cthulhu, c’est moi: mixed-race folks & aliens

by Nabil

last night after getting my hair cut in japantown, i found a copy of the hapa project book– photos of mixed-race folks, with their self-descriptions on the facing pages.  i’m very excited.  i haven’t studied the book yet– i was watching twilight instead– but skimming through it before the movie started, i’m struck by how often the self-descriptions reference aliens.  you know, i sure always felt like an alien– how interesting to think that might be a common experience for mixed-race folks.

on the same bookshelf was a copy of alien encounters, an anthology of asian american cultural studies.  i didn’t get that one last night because i’m trying not to die horribly in an earthquake when all my books fall on me.  but i did read a few of the essays standing in the bookstore, and was impressed by discussion of a cheesy hollywood movie that segued into the way asian american movies from the uk tend to be better then those from the us because they don’t endlessly focus on coming out stories and processing, but take the experiences of the characters matter-of-factly in stride while telling stories.

this is something that i think about a lot with my own fiction.  i do come from this identity-politicky queer setting– good god, i cringe in shame when i remember the time that any essay i wrote had to start out with a sentence like “As a middle-class mixed-race Arab American city-dwelling bisexual lesbian-identified…” etc etc etc– and it is far too easy for me to write fiction with coming-out scenes and endless processing.  at the same time, it’s a genuine challenge to figure out how to write stories with transexual folks knowing that a lot of people who i might want to read my writing haven’t ever met a trans person before.  (at least that they know of.  but that’s another story.)

anyhow, in the interest of this post having some sort of point, let’s pull this back to the alien thing. making explicit connections between mixed-race folks and aliens runs the risk of highlighting angst and woe-is-me and melodramatic processing, and it might be a better idea to avoid these metaphors.  at the same time, i felt like an alien.  and it was made repeatedly, tediously, vividly clear to me throughout my childhood that my dad was not acceptable to my mom’s family.  i got lucky in that the racism of my mom’s fam didn’t get turned on to me– but while i might somehow be okay myself, i was a product of an unacceptable union, of miscegenation, and that was never going to be okay with my nasty white  grandparents.

an alien, then, in a bad way.

speaking of cthulhu, whilst rereading lovecraft on a recent planetrip to the middle east (long story) i was struck by the fact that lovecraft greatly resembled my nasty white grandparents.  specifically, one of the major sources of his horror was miscegenation.  even more specifically, he had an absolute horror of nice white folks like my mom shacking up with– and reproducing with– greasy, olive-skinned, big-eyed, dark-haired semites like my Dad.  if there are three stories that Lovecraft tells, one of them is the story of my parent’s marriage.  if there are three monsters that Lovecraft repeatedly visits, one of the them is the degraded children of these unholy unions– in fact, Lovecraft was scared to death of me.

given the number of times he’s scared me, it seems only fair.

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half life by shelley jackson

by Nabil

a few years ago me & my partner went to this feminist science fiction convention in wisconsin.  & it was radical, and awesome, and life-changing in many ways and sometime i’ll tell you the whole story.  & also, at the awards ceremony, this attractive young lady in a kinda-crazy-retrofuturist 70s dress and perhaps white gogo boots (am i remembering that right or did i dream of the boots that night?) won an award and gave a gorgeous and strange free-associative acceptance speech about aliens and mutation and twins and i thought huh– i have to check out her book.

for some reason it took me a few years to do so!  but i finally got around to reading it lately, and OMG it is so amazing and thrilling and wonderfully marvelous.  it is set in san francisco; it opens during the pride parade where the narrator is trying to get coffee while avoiding folks trying to congratulate her on her prideful marginality.  the twist:  this is siamese twin pride.

this novel sucked me in with its cleverness, then clubbed me over the head with its soul. the first few chapters are just thrilling in all the pomo references, the hilarious little snapshots of queer urban hipster life.  then all of a sudden you start getting into the heart of the thing– where all of the siamese twins came from, growing up in nevada, the radioactive testing and destroyed small towns left over from the 50s, the destruction of us citizens by the us government.  gorgeous.  gorgeous.  lovely and sad.

i’ve been thinking lately about something that happened in the us before i was born, something i don’t understand, something did go really wrong in the us and this novel starts to get at maybe what and when and why.

a couple other things that particularly impressed me about this novel:

* the sense of place, land, animals, earth.  the landscapes of san francisco and rural nevada are vivid characters in the book.  i’ve seldom seen place handled as well in a science fiction novel– and this rootedness goes a long way to helping with the suspension of disbelief, as well as balancing some of the headier frothier bits of theory.

* i thought the class & background of the heroine was handled really well.  she grew up in a rural place, without a ton of money or just cityness in general, and she moved to the city & lives around a lot of folks who assume she has a very different background then she does.  she doesn’t process it endlessly with people– it’s just there, in the background, helping ground the novel more deeply.  i was really thrilled to see a country girl living in the city handled with this level of realism and respect.

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raphael carter & the congenital agenesis of gender ideation

by Nabil

nabil again.  liz just authorized me to post as many and as long posts as i want today so ha ha ha evil laugh i win!

reading henry’s post on the fortunate fall of late made me hungry to go reread that novel.  i read it when it came out, and was disappointed for unfair reasons– i had ridiculously high expectations.  that novel would’ve had to cure cancer, usher in queer utopia, and destroy the republican party forevar for me not to be disappointed when i read it.  because everything else i’ve read by Raphael Carter Really Is that Good.

