Vaginal Intelligence and New England Summers

    This week I’m on a vacation in a remote part of New England with my girlfriend Grace. We’re staying in an Airbnb that is an apartment attached to the home of a kind, elderly white couple. In the mornings, we take walks around the lush, tree-lined neighborhood, trying to get as close as possible to the lake that is walled off to the public by people’s homes. In the afternoons, we make our best effort to visit the surrounding towns and trails. The air is much cooler up here, and the houses are built in the shape of sturdy wooden boxes painted clean white. The area feels ancient in a way that is unfamiliar to me. On our second day here, we visited the campus of a prestigious university. This was mostly Grace’s request, as I had already visited the campus as a high school student, and my decade of experience within academia has rubbed away much of the sparkling magic of university territory. But she wanted to go badly, if only to disabuse herself of the fantasy that we would have accomplished something if we managed to send our children to one of these schools in several decades’ time. We parked a couple of blocks from campus and were first greeted by the school’s various art museums and performing arts centers, all named in honor of wealthy white families that donated significant amounts of money to the school. It was a reminder to me that private schools desperately depend on the largesse of those with generational wealth and are therefore bound to the norms, preferences, and biases of that small, insular, racially homogeneous class. 

    Nonetheless, we continued deeper into campus and I allowed my memories of my last visit to resurface and narrate the geography of the landscape. My memory guided us to a graveled pedestrian intersection in the middle of campus where each incoming class traditionally takes a group photo. We stood in the very center of the crossroads and kissed as parents passed us by with their new college students and their eager-eyed younger siblings. Grace took candid pictures of me as I twirled for her in the intersection. Then we took a couple of photos together, Grace beaming with excitement and pride and me smirking shyly as if I held a rebellious secret. It felt tolerable being on this campus with her because I was not hiding as I had been in the past. Somehow, being so aggressive there in my difference—by being openly gay, wearing a flowy, dramatic kimono, and performing a general disinterest in the prestige of the school’s culture—helped me to feel more at ease. This time, I was choosing to be an outsider because I could go back to a life that I genuinely loved, instead of feeling the pain of never quite code switching well enough and being distraught that I knew of no other place to go. Standing in the crossroads with Grace allowed me to visually understand the basis of so many of our conflicts—we have so many choices regarding how to live our lives, which is a privilege that both of our parents and grandparents may not have had as much access to. How could I cope with this abundance of choices instead of conforming to an existing, broken system out of fear and a lack of faith in my abilities? 

At the crossroads

    Eventually we did make a choice, deciding to walk toward the engineering part of campus. I smiled at two Black men walking past us as we held hands, but they simply gave us a neutral look in passing and continued about their way. As I am on my journey to escape the cult of academia, I had gotten out of the habit of remembering that Black people at elite schools are socialized to avoid demonstrating solidarity with or affection for each other in order to make ourselves more desirable to wealthy white people in power. It is a fact that white institutions, like plantations, tend to prefer a divide and conquer mentality among Black people in order to ensure that we are easier to isolate and control. If every Black person on campus derives their self worth from being a token, it would be impossible for us to organize a collective protest. 

    We needed to use the bathroom, so I confidently strolled up to one of the classroom buildings and tried the door. It clicked open for us, and we entered. In a reversal of our usual dynamic, Grace became the more timid one in the campus space while I moved with an ease and arrogance that could only be gained from successfully existing in these spaces for years at a time. After we left the building, we saw a gaggle of white people and a few minority tokens in business casual attire leaving a meeting. What do you see, I asked Grace. She said that they seemed full of energy, curiosity, and life, that they were bubbling over with new possibilities. She wasn’t wrong, and I am always grateful for her sight. My cynical tongue could not resist though, and I said I saw a group of people whose life force and talent would be exploited and extracted by an institution that is literally incapable of producing life. Much like how vampires are already dead and must therefore consume the blood of living creatures in order to maintain an existence that is approximate to living. As we walked around, Grace would inch closer to snowy-haired professors in the hope of hearing the wisdom they might casually dispense. I, in contrast, worked hard to physically avoid them in order to protect my energy and spirit. Instead, I found myself being drawn to the excited chatter of the undergraduates around us, thinking about how elderly professors sustain their careers by feeding off the ideas of young people who are not yet aware of the value of their words. 

    After a while, we strolled off campus and stopped at a local ice cream shop for a treat. The small, sweltering establishment was tightly packed with white people who were stiff in posture and comportment. In line, we stood beside a young, thin white woman who had her arms crossed. The cashier called to the three of us to see if we wanted to order. In a gesture of generosity, I asked the white woman if she had been in line before me. When I do this, I generally expect the harmony of the social interaction to continue with the other person extending an offer for me to go ahead of them. But the woman spoke off-key and insisted that she be first. Grace and I looked at each other for a long moment, having a Silent Black Conversation. We ate our ice cream outside, with me sitting on a bench and Grace standing in front of me, her back to the crowds. I licked my ice cream cone seductively to tease her amidst the rigid-backed, straight white people in business casual clothes. It felt good to open up a portal to our private queer world. 

