An interview with Jarvis Derrell, who runs

QUEENS
Cover image: Elizabeth I, portrait by Nicholas Hillard (1585). Next page: Catherine Parr, Queen of England (1543-1547)
June 2014 | Volume 29
The New Inquiry Magazine is licensed under
a creative commons license [cc-by-nc-nd 3.0]
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Editor in Chief
Ayesha Siddiqi
Publisher
Rachel Rosenfelt
Creative Director
Imp Kerr
Executive Editor
Rob Horning
Senior Editor
Max Fox
Managing Editor
Joseph Barkeley
Editors
Atossa Abrahamian
Aaron Bady
Adrian Chen
Emily Cooke
Brian Droitcour
Malcolm Harris
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Willie Osterweil
Alix Rule
Contributing Editors
Alexander Benaim
Hannah Black
Nathan Jurgenson
Sarah Leonard
Sarah Nicole Prickett
Special Projects
Will Canine
Angela Chen
Samantha Garcia
Natasha Lennard
John McElwee
Editors at Large
Tim Barker
Jesse Darling
Elizabeth Greenwood
Erwin Montgomery
Laurie Penny
Founding Editors
Rachel Rosenfelt, Jennifer Bernstein, Mary Borkowski
I N T E R V I E W
7 YA S S S S S , K W E E N !
JA RV I S D E R R E L L I N T E RV I E W E D BY E L I Z A B E T H G R E E N WO O D
E S S AY S
1 3 YO U D O N ’ T O W N M E B Y D AV I D G E E R
1 7 SCREAM QUEENS BY KARTIK NAIR
2 3 FA C E M E , I FA C E YO U B Y D E R I C A S H I E L D S
2 7 M A R G OT, N OT AT T H E W E D D I N G B Y S T E P H A N I E L A C AVA
3 0 S E E I N G S TA R S B Y A N A F I N E L H O N I G M A N
R E V I E W
4 1 I N A M I R R O R , D A R K LY
A R E V I E W O F H E L E N OY E Y E M I ’ S B OY, S N O W, B I R D
BY H A N N A H B L AC K
C R O S S W O R D P U Z Z L E
4 5 L A D I E S F I R S T B Y J O N AT H A N Z A L M A N
THE
queen addresses her audience. She is draped
in ermine. She wears her jeweled crown and sits on her gold
throne. It is the day she speaks to her assembled Parliament
and delivers directives for the year. The representatives of
capital stand before her, looking as obedient as children
dragged to church. A single page boy faints, overcome by
the power of the ceremony, but the queen does not signal
that she notices. It seems like a grace note in the perfor-
mance of her power, or a sad commentary on its actual application. Such is the plight of the queen.
A queen is the image of a woman at the height of
her potential social standing. She evokes beauty, poise,
and dignity simultaneously with power. Women who
inhabit their social role fully and without struggle are
crowned queens. But if the queen is the pinnacle, she is
also the limit. If she is an exception to the general subor-
dination of women, she proves the male rule.
We are now republicans, as far as the term goes. And
the redistribution of royal titles can only be celebrated. Many
more women than there have ever been noble families elicit
cries of “queen” these days. “Queen,” unlike “princess,” functions as praise—though its deployment can teach us about the
gender of power. She has avoided the fate of a princess, a title
applied with more derision than awe, shaming women for articulating their desires as demands.
A queen is also ruthless, controlling, runs shit. A
queen is not an executive, though. The corporate form of
power is still far too fraternal to allow for anything sororal in the boardroom. A queen stands alone, fixed in place,
with her subjects arrayed around her. This means she is also
outnumbered. If her every movement seems deliberate, she
might be self-possessed or she might be trapped.
In this issue, we explore the various valences of queendom. Beginning with an interview with Jarvis Derell, the
voluble hashtagger behind #shehashadit, we discover the
joys of “reading” and applaud the femme art of survival. By
turning queens into #kweens, Derell opens up a social landscape where “the sorrows of long hours and urban poverty
and precarious labor in the Sisyphean late-capitalist grind
are reimagined as a series of joyful auditions and queer style
choices and performative expressions of defiance.” And in
“Seeing Stars,” Ana Finel Honigman assembles a collection
of fan art devoted to female celebrity that rides on the dark
energy of their public shame. Praise is central to the construction of the queen, though she must be strong enough
to withstand the schadenfreude and sadism that inheres in
celebration.
If queens live as exemplars of feminine performance,
then most other types of women must be construed to miss
her mark. In “Face Me, I Face You,” Derica Shields writes of
searching visual culture for a reflection of herself and ends
face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth I, her white head in the
writer’s brown hand, both weighted with the unequal historical division of the spoils of slavery.
Not all queens are women—that’s clear—but not all
drag is cis. In “You Don’t Own Me,” David Geer lauds drag
sisterhood Chez Deep for their refusal to locate drag as the
exposure of gender’s falsity, instead living drag as a form
akin to goddess worship. While drag often does little but
repackage the gender binary, Chez Deep prompts audiences to reject assumptions about the gendered subjectivity of
the performer on stage. In return, Geer asks audiences to
“rethink their relationship to drag performance and their
responsibility as spectators.”
Early patriarchal attempts at codifying how to shut
women up often left exemptions for funereal wails; later, all of women’s speech would be regarded as so much
screaming. In “Scream Queens,” Kartik Nair investigates
the sexual semiotics of the feminine shriek in horror films
as they encounter early Hollywood censors and when they
are dubbed into Hindi. The scream is part of a much larger body of emissions through which sexual difference is
brought onto the screen, Nair writes. “What you hear is the
sound of air passing through a matrix of sexual and social
prescriptions.”
On other screens, queens project sexual difference
as fate. In “Margot, Not at the Wedding,” Stephanie La
Cava describes how she derived a stable of fetishes and a
lesson in the feminized burden of survival from watching
Patrice Chereau’s La Reine Margot at an impressionable
age. The historic Margot has been immortalized in film numerous times, her story ripe with sham marriages, reversals of fortune, massacres, and betrayal. There may be two
star-crossed lovers, but only one dies a martyr; Margot’s
self-sacrifice ends in disgrace, poor queen.
We love queens because they are the supreme example of what we have. Their triumph as women can,
from opportune angles, become women’s triumph. But
like on the chessboard, their dominating capability is
still in the service of the rule of a king. We can’t help but
wonder what women might do or be after the queen’s
reign ends.
ELIZABETH GREENWOOD
YASSSSS, KWEEN!
7
JARVIS DERRELL interviewed by ELIZABETH GREENWOOD
shehashadit.tumblr.com
An interview with Jarvis Derrell, who runs @shehashadit on Instagram
“READING,”
says legendary drag queen Dorian Corey while making herself up in the mirror
in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, “is fundamental.” Jarvis Derrell, the voice behind the wildly popular Instagram
account ­#SheHasHadIt, first watched the influential 1990 film on New York City drag culture on a VHS tape a friend
8
had spirited to his Florida home. Derrell took what he saw
of queens cutting each other down while simultaneously celebrating one another and built on it to create She Has Had
It, his Instagram collage of the deranged and delightful individualism of anonymous New Yorkers. The site features his
own version of reading that uses the cultural touchstones of a
childhood spent in a poor, Pentecostal household and incorporates back stories, journeys, and narrative arcs from people
he encountered in church. Reading, Corey says, is “the real
art form of insult”—think Don Rickles meets Ru Paul—but
it also celebrates the subject, because so rarely are we ever
really seen and acknowledged by another person, let alone a
stranger on the subway with a smartphone camera.
While reading may be at least as old as Oscar Wilde,
Derrell has reinvented the art with creative hashtags, adding layers of complexity and microfiction to the photos he
captions. His frame of reference is vast, encompassing teen
movies, high theater, ghetto language, the black church,
and consumer aspiration.
To be good at reading, one has to be ready to be read.
While Derrell’s assessments can be harsh, he is always
quick to come with an upper cut to his own face. He describes himself as a “Holy Ghost bowlegged ethnic power
bottom with a sensible community college AA in HPV,
weaving and gay wizardry #lonelyoldbottom #ihavenolife.”
But She Has Had It has had critics other than Derrell himself. Some say he is exploitative and voyeuristic,
as many of his images are of the city’s downtrodden. Jesse
Darling describes his images as those “in which the sorrows of long hours and urban poverty and precarious labor
in the Sisyphean late-capitalist grind are reimagined as a
series of joyful auditions and queer style choices and performative expressions of defiance.” He might say it’s something a little more lighthearted.
In person, Derrell is everything like his She Has
Had It persona and also nothing like it at all. He is prone
to bursts of exuberance and cruises the cute waitstaff, but
he is also contemplative. He showed up at Café Select on
YASSSSS, KWEEN!
a recent Wednesday afternoon wearing a conservative gray
cowl-neck sweater and diamond studs in each ear—though
She Has Had It would speculate that perhaps, given the
size, they may have been cubic zirconium. We talked about
language and the ethics of projection, about how struggling
in the city can be an exercise in joy, and ultimately about
how reading is an expression of love.
