A Study in Personal Bias

Like most of us, I had to page back through my own posts from this quarter to remember what topics I chose and why. This then became an unavoidable study in the biases I had cultivated over time towards certain aspects of scholarly work. What fascinated me most (if I can be allowed to embrace the thrilling perversity of being fascinated by myself) is the apparent resistance to close-reading. Even in my heavily idealized and hypothetical teaching posts, there is a marked distaste for creating lessons out of small, particular moments of textual analysis in Woman on the Edge of Time. In most cases, my engagement with our articles from this quarter emerges from a place of structural interest and a constitutive need to see why this thing of all the things in the article matters.

So, in continuing service of the aforementioned perversity, I'm going to somewhat grossly reduce my posts (excepting the collaborative) to a single descriptor each and use that to indulge in more wanton structural play.

• Week 2, "Can literary criticism create its own object of study?", in which I take an offhanded comment in Chakrabarty and use it to ask how we make the concept of literature an object with a pre-defined purpose

• Week 3, "Cutting the body and text," in which I have a visceral reaction to Smyth's use of the word and end up existentially wondering if it's ever really possible to avoid doing violence to a text or a body

• Week 4, "The Obligation to Instruct," in which I make an entire post out of Raley's lifehacking footnote and implicitly add to my own first post by suggesting we make the concept of literature at the same time it's always already a concept

• Week 7, "Teaching in Concentric Circles," in which I give up pretending my interest isn't completely structural and create an impossibly abstract lecture out of Spivak's idea of reading for a class that would hate it even though I started with a gesture at close-reading

• Week 8, "The Porous Body," in which I use the structure of Chen's critical/personal piece to build a lecture around my own political motivations and discover a strange value in using a fictional, 1970s ungendered (though not unproblematic) pronoun

(I have not listed the two collaborative posts with Katherine and Rebecca here so that I can avoid reducing collaborative work to my own interpretation of that work, and also because it would be curious to see a different structural analysis on the way those collaborations were pursued and enacted).

This brings me to my larger point--because of course there is one [insert bad meta-structure joke]--about the one issue I've developed this quarter. For all the variety in the articles and the richness of the text in Woman on the Edge of Time, my topic has been the same in each post: the value of The Question. For me, structural, theoretical, or merely abstract analyses are an alternative way of approaching my own frequent frustration with my work and scholarly analyses in general, which manifests as a desperate "why should I care," or even "why do I care."

Though this is something I think probably depends on an individual's ability to reconcile the practice of studying literature with the value questions asked of those studying literature, I personally find that there is great utility in asking myself what the point of doing this actually is. It's apparent to me from my posts over the span of the quarter that I have been using Woman to ask this, and, in many ways, watching it answer my question via the continued push into structure.

Several of you are already aware that I have decided to exit the program after this quarter and pursue an "alt-ac" career for the time being (and for those of you who weren't aware until now, please forgive the crassness of finding out via blog). I mention this because I think it has bearing on the topic that has been coming out of my novel and the articles for the past couple months. I would suggest that my creative process has been an attempt not so much to get at the "point of it all," as it were, but at what I think is a more crucial question in pursuing higher education: "what is the point of this for me and right now?"

If the Chen article taught us anything, it was that the critical can be deeply embedded in the personal, and I think that always defaulting to close-reading can make us forget to ask ourselves the more difficult, abstract, or structural questions about our work. In our obsession with the criticalness of literary criticism, it's all too easy to ignore that, at the same time literature is Chakrabarty's object of study, it's also an experience, a medium for self-analysis, and a strong marker of our own temporality. Graduate students are often told that they will go through phases of crisis and self-doubt, but I rarely (if ever) hear someone suggest turning to the very texts that cause this crisis and letting them show you the structure of your own relationship to your research. I think we'd all find a surprisingly ally in our work no matter what direction it seems to be taking.

