Hello Everyone! Happy Pride from Roundabout!
I'm happy to have a fresh collection of books on display this month in our new book room featuring books on queer experiences and ideas, gender theory, history (both biographical and rights movements)... and of course fiction that explores where these ideas go when we embody them in stories. It is delightful to see vampires, dressmakers, and time-traveling spies next to these books of non-fiction. I still tend to be most excited to see what non-fiction books have to say--and I found myself reading parts of several of these titles tonight--but I have to confess that for me, too, sometimes it is with the storytelling of fiction that I can settle in to a long evening and really court an idea.
And what an idea! Perhaps I tell you my angle into this every year, since I deliberately don't look back at what I've written to you in previous letters. One of the most interesting ideas to me over the past few years was encountering in an article about transgender ideas the concept of the "pleasures of gender." This idea runs through many of these books: that for thinkers on gender today the very idea of a "rights movement," which I listed above, seems necessary but not sufficient. It is right to have rights. But, maybe there is a whole constellation of ways the individual--seeking their freedom--might interact with society. Flipping through these books I see ideas about rights, to be sure, but also ethics of consent and "refusal," of "translation," "representation," and, also, of "joy."
What is this joy? To me, it it two things. First, it is the hope that a fullness of freedom is possible that means that rights need not just be defensive, that we can hope for something more than safety. That our selves could one day be effortlessly free to be ourselves. And, second, an honest recognition that we are in a dance with society. That is: some of us may never want to play with or bend the emergent categories called "gender" which, at minimum, society is a part of defining. But some of us, it turns out, do take part in just that dance of expression-through-social-
Let me also put this on the ground, if I can. A high school student of mine told me around 2007: I wish when I was skating people wouldn't yell homophobic slurs at me from their cars. I thought: that's just the way things are. Now, I believe I'm wrong. It isn't that homophobia is done. It's just that when you see people expressing themselves and supporting one another, even a small quorum, with the courage to have "pride" in how they choose to express themselves, it makes you think: wow, this wasn't so unchangeable as I thought. I think that might be my favorite thing about getting older. Seeing that the people who said "that's just the way things are" being wrong.
In both our fanciful stories and our diligent and "serious" analyses, I think we can paint the picture of what freedom in this arena could be. A lot of these books are paperback, too, so maybe they won't cost too much relative to their mind-expanding potential.
Love, love, love folks, and read, please, unless you find some better way to ignite the mind and heart!
Raymond
