex as disabled in the sense that it is barren and monstrous) of the children fails the expectations of the parents. Marty Fink writes on HIV narratives as showing “the family (support systems) and not the sick body (disabled individuals) as requiring intervention” (2020: p. 79). Nico’s parents rejected their son and only when Nico is dying do they bring their son closer – to a hospital away from his home, away from the people who were close to him while alive. As Nikola Stepic writes [i]n the face of sickness and death, especially when AIDS literalized that progression so compactly as it did in the 1980s and 1990s, family and its tropes are bound to not only resurface, but take center stage in the form of caregivers, lovers, friends and even antagonists. (Stepic, 2017: p. 3). Throughout the book, many men disappear; it is the burden of the ones who survive to take care of those who are dying and stay by their side on their deathbed, standing in for an absent mother or father. The Great Believers explores family dynamics and the failure of them; when sons and daughters do not fit in within the heteronormative household, it is the work of a family made of friends to look out for them. But according to Weston, this particular time also marked the resurgence of other dynamics within blood and chosen families, after what is referred to as a lesbian baby boom: 41 “In contesting these medical narratives through HIV fiction, these archives reposition family trouble as caused by homophobia and cissexism (and not homosexuality and trans-ness). HIV archives likewise identify how ableism (and not disability) is the problem in need of a cure.” (Fink, 2010: p. 76) 122 Situated historically in a period of discourse on lesbian and gay kinship, AIDS has served as an impetus to establish and expand gay families. In certain cases blood relations joined with gay friends and relatives to assist the chronically ill or dying. Sometimes a family of friends was transformed into a group of caregivers with ties to one another as well as the person with AIDS. Community organizations began to offer counseling to persons with AIDS "and their loved ones," while progressive hospitals and hospices modified residence and visitation policies to embrace "family as the client defines family." Implicit in a phrase like "loved ones" is an open-ended notion of kinship that respects the principles of choice and selfdetermination in defining kin, with love spanning the ideologically contrasting domains of biological family and families we create. (Weston, 1991: p. 183). The urgency of preserving queer memory 42 while also looking at it critically is a moving force in every case study chosen for this thesis – one might add, in every queer text, literary or visual, ever created, especially because “[a]lthough the gay community has often been seen in terms of an ethnicity, gay men do not have equivalent structures of kinship, family, or memory” (Pearl, 2013: p. 7), and without such structures, the need to create a legacy and archives that are not only material but also composed of written and oral histories, affection and structures of caring is crucial. Moreover, as Freccero writes on narratives of colonization that could also be extended to AIDS narratives: [t]hus for these writers engaged in an ethical relation to a traumatic past event, the trace that is also a calling, a demand, a messianic wish or hope, takes the troubled form of a ghost – neither altogether processes of recollection are present nor quite absent – conjured by the moment of writing. (2007: p. 199-200) For a community plagued by illness and death, with a prospect of no future, artistic creation, autobiographical narratives and testimonies of resistance become particularly relevant in order to create that same “queer time” that Halberstam writes about, a queer time that signifies a queer history often but not exclusively lived side by side with straight history: 42 “we urge a return of/ to memory as a means to resolve queer theory’s persistent melancholy, to reanimate its connections with the social and rhetorical innovations of previous generations of gay and lesbian thinkers (or with a current generation that still identifies with that past), and to integrate those generations’ materialist critiques into the abstracted domain of academic theory. A more direct reckoning with the past and with our desires for pastness might, we hope, produce more nuanced and self-critical forms of engagement with the present and our traumatized desires for transformed social and sexual opportunities, for queer world-making. Queers are not lacking; queers are productively abundant. Queers do not experience only shame, guilt, or grief; we also experience exuberance, defiance, pride, pleasure, giddiness, enthusiastic innocence, outrageous optimism, loyalty, and love. We are, in short, as wonderfully and complexly queer as were those in our social and rhetorical pasts.” (Castiglia & Reed, 2012: p. 148) 123 [q]ueer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic. … the constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment and … squeezes new possibilities of the time at hand. (Halberstam, 2005: p. 2) It is not a coincidence that Yale’s project at the museum involves collecting paintings, while also discovering the personal life of Fiona and Nico’s aunt, Nora, a former model for Modigliani, who, as many women throughout art history was stripped off of her voice and served only as model for a great male genius, having even aided a male painter to finish his paintings without taking credit for it. Neither is the placement of Fiona as the bystander of the terror of the Bataclan attacks fortuitous; The Great Believers works with and through history, in both personal and collective perspectives, to address matters of loss, death and recovery. If the AIDS crisis marked the 1980s, terrorist attacks and the constant threat of violence, as argued before when addressing Middlesex , marked the experience of post 9/11 imaginary. These artworks can be perceived as responses to the damaging effects of these events, while attempting at working against the erasure of the memory of those who disappeared. When at Richard Campo’s house, Fiona finds what she mistakes to be a photo album. Then, after dropping the file, and the past comes flying around her, she realises that the photo album is an archive of prayer cards and funeral bulletins of men who died of AIDS related complications, an archive of loss of “so many of them, so impossibly many” (Makkai, 2018: p. 184). Even decades after, Fiona is constantly reminded of the AIDS years and “the PTSD she’d carried with her from the 80s” (Makkai, 2018: p. 168). Whenever someone went to her AIDS benefit store, people would mention the AIDS years as a faded memory, a distant relative who would have had the virus, ask Fiona is she had seen “Philadelphia”: And how could she answer? They meant well, all of them. How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out? (Makkai, 2018: p. 184) As Castiglia and Reed write, taking into account Huyssen’s argument that only a certain part of memory is turned into an official discourse of history, achieving national consensus, the narratives that followed the AIDS years, often aimed at a mainstream audience unfamiliar with AIDS individuals, worked more 124 towards amnesia than remembrance, by providing a sanitised, acceptable version of history, one that does not challenge nor rewrites official discourses: Paradoxically, then, official memories—in the form of films, education, museum exhibitions, holidays, news reporting, and political speeches—constitute a potent form of forgetting even as they purport to traffic in memory. The assault on gay memory following AIDS took precisely this form, offering “cleaned-up” versions of the past as substitutes for more challenging memories of social struggle. (Castiglia and Reed, 2012: p. 2) Schulman remembers someone, an “apparition”, who used to attend the ACT UP demonstrations with a sign that would be updated every month, to show for how long he had been living with AIDS, making himself his own queer timeline; eventually the man disappears from the archival footage, having possibly died like many others, a conclusion that Schulman reaches easily due to the ending that people with AIDS had, although she only notices that he is in the footage when he is not there anymore. Interestingly, although Schulman claims that Fotopoulos would stand alone, in a photograph (Figure 11) he can be seen next to a woman who carries a sign that reads “Loving a Son Living With AIDS: I had almost forgotten Mark Fotopoulos, until he kept popping up in archival footage. This was the guy who used to stand alone at every demonstration with a sign saying "Living With AIDS 2 Years and l Months, no thanks to you Mr. Reagan." Every month he would update the numbers. Three Months, Four Months, Three Years. He's in each demonstration somewhere, in a corner, in a backdrop, standing to the side holding his sign. Then at some point he is no longer there. Only when I start looking for him in the footage do I realize that he has become an apparition. He stops appearing long before I recognize his absence, and only when I understand this fact does it become clear to me that he must have died. (2012: p. 55) 125 Figure 11: ACT UP member and Broadway performer Mark Fotopoulos and his mother demonstrate on Broadway, March 24, 1988. The ghost of AIDS float over Fiona and those who managed to survive: some even materialize themselves like Julian, who shows up after everyone presumed him to be dead, or Asher, who Fiona sees – where else? – in a documentary about three decades of AIDS, “as healthy as anyone, was so muscular you couldn’t believe he had the same virus she’d seen carved men into skeletons” (Makkai, 2018: p.184). “Here, in her hand, a stack of ghosts” (Makkai, 2018: p. 184): for Fiona, these ghosts