Shelley, Stoker, Chen, Derrida, The Walking Dead comics, and a book that snarls and bites

I found Chen’s “Toxic Animacies” to be a promising point of entry for teaching Shelley’s Frankenstein. I can see assigning this piece in a course on monsters and monstrosity (a course I can’t wait to design). The theme of invasion, the potential for toxicity to breach boundaries of imagined purity and security, opens the way for a discussion of how such infiltrations are figured in literature and what they might say about our ideas of what constitutes a monstrous threat—and, conversely, what constitutes purity.

Chen posits that “the queerest bioterrorist is the one who is remote, racialized ‘otherwise,’ and hybrid” (271). I would add to this list “fecund.” The danger of reproduction, replication, contagion, or contamination beyond the point of the initial breach seems to be ubiquitous in the representations of such monstrous threats (e.g., the default mode of dietary and other environmental toxins is to "cause cancer" rather than, say, make your heart stop). Certainly some prominent literary and film monsters illustrate this fertile potential: werewolves, vampires, and zombies alike are able to infect others—thus reproducing themselves and perpetuating the bio-not-bio-threat. Interestingly, in Frankenstein one of the most salient examples of a threat to sacred, pure domestic safe zone occurs after Victor refuses to continue his work on the female mate the creature has demanded. The creature vows to visit Victor on his wedding night, at which point he murders Victor’s bride in her bed. Both injury and revenge center upon marital—and potentially reproductive—relations.

The reproductive potential skirted around in this revenge plot suggests an interesting parallel between the Original Threat to correct life-giving (the creation of the monster) and the Ultimate Threat (the monster reproducing). I found this line fascinating and would probably use it as a starting point for a group discussion: “The mediation of [toxins] in and around categories of life [. . .] undoes lead’s deadness by reanimating it” (272). I would be interested in helping the students parse and think through this line. What does Chen mean by “mediating”? What does it mean to offer both “in” and “around” as approaches to “categories of life”? And most importantly, why “reanimating” rather than simply “animating”? This line in particular offers a series of potentially productive stumbling blocks to prevent too quickly accepting an easy, binary conception of life/not-life. It’s in this line where I think Chen’s argument challenges itself.

Not only does Chen's article privilege animacy over life in considering the personified toxic threat, it suggests that its life-status is irrelevant: “Toxins sometimes bear the threat of death to a protected life, but whether or not they ‘are’ alive is not the issue” (272). I’m not so sure. It might not always be at issue, but on the other hand, it’s striking to note how many figures of invasion—especially contagious invasion—involve an unstable, mutable boundary between life and non-life. I am thinking here of zombies, vampires, and of course the animate, intelligent creature Victor Frankenstein fashioned from dead tissues. These threats are absolutely queered; they occupy a third space along the alive/not-alive binary. They are also hybrid in the agent/object sense: they are both victim and perpetrator, both poisoned and poison.

At this point I would produce a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) dramatically from within the folds of my black satin cloak and read to the students the passage about the need for vampires (the unholy undead) to sleep in consecrated earth. And as a fun prank, I would then assign Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”! Right? Perhaps not, but I would certainly consider it as a reading for any grad students who might be taking a cross-listed version of this monstrously exciting class.

"Lethal sweetness socks tots": animating theory, animating a cereal box

Probably what I've outlined below is too ambitious, even for advanced undergraduates-- I welcome y'alls input on that.

If I wanted to teach Mel Chen’s "Toxic Animacies", I think the first thing I would have to do is spend some time discussing the points in the article that I think would be difficult for an undergraduate reader: namely, Chen’s prose is dense, and several of her lines of argumentation push at the boundaries of what we expect to see in an article. 

I think it’s worth it to try to show students how to be patient with texts like this. For me, this involves reading them with the kind of critical eye we bring to science fiction (or any fiction), rather than asking if the world described in theory matches up with our experience. In other words, I think that (from a pedagogical perspective) it would be useful to treat theory as requiring a readerly logic of “what if?” rather than one of “what is?"

So instead of starting with the Chen piece, I would start with “Heat Death of the Universe” and a discussion of genre. 

• This short story has actually been the source of a lot of debate about genre: it was published in a science fiction magazine, but the SF community is split on whether it is SF or not. What do you guys think?

I've seen this particular question asked in classes before. It tends to create interesting debates about genre.