Raphael’s short story, “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation,” won a Tiptree and was reprinted in the James Tiptree Award Anthology volume 3.  i cannot recommend it more highly.  part of what is so great about it is that it is not possible to explain how cool it is in fewer words then the story itself takes.  you know?  it is just that radamotronic deGroovy awesome-tronoid.

the short story is in the form of the scientific paper that starts a new field of study– the study of scientists who study gender.  basically, it is a hilarious playful and h0t h0t h0t meditation on why humans divide other humans into two different genders, and how likely that is to accurately reflect some sort of objective reality, rather then just some innate tendency of humans brains.  (spoiler warning:  not very.)

the other writing that makes me want to have Raphael’s alien kittens is from hir old website, the Androgyny Rarely Asked Questions.  first off, how awesome is the idea of a Rarely Asked Questions?  admit it– most FAQs are made up of questions we only wish folks asked frequently!  second off, everything on that site is gorgeous and brilliant– but most particularly Not This, Not That, a meditation on labels.  again, any attempt to recapture some of what is so cool about this short piece is bound to be both longer and non-trivially less elegant then the piece itself– but basically, it looks at the tendency to turn self-description into self-prescription– to go from “i am this” to “oh noes i’m not allowed to do (or not do) that” and recommends a specific (meditation) technology to counteract these tendencies.  if donna harroway’s “the cyborg manifesto” is the theory, Raphael Carter’s “not this not that” is the practice.

tragically, Raphael Carter’s Rarely Asked Questions website is no longer up.  thankfully, it is available via the wayback machine:

Not This, Not That

Table of contents for RAQ

ps– Raphael, if you’re reading this, I want to have your alien kittens!  But, um, I’m not a crazed stalker, I’m actually very nice.

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Take two on Twilight, Let the Right One In

by Nabil

Hey there, this is Nabil, posting with guest-access in Liz’s backyard.

Last night I saw Twilight.  I haven’t seen Let the Right One In, so I’ve seen half of the vampire movies previously discussed here– the opposite half– and have a different perspective.  I thought it might be fun to provide a counterpoint.

First off, Twilight is awesome.  It is absolutely hilarious, and also kind of sweet.  We saw it in the same theater that we had seen Black Sheep– the were-sheep horror comedy from New Zealand–and it is even funnier.  

I felt a bit guilty for my hysterical laughter– I wanted to be respectful and supportive of the young women in the front row who were having a rather different experience–but my friend Theo, another queer transman, kept leaning over to whisper evil commentary to me until our glasses clinked.  I will say, in my defense, that my laughter was affectionate.

Truthfully, desire is laughable, no?  The sweetness in this movie came from its faithfulness to a very very young model of female desire– we never see the vampire object of desire’s bare chest, much less anything more risque.  I think the characters kiss a few times, but mostly he gives her magical flying piggy-back rides, broods romantically, is rude to her because he can’t stand how much he loves her, and turns out to be made of glitter.  Edward Cullen seems to be the current version of a My Little Pony– aimed at a similar demographic.  Ted is commenting that he is sort of the My Little Boyfriend, the special glitter version with the sparkles in his mane and his tail.

Without wanting to dismiss the importance of romance narratives as important wish-fulfillment tools for one-down folks within patriarchy, this movie is ridiculous.  Its ridiculousness is what makes it charming.  The ridiculousness comes from the unabashed specificity of the desires it was designed to reference and incite– carried out to the logical extreme of little-girl desire, this brooding rude obsessed protective lipstick-wearing boy band member dangerous vampire is Made Of Glitter!  Edward is both ridiculously specific and entirely generic, with nothing there that is not designed to incite the movie’s heroine and viewers– there’s a speech he gives early on where he warns her that everything about him is designed to suck her in and make her want him– and an extremely honest portrayal of sexiness for the middle-school set.

When my brother was in high school, he had a screen saver on his computer that embarassed me.  It was a skinny blond woman with a cheesy smile and enormous breast implants, and whenever I happened to come into his room and catch a glimpse of it I felt embarassed on  his behalf.  I was embarassed for him because the image was such a parody of teen male desire– and I was more embarassed for him because he didn’t seem to be a bit embarassed for himself.  There’s a simiilar squirming embarassment in this film– but for several reasons this embarassment is more pleasurable.  I laughed at the film with  my dear friend til our glasses clinked together– but I was also proud and pleased for the makers of the film, and for the girls and young women who will get to watch it and coo over it together.

How delightful to see a parody of young female desire released into mainstream theaters!  How glorious for teen (and pre-teen) girls to get the same pleasure my brother did with his screen saver– how absolutely lovely for us older folks to be embarassed on their behalf!  I cringe and squirm and laugh in half-recognition– remembering the ridiculous secrets I whispered to my best friend in the playground when I was a lassie-to-lad– and also recognizing how similarly ridiculous my desires now are.  Adult fantasies are different then little-girl fantasies– but really no less ridiculous.

***

Edited to put spoiler about Let the Right One In beneath a cut– thanks for the reminder from Ide Cyan!

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