are reminders of her guilt and inability to having saved these men, as well as pain, loss and mourning, perfectly encompassed in the shape of photographs, frames that “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction and this link between photography and death haunts all photos of people” (Sontag in Hirsch, 1997: p. 19). They also disrupt linear time, bringing the past back in the shape of a “real memory, which these picture trigger … an invocation of color, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and flavor of life” (Goldin, 2001: p. 6), with an urgency to remember, for “haunting, 126 ghostly apparition, reminds us that the past and the present are neither discrete nor sequential. The borderline between then and now wavers, wobbles, and does not hold still” (Freccero, 2007: p. 196). In one of his final self-portraits (Figure 12), Robert Mapplethorpe also appears as a ghost: his head floats upon a body that seems not to exist anymore “already “swallowed up” by the negative pan” (Phelan, 1993: p. 40). In the forefront, the skull predicts the eminent death. In a single frame presence and absence coexist and timelines juxtapose. Mapplethorpe’s features are already blurred but his hand and hand are well defined, holding centre stage of the composition, death clearer than the body: “[t]he image of the ‘self’, Mapplethorpe suggests, can only be glimpsed in its disappearance” (Phelan, 1993: p. 40). Figure 12: Robert Mapplethorpe, “Self Portrait”, 1988. The way how Hirsch conceived postmemory seems to be a productive way to think about the AIDS years, their dimension and their social and cultural implications upon the next generations of queer individuals, for “incomplete mourning, a holding on to the past that keeps the dead with us, can be a resource” (Cvetkovich, 2003: p. 208). Regardless of the fact that the Holocaust is marked by discourses, dimensions and political and social matrixes that are particular and complex that distinguish it from the AIDS crisis, to read these events in light of Hirsch’s postmemory can perhaps elucidate how a generation of gay men have inherited and consumed images, representations and social and political implications from the AIDS years – and how to live with and from those spectres. The link between AIDS and the 133 contagious. Later, new findings about the disease would contribute to a new attitude by medical practitioners and carers, trying “to keep a sense of visceral disgust at bay, a disgust that was already a vital part of homophobia and that made slogans like “homosexual diseases” possible” (Murray, 2020). The slogan does not mention AIDS, but “homosexual diseases”, a plurality of conditions, one of them perhaps being gay, that would find their way into the American home, threaten it and possibly destroy their physical bodies as well as their morality. Figure 13: Moral Majority Report: “Homosexual Diseases Threaten American Families”. By passing the artworks onto a gallery through Yale, Nora is choosing what to do with her heritage and who deserves to hold onto her memory and her heirloom, again challenging the natural and common decision of giving an heirloom to blood relatives. Yale and the gallery become, like Fiona and Richard Campo’s photographs, “miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (Sontag, 2008: p. 4), the holders of the personal and collective memories of both Paris in the beginning of the 20th century, and 134 Chicago in the 80s, a memory as fragile as Nora’s collection, precariously collected in shoeboxes secured by rubber bands, inside manila envelopes that are falling apart, prone to water and time damage but kept in a safety deposit at the bank. When Nora’s sees her collection again, next to Yale, who is seeing the collection for the first time and realising that it is indeed everything that Nora had promised it would be, she exclaims that “it is like being pried open” (Makkai, 2018: p. 151), a reaction much similar to the one that Fiona has when seeing Campo’s images of her long gone friends, a recollection of something presumed lost but rescued. Nora’s words and personal memories, in the same way that Nico’s memory is rescued by Fiona, are also used to authenticate the pieces, to provide them with an origin and history that, without her witnessing their making, would certainly be harder to authenticate. Retelling these narratives, and reinserting them within and beyond their contexts of production, validates the past, authenticate it and turn it into something that is tangible. “Domeone should be taking it all down … you’re going to need these stories. … And I’m going to want to sort things too. I can see now they’re out of order.” (Makkai, 2018: p. 157), says Nora, wanting to take control over her own past, retell it, give it an order and a meaning. Even if the artworks and photographs are remembrance of a past long gone, for Fiona there is a tension between art and testimony, being voyeur and agent: when