I’d spend a couple of minutes on how science fiction is defined at various points by various theorists:

• a sort of ‘predictive’ logic of SF (beginning with the early pulps)
• which was reframed by New Worlds (the magazine in which this story appears): editor M. Moorcock tries to move from intensive engagement with technology, the future, and “outer space” to an engagement with speculative approaches to “inner space.” 
• Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”: 
• meaning that it deals with unfamiliar/strange objects, situations, and locations (estrangement), 
• but it is possible to approach these instances of “strange newness” using a cognitive approach, making sense of the relationship between them and the “real world”

Then I’d ask what aspects of Zoline's short story are speculative, in the sense of creating estrangement and cognition. I'd take a few responses before moving on, once I got a sense that students understood the concepts outlined above.

Transitioning to ‘Toxic Animacies,’ I would encourage students to think of this piece of theory in a similar way— what kind of world would we have to imagine for the theory to make more sense? As I was saying before, I feel like there are parts in Chen's piece that use complex language and are hard to parse, and then other parts that may be easier to understand but might be either emotionally uncomfortable or hard to believe.

Two such moments, at least for me, are:

(1) The section in which Chen riffs on the idea of "black children licking the peeling walls of their unmaintained dwellings" and the (unrepresentable, but surely there?) image of a little white boy licking Thomas the Tank Engine, “playing improperly with the phallic toy” (270-1). For me at least, this was a tiny bit unconvincing, if deliciously controversial. I have never envisioned either of these scenes!

In discussing this with students, I would try to guide them to the idea of looking at this image as a stylistic device. The the idea of interpenetration, permeability, and radical vulnerability to others (and the assault on traditional white masculinity this implies) seems to hold up even if we don't buy the queerness of licking Thomas the Tank Engine. 

• “If this were a kind of science fictional representation, we wouldn’t say 'I’ve never seen a two-headed alien in real life’, and stop there. We would ask what the author is DOING with the two-headed alien— why are they depicting it, rather than ‘is it possible?’. Instead of asking if it’s plausible, lets ask what Chen is trying to represent with this image."

(2) This might lead us into the section in which Chen writes personally about her experiences with multiple chemical sensitivity. Here I think it would be good to give students time to express their responses to Chen’s description of intoxication and vulnerability. 

• Who among us has never used scented laundry detergent, deodorant, cigarettes or skin cream? How should we feel addressed by this section of the paper? I for one feel guilt and anxiety about being toxic, which threatens to slide into frustration and anger at her “sensitivity” to me.

• What kind of world does Chen live in, and what does it draw her attention to? Her experiences may seem “estranged” from our own (or maybe not?), but they DO let us see the “real world” differently.

Finally, time permitting, I would bring us back to “Heat Death,” and ask students if we can find scenes that help us understand what Chen means by ‘animacy.’ She writes that while "animacy has no single definition," part of it is "a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness." She encourages us to "ask not 'who is alive, or dead,' but 'what is animate, or inanimate, or less animate'; relationally, we can ask about the possibilities of the interobjective, above and beyond the intersubjective” (280). 

As a candidate passage for finding “animacy” in “Heat Death,” (should students be less than forthcoming), I would turn to the description of a box of frosted flakes which participates in the kind of narratives of toxicity Chen describes. I’ve included an image of the passage below, instead of a big block of text, so I can pretend this entry is shorter than it would be otherwise.

I wish I could conduct a detailed close reading of this passage for you all now, but I’m really pushing myself to stop at two pages, for all of our sakes. So suffice it to say that I think the way that the box is designed to “appeal” to children begins to bleed over into a sort of animacy. The box undergoes a transformation here from being “appealing,” (i.e. having properties of classical sculpture) to launching a series of appeals, a “blatted” discourse with the children (to which they enthusiastically respond). And then there is this maternal paranoia about why the cereal box is so communicative: Sarah already hears "the decay set in upon the little white milk teeth, the bony whine of the dentist's drill,” and fears the cereal must cause a “special cruel cancer in children.”