   As I stepped into this portal and softened to the possible stories of the white heterosexuals surrounding us, I thought of the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s work on paranoid and reparative reading. In her essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Sedgwick outlines paranoid reading and reparative reading as two contrasting modes of interpreting not only literary objects, but also ourselves and other people. Sedgwick notes that the fields of critical theory generally and queer theory generally took on paranoia as a default mode of reading that was considered to be the most rigorous or factually true. To read with paranoia is to assume that one always has enemies, must always be on the lookout for harm, and that there are oppressive systems in place that limit one’s life outcomes. 

    As a feminist and ally to queer communities, Sedgwick was certainly aware of the very real obstacles and traumas that marginalized people face on a daily basis. However, Sedgwick proposes the concept of reparative reading in the hope of offering queer and other marginalized folks a way of moving through the world that was not rooted in defensiveness, hostility, and extreme stress. It is also important to note that Sedgwick defines the modes of paranoid and reparative reading as positions that are flexible enough for individuals to move between when they so choose—in short, Sedgwick is saying that queer folks are not required to remain in a posture of paranoia that is caused by experiences of trauma or homophobia. Sedgwick describes the reparative or depressive position as “the position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Among [Melanie] Klein’s names for the reparative process is love.” For Sedgwick, the reparative position is one which is rooted in love of the self, which then expands one’s ability to feel compassionate love toward others. The process of loving the self requires the unconditional acceptance of those “murderous part-objects” that may be pathologized or rejected within homophobic or otherwise discriminatory spaces. The process of accepting those previously-despised parts of the self results in the creation of a new self which is “not necessarily like any preexisting whole.” Practicing the ritual of self-love will make you unrecognizable to yourself because you will learn to develop your own system of valuing the parts of yourself that wider society may deem worthless or unacceptable. 

It is important to note that Sedgwick wrote this essay and many of her other seminal works during the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and 1990s. Sedgwick’s writing also takes place at least a generation before the legalization of gay marriage. When we view these two facts together, we can understand the emotional urgency behind Sedgwick’s writing. The “paranoia” that Sedgwick observed among queer communities was at least in part tied to queer folks’ experiences of losing friends to complications of AIDS at a young age and not having the legal protection of marriage to ensure that they could provide adequate care for those who were slowly dying. As Grace and I ate our ice cream cones outside, I noticed groups of white families taking selfies with their children and reveling in the tiny worlds they had been able to create for themselves. I am very privileged to live in a time when marriage, children, and family are accessible to me as a queer woman of color. But I recognize that not only has this not always been the case, but also that the lack of access to these adult rites of passage may have caused a particular strain of arrested development that makes queer folks more susceptible to inhabiting the paranoid position. If it has historically been unthinkable for queer folks to “grow up” by getting married and having children, what would be the point of a queer person choosing to achieve the levels of emotional maturity, self-love, and self esteem that are typically expected of adequate spouses and parents? It is my hope that our generation will take full advantage of the rights that previous generations of queer activists fought and died for in order to explore the experience of queerness lived from a reparative position. What does a repaired queer life look like?

    Walking back to the car in the dark, we noticed a community of large spiders weaving intricate webs under a series of short light fixtures beside the art museum. Each spider had woven its own little world from the contents of its body. I said that I wanted to do something similar with my life and my body. We watched the drama of spiders fighting for territory and hunting their prey for a few minutes until a group of older white professors began encroaching upon us. They were clearly annoyed that we were standing still in the walkway, and they passive-aggressively made very little room for our bodies as they brushed by us. One white male professor in a blue camp shirt walked so close to us that he nearly swiped his body against the spider and its web. Grace thought it would have been funny if he walked away without knowing that he carried a spider on his chest. And we would have let him. The moment was important for me because it reminded me how disembodied and disconnected academic culture can be. Grace and I’s observation of the arachnid dramas felt so much more spiritually meaningful and insightful to me than most of the seminars I’ve had to take in order to acquire my PhD. The idea of sitting stiffly in a classroom as the only Black person while talking about white-authored texts in a voice I specifically only use to pass in white spaces could not compare to the stimulation and curiosity I felt at witnessing nature unfold. I did not want myself, Grace, or our possible future children to become like those professors, so caught up in performing an illusion of intellectualism that we forget how to think and perceive. 

    In the car, Grace noted that the white woman in the ice cream shop had an obsession with being first, like so many of the other people on campus. This desire to be first could manifest as a need to step ahead of two Black queer women in line or to wear the most “professional” business casual clothing or to say the wittiest comment during a conversation where everyone is expected to forget their bodies. I interpreted this need to be first as a very phallic definition of intelligence that is bound up in needing to visually “prove” one’s intellectual virility by penetrating or dominating everyone around you. In contrast, I’ve become more interested in a distinctly feminine or vaginal form of intellectualism whose value is rooted in the unseen-yet-felt. I want to learn and teach in ways that require me to remain receptive, open, and vulnerable. After our trip to campus ended, I realized that my time in the academic world only further enabled my issues with intimacy. From age 18 on, I was given a set of coping mechanisms that allowed me to avoid the messy work of being deliriously and imperfectly human. In these institutions, I was taught to value being right over being honest and to believe that my core self was somehow inadequate and deserved to wither away in darkness. I say this as someone who is deeply invested in learning, curiosity, and study. But there has to be another way, a way to preserve and protect the vibrant life energy that we witnessed in the undergraduates without the elitist, white supremacist infrastructures and resources that institutions often must rely on to continue existing. Let’s keep thinking. We will figure something out together.