asked about a photograph of herself curled up in a hospital bed next to an ill man, she explains: “[y]ou’re asking about private things,” she said. “It’s art, but I was there . Those were my friends” (Makkai, 2018: p. 164) echoing what Goldin writes about The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, of being both agent and object of her own photographs, of not being a voyeur of the disappearance of her group of friends for she was also a part of that same group, suffering along them and not outside, but also enjoying moments of community and sharing (Figure 14): People in the pictures say my camera is as much a part of being with me as any other aspect if knowing me. It’s as if my hand were a camera. If it were possible, I’d want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. The camera is much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex. The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history. (Goldin, 2001: p. 6) 135 Figure 14: Nan Goldin, “Picnic on the Esplanade”, 1973. 2.6. In Loop The end of The Great Believers , regardless of its many deaths and damaged familiar ties, has a celebratory note, one that may hint at the repairing that Fiona desperately wants to do with her daughter and granddaughter, as well as the past. Fiona attends Richard’s exhibition, accompanied by Claire, with whom Fiona has a heated exchange of words in which she is accused by Claire of having a childhood overshadowed by the death of Yale, who died the day after Claire was born. Claire, who has not experience the AIDS years, embodies exactly what Hirsch claims to be postmemory, as her entire life was inscribed by the trauma of the losses of the AIDS years, her birth and Yale’s death happening one day after the other marking Claire has an heir of this trauma. Claire experiences the AIDS years directly, through her mother, and indirectly through the series of Richard’s photographs, just like the audience of the exhibition will become acquainted with a past they may not be familiar with, through the family album of Richard and Fiona. At the exhibit, Fiona sees a video of Charlie and Yale that shows the men watching the demolition of a well-known gay bar: after the demolition, the men rub the glitter that they find on the club’s ruins on their t-shirts and take it home with them. The ruin of the bar can be seen as both a place of destruction 136 but also of renewal, for the film is played in a loop and as soon as it is destroyed, it starts again, the building still intact. Perhaps Richard’s photographs can also be seen as ruins, as defined by Cadava, as places death and survival side by side – just like the photographs of Julian from the 80s that are not juxtaposed to one taken in 2015 . But although Cadava mentions that the ruin implies silence and the inability to narrate the past, the photograph distances itself from it, by narrating the past through nostalgic recollection: There can be no image that is not about destruction and survival, and this is especially the case in the image of ruin. We might even say that the image of ruin tells us what is true of every image: that it bears witness to the enigmatic relation between death and survival, loss and life, destruction and preservation mourning and memory. It also tells us, if it can tell us anything at all, that what dies, is lost, and mourned within the image - even as it survives, lives on, and struggles to exist - is the image itself. This is why the image of ruin … often speaks of the death, if not the impossibility of the image. It announces the inability of the image to tell a story … this silence in the face of loss and catastrophe. (Cadava, 2001: p. 36). The video ends and starts again, in a continuum that prevents the men from fully disappearing, in a ritual act of remembering: the loop is not a mere repetition – it creates intensity and reinforces a presence, as well as the absence of these men. Makkai’s words, regardless of the subject theme of the book and its many deaths, hint at a future, if not for these men directly, for others like them: “[t]hen the whole film looped again. There they all stood, the Bistro whole. Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin.” (Makkai, 2018: p. 418). Every time the film is played, the Bistro is destroyed and rebuilt, just like Fiona’s memory is also trigger by these flashes, as she shifts between Claire and her need of a mother, in the present, and the inability to bring back the dead, except through recollection. The Great Believers , by juxtaposing two different timelines, and for its emphasis on family and inheritance, ambiguously addresses time as both crystalized, in photograph, but also full of possibilities, with the video in loop. In one of the photos of the show, Fiona sees herself along with her dead friends; as she recollects that particular moment she addresses the fact that Claire was not even conceived yet and therefore, unable to be traumatized by Fiona’s