 (animating a box of frosted flakes, p.1 )

 (a special, cruel cancer p.2)

There's more than enough here for chewing through some of the Chen, though admittedly it diminishes her point about differential risk exposure: I'd have to bring that up specifically, perhaps by noting the brilliant moment where she talks about the NY Times' assumption that cheap McDonalds toys certainly may be toxic, expensive trains should not be. 

Toxicity in Silas Marner

Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” covers a lot of ground, touching on lead poisoning, queerness, race, and her personal experiences being treated as toxic on the street.  The wide range of topics can seem noncontiguous, a fact Chen herself acknowledges by noting the essay “seems at first to float outside queerness,” until it reaches section two (265).  However, the breath that Chen can cover in the essay also nicely highlights how widely applicable her theories of toxicity can be.  Chen writes:

“Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion: so an advice columnist might write Keep a healthy distance from toxic acquaintances, while a senator up for reelection decries the ‘toxic’ political atmosphere” (266).

If I were teaching an undergraduate class in which the students were reading Chen and Silas Marner together, I would like to use this statement about general ideas of toxicity to start the discussion.  This way, the students would be able to think about toxicity at least partially on their own terms, rather than trying to read Chen directly onto Elliot and saying, “Well, Chen says X thing about toxicity and queerness, so where in Silas Marner can I find X thing being demonstrated?”

We would start out brainstorming characters or scenes in the book that we think demonstrate toxicity.  Three things I hope would come up:

1. The opening scene where a young Silas Marner is accused by a friend of stealing money.  His religious community draws lots to determine if the accusation is true, then expel him from the community when the lots declare him guilty.
2. Eppie’s mother, Molly, a poor opium addict who dies on her way to publicly declare the wealthy Godfrey Cass is her husband.
3. The factory that has been built in the place where Silas Marner lived as a young man.

Once we had our list of toxic people and places, we would write them each as a heading on the board, then brainstorm what seems particularly toxic about them.  Some things we could note (though probably in fewer words on the board!):

1. Silas’s religious community sees immorality as toxic, since they must literally distance themselves from it.  Conversely, one could argue that the community, which judged him unfairly, was toxic to Silas because his expulsion leads to the depression that characterizes him for much of the book.  The friend who framed Silas for the theft could be the “toxic acquaintance” alluded to in the Chen quote because he destroyed their friendship.
2. Assuming this is the same class in which we read the Armstrong article and Silas Marner together, I would like the class to draw parallels between Armstrong’s argument about women who do not properly fit into Victorian society and toxicity.  Note that Eppie’s mother, a drug addict and someone who seems to be a single mother (since her marriage was secret and to someone far above her social status) must die.  The community wants nothing to do with her and the book has no way of fitting her into the happy ending.  The drugs themselves are also toxic to Eppie’s mother and contribute to her death.
3. The factory is literally emitting toxic fumes into the air.  The density of the buildings is also problematic, as Eppie says, “I’m like as if I was stifled…I couldn’t ha’ thought as any folks lived I’ this way, so close together.  How pretty the Stone Pits ‘ull look when we get back!” (179). 

After we have some major thoughts about what makes each person, place, or thing toxic, we would discuss what each does or does not have in common and what a definition of toxicity might be.  Most likely, we would conclude that anything can be toxic, that what one considers toxic might depend on one’s point of view, and that toxicity is generally considered to be contagious in some way (even if not literally so).

This would also be a good place in the discussion to talk about Chen’s definition of animacy: “Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification” (265).

There is not much opportunity for racialization to occur in Silas Marner, a book of small cast and therefore little diversity in just about any sense of the word.  However, we could expand the concept of animacy to discuss how concepts and inanimate objects are othered, how toxicity is generally something associated with women or with the unnamed “faraway” place Silas came from and can only briefly return to for a supremely unsatisfying visit.  We might additionally discuss what the effect of othering a town that seems to be literally a couple days’ walk away vs. what the effect of othering a different continent is.

Overall, I hope this lesson would encourage the students to think about the general theoretical ideas being proposed in the Chen article are and how they might apply to a primary text.

Toxic Virgins, Queer Relations

The following is an outline for a teaching discussion about John Lyly's Gallathea using Mel Y. Chen's "Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections" as a lens.