(The conversation has been edited for clarity
and shortened.)
How would you describe what you do?
It’s so complicated. For me, it’s an escape. It’s an extracurricular that just happened to pick up and become
lucrative. I tell stories. That’s the basis of what I do, I tell
stories. By any means necessary.
There’s always such a distinct narrative arc that accompanies each photo. How long does it take you to write a
caption or a story? Do you write drafts?
I get thousands of submissions a day, but I have decorum. I’m not going to use naked people or really poor or
homeless people. It’s a fine line. But I know what I’m going
to say the minute I see it. I do one little draft, it takes five
minutes, and I post it.
You’ve taken the platform of hashtagging and elevated it to an art form. What were your reads like prior to
­Instagram?
She Has Had It is not anything new. I’ve been saying
it with friends since college, since the first night I blacked
out drinking. Somebody asked me, “Have you had it?” and
I was like, “Yes, she has had it!”
Reading then was always to rebut statements. You
know, like “#regret!” “#youdontknowmylife!” It just kind
of happens naturally. It was definitely storytelling. I have
done face-to-face reading, and it’s a different experience.
What are some of the differences?
ELIZABETH GREENWOOD
For any of my reads, I never come from a place of
hate or trying to cut someone down. We all have lived lives
on spectrums, with crazy highs and crazy lows. That’s what
I like about reading—it includes everyone in on the joke.
I’m laughing at you, but I’m also laughing at me, so we can
laugh at each other. Everybody’s laughing, let’s laugh! Nobody’s safe, which makes it a safe place. It’s not hard to read
someone to their face if you’re living for them. And I’m
also vulnerable enough to be read, whatever you have to
say about me I can handle it. You have to, if you’re going to.
Most people read in fits of anger, but I’d rather save
them for times of praise. I don’t like to be provoked. People will ask me to do live reading, and it’s not really me. I
can do it. If you’re paying me, hell yeah. But I’m usually
not inspired to read people face to face in the She Has Had
It sense. But I read people everyday just naturally. It’s just
people watching. Like, “She’s gonna wear Louboutins, but
she’s rocking a fake Coach? What is going on?” Just read!
It’s usually the first three things you think about a person.
I actually have a spreadsheet somewhere.
So what are your tips for reading? What makes a good
read? What should your amateur reader know?
I’m from the south, so my mom taught me that you
win more people over with sugar than you do with salt. So
usually when I meet a person I think of three things off the
bat that I like about them. No matter who you are. It’s also
really good at helping me remember people’s names.
That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard! How have you
ever survived in New York?
Well, I don’t tell them, but I remember, “She smelled
good,” or “She has the cutest eyes! So when it comes to
reading, I pick out three things that stand out that are right.
Because it’s usually just one thing wrong, but usually when
it’s a lot of things wrong, you just think about the things
that are wrong. But for me personally, I like to praise them,
in a very kind of side-eyed way. Like, “What is that, Lane
9
by Lane Bryant?” Then you play on words and think of the
most floral way to deconstruct them.
Do you think some of the criticisms of She Has Had It—
where people say you’re making fun of people who are
poor or struggling—do those critics misunderstand the
context of reading?
I don’t believe in overanalyzing. If there’s something
that doesn’t work for me, I don’t follow it. And I understand that about She Has Had It. Poor? I don’t do those
people. And poor? Who isn’t poor? I live in NYC. I arrived
here with $50 to my name on an air mattress in Brooklyn
five years ago so I know poor, I know what it’s like to struggle, and I also know it wasn’t the worst time in my life. I
wasn’t miserable, I had to wear some hand-me-downs, but
I rocked it like it was Hermès!
Have you ever taken any posts down that you felt in retrospect crossed that line of decorum?
There was one a really long time ago of a boy who was
really rude to me on Grindr. So I was like, “Okay, I’m going
to read him!” That was pure vengeance and one of my first
big successful posts. He had long luscious locks, and I was
like, “We’re both bottoms, this isn’t going to work.” It was
so successful, and I felt really bad.
Another one was of a woman breast-feeding on the
train. I was breast-fed as a kid—clearly, it did nothing for
me—but not when I was a toddler. The kid could walk and
talk. I hashtagged it “#breastfeeding.” A lot of people saw it
and said, “This is very cruel, you’re exploiting this woman,”
and that was never my intention. I just thought it was funny.
She seemed fine with it, having her breast out on a crowded
train. But I decided to pick my battles. So I took it down.
But no others. And I’ve actually met a lot of people who
have been in She Has Had It, and they’re like “whatever!”
or “that’s funny!”
Lately, it seems like a lot of language from black drag
10
culture is coming to the fore in the popular lexicon—like
queen, throwing shade, reading, even ratchet. Why now?
The gay culture, and the black gay culture specifically, is arriving at a level of notoriety where it needs to
be, because it’s spilled over into so many other different
parts of society. It’s crazy, it literally is mainstream. With
“Queen,” I changed the spelling. “Queen” with a Q is so
feminine, whereas Kween with a K means that everybody
is a kween. I’ve always called people kween in the She Has
Had It voice, and everyone—boys, girls. If you are making
do with what you have, you are a kween. I wanted to make
that something indigenous to She Has Had It.
People know about shade and reading. I’m like, “You
don’t know shade! You’re in Louboutins, sit down!” I’ve
known these words all my life. It’s funny, it’s refreshing, really seeing people learning the art of it. Because it is an art.
How did you come to reading?
My movie of choice when I was a teenager was Paris is Burning. All of that is in the documentary—reading,
shade, ratchet. It’s all in that documentary. And I feel the
footprints of our history. It really is history. I loved that as
a teenager, and I taught myself how to read.
I was raised very religious, very sheltered, and that was
just my small glimpse. No one taught me. I wasn’t surround-
If you are
making do
with what you
have, you are
a kween
YASSSSS, KWEEN!
ed by influential black gay people in my life, I just wasn’t. I
was very much more a musical theater kid, and in musical
theater you learn to fake what you don’t know, so you make
it up. So in my own mind, I made up this whole version of
reading, and I think that’s how She Has Had It is what it is.
What would your particular version of reading look like?
Oh, you know looking at a person in church and
praising them, but also knocking them down a little. Like,
‘You are serving Payless heels! And they are WORKING!
You can’t walk, but God is still good!”
What about the Miley Cyrus fiasco? You were at the VMAs
as a correspondent, and people were up in arms about her
performance, co-opting ratchet signifiers and using black
backup dancers in a way that seemed a little prop-like.
I think it’s all fair game in this industry and in this
culture, and in this day and age. There are bigger battles to
fight. She’s not claiming that it’s hers. A younger fan might
think it’s new. But a deeper experience would be to say this
isn’t new, this is old. It opens up a conversation, which I
think is healthy. So I can’t knock her. These words need to
be out there. Look at hashtags. I’m quoting stuff that isn’t
new, but now it’s open to the whole world on Instagram.
But it’s only been a year since I made my Instagram public.
What was that experience like, becoming Internet famous
overnight?
Overwhelming, when you’re waiting tables! A year
ago I was in a really rough place. She Has Had It was on
my Facebook and my friends loved it. The pictures started
when my friend Joshua and I first moved to New York. On
our first train ride, we saw a woman who had fallen asleep
and we took a snapshot. And he had the idea to make a
Facebook album. But he was like, “These are just pictures.
What’s her story?”
But at that time, I was struggling. I didn’t have any
money. I was trying to pay rent, it was really awful. So I was
ELIZABETH GREENWOOD
11
moving home around this time last year. She had had it! I
needed to go home and refocus. I was like “I have this useless degree in musical theater, I’m broke from it.” I knew I’d
be poor living in New York for a little bit but not like this. I
couldn’t even afford ramen. But my friends were like, “You
are a star through and through.” And I was like, “I don’t understand what you mean by that.” And here I am seeing it
manifested in different ways because they didn’t give up on
me. I crashed on a friend’s couch, I got a job waiting tables
within a week, I turned my whole life around. Then within a few months of waiting tables, my Instagram followers
were at 10,000. Then people started knocking on my door.
And I’m so grateful. I don’t wait tables anymore.
So what was it like growing up in that environment, while
you’re memorizing Paris Is Burning in your room?
I loved it! Paris Is Burning was a look into an outside
world that a friend showed me on VHS. It wasn’t my dream,
it wasn’t anything obtainable for me, it was just pure fascination of a world outside my own. Which is kind of like She
Has Had It. A lot of people don’t live that life, but they can
relate. I was a gay male, and I could relate to those kids and
what that was like. But I didn’t want that life, I didn’t want to
be a drag queen. But it was just fascinating. And it worked.
So growing up I didn’t really know what I was missing.
I went to church like four or five days a week! There
was a lot of gay sex in that church!
