The Argonauts Read Free Page A

other things, it makes one want to live.
    Some people find pleasure in aligning themselves with an identity, as in You make me feel like a natural woman —made famous by Aretha Franklin and, later, by Judith Butler, who focused on the instability wrought by the simile. But there can also be a horror in doing so, not to mention an impossibility. It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature .
    A friend says he thinks of gender as a color. Gender does share with color a certain ontological indeterminacy: it isn’t quite right to say that an object is a color, nor that the object has a color. Context also changes it: all cats are gray , etc. Nor is color voluntary , precisely. But none of these formulations means that the object in question is colorless .
    The bad reading [of Gender Trouble ] goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out apiece of clothing and change my gender: stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something like the commodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism…. When my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons , presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that “performativity” is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in .
    You should order a mug in response , my friend mused while drinking her coffee. Like, how about one that features Iggy’s head crowning, in all its bloody glory? (I had told her earlier that day that I was vaguely hurt that my mother hadn’t wanted to look at my birth photos; Harry then reminded me that few people ever want to look at anyone’s birth photos, at least not the graphic ones. And I was forced to admit that my past feelings about other people’s birth photos bore out the truth of this statement. But in my postpartum haze, I felt as though giving birth to Iggy was such an achievement, and doesn’t my mother like to be proud of my achievements? She laminated the page in the New York Times that listed me as a Guggenheim recipient, for God’s sake. Unable to throw the Guggenheim placemat away (ingratitude), but not knowing what else to do with it, I’ve since placed it below Iggy’s high chair, to catch the food that flows downward. Given that the fellowship essentially paid for his conception, each time I sponge tidbits of shredded wheat or broccoli florets off of it, I feel a loose sense of justice.)
    During our first forays out as a couple, I blushed a lot, felt dizzy with my luck, unable to contain the nearly exploding fact that I’ve so obviously gotten everything I’d ever wanted, everything there was to get. Handsome, brilliant, quick-witted, articulate, forceful, you . We spent hours and hours on the red couch, giggling, The happiness police are going to come and arrest us if we go on this way. Arrest us for our luck .
    What if where I am is what I need? Before you, I had always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situation. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.
    In The Cancer Journals , Audre Lorde rails against the imperative to optimism and happiness that she found in the medical discourse surrounding breast cancer. “Was I really fighting the spread of radiation, racism, woman-slaughter, chemical invasion of our food, pollution of our environment, the abuse and psychic destruction of our young, merely to avoid dealing with my first and greatest responsibility—to be