Consider the following passages from the Chen: 

A toxin threatens, but it also beckons. It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death. A toxin requires an object against which its threat operates; this threatened object is an animate object — hence potentially also a kind of subject — whose “natural defenses” will be put to the test, in detection, in “fighting off,” and finally in submission and absorption. (265)

Toxins — toxic figures — populate increasing ranges of environmental, social, and political discourses. Indeed, figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion[. . .] (266)

1. Considering Chen's definition of "toxin," what are the toxins in John Lyly's Gallathea? Maybe a more appropriate question would be who are the toxins? 

What are the roles of the citizens, the Danes, and the gods in creating a society that fears toxins? How do the Danes enact toxicity? Can the Danes be considered a racialized, toxic other?

2. Are Gallathea and Phillida toxins? Remember that the sacrifice to the Agar must be "the fairest and chasest virgin in all the country," which appears to fall under the requirements of Chen's "new kind of purity" (266), since outward beauty and sexual absistence can be see as manifestations of purity and innocence.

View the following clip:

3. How does toxicity function according to temporality? Once intoxicated, is a subject or object always toxic? This is, at least, the running joke in Monsters, Inc., in which the character "George Sanderson" is constantly subjected to new detoxifying regiments. If Gallathea and Phillida are toxic, when did they become toxic? Does their impending gender/sex transformation at the end of the play detoxify them? Consider the following passage from Chen: "Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives" (281-82).

4. The Rafe/Robin/Dick subplot is often ignored among critics and scholars, for various reasons. Even though the subplot appears to be a low-brow, simple farce that makes fun of dimwitted servants, some of the brothers health is endangered as they work for different masters, which can be seen as an early modern echo (if we can echo back in time) of the Chinese workers who are exposed to lead paint. Chen says of the Western concern (or lack thereof) for these workers: "the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to facilitate the territorial/state/racial assignation of blame, but not enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around the workers themselves" (269). Can these servant brothers be compared to the Chinese workers? Does the play encourage us to pity or sympathize with the servant brothers, or are the just visible enough for "blame," but not enough for "the ring of sympathetic concern"?

The Train-Licking Boy

As I was reading the Chen article, I was continuously trying to figure out how to tie the Chen to Edelman’s queer theories and somehow then to Maisie and teaching. I was therefore not surprised when Chen did in fact mention Edelman; not surprised because really she had to at least acknowledge his theories in her argument. Chen writes of Edelman, “Signal to queer theory’s interest in queer relationality, Lee Edelman takes up a psychoanalytic analysis of queerness’s figural deathly assignment in relation to a relentless reproductive futurity” (278). It didn’t seem to me that she really elaborated on how “queerness’s figural deathly assignment” plays into her argument beyond being a point in queer history’s treatment of life and death and consequently its relationship to toxicity (please correct me if any of you would disagree with this assessment). This is the moment when she brings toxicity more explicitly into parsing the boundaries of the body:

Toxicity straddles boundaries of “life” and “nonlife,” as well as the literal bounds of bodies, in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects. While never undergoing sustained theorization in queer theory, toxicity has nevertheless retained a certain resonance there and a certain citational pull. (279)

I personally felt it would’ve been more helpful for her argument to discuss Edelman’s treatment of children in relation to the train-licking boy “that must not be allowed to become toxic: he must not be mentally deficient, delayed, or lethargic. His intellectual capabilities must be assured to consolidate a futurity of heteronormative (white) masculinity, which is also to say that he must not be queer” (271). That, however, might’ve shifted the focus of the article. Nonetheless, if I were teaching this article, I would focus specifically on Chen’s discussion of toxicity related to (non)reproductive futures. I would have my students specifically explore the following aspect of Edelman’s theory, and come up with a question in their respective texts (for the purposes of this post, I suppose we would be reading What Maisie Knew, though I think there are other late Victorian texts that might better serve this purpose) that links the two:

Edelman investigates the ramifications of treating the child as a symbol for the future rather than an individual. Edelman writes, “Historically constructed…to serve the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 11). Using Lacan’s lectures, Edelman crafts a theory of sinthomosexuality with which he challenges the assumption that non-procreative sex is destructive because it threatens a heteronormative ‘love-based’ society by refusing to buy into the future as represented by children.