Tell me more about your background.
I moved here literally on a whim. I studied musical
theater at Florida State, and I wanted to move to New York,
but my journey, where I’m from, I’m poor. I knew I was going to have all these student loans. Like, I have a degree in
musical theater. What can you do with a degree in musical
theater? Why why why? So I saved up two paychecks from
working at McDonald’s and college graduation card money, which was enough to pay for my one-way ticket, and
then what was left over from that was $50. Looking back,
I never would’ve done it. There’s no way you can live for
even a day in New York for $50! It’s not even enough for a
weekly Metrocard!
Thinking about stereotypes you often play with on
She Has Had It—like theater queens and low-budget
­fashion­istas—coming from your background, there are
a lot of stereotypes people could project on to you: as a
conservative Christian—
As a black male, as a gay black male—
What about your family? Do they get what you’re doing?
No, absolutely not. They are super conservative and
religious. I wasn’t raised with TV. I came out when I was
13, but they were always supportive. They never tried to
make me straight. It could’ve been a lot worse! I’ve heard
horror stories. They are supportive. They are so proud.
When the piece in Paper Magazine came out, they were
like, “Well, why are you in your underwear?” and I was like
“Can you read the article?” I’m going to be in Vogue next
month, and they don’t know what Vogue is.
Do you think that the voice of She Has Had It plays with
those stereotypes or subverts them in any way?
I am playing with them. It’s complicated. I’m praising them, I’m living for them, I’m defying them. It’s hard.
Stereotypes are caricatures. It’s larger than life. Especially
the gay stereotypes, like being a bottom. I’m playing with
all of them—religious caricatures, black caricatures, white
caricatures, poor, rich. It’s all there if you look for it. There
are some hashtags that are so on a level that you really do
have to get your shit to know them. Some people don’t get
all the hashtags, but the ones they get they really get. Like,
how’d you get that movie, how’d you get that reference?
Would you say there’s a distinction between the She Has
Had It persona and you?
Oh, yes! Day and night! I am so different, because I
am such a lover of characters, She Has Had It is a person
12
who is so different from me. Even style-wise. I dress pretty
conservatively, except in the summer. I love a booty short.
When I meet a lot of people, they say I’m not how they expected me to be. People expect me to be so many different
things. They think I’m going to be mean or ratchet or ghetto. I can be if you want me to be. If anything, I’m a musical
theater gay, at my center.
I struggled a lot with self-esteem. I never felt I was
handsome enough, so I liked to hide between characters
and makeup in the theater. I felt comfortable being gay,
but I never felt pretty enough, or handsome enough, or the
fact that I was black, and black didn’t seem like a thing that
was in. I never thought I dressed cool enough. But now I
like the clothes that I wear. I like the skin that I’m in.
Everyone wants to be understood. That’s why we write,
that’s why we do, that’s why we are. I want to be understood.
I like the character of She Has Had It because she is all understanding. She’s reading you, but she gets you. But me as
a person, I’m so different, even in my sex life. There was a
point in my life when I was doing all that—the Grindr hookups and what not. I’m not on Grindr now, but I have been.
But the sexual culture in New York can be a little dangerous.
I’m not afraid of it, but it’s not for me at the moment. I prefer
to date exclusively. But She Has Had It is like “Dicks!” “Gurl,
live your life!” I feel like everyone goes through that phase,
so let her be in that phase and it’s fine. I like the separation.
For a while I worked out a lot of my problems in She
Has Had It, even with Grindr and hookups, because that’s
what I was doing for a long time to find validation. Boys
didn’t want to date me, so I would hook up and that validation would last for 20 minutes after sex. So I was working a lot of that out in my writing, of “Whew, gurl, I met a
stranger, I went to his house!”
But working out personal issues and projecting them onto
someone else’s photo, is that unethical?
I don’t think it’s unethical. I think it’s human nature
to project your problems on to other people. But it de-
YASSSSS, KWEEN!
pends on how you do it. I’ve been the brunt of people’s
anger, but it’s fine. People have trolled me, telling me I’m
not funny, and I’m stupid.
I’ve never understood why people expend the energy saying
someone is stupid instead of just moving on to the next thing.
I get it. I say go for it! If this is what you need to do to
feel better about yourself, then go for it. But just know that
it does not affect me in any way. It’s not going to hurt me. I
don’t give people that control over me anymore. But for a
long time, I did.
What have you learned from seeing She Has Had it blow up?
There’s really something in every hashtag of humanity. That’s what it is. It’s looping someone in, but with real­
ness, a tangible truth that is inevitable. It’s to grab someone in a moment and make that connection. That’s the
true power of the words.
Do you have a favorite hashtag?
#canthost. You know, it’s like, you can’t come to my
house, but I’ll stop by yours. Because I wanna fall asleep after this, and I don’t want to deal with you! And you might
steal! I love #everybodyaintable. I started a weekly column
for MTV about style called #everybodyaintable. I also
like #youdontknowmylife I don’t know there’s so many ...
#blessed #regret.
My ex-boyfriend is this giant hairy hetero six-foot-three
guy and he loves She Has Had It, and it’s so funny hearing him do the dramatic dude reading of it—“#thriving
#youdontknowmyjourney #brave”
Yasssss kween!!! The fact that a straight guy loves it
literally makes me want to cry. You don’t understand, I love
that. Everyone is in on this joke. It gets conversations started. It’s the thing at a party that opens up the floor. That’s
what it’s for. This is why I do it. That’s why I love it. That
is her, having her whole life! You can have all of that!
13
DAVID GEER
You Don’t Own Me
By DAVID GEER
Performance collective Chez Deep explores drag performance
as both physical and emotional labor
SHE MAKES HERSELF HAPPY BY USING HER BODY.
HER FAMILY AND THEIR INTERACTIONS BRING HER
JOY. SHE IS HAPPY WHEN SHE USES HER FACE, HER
ARMS, HER LIPS, HER EYES. SHE’S HAPPY WHEN ENERGY IS CONDUCTED AND EXCHANGED; WHEN
SHE IS ABLE TO DISTRIBUTE IT THROUGHOUT THE
WORLD. […]
SHE IS FOCUSED ON HER INNER LIGHT. HER LIGHT
IS A FIRE THAT BURNS WITHIN HER AS IT DOES IN
HER ANCESTORS AND HER HEIRS. IT IS A FIRE OF
PURPOSE, REASON AND ORDER IN PERFECT CHAOS
THAT FINDS ITS WAY INTO THE MAKEUP SHE WEARS,
THE WAY SHE COMBS HER HAIR, THE GAIT OF HER
STEP, AND THE LAUGHTER IN HER VOICE. IT IS THE
ESSENTIAL IDENTIFICATION OF HERSELF AS A BEING BEYOND A BEING; A STORY; A SONG AT EVERY
WAKING MOMENT THAT LIGHT INEVITABLY SPEAKS
AS A LANGUAGE OF MOVEMENT, COMMUNICATION
AND CHANCE.
—excerpt from the Chez Deep Manifesto
CHEZ DEEP
is a New York City
performance collective—or more aptly, a sisterhood—that
confronts and playfully annihilates their audience’s expectations of bodies in drag. They are a community of artists
who inhabit various trans and non-trans subjectivities, in allegiance with an often unaccounted-for history of drag that
refutes drag as only representative of the artistry of non-trans
gay men. In their performances, the sisters (Colin Self, Alexis
Penney, Hari Nef, Bailey Stiles, and Sam Banks) privilege intimacy among themselves and their viewers, and each Chez
Deep event culminates in a group number that joyfully celebrates the bodies both on stage and in the audience.
Yet by releasing their own manifesto in 2013, Chez
Deep decentered the stage as the primary space for drag
14
performance. The text reads as a call to action not only for
drag queens but also their audiences to understand drag’s
potential as a political, poetic, and psychic force realized
through a body’s labor. Labor for bodies in drag does not
only mean their physical movement; it is the work required
for sustaining emotional connection with an audience and
transforming already-gendered signs and materials into
new ways of living and performing within the very real limitations of the gender binary.
When I read the Chez Deep manifesto, I am reminded of Spiral Dance, a foundational text of contemporary
goddess worship by feminist-pagan activist and organizer
Starhawk. Just as Chez Deep theorizes the laboring queen’s
body as the site of her language and power, Starhawk privileges bodies over ritual objects during spiritual work and
invocation. In Spiral Dance, she writes, “The tools are unimportant, we have all we need to make magic: our bodies,
our breath, our voices, each other.” Chez Deep invokes the
language of goddess worship to underscore their bodies’
engagement with psychic and spiritual labor. Their bodies
are “casting a circle,” invoking a space of positive energy for
a drag that excites the possibility of a bodily transcendence
that does not dismiss the material.
