of gay jesuses and pregnant men
Music: Tobias Lilja: Time is On My Side (2007)
I'm finally home and a little rough for wear. Walked in the door precisely at midnight and was reminded I departed leaving the condo in something of a mess. A spring clean is definitely in order. I see I got a whopping $120 royalty check . . . just enough to hire someone to steam the carpet. Nothing cheers more, however, than a lovely, delightful-smelling plant and gift of goodies waiting for me (thank you, friend). Today is a series of meetings beginning here in a couple of hours. There is no rest for the nice guy.
That said: I can't leave the Tubes for two weeks without a number of titillating stories breaking! Mojoshaun reports a Last Supper as "gay orgy" painting has stirred some controversy in Austria. Then, some dude appeared on Oprah rotund for success: Thomas Beatie is pregnant. Dude doesn't look like a lady, he is a lady (on the inside) and, after sexual reassignment, he decided to leave the reproductive bits intact because he always wanted to conceive. After discussing the discrimination and difficulties Thomas and his infertile wife faced from the medical community and their families, he concluded "Love makes a family and that's all that matters." I cannot imagine a more incredibly stupid statement coming from a pregnant man.
There is much to say here, of course, regarding performativity, female masculinities, and so on, but much of that should be familiar to the academic jet set: both gender and sex are socially constructed; Thomas' scars from his breast removal bespeak the mark of a forced choice; sexuality is multiple and mutable, and so on. The Oprah appearance also highlights the regime of visibility rather well---if not the mismatch between (high) theory and affective practice. What interests me more so than what "theory" might say about Thomas' pregnancy is what everyday folks like my mum would say: this person wants to have his cake and to eat it too, and the publicity surrounding his pregnancy only serves to reinforce the impossibility of such a desire. Thomas is a woman, whatever we decide that means.
"Love makes a family and that's all that matters," says Thomas. Love, of course, is never enough: such is the brutal truth of adulthood. Yet coupled with Thomas' statement that it is his "right" to have a child, love represents something much more than intercourse or altruism. "Love" in this context is another form of righteousness, a challenge to the "natural order" of things (which is good) as well as a kind of secret violence made most blatant in Children of Men: the hubris of "men" claiming the womb of the Other. In other words, beyond the complexities of sex and gender, there are certain beings who are biologically capable of producing children, and certain beings who are not. Thomas' claim to the right of reproduction is both justified and overdetermined, both a delicious confrontation of norms as well as a reinscription of the centuries-long fantasy of "men" having children, a strange misogyny indeed.