Perhaps a question a student or I might generate would be: How does Chen’s train-licking and consequently mentally deficient child queer the future represented by children that society holds, in Edelman’s opinion, “in perpetual trust” as a symbol of the reproductive and therefore non-queer future?

To better contextualize the importance of the child as the site of society’s future, and therefore the metaphorical death of the individual child that makes the real child become a specter, we would read all or part of Katherine Bond Stockton’s book The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, who considers the ramifications of forgetting the individual child in favor of managing that child’s fictitious innocence on which society depends for the reproduction of the heteronormative future: “This kind of growth is made palpable, as I plan to show, by (the fiction of) the ghostly gay child – the publicly impossible child whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child” (Stockton 11, her italics). I would explain that rather than looking at the child as a site of the future or the fantasy possibility of retroactive adult discovery like Edelman does (which is very Freudian), Stockton proposes that instead of growing up, children today are subjected to managed delay, “the notion that children should approach all things adult with caution and in ways that guarantee their distance from adulthood” (Stockton 91), and so ‘grow sideways.’

To link the novel to Chen, Edelman, and Stockton, and the above aspects of their respective theories/ideas/opinions that I would hone in on, I would posit that Maisie’s body acts as an impenetrable tomb into which information, often toxic information, enters and from which it never again emerges after she initially decides to seal herself off from her parents. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post linking Maisie and Moretti, James writes that Maisie “was the little feathered shuttlecock that they fiercely kept flying between them. The evil [her parents] had the gift of thinking…of each other, they poured into her little gravely gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle” (James 12). Maisie, however, zips her lips and eventually refuses to recite this information; she breathes in the toxins, and in an attempt to control her situation, she lets them recirculate in her body rather than expelling them, and in this self-poisoning she takes great pleasure: 

"She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been the centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so. Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would...repeat nothing, and when, as an tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure altogether new" (James 13).

The question throughout the novel therefore becomes, what does Maisie know? Even the reader cannot quite make her body of knowledge his or her own, cannot co-opt or appropriate the personal narrative tucked into her brain. We can only hope to understand by the end of the novel whether or not she has managed to maintain some semblance of a sense of self and agency (arguably, she has not, but that’s my attempt to interpret what it is that Maisie knows). Maisie therefore becomes illegible, an almost-specter in the text, the “ghostly gay child” whose “identity is a deferral” because it is only while she is a child that her parents can continue to use her for their purposes; they delay her adulthood and therefore delay the reproductive future, unwittingly creating a version of Edelman’s sinthomosexual, the figure that rejects the future-based social order; Maisie becomes the train-licking boy. But as Chen and the novel suggest, “We need not assign the train-licking boy so surely to the nihilistic underside of futurity or to his own termination, figurative or otherwise” (281). I'll leave you with that titillating thought.

The Porous Body

The Chen article is at once the most accessible and most difficult entry to choose for a hypothetical undergrad class. The structure of the subjective narrative in the latter half combats the abstract quality of many of the articles we’ve read so far, but the variety of topics would make it a complex beast to tame in a section.

With that being said, there are two specific avenues I would address in “Toxic Animacities, Inanimate Affections,” the first being more directly related to teaching Woman on the Edge of Time.

“In this notion, asset is a good precisely because it entails capital value, but one which has unfortunately become—considering the discourse in which toxic asset has meaning—not only toxic but also perhaps ‘untouchable’ (as an affective stance), ‘unengageable’ (as tokens of exchange with limited commensurability), and perhaps even ‘disabling’ (i.e., rendering the corporations that buy up those assets invalid themselves). […] In what follows, I investigate the potential to resignify toxicity as a theoretical figure, in the interest of inviting contradictory play and crediting queer bonds already here: the living dead, the dead living, antisocial love, and inanimate affection” (Chen 266).

