Limaceous
I recently finished The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. A memoir, Bailey juxtaposes her life altered by illness – an infection that completely destroys her neurological functions – with a new companionship with a woodland snail. There was something so special about the slowness of these two bodies – both pouring inward. Dark clouds unfurling like fiddlehead ferns: I imagine myself curling up over my muscular tongue and sliding on self-made soup. My pink labial folds slide on a ribbon of ooze over liver red leaves. Pale stalks of my eyes rise from hidden shoulders. Do you hear my quiet sucking sound? The slurp of my nail-lined mouth scraping at unimaginable things? I too want to pour inward for a slow wild life. Did you know that snails are hermaphrodites? When they make love they decide their sex. As if playing Cupid, they throw love-darts into one another! Even this little creature knows the complex relay of pleasure and pain. They seduce, taste, and feel one another for days – clasping wet silks....o00O00o...
Cut Sex
The cut is possibility. For some transsexual women, the cut is not so much an opening of the body, but a generative effort to pull the body back through itself in order to feel mending, to feel the growth of new margins. The cut is not just an action; the cut is part of the ongoing materialization by which a transsexual tentatively and mutably becomes. The cut cuts the meat (not primarily a visual operation for the embodied subject, but rather a proprioceptive one), and a space of psychical possibility is thereby created. From the first, a transsexual woman embodiment does not necessarily foreground a wish to ‘‘look like’’ or ‘‘look more like a woman’’ (i.e. passing) – though for some transwomen this may indeed be a wish (fulfilled or not). The point of view of the looker (those who might ‘‘read’’ her) is not the most important feature of transsubjectivity – the trans-woman wishes to be of her body, to ‘‘speak’’ from her body.
..o00O00o..
"Hate and Marriage, Can't Have One Without the Other?"
A lawyer for Littleton illustrated the capricious nature of gender and marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Texas, is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Texas, and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.” This quote instances the absurdity of institutionalized gender categories and the requirements of marriage across the country.