Although the subject of Chez Deep’s manifesto is a
feminine being, she is not necessarily a woman. Feminine
pronouns become a call for solidarity, much like the use of
“sisterhood” as a term of collective struggle in feminist activism. Similar also to “lesbian” in “The Woman-­Identified
Woman” by feminist collective Radicalesbians, Chez
Deep’s “she” is poetic allegiance with not only the history
of women’s resistance against gender-based violence but
also a celebration of feminist work that builds subjectivities
through intimate engagement with others.
In “The Woman-Identified Woman,” Radicalesbians
infamously state, “Only women can give to each other a
new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with
reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men.” Women may be at the center of Radicalesbians’ theorizing, but
YOU DON’T OWN ME
they were uncovering a need for a way to speak of women
without speaking toward men. This language begins with a
recognition of women’s affect: “A lesbian is the rage of all
women condensed to the point of explosion.”
For Chez Deep, the unnamed subject of the manifesto locates her affect within herself—her body—and finds
communion with others through this action, building her
identity in relation to her sisters. The labor and intimacy
of drag is valued more than the glamorous “look” or “face”
of the performer. The drag queen’s tools run through the
extent of her body and connect to her language. Drag, for
Chez Deep, is a linguistic operation of communal ecstasy
and psychic liberation.
During New York City’s Pride weekend in 2013, I
attended Chez Deep’s Common Visions at the Ace Hotel,
which was billed as “a ritual drag transformation and performance installation.” Bailey Stiles’s performance of Christina
Aguilera’s “Reflection” stood out to me as one of the night’s
most powerful moments. Bailey was a queer woman on
stage performing a longing that is often associated with the
failure to sufficiently embody patriarchal ideals of womanhood. “Reflection” is about a desire for a female subjectivity
that does not require the illusions or “mask” of femininity to
substantiate authenticity: “Everyday, it’s as if I play a part /
Now I see, if I wear a mask I can fool the world / But I cannot
fool my heart.” Christina is lamenting her own melancholy
but finds no escape from her malaise at the song’s conclusion. She is perpetually trapped by her desire for truth.
Bailey walked down a catwalk made of tables, wearing
a G-string and two large plastic bags filled with balloons.
The balloons were released as she made her way to the middle of the stage, making it a perfect time for her to put on
coy femininity, posturing for the audience in the manner of
a striptease. She slowly walked to the end of the stage where
a stool and Louis Vuitton bag were waiting for her. As she
sat down on the stool, she pulled makeup from her bag, applying blush and staring into a mirrored compact. At this
moment she lip-synced Christina’s words, “Who is that girl
DAVID GEER
I see/ Staring straight back at me?/ When will my reflection
show/ Who I am inside?”
Bailey’s performance relied on a common trope of the
queen’s, or diva’s, affected narcissism as she found power in
the desire to gaze at herself. Both the audience and the makeup compact were Bailey’s mirrors, and it seemed she was asking us to reflect a truth about women’s subjectivity that was
not yet found or apparent to her. But the performance was
not about us looking at her to assuage her despondency. She
embodied the stereotype of the melancholic woman to thwart
the passivity that we, as the audience, project on that figure.
Chez Deep
invokes the
language of
goddess worship
to underscore
their bodies’
engagement
with psychic and
spiritual labor
Bailey’s performance played with Irigaray’s conception of mimicry as resistance, which postulates that a woman must “assume the feminine role deliberately” in order to
“try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse,
without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it.” Bailey was not actually passive or coy; she was celebrating the
15
a­ ffective labor of getting dressed that is so often unquestionably expected of women (and drag queens) but dismissed as meaningless.
After applying her makeup, Bailey continues to get
dressed in front of the audience: first putting on a lace bra,
then lavender underwear, a skirt, a pair of heels, and lastly,
a button-up blouse. The performance was not only about
exposing the mechanisms of gender, or trying to uncover a
gender fallacy; it celebrated the mundane act of dressing as
an active labor of self-creation.
Shortly after Bailey’s performance, Hari Nef came onto
the stage to lip-sync an interview with Aileen Wuornos that
was conducted the day before her execution in 2002. Wuornos was convicted of murdering six men as d­ efense against
rape in 1993 and was sentenced to death for this resistance.
Her life was made the subject of Monster, an exploitative
lesbian serial-killer film starring Charlize Theron. The male
interviewer’s voice was removed from Hari’s lip sync, leaving Hari with only Aileen’s words on the exploitation she
experienced both in and out of prison: “You sabotaged my
ass, society … and the cops, the system—a raped woman
got executed and was used for books and movies and shit.”
Aileen’s words go on to confront the imperative for remorse
that incarceration expected from her: “I didn’t do anything
as wrong as they said. I did the right thing, and I saved a lot
of people’s butts from getting hurt, and raped, and killed too.”
Dressed in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with catholic
football emblazoned across the front, Hari was wearing
what looked at first to be the casual comfort of Ivy League
male masculinity. Their choice of clothing was gendered insofar that it reminded me of the clothing that undergraduate men wore to the gym when I was in college—a sort of
formless uniform for weight training and male-only bonding. However, my impulse to initially gender Hari’s outfit as
male hypermasculinity was claustrophobic, as it relegated
their performance to a mere subversion of male identity and
violence. Instead, Hari’s lip sync was a painful eulogy for Aileen that simultaneously mourned and celebrated her. Their
16
sweatsuit was an antiglamour that a­ ccentuated the rage of
Aileen’s words and destroyed the audience’s expectation
of drag as a sentimental performance of femininity. Hari’s
remembrance of Aileen flipped the script on nostalgic diva
worship—an unexpected disavowal of drag as always being
glamorous entertainment.
The final performance of Common Visions, a collective lip sync of Brownstone’s “If You Love Me,” reminded
me of the ending to The First Wives Club, where Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn sing a rendition of
“You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore. In the film, the three
women have just finished hosting a fundraising event for
their nonprofit organization named in memory of a close
friend. Partly a jubilant send off for her, Diane, Goldie, and
Bette break into a choreographed dance that intuitively
rages against patriarchy as they sing over and over again:
“You don’t own me/ No, no, you don’t own me.” It is a triumph of intimacy and labor among women. Chez Deep’s
last number for Common Visions likewise conveyed an
ecstatic sense of liberation through collectivity as they lip
synced Brownstone’s lyrics not only to the audience but
to one another. Chez Deep transformed into a drag supergroup as they mimed, “I wanna love that is based on truth
not just dare,” calling on the audience to join a celebration
of their drag kinship.
Drag has long been understood as a language of nontrans gay men, but this gendering has washed over a complicated history of the political and poetic realities of many
queer performers and artists. Drag is often thought of as
culminating in a singular, glamorous look that is used only
in a performance: Drag is entertainment for others. But a
survey of the history of drag and, more specifically, drag
queens, shows that drag is a language that not only unearths our deeply rooted expectations of gendered bodies
but also formulates and reaches for radically different ways
of living and laboring with a body. As Chez Deep shows,
drag can be about more than the subversion of gender; it
can also speak to a collective, psychic longing that does not
YOU DON’T OWN ME
see “man” or “woman” as its only locations of desire.
I’d like for drag’s audience to think about drag and
drag performance without relying on the idea that drag is
only a subversion of the gender binary. Drag may be subversive for some, but gender subversion does not so much
upend gender as repackage its language. A focus on drag
as an exposure of the falsity of gender also disconnects the
drag performer from their labor, from their own body. Drag
performance as gender muckraking positions the drag performer’s body as a site where the audience is making and
unmaking meaning, rather than understanding the drag
performer as a progenitor of their own truth and desires.
What about a drag that doesn’t simply show how the
ideals of “man” or “woman” are done, but how the binary
can be lovingly destroyed? Or how the language of drag is
also used to create new embodied possibilities and intimacies among individuals, regardless of gender? If we think
about drag and drag performance as always pointing toward or exposing the mechanisms with which gender is
created and substantiated, then we will miss the moments
when drag is asking for us to celebrate modes of being and
community both within and without the gender binary.
It’s time to imagine a new poetics of drag, one that
rejects audience assumptions of the gendered subjectivity
of the performer onstage. I’m not asking drag performers
to bear the burden of this labor; instead, I want audiences to rethink their relationship to drag performance and
their responsibility as spectators. Let’s celebrate drag as a
liberatory mode of being, as conscious of itself as language,
rather than a gendered illusion to satiate our desire for entertainment. If we, the audience, interrogate our own expectations of drag, then we’ll recognize when drag finds
liberation in the knowledge of its own historical place and
potential, rather than glamorous transformation. Chez
Deep demands a space for drag’s poetics to be valued as a
language of “movement, communication, and chance” and
for the celebration of a “being beyond being.” So let’s listen
and foster a loving space for a drag that just is.
KARTIK NAIR
17
Scream Queens
By KARTIK NAIR
Phantasm II (1988)
What do we hear when a woman
screams for the camera?
18
I.
