It is a corporate Christmas party, and I feel clumsy.
I shift uncomfortably. I do not belong. Or maybe I do and I simply don't like it.
Both options are unappealing, and I am unsettled by my contradictions.
This is business. Why am I here?
This question threads together my day-to-day. I should be writing about my experiences, but my hand is heavy to the page. The questions begin to multiply, raising my pulse and stirring up doubt. What is there to say? Why am I doing this? What is the value in me doing this?
This last question is inextricably tied to how we view ourselves as social subjects. It is a question that could only be asked in a society whose economies of desire and pleasure are measured by singularity. How does your experience translate to a dollar value? What is your material worth to this company? Is it worth it?
I said for a long time that feminist theory saved my life. My theoretical imagination allowed to me to render all that haunted me into abstraction. By turning everything around me into a concept I was in control, I knew what the relationship between pleasure and labor was, how patriarchy deploys shame to police women, and how sexism works. That was all undone very quickly as I heard stories, answered questions, and generally observed life in the shop.
There is a woman in line and she is scowling at me. It startles me and as I catch her eye, her lips curl in a snide snarl. Worthless, whore, disgusting. Its not the first time, and my eyes flash cobra gaze that I am everything she thinks I am.
There is a man, who asks me what my boyfriend thinks of me "doing this." I tell him that I would not date someone who doesn't respect and value my decisions. He says yes, but he can't imagine a woman being around so many porn movies. I tell him that I write about porn.
Which someone else interprets as that I write porn, which while untrue, sounds cooler.
A woman laughs at me in disgust.
Someone tells me that a woman manager was once attacked by a customer.
An elderly couple, who radiate love, are laughing happily together. The woman and I scour through racks on an empty Sunday morning, reading the plots to movies out loud together and trying to pick some good ones. "I want the girls to be pretty" she says.
There is a woman recovering from a hysterectomy, who has a limited sexual vocabulary with which she is comfortable. And I am Nancy Drew, deciphering clues. There are a lot of whispered analogies and hushed euphemisms. She says thank you and means it.
A man tells me that he was embarrassed, but feels better now.
All is full of slowly worded confessions, euphemistic codes, life narratives, and judgments. "Am I sick? Am I disgusting? Do you think I am disgusting?"
I see people where no one is supposed to see them. Many arrive cloaked in shame and I often wonder if I am just another peg in the shame industrial complex.
Distressed, I turned to Amber Hollibaugh's My Dangerous Desires which is one of the few places I feel home. In her introduction to the book, Dorothy Alison writes about how she hid in fiction writing to escape her immense fear of biography.
- "The grace of fiction is that you can tell a larger story than the world has yet acknowledged---and pretend, at least in part, that you are not completely present in the story you tell" (xvii).
The grace of academic writing lies in that it can and will only be understood by a small, specific population. But, this isn't grace so much as it is a privilege. Stripped of dense verbosity, what could I possibly have to say? Why should I say it?
Because I want to. I find myself surrounded by women who know what they want. Women who articulate what they want and have gone off to find it. Women who are assured, and strong, and unafraid to inhabit a space that most assume we are all terrified to be in. They reassure me, they make me laugh, they trust me, and we share time together.
I arrived there looking for what Lynn Comella calls "sex positive synergy." What I have found is a messy navigation of shame, wanting, histories, and hyper-capitalism. I found myself living in my body differently, and while I am often distraught and upset, I am often profoundly moved by the temporary intimacy some allow me.