past, while expressing the desire to contradict time and participate in the photograph as more than a mere viewer: There she was herself, an arm around Terrence. In a restaurant, it looked like. She never remembered being that pretty, that happy. Claire was just an egg in an ovary, one more thing Fiona hadn’t ruined yet. At the left of the shot was Yale, mouth open, talking to someone out of frame. … she wanted to climb into 137 the photo, to say, “Stop where you are.” Wasn’t that what the camera had done, at least? It had frozen them forever. (Makkai, 2018: p. 415) “What a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory” (Makkai, 2018: p.415), says Julian about Hamlet , although it is clear the Makkai is referring to Fiona, to Julian, to Richard’s show, to an entire generation of individuals who lost friends, family and loved ones to AIDS, who, like Horatio, are also visited by ghosts. Fiona’s heart is described as a “palimpsest … the way things could be written over but never erased” (Makkai, 2018: p. 416), echoing the title of Richard’s show, Strata , in which past and present are also juxtaposed, overlapped, overwritten but still unchanged. According to Love, “[t]he effort to recapture the past is doomed from the start. To reconstruct the past, we build on ruins; to bring it to life, we chase after the fugitive dead” (2007: p. 21). Fiona chases after the dead through her attempt at surviving trauma, by looking at the Bistro ruins and Richard’s photographs but the past is never quite reconfigured, except for ghosts, like Julian, who have a second chance at life. Richard’s exhibition itself is an archive of feeling, a walk into the past through static images that only open up windows into the past to be scrutinized with a magnifying glass, with a one way interaction from viewer to subject, only to be left alone again. Besides the photographs, the ruins of the bar also evoke another space and time; as Huyssen writes, “[t]he architectural ruin is an example of the indissoluble combination of spatial and temporal desires that trigger nostalgia. In the body of the ruin the past is both present in its residues and yet no longer accessible, making the ruin an especially powerful trigger for nostalgia” (2006, p. 7). The image of the loop becomes particularly strong as a force of intensity and remembrance when taking the example of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops (2002-2003): when transferring old tapes into a digital format, the tapes started to disintegrate, leading Basinski to play them until they were destroyed, becoming a ruin. Finished on September 11, 2001, Basinski then played them as he saw the Twin Towers collapse, making one of the most powerful artworks about this event in The United States history by coincidence. These loops are, at the same time, a testimony of amnesia and remembrance: as they disintegrate, they also come to being. The sound that is heard, is, at the same time, the one of creation and destruction. Mark Bibbins encapsulated Basinski’s artwork in a poem that also denotes how these loops were created almost by accident, how Basinski’s creation of the artwork predated the event, in an inversion of the sequence of cause-effect: William Basinski made the truest piece of art in response to 9/11 before it happened 138 and mostly by accident He had been digitizing old tape loops and as they played the magnetized coating on the surface of the tapes began to flake off to disintegrate He kept recording until there was no sound left and replayed the digital files on his Brooklyn roof as the sun went down behind the appalling cloud of smoke (Bibbins, 2020: pp. 37-38) The loop implies ending but also an idea of re-starting: perhaps instead of thinking of a loop as a cycle, it would be more productive to think of it as a ruin – one created over the ruins of the Twin Towers – as what is intended is not repetition but recreation, not cyclical inheritance but a continuum. When men start dying of AIDS, and when he is faced with the possibility of being infected, Yale wonders what will happen to the next generation of gay men: I keep thinking that maybe they’ll start over, you know? The next generation of baby gays, when we’re all gone. But maybe they won’t, because they’ll be starting from scratch. And they’ll know what happened to us, and Pat Robertson will convince them it was our fault. (Makkai, 2018: p. 268) The next generation did not start over; gay experience is still deeply marked by AIDS and its presence, both as ghost and a reality. It is exactly this questioning of what one generation of gay men leaves as legacy to another, as well as how to dialogue with the past, that Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance addressed, as analysed in the following Chapter. 