Why censor a scream? In January 1932, a letter was dispatched from the office of Jason Joy, administrator of the
then incipient, now infamous Hollywood Code. Joy was
writing to Universal’s Carl Laemmle Jr. following a screening of the studio’s forthcoming Bela Lugosi picture Murders
in the Rue Morgue. Early on in the film, we hear a woman’s
scream: a helpless Parisian girl (Arlene Francis) is witnessing a knife fight between two men. In swoops Lugosi, offering the woman comfort in his carriage. With them we
depart the foggy street and fade—not to silence but to a
shadow and another scream: The girl in silhouette, her legs
and hands bound to a cross, is writhing in agony. Lugosi is
Dr. Mirakle, a mad scientist on the loose in the city, and the
young girl is his latest experiment.
In his letter to Laemmle, Joy wrote, “Our feeling is
that the screaming of the woman … is overstressed.” But
it is not the woman’s first scream—emitted as a witness to
­violence—that disturbed Joy; what prompted the letter is
her second scream—when she is a target of violence. “Because the victim is a woman in this instance, which has not
heretofore been the case in other so-called ‘horror’ pictures
recently produced.” Joy suggests “making a new soundtrack
for this scene, reducing the constant loud shrieking to lower moans and an occasional modified shriek.” Laemmle
complied, and the letter has since served as an illustration
of censorship’s preoccupation with screen violence.
But is the scream violence? If the eye of horror prises
open the human body, what interior worlds does the cinematic scream open up that need to be occluded from the
range of hearing (and seeing)? In other words, what do we
hear when a woman screams for the camera?
Perhaps the single most famous scream in cinema is
a man’s—the Wilhelm scream, first used in the 1950s and
since then ripped off for high-profile franchises like Star
Wars and Indiana Jones, it now circulates among gleeful
sound-effects technicians and movie nerds. Instantly recognizable yet still unidentified (we don’t know, despite some
efforts, who recorded the original), the Wilhelm scream is a
great joke but a bad scream: brief, boring, and bodiless. By
contrast, when a woman screams on screen, it tends to be
Stills from Psycho, 1960
SCREAM QUEENS
sustained and staged, unabashedly addressed to the technological capture of cinema, a kind of fetishistic elaboration of the woman’s voice in extremis.
The scream is part of a larger range of bodily emissions through which sexual difference is literally enunciated in the cinema: women scream, men yawn and so forth.
The image of the scream queen is very much like any other
“image of exploited female labor” that Mal Ahern observes
Hollywood continuously offering its audiences. Yet what
the scream queen produces is both sound and image, or
sound as image.
Women screamed in the silents too: Rhona Berenstein, looking at a sequence of Christine from the 1925
silent film version of Phantom of the Opera, notes that the
sight of a woman screaming—usually a close-cropped image of her face—indulges and shapes a cultural fascination,
the ability to extract from women’s bodies a visible testament of their subjection to the awesome powers of men,
whether as filmmakers or film monsters.
But Christine’s scream is visible, not audible—the silent film scream has no grain, to use Roland Barthes’s term
for “the body in the voice as it sings.” I am interested in the
19
body in the voice as it screams. The cinematic scream is a
particularly grainy catchment area of onscreen and offscreen affects.
For inspiration therefore I use not the silent version of
Phantom of the Opera but a moment in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s 1980s shlocky stage-musical version. I’m talking about
that moment in the musical’s famous title song, in which
the phantom menacingly implores Christine to “Sing! Sing
For Me!” For sopranos who have played the part (including
superstars like Sarah Brightman), this has meant venturing
higher and higher in live performance, forcing the soprano
to scale a series of notes that begin at the top of her range
and climax with an E6, the first note in the highest register
of the human voice. Entering this so-called whistle register,
the female voice appears to be vaporizing under pressure, a
kind of sublimation of the woman’s body under the sadistic
tutelage of her master.
In his book Nuns Behaving Badly, about subcultures
in Italian convents in the 17th century, Craig Monson uncovered evidence of all-female choirs that sang bass just as
well as they did the part of soprano. The work of producing
the high female voice is thus as much physiognomic and
Stills from The Lost World, 1997. Stills from The Phantom of the Opera, 1925.
KARTIK NAIR
20
muscular as it is historical and cultural: what you hear is
the sound of air passing through a matrix of sexual and social prescriptions. Like the singing soprano, the screaming
actress joins a transmedia, centuries-long public archive of
women’s voices trained to surge, to skirt the edges of the
audible and the acceptable, pitched to explode into the air
and leave the body behind.
But even as a mechanical recording subject to technological control, the cinematic scream bears the traces of
something involuntary, unplanned, excessive—something
alive. The scream perversely indexes the minutest secrets of
the body from which it departs. The onscreen scream not
only serves as an index of visual terror—that is, as an accompanying expression of a woman’s suffering—it is also
violence itself, a very idiosyncratic irruption from her insides. In the same way that one can’t predict the exact splatter from a bursting blood squib when producing action cinema, the scream in the horror film, even when scripted and
storyboarded and filmed in take after take, is an unseemly
profusion of tone, timber, vibration. It is gestural, guttural,
grainy affect that cannot be controlled for. Cutting off the
scream—censoring it—is a way to render inaudible that
which threatens to become audible on the soundtrack: the
inside of the woman’s body—her vocal cords, larynx, and
lungs at full power, a pornography of pure voice.
Like pornography, horror is what Linda Williams so
usefully terms a “body genre,” a cinematic configuration
that operates by visceral mimesis, shuttling bodily pleasure
and performance between screen and spectator. Insofar as
the filmed scream in Murders in the Rue Morgue cues audiences to scream, the request to censor it is a response to
that response. Jason Joy is effectively troubled by a scream
that alighted not from the screen but from his own body in
the screening room: an unexpected echo, an uncanny reverberation of the death rattle. The censor’s is the first in a
series of screams that every horror film elicits: Everywhere
it goes after it demands and draws more, its screams are often doubled and sometimes, quite strangely, dubbed.
SCREAM QUEENS
II.
Why dub a scream? Take, for example, the case of I Know
What You Did Last Summer (1997). The prolix and much
parodied title of the slasher film refers to a note received by
four teenagers in a small fishing town informing them that
someone knows what they did, well, last summer. Soon,
this surprise witness has begun picking them off one by
one. But who could possibly know? Whose breath do we
hear on the soundtrack and whose silhouette do we see in a
hooded slicker? He can hear their conversations and watch
their movements, but they cannot see or hear him. At one
point in the film, one of the exasperated teenagers ( Jennifer Love Hewitt) looks heavenward and screams: “What
do you want from us, what do you want?” All-seeing, all-­
hearing, the killer is a slight incarnation of the omniscient
acousmêtre that Michael Chion speaks of in the opening
pages of his book Voice in Cinema: a figure whose presence
pulsates in off-screen space and ranges over the screen, a
godlike eye and ear, himself unseen but able to emerge and
extract life—and screams—at will.
Chion develops the idea of the acousmêtre first in relation to the plot of Murnau’s early sound film Testament
of Mabuse, in which a booming and disembodied voice
speaks to other characters from behind a curtain. When
the film’s protagonists finally make it past the curtain, they
discover not the person of Mabuse but only a loudspeaker
from which his voice issues. For Chion, this revelation of
the loudspeaker instructively suggests the ways in which
the coming of sound effectively originated off-screen space
in cinema by exploiting that which is heard but not seen.
I want to make a metaphor of the hidden loudspeaker as
KARTIK NAIR
i­ncarnating a different kind of acousmêtre—the dubbing
artist in the recording studio, whose voice we hear but
whose body we never see.
In 1998, Columbia Pictures brought I Know What You
Did Last Summer to India, and it was released in both English and a Hindi-language “dub.” Historically, notes Nitin
Govil, the dubbing of Hollywood pictures into Indian languages has faced heavy resistance from the country’s do-
The onscreen
scream not only
serves as an
index of visual
terror—that is,
as an expression
of a woman’s
suffering—it is
also violence itself
mestic film industries, and film producers in Bombay and
elsewhere have spent much of the last century informally
lobbying for quotas, stringent censorship, and other curbs
on the circulation of international film product in India.
Thus it is that the dubbing of Steven Speilberg’s Jurassic Park
into Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu in the early 1990s serves as
21
an emblem of a significant moment in the history of media
globalization. “The sight of dinosaurs running amok and
their victims screeching in a local language,” observes Nandini Ramnath, broke new ground and box-office records,
sparking a concerted effort to “open up” the world’s most
impenetrable film market.
Around the same time that I Know What You Did Last
Summer was being dubbed in Hindi, the first convention
was held for Bombay’s voice artistes. The Voice Artistes
Association was formed in the late 1990s with the aims of
enforcing payment of dues by film producers, overseeing
contracts, and regulating working conditions and remuneration. For the first time, a wage list was made available in
print, which standardized the cost of hiring a voice artist to
dub a film by language, budget, and character type (hero,
heroine, parallel hero, villain, supporting character, and so
on). For dubbing an actress’s part in I Know What You Did
Last Summer, a voice artist could expect to be paid approximately 5,000 rupees (about $85). In the dub, these artists
can today be heard screaming for their lives (and livelihoods), their voices interlaced with the film’s original score
and soundtrack.