The concept of the toxic body and its intimacies is one that has strong associations with my novel. I would want to delve into the more capacious sense of “queered bodies” that is implicit in Chen’s article as a term that suggests bodies resisting “normative” configurations and relationships to themselves or others. Specifically, I’d focus on the sense that includes the aging body (particularly the female aging body), the disabled body, the racialized body, and, most of all, the porous, penetrable body.

While the protagonist Connie is an obvious choice for this discussion (i.e. the aging Chicana woman forced into a mental ward for her non-normativity), there is another character from the mental ward I would use in discussion.

“Sybil was crazy, but Connie had no trouble talking to her. Sybil was persecuted for being a practicing witch, for telling women how to heal themselves and encouraging them to leave their husbands, for being lean and crazily elegant and five feet ten in her bare long high-arched feet, for having a loud, penetrating voice and a back that would not stoop and a temper that stood up in her, lashing the tail of a lioness. […] Mainly, Sybil was a fighter and she fought those who threatened her, instead of hating her own self. She didn’t deny herself […] The hospital regarded Sybil as a lesbian. Actually she had no sex life.

‘Who wants to be a hole?’ Sybil asked her. ‘Do you want to be a dumb hole people push things in or rub against?’” (Piercy 76-77)

[NB: In deference to Chen’s self-described “off-gendered form” (274), as well as the resistance to gendered pronouns in nearly all of the articles/analyses on Chen that come up in a Google search, I will use the genderless pronoun “per” (short for “person”) chosen by the utopian society in Woman on the Edge of Time. It makes things terrifically defamiliarizing to read, especially if you are like me and have to force yourself to unhear the rhyme with “her.”]

In the latter half of Chen’s article, per gives an account of per experiences as a porous, intoxicated body navigating per own hyper-sensitivity to the sights, sounds, and smells of the world. I have chosen Sybil from Woman on the Edge of Time to explore the boundaries of this kind of permeability with my hypothetical class, and would do so under the following categories:

1.     Sybil as a penetrated body

a.     Examples: Sybil as woman (the always-already penetrable); Sybil as mental patient (forcibly penetrated by needles, shock therapy)

2.     Sybil as a body that refuses to be penetrated

a.     Examples: Sybil’s asexuality; Sybil’s strength and violent resistance to the nurses who attempt to drug her

3.     Sybil as a body that penetrates

a.     Examples: Sybil’s voice, which makes a number of insistent appearances even when she’s covered by a sheet, etc.; Sybil’s highly embodied presence in the world; Sybil’s tall, uncompromising stature

With the hope that the class would come up with more examples and interpretations of each category (or even more categories), I would then loop the discussion back around to Chen’s article and talk more generally about the cultural and social toxicity of penetrated bodies in our current imagination. I would ask the students to think about how we still discuss queer bodies in heternormative terms (e.g. the notion that, in a male/male sexual relationship, there must still always be a penetrator and a penetrated despite studies showing that that’s not a binary, or the depiction of female/female sex in pornography as revolving around a substitution of the penetrating object). I would ask them to think about how female social respectability still depends on a spectrum of the permeable body (e.g. there is a shifting ideal for women’s sex that floats between under- and over-penetrated). I would even ask them to think about how legislation treats certain bodies as inherently more penetrable and porous than others (the recent mandatory transvaginal ultrasound bit comes to mind, as does the very long fight against the banning of gay men from donating blood).

If there were still time after that in a section, I would end with my second avenue of discussion, which might better be called something of an exhortation, and this quote:

“It [Chen's biographical turn] is not intended as a perfect subjectivity that opposes an idealized objectivity; rather, it is meant as a complementary kind of knowledge production, a sensorium…” (Chen 273).

I think we very often try to suppress the personal when analyzing literature, a practice that can seem counterintuitive to the actual process and experience of reading. To close a class on Chen’s article, I would try to impart a sense of the fluidity of “not supposed to” in writing—yes, there are common rules and expectations, but the best writers in every generation tend to be people who resist those rules or find ways to subvert those expectations. The rules of criticism are different from the rules of novel-writing, but there’s no reason we can’t share certain methodologies. Chen writes about toxicity and uses per own experience to think through theoretical ideas in a way I found eminently readable. In other words, to want to be a subject while you write about subjectivity is not an invalid desire.