139 Chapter 3. Ghosts, Queer Heritage and Community in The Inheritance Prior : My name is Prior Walter. Prior 1 : I know that. Prior : Explain. Prior 1 : You’re alive. I’m not. We have the same name. What do you want me to explain? Prior : A ghost? Prior 1 : An ancestor. Tony Kushner, Angels in America 3.1. The Inheritance E. M. Forster comes back from the dead to haunt a group of young gay men. The premise of Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018) closely based on Forster’s Howard’s End and written in dialogue with the English author as a forefather of homoerotic love, is easy to follow, and its dialogues are dense with sex, identity politics, intersectionality, violence against gay men, the commodification of gay culture, the AIDS years, the AIDS ghost, a new virus called neo-liberalism, and what is the responsibility of one generation of older gay men towards a younger one, facing the same old problems as well as new threats to their well-being. The play appears in a moment that seems to be particularly marked by a desire to remember the AIDS years, through “a strong impulse to historicize and memorialize the lives and deaths of those affected by HIV/AIDS through a large body of filmic work” (Hann, 2020: p. 101), a desire that seems to arise from a fear of amnesia due to the shifting nature of the virus from death sentence to chronic illness, resulting in what Hann describes as “AIDS nostalgia”, a sanitized version of the AIDS years and its victims offered as a commodity to a mainstream audience that emphasizes the dichotomy between past and present, without reflecting on the effects of the virus today. “With emerging queer generations now experiencing HIV/AIDS as something primarily chronic and manageable rather than a killer virus, a complex debate has arisen within academic and artistic realms. That is, does a queer heritage exist – particularly amongst gay men – and if so what forms does it take?” (2010, p. 101), asks Louisa Hann, and Lopez also wants to engage in that debate. The actual inheritance of the play is a house that was used during the AIDS years as a shelter for hundreds of rejected, dying men, itself haunted with their ghosts, that is now being passed on from Walter, an older man who has survived the AIDS years, to Eric, the play’s central character. Margaret, a friend of Walter, works as a mirror image of Fiona, as she helped Walter taking care of the sick men, 140 again providing a structure of care that is not based on blood. These ghosts urge Eric to take on the role of caretaker, to act upon his community and assume a responsibility not to the past but to the future: [t]he ghost is … pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost but never had. (Gordon in Frecerro, 2007: p. 196) In the vein of Angels in America (1991) , with which it engages directly, particularly in how ghosts and apparitions are used to overlap temporalities, The Boys in the Band (1968) and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), to which The Inheritance has been compared to exhaustion, Lopez’s play looks at the lives of several gay men, both younger and older, as they come to terms with their own privilege, either provided by race or class, while reflecting on the legacy of the AIDS years, its activism and survivors, as well as the legacy of shame that the gay community has inherited. The characters work more as tokens rather than well rounded beings: there’s the gay couple who is adopting a child, an older, rich Republican for whom gay rights must be overshadowed by economic politics, a reckless and self-destructive young man who hustles for a living (and becomes HIV+), an arrogant writer who cannot face his past and a young man who would like to dedicate his life to helping others. In The Inheritance the ghosts appear, both materialized and metaphorically, to force a younger generation of gay men to face their past while also vowing to make a difference, aware that HIV/AIDS is also not only a part of the past, for “[e]very gay person walking around who lived in New York or San Francisco in the 1980s and early 1990s is a survivor of devastation and carries with them the faces, fading names, and corpses of the otherwise forgotten dead” (Schulman, 2012: p. 45). Successful in the UK, where it was first staged by Stephen Daldry in 2018, the play was not as well received across the Atlantic, where it was written. This Chapter aims at understanding to what extend does The Inheritance really portray, analyse and question white privilege, the intersections between race, class and homosexuality, right wing politics, neoliberalism and their implications in queer lives, random acts of violence towards queer people, as well as how can a community learn from the past and re-adapt itself to new challenges through the haunting of those who preceded them, remaking family and kinship structures. 