Temporally and spatially removed from the throats of
the film’s “scream queens” (actresses Jennifer Love Hewitt
and Sarah Michelle Gellar), such out-of-sync, out-of-body
voices generate a grain that interlaces the sexual division of
labor with its global division. When Elsa (Michelle Gellar), on the run from the film’s slasher-killer in the aisles of
a department store, chances upon the body of her sister, her
throat slit, she lets out a full- bodied scream.
But whose voice do we hear? The wage forms printed
in Bombay required that “Names of all the Voice Artistes
should feature in the End Credits of Feature Films,” but I
couldn’t find them anywhere. I cannot put a name, face, or
body to that screaming voice: What remains of the dubbing
artist is thus a corporeal trace of her craft. She is, one might
argue, the ultimate acousmêtre (or mêtress): heard but not
seen, her voice produced onscreen only in its ­technological
mediation, a kind of bodiless presence ranging across the
surface of the screen, emerging not from its on-screen diegetic fiction but from its off-screen distributive circuits.
In his work on film sound, Rick Altman has compared sound cinema to ventriloquism, glossing its origins
in the Greek ventri, for the belly, the body voice. Just as the
ventriloquist asks you to believe that sounds are coming
from where your visual attention is focused rather than
elsewhere, so “pointing the camera at the speaker disguises the source of the words, dissembling the work of production and technology.” But in the case of the dubbed
scream, it is precisely the fact of having the camera pointed at the onscreen screaming subject that disaggregates
cinema, bringing into view the unlikely agents of film
work. And in I Know What You Did Last Summer this disaggregation is immediate and obvious, in that the “Hindi” scream is tinny, metallic and perhaps too shrill, full of
reverb and overlaid echoes, a body obviously screaming
inside a Bombay recording booth nested inside a body
SCREAM QUEENS
b­ eing hunted down the aisles of a department store in
Nowhere, America.
These wordless translations of terror raise further
questions: As she watches the film in playback and records for it, is our nameless dubbing artist a spectator or
film worker? Does she scream at the screen or for it? To
watch her alter ego onscreen is to see a woman fall, rise,
run, crouch, cower—a full-blown somatic performance of
a scream that now must be intimated by a body and voice
proximate only to a recording mike. To watch the scream
onscreen is also to see something else: one woman screaming at the sight of another’s slit throat, blood oozing from
where her voice should. The slasher film is traditionally
preoccupied with serializing women’s bodies as dead waste,
creating a deadly sisterhood of scream queens. But as she
produces new cinematic materialities and outlives everyone onscreen, the dubbing artist is also the final final girl,
perched beyond the frame of the film, her throat, voice, and
body intact.
Stills from I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997
22
DERICA SHIELDS
23
Face Me, I Face You
By DERICA SHIELDS
Queen Elizabeth I’s history
with slavery
IT’S
winter and I’m on the top deck of a bus
in London, heading from Brixton, South London, to
central London. Through Westminster, across Pall Mall,
and past all the monuments, which crystallize a fabled
time when Britain reclined easily in its place in the
world. The friend I’m meeting texts to say he’s running
late, so when I land in Trafalgar Square I pass through
the National Portrait Gallery’s revolving doors into its
dark entryway.
I’ve come for the portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a West African man who was enslaved in 1731 but
managed to find his way home again. In this way, Diallo
is Britain’s favorite type of migrant. He enriched Britain
with his free labor, astounded some white people with
his book learning, and then fucked off back to Africa
where he came from.
For a while, William Hoare of Bath’s portrait Ayuba
Suleiman Diallo, Called Job Ben Solomon (1773) didn’t
seem to belong anywhere. In 2009, a private collector
sold the painting at Christie’s to the Qatar Museums
Authority (QMA). But when QMA attempted to export
the painting in 2010, the British government barred its
24
export and offered any interested British museum the
opportunity to buy it. The Portrait Gallery’s acquisition
campaign raised more than £400,000, arguing that the
image is “the earliest known British oil portrait of a freed
slave and the first portrait to honor an African subject as
an individual and an equal.” But in the end QMA refused
the gallery’s offer, and now there’s a notice beside the
portrait: “Property of Qatar.”
Slavery is not something Britain likes to talk about,
that is unless we’re talking about modern-day slavery
(perpetrated by black or brown people) or about our
role in dismantling the Atlantic trade. A crude sketch of
what the British learn about slavery at school: A deplorable condition that ended long ago thanks to Thomas
Clarkson and Richard Wilberforce, and which took
place in the ­A mericas—in the renegade colonies—elsewhere. So why this attachment to a portrait of a handsomely dressed West African man wearing a beatific
smile and a turban?
At the National Portrait Gallery, the wall behind
Diallo has been painted mauve to mark it out as a special
exhibition. Two blocks of non-narrative text surround
the portrait. On the left is a word cloud, which appears
to be the result of a primary school brainstorming session. The nouns “stories” “seas” “silence” “empires” “language” “life” “riddle” “chains” hover in indeterminate abstraction, with “freedom” at their pinnacle. To the right
is a poem by Ben Okri and then the portrait description:
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was an educated man from a
family of Muslim clerics in West Africa. In 1731 he was
taken into slavery and sent to work on a plantation in
America. Recognised as a deeply pious and educated
man, in England Diallo mixed with high and intellectual society, was introduced at court and was brought out
of slavery by public subscription.
Framed in this way, Diallo’s image tells a story palatable to British audiences unwilling to reckon with the
enormous displacement, disenfranchisement and dehu-
William Hoare of Bath, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, 1773
FACE ME, I FACE YOU
manization wrought by the Atlantic slave trade. In this
version, even at the height of slavery an African could
hoist himself up by the bootstraps, and find his reward
in the embrace of British intellectual society. While
Americans were wallowing in the moral filth of plantation slavery, the British stood ready to bestow freedom
on exceptional Negroes who washed up on these civilized shores.
A timeline at the gallery offers additional context. Britain’s first slaving expeditions took place under Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603). The timeline
moves quickly on to the abolitionists, but it’s fun to
sit a while with Elizabeth whose started-from-the-bottom-now-we’re-worldwide story was captured in the
1998 film starring Cate Blanchett, a film which glosses
over the fact that Elizabeth went global by pioneering
the slave trade.
25
DERICA SHIELDS
Facts that do not appear on the National Portrait Gallery Timeline: While he was still alive, Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII bought a 700-ton ship called
The Jesus of Lubeck, which Elizabeth inherited. By 1564
she’d heard about the success of early slaving expeditions and decided to lend the ship Jesus to a man called
John Hawkins who sailed to West Africa where he “got
into his possession partly by sworde and partly by other
meanes to the number of 300 negroes.” In Sierra Leone
he managed a further 500. That Elizabeth I had so much
to do with the sight of a ship named Jesus bearing down
on West African shores is a fact that should be better
known. In 1568, the Queen presented John Hawkins
with a coat of arms. The design pictured an enslaved
African person, to reflect the trade in humans Hawkins
had pioneered.
Dates that do not appear on the National
Portrait Gallery Timeline: 1596. Elizabeth issues an
order to expel all the black people in Britain, writing
to the Lord Mayor of London “there are of late divers
blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde
of people there are allready here too manie”. It was her
“good pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out
of the lande.” Her reasons are familiar:
i. t o protect the purity of English blood
ii.to protect the livelihood of British servants who
might “perishe for want of service” given the
availability of cheap black labor
1601. Because it wasn’t clear enough the first time,
Elizabeth complains again about the “great numbers
of Negars and Blackamoors which are crept into this
realm” and “who are fostered and relieved here to the
great annoyance of her own liege people that want the
relief which those people consume.” She insists that “the
said kind of people should be with all speed avoided and
discharged out of this Her Majesty’s dominions.”
In the gallery, a pale woman swaddled in a dark
winter coat turns to face Diallo. She glances up at the
word cloud, carefully reads the description and then angles herself to read Okri’s poem. Her concentration lapses and when she feels my eyes on her, she scuttles away
towards the permanent collections. Maybe like me she’s
irritated by these abstractions that tell us little about Diallo. Perhaps she wants to know: Did he stoop to say his
Can the British
reckon with this
history if it is
always held apart
and discussed in
relation to black
bodies and not
white ones?
prayers in the tobacco fields of the Maryland plantation
where the British slaves shipped him? Did he meet other
West Africans in London? If so, how did he greet them?
When he boarded the ship to Gambia, was he afraid that
beneath the jubilation of his homecoming there would
be shame too? Can the British ever truly reckon with
this history if it is always held apart and discussed always
in relation to black bodies and not in relation to whites?
I imagine a word cloud surrounding Elizabeth I’s coro-
nation portrait: “Pioneer of chattel slavery” and “early
proponent of British border enforcement” and wonder
if, in fact, it is my presence the woman cannot face.
