Here's what you're going to do. You are going to read Terry Castle's LRB essay on the real joy and underlying ambivalance about marriage equality, which is really an examination of how comfortably or uncomfortably the new acceptance rests on all the rejection that came before. With sentences like, "In those days (and yes, even now) one’s mother could always be counted on, likewise, to underscore one’s alienation from the rest of humankind," it's mandatory reading:
"Some of the diffidence I felt no doubt had to do with the fact that Blakey and I had already been living together – delightfully, with nary a closet in sight – for six years. Apart from the political statement – rah, rah, cheers, queers – the ritual, I grumbled, was beside the point. Yet troubling too were a host of larger metaphysical questions. Marriage had always been defined (and naturalised) as a relationship between a man and a woman; could it now, merely by way of a few wishful speech acts and contrived theatrical gestures, be completely reconceived? Was it possible – just like that – to revamp one of the key kinship structures around which human society had been organised for millennia? What would Wittgenstein have said? Was ‘gay marriage’ part of ‘everything that is the case’? Would he have got married? To himself or another person? One could noodle away the hours pondering such things.
"My own seemingly innate, sometimes Arctic, aloofness had to be part of the equation too. Anyone who knows me knows it: my perverse tendency to stand sadly apart from sociability and look rejected, even when surrounded by affable people doing everything possible to show their affection for me. In some skittish, not so deeply buried part of me, it’s always San Diego in 1967 and the treacherous lunch court at Marston Junior High School. I’m 13 again; shy, pudgy and unpopular, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich in miserable, Cain-like isolation, while the more confident girls – those who shriek and rat their hair and travel in ardent, gossipy packs – point at me and guffaw. What a weirdo. Shall we just say that my childish heart turned then to adamant? That self-protection meant fixing one’s eyes on blankness and acting dead? When I began thinking of myself as a lesbian – not so long afterwards, really – the age-old stereotype of the female homosexual as doomed misfit, lost in a dark and sterile world of shadows, seemed purpose built for me."
If you somehow still don't know Castle -- whom Sontag named "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today" and James Wolcott calls "a Jedi knight of literary exploration" -- for goodness' sake, get the essay collection The Professor: A Sentimental Education
"Cain-like isolation" Yes!
Posted by: Sandy | August 28, 2013 at 05:19 AM