3.2. (In)Visible Ghosts 141 And the past with its fierce undertow won't ever let us go / Won't ever let you go. Nick Cave, “Ghosteen” As previously mentioned, The Inheritance proposes a cross temporal dialogue between three generations of gay men: a group of younger men who seem unaware of what the 1980s meant for gay men, E. M. Forster, the symbol of repression and the shame of disclosing a non-normative sexuality, and Walter and Eric, an older couple who lived through the AIDS years, who give the younger men a “firsthand gay history” (Lopez, 2018: p. 70), a history whose “dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma, and violence”, especially concerning the AIDS years (Love, 2007: p. 1). It is the presence of ghosts, both Forster, who appears as another character of the play, and the dead men from the 1980s, that seems to work as catalyst for the need to act upon the present. Through a retrospective look, similar to the one used in Middlesex , also informed by a desire to repair the past, the inheritance moves in a difference direction than the one that Eugenides’ narrative followed. Although Halberstam refers to time of inheritance as a heteronormative matrix of passing down history and knowledge of the past, the concept seems to be productive when analysing The Inheritance , as it also established a link between generations, not linked by blood, while linking this particular ‘family’ of friends to a particular time of the past within the nation, while also connecting it to the future: the time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability. (Halberstam, 2005: p. 5) While Halberstam claims that queer time is outside “temporal frames of bourgeois and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (2005: p. 6), it still seems relevant to think of a queer time, or a queer temporality as a lens to analyse The Inheritance , as the contact with the past is also established through dialogue, in a present that looks back and dialogues with the past instead of perceiving it as a stable inheritance, as it happened in Middlesex . This seems to be sustained by Hann, when address the utopian aspect played by The Inheritance . It is then suggested that both these ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ temporal frames can coexist, as few straight families are also informed by purely temporal frames as described by Halberstam, given illness and premature deaths, poverty and the lack of a family heirloom, infertility, and even HIV infections. ‘Inheritance’ is produced here outside the domains mentioned by Halberstam but 142 also possibly encompassing them, or at least queering them, by claiming that this inheritance can be familial but also communal, not ruled by a patriarchal structure neither by blood. Besides the phantoms aforementioned, Rennie McDougall, in a negative review of the play, points out that Lopez’s play is also “haunted by outdated gay archetypes” being “celebrated as a mainstream gay milestone while stirring resentment and frustration in queer circles” (2000), perhaps because “given the scene of destruction at our backs, queers feel compelled to keep moving on toward a brighter future" (Love, 2007: p. 162), celebrating a narrative of progress that is also inscribed in a time that is, as argued before when looking at Middlesex , triumphalist. Even if Matthew Lopez intended to write “an examination of class, economic inequality, and poverty within the gay community” (Lopez, 2020) what The Inheritance does is to raise those same questions just to let them die down right after, in several pivotal moments of the play that work as breaks in the somewhat larger matrix of love relationships, the passing down and search for homes and estate, moments of death and despair, and dinner parties. As pointed out by McDougall, these men are The leads are all white, while men of color stand around the edges of the stage yelling finger-snapping woke-isms: “Let’s talk about trans rights,” “Let’s finally ratify the motherfuckin’ ERA,” “Let’s talk about the resurgence of HIV amongst gay men of color,” they cheer, then talk about precisely none of these issues for the remainder of the six-plus-hour play. (2020) The Inheritance does tackle these issues but it does it with the brevity of social media activism: click, share, move over. “These are the things that will require just as much of our blood, sweat and tears as marriage equality” (Lopez, 2018: p. 91): and yet, none of these men is an activist of any sort, nor do they actively take a part to change anything, even in the face of Trump’s election, with Clinton shining as a beacon of hope that fades fast. These discussions about race, class and gay rights appear briefly as a topic of conversation during a dinner party but never become one of the major issues of the play. “Being gay was like being a member of a secret club” (Lopez, 2018: p. 85) but it “doesn’t feel remarkable anymore” (Lopez: 2018: p. 86), say Eric and Jason 2, only to be contradicted by Jasper, who explain that “the point of all that work at visibility was to not feel stigmatized. To not have our sexual identities be our primary identities” (Lopez, 2018: p. 86). 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