My phone buzzes and I make my way to meet my
friend in the gallery shop. On my way I pass a portrait
I would spend hours staring at as a child, on summer
holiday visits to Central London. The subject is a young
woman with opaque white skin and hair worn in copper
ringlets. She has the kind of hair that really knows how
to hold a curl. I think about the brazen memory of black
hair, which, however it is pulled and pinned, knows how
to revert, how to return. Her smile pinches her lips so
firmly that each corners of her mouth are full stops. I
remember my English teacher’s thumbs pressed firmly
into the corners of my desk as she insists that the Dark
Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets is not dark in that sense.
What was I looking for when I searched these white faces for a “touch of tar?” The truest face of British history,
its blackness elliptical and submerged?
All the tea towels and mugs and postcards in the
Gallery shop have been colonized by prints of Marilyn
Monroe and Diana Princess of Wales, apart from an exclusive collection of leather objects bearing Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation portrait. I’ve already decided on
a handful of pencils and when my friend joins me I’m
fingering a wallet from that collection. I’ve been thinking about reparations since the Mau Mau case, and since
15 Caribbean nations (CARICOM) announced their
intention to sue the British government. After Benedict
Cumberbatch’s mother encouraged him to go in fear of
descendants of slaves who might lay claim to his family’s
fortune, I looked up my mother’s maiden name on a database which catalogs the reparations paid by the British
government to British slave owners who “lost property” when the trade was abolished. A man called Herbert
Newton Jarrett V was awarded £13,591 in compensation
for the 695 people he enslaved in the Orange Valley Estate in Trelawny, Jamaica. As it turns out, my mother’s
FACE ME, I FACE YOU
Queen Elizabeth I. by Unknown English artist
26
maiden name carries this other meaning. It also turns
out Herbert attended the same college I did. It seems
right, then, that Elizabeth’s face should sit in my hand.
She would not have anticipated my using her her face as
an object to stuff money into.
Six months later I pull out my wallet in a health
shop in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and the Russian-American girl behind the counter asks “Is that a
Queen Elizabeth I wallet? I’m so jealous!” I ask her
why she’s such a fan of Elizabeth and she says “I mean,
45 years of peace and prosperity! Who can argue with
that?” In the moment, faced with her elation it feels
utterly futile to insist on the human cost of 40 years
of peace and prosperity, to say, as I usually would “on
whose back?” to insist on my presence in that old narrative. I pay for my tincture and go.
27
STEPHANIE LA CAVA
Margot, Not at the Wedding
By STEPHANIE LA CAVA
IN
a Miramax memo dated 1992, when it seemed
unlikely his 1994 movie, La Reine Margot (an adaptation
of Alexandre Dumas’s 1845 novel), would ever be made
because of its cost, Patrice Chereau writes, “It will be anything, perhaps, but a period piece.” The late director was
not interested in papal pomp and circumstance or in reimagining the Louvre in its 16th-century glory; rather, he
wanted to show how religious wars have long played out at
home and how fraught as exemplar a titled woman’s sexuality is. Chereau’s chosen narrative—Margot’s dooming
passion for a soldier on the opposing side, serving as either
impetus or shield for her class transgression—could be applied to many other times, other places, far from the plague-­
ridden Parisian streets. We are familiar with the feminized
burden of survival. We know, from West Side-type story after story, that no house can be built on such a divide. The
aristocratic beauty loses her love, only to live out her new
ideals solo; her formal marriage empty, her family morally corrupt. When you think of a brave king, you think of
an army behind him. Not so his consort, if equally brave.
Marguerite Duras gave, in The Lover, a perfect summation
of the femme rebel: “Alone, queen-like. Their disgrace is a
matter of course.”
Chereau’s version would not be the first time the story of Margot (or Margaret, or Marguerite) de Valois was
taken to screen. In 1954, Jeanne Moreau starred in Jean
Dreville’s film—also known as A Woman of Evil, which one
must assume refers to Catherine de Medici, the meddling
The young Margaret of Valois, François Clouet, c. 1560
La Reine Margot recasts the 16th-century queen
as a prisoner not of religion but of love—and class
28
mother figure responsible for both a brutal massacre and
the supposedly well-intentioned inter-religious marriage
leading up to it.
In brief: France in 1572 is deep in religious division
between the Catholics and Huguenots. The de Medici has planned a wedding of her daughter, Margot, to the
French Huguenot King Henri of Navarre; the event will
serve as Trojan horse, leading Protestant aristocrats not to
a celebration of unity but into a massacre. Known as the
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it will leave 3,000 Protestants dead, the Catholics then at an advantage. Meanwhile, Margot is uninterested in her arranged marriage and
­commences an affair with a Hugeunot soldier, La Mole.
Intrigue and multiple deaths follow; Margot successfully
harbors both her husband and other Protestant targets but
fails to save her lover. The 1994 film ends with Margot alive,
her lover’s decapitated head on her lap. (It is of note that
the Bosnia War was taking place around the film’s shooting
and release. In 1993, the 17-year-old Bosnian beauty queen
Imela Nogic, having been crowned Miss Besieged Sarajevo,
chose not to waste her tears on “world peace.” Instead, she
unfurled a banner that read don’t let them kill us. )
In historical reality, Margot, who did save her husband and other Protestants, was left behind when the king
escaped. Surviving by sheer will, she endured banishment
by her brother for promiscuous conduct and subsequently attempted to stage a coup d’etat in Asen, though it was
met with citizen revolt. She was eventually imprisoned by
this same brother for 18 years, during which she would
write her memoirs. (Her marriage would be annulled after her estranged husband reclaimed the throne.) It is said
that when Margot returned to society, she took up a more
humanitarian path and retained her title as queen despite
the king—her former husband—having remarried.
The high-stakes emotional and ideological growth of
Margot in Chereau’s film is mostly the director’s fantasy.
What is compelling and true in it is that Margot confronts
her powerlessness through passion that ignites her secular
MARGOT, NOT AT THE WEDDING
spiritual development. It is no longer about two religions,
alike in dignity, but loosely about unequal foundations.
Betraying first her aristocratic mother (in saving the Protestants) and then her royal husband (in romancing a soldier), Margot twice “leaves the side of the oppressors to
side with the oppressed,” as Chereau put in his notes for
the film. For a queen, this is unusual, but what happens in
turn is not. As the king leaves the scene, so does La Mole,
as do the men in so many narratives of war, either for glory or for death. Margot is the Penelope, if Odysseus were
never to return.
Of the queen while she reigned, Dumas wrote that
“the French, who possessed her, were proud to see such a
lovely flower flourishing in their soil, and foreigners who
passed through France returned home dazzled with her
beauty if they had but seen her, and amazed at her knowledge if they had discoursed with her; for Marguerite was
not only the loveliest, she was also the most erudite woman of her time.” All this may have been true, but it’s also
an expedient description of a dead queen in the France of
1845, when royal hagiography suits a nation in economic
decline. What distinguishes Margot, and what is implicit in
Chereau’s own notes and film, is that she wasn’t, like Marie
Antoinette, a sacrificial lamb. She was—and it somehow
sounds wrong, but she was—a survivor.
SOME
’90s babies love a good Dazed and
Confused reference or a Reality Bites–inspired look. My
cinematic rite of passage was La Reine Margot. This movie
ruined me. I was 11 when it was released and was living
in France at the time; I have since seen it more than 20
times, in various countries and states of undress. It haunts
me still; I knew so young that, like Margot, I would be a
survivor even when I’d want to be the martyr. It is hard
to accept that no matter how depressive a realist you are,
there are no escape routes save for fleeting passions. No
longer just a beautiful figurehead or a hot, witchy seduc-
29
STEPHANIE LA CAVA
tress, Margot became for me the archetype of a woman
with soft power, married to hard power—a woman for
whom each decision is more like a double bind. There is
no leaving the side of the oppressors, even when you sympathize with the oppressed; Margot can’t take away the
circumstances of her birth. She can’t adulterate her way
to martyrdom. (Remember bell hooks: “Don’t you think
the biggest lie of our contemporary liberation movements
is that who you fuck radicalizes you?”) But if she must
keep her lineage—evil mother, incestuous brothers, and
all—she can reject, to some degree, her legacy. How many
queens have pretended their way to wealth and neat little portraits to secure a comfortable, jeweled, and plotted
place in history? The sex is a decisive factor in the power
of Chereau’s adaptation, not least because it’s secretly and
by far the most violent part.
In the film, Margot (played by Isabelle Adjani) leaves
to seek a lover in the filthy streets, dressed in her blue velvet
gown with a black mask (which is forever in my stable of
fetishes). She lands upon the handsome, grizzled La Mole
(Vincent Perez), and then there she is up against the wall
with a man she never knew, a man who should have been
her enemy, in the city that belongs to her new husband. It
is a shockingly beautiful scene, yet also perverse and raunchy. She hikes up her embroidered skirt, made of the finest
material, and has a Protestant soldier penetrate her on the
very streets where the massacre of his people takes place. In
a way that’s both sacrificial and shamelessly self-satisfying,
she permits a revenge upon her body for the crimes of her
“side.” That’s romance? Ruined me.
In Chereau’s notes, he calls La Mole “an idealistic
Protestant, both pure and fierce.” The passion Margot finds
with him is counterintuitive; only peaceful redemption, in
holy matrimony to King Henri, was thought a reasonable
means to end the French Wars of Religion. Everything is
a paradox, according to Chereau, who notes, “We shall
have to show this pagan yet fanatical period, to show how
religious and sensuous it was, show death alongside the
pleasures of the flesh, the feeling of sin alongside the taste
for pleasure.” And the paradox is worst for Margot. She is
not a frail queen, a Disney princess with an evil, plotting
mother, or a ready victim. It is not religion (could Medici
represent not just bad faith, but the worst faith?) that is
her opiate; rather, it’s romantic love. She is both a paperback heroine and her antithesis. Rather than turning a stereotypical bad bachelor into a suitable husband, she turns
a good, religious soldier into a bad woman’s lover. In the
beginning, La Mole believes Margot to be evil; by the end,
she’s saved his life by allowing him to die a martyr—pure
again, as all martyrs are. She will merely attain a survival
attenuated by disgrace.
IN
Marguerite de Valois’s own writings, she says,
“Women suffer more from disappointment than men, because they have more of faith and are naturally more credulous.” Perhaps. She also says, “Love works in miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and strengthening
the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools;
favoring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word,
turning everything topsy-turvy.” Margot’s sexuality, her hot
soft power, was used against her from the beginning. Her
mother—ugly, unloved by her husband, and finding refuge
in cunning—plotted to use her as bait for the brutal massacre. The daughter—beautiful, not perhaps so cunning—
resisted the plot, and tried to annul her dangerous sexuality
by reconstituting it as love of the first man, La Mole, who
really tempted her. (See also, among others: Princess Di.)
The role of queen is that of the greatest visibility and
least actual power in the land. She is protected not as a wife
but as a mother to an heir, so it is no wonder that tales of
queens becoming adulteresses are common throughout
historical adaptations, if not history itself. Sex without procreation becomes the only way to refuse one’s role. It’s not
a revolution, but in Margot’s case, it is a passion that fades
to compassion.
30
SEEING STARS
Seeeing Stars
By ANA FINEL HONIGMAN
MAY1ZZZ, lilo Lindsay Lohan (fanpop.com)
A portfolio of fan art
FAME
can be toxic. It can unleash stars’
self-destructive drives and vulnerabilities. Such are the
morality tales that surround celebrity, female celebrity especially. This portfolio of art by amateur and professional
artists glorifies stars whose celebrity is infused with public
shame. Their private pain becomes the dark, paradoxical
basis of fandom.
The artists featured here approach their subjects
as fans. Yet their works reveal a range of emotive responses
to their publicly troubled star-subjects. Some appear to be
at odds with an adoring and protective investment in cherished idols. Images transform glamorous but shamed celebrities into super-natural, totemic figures: desecrating admired bodies blurs the line between predator and prey. By
turning their subjects into zombies, these works, taken as a
group, manufacture a special genre of redemption, revenge.
Graphic gore surfaces in portraits—schadenfreude and sadism emerge as the real face of celebration.
31
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN
Stella Vine, Courtney blue dress, 2006
Courtesy Modern Art Oxford.
32
SEEING STARS
Daniela Luna, Lindsay, 2012
33
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN
Dawn Mellor, Cigarette Dream Dorothy, 2008
34
SEEING STARS
Richard Phillips, Lindsay II, 2012
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photograph by Robert McKeever.
35
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN
Marc Quinn, Sleeping Beauty, 2005
Courtesy artificialgallery.co.uk
36
SEEING STARS
Taranenko, Rihanna, 2011
DeviantArt.com
37
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN
Brothers De La Motte, Paris Hilton’s selfie, Undated
38
SEEING STARS
imsoqueer, Mary Kate, 2011
DeviantArt.com
39
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN
Cameron Gray, Oops...I did it again, 2007
Collection of Howard and Judith Tullman.
40
SEEING STARS
docop, Giantess Lindsay Lohan, 2011
DeviantArt.com
41
HANNAH BLACK
REVIEW
In a Mirror, Darkly
BY
HANNAH BLACK
Given the choice between being white or being black, how could you possibly choose either?
Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird. Riverhead. 320 pages.
CARRIE
Mae Weems’s Mirror Mirror
shows a black woman looking into a mirror where a white
woman appears. The subtitle reads: “Looking into the mirror, the black woman asked, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall,
who’s the fairest of them all?’ The mirror says, ‘Snow White,
you black bitch, and don’t you forget it!!!’ ”
Helen Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, also
returns to the old German fairy tale Snow White—a story
about a girl so white they named her after it—to critique
anti-blackness. In the original Snow White, a queen accidentally pricks her finger while sewing and, contrasting
the drop of blood on her finger with the snow outside the
window, wishes for a daughter with lips as red as blood,
hair black as the ebony window frame, and skin white as
snow. She dies giving birth to the child she wished for:
Snow White. The king remarries, and the new queen’s magic mirror helpfully lets her know that her stepdaughter is
more beautiful than her. She tries to have the child killed,
but Snow White escapes and takes refuge with a household of dwarfs (those same seven dwarfs immortalized by
­ isney as a fraternity of cheerful workers and by Donald
D
Barthelme as a kind of dysfunctional Maoist sect kept alive
by sexual jealousy—Oyeyemi wisely elides them). Snow
White’s stepmother tracks her down and tricks her into
eating a poisoned apple. Finding Snow White in a coma,
the dwarfs assume she is dead and place her in a glass coffin.
A passing prince falls in love with her beautiful corpse and
persuades the dwarfs to give him the body, Snow White
wakes up, the necrophiliac prince proposes marriage, and
at their wedding party Snow White’s evil stepmother is
forced to dance to death in a pair of burning shoes. That’s
the Brothers Grimm original: Like all fairy tales, it’s both
satisfying and horrible, rich with sex and death.
Oyeyemi takes this tale and refashions it to talk about
race, the social form that mediates between sex and death,
tells us who should be loved and who can be killed. Boy,
Snow, Bird is set in a small town in New England in the
1950s. A white girl named Boy is raised in New York by
her abusive father, a creepy figure who exterminates rats
for a living and whose parenting mainly takes the form of
Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror, 1987-1988. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.
42
i­ntricate acts of violence. She escapes to the comparative
paradise of Flax Hill, where white people ply interesting
trades like making elaborate cakes or selling antique books.
There she meets a handsome, widowed jewelry maker who
dotes on his daughter, a dazzling little girl called Snow. Boy
marries him and has a child she names Bird.
The surprising brown skin of this second daughter reveals the secret of Boy’s husband’s family: They are
white-passing blacks from the South. Therefore snow-
IN A MIRROR, DARKLY
white Snow is black too; most of what has appeared white
through the first part of the novel now turns out to be either black or predicated on blackness. Boy is white but
she catches on quickly: The beauty of whiteness, embodied by Snow’s semblance of it, is a threat to her daughter’s
happiness. Through the efforts of Boy, in the role of “evil
stepmother,” the half-sisters do not live the lives that might
have been determined by their respective appearances.
White-­seeming Snow is raised by her black aunt and uncle,
and black Bird grows up with her white mother and white-­
passing father. Already in this brief description it’s evident
how much pressure Oyeyemi’s magically charming novel
exerts on the categories of race.
The characters are sharply drawn and likable, making
the calculated sweetness of Oyeyemi’s telling more complex on the palate. Boy narrates the first half of the novel,
where race appears only obliquely. She’s a great invention,
witty, tough, and loving, and Oyeyemi has fun with her
hardboiled diction. Later on, she switches to the point of
view of Bird, a well-loved and inquisitive kid whose attempts to make sense of race and her relation to it stage Oyeyemi’s concerns. The pleasure of the prose is in a kind of
seductive sleight of hand—amid the surface shimmer, what
Oyeyemi is really interested in, broadly, is how patriarchy
and white supremacy warp lives like wishes and curses do
in fairy tales. In place of the drop of blood shed in the original Snow White, all the novel’s characters live in the shadow of the “one-drop rule” with which American apartheid
policed the fluctuating boundaries of whiteness, a vision of
race-as-bloodline that endures to this day.
Despite their separation, when long-lost sisters Bird
and Snow rediscover each other, they find that they have
some unusual things in common: “I don’t always show up
in mirrors, either,” Snow confesses. “For years I wondered
if it’s all right or not, but there’s been no one to ask, so I’ve
decided that I feel all right about it.” Both girls are as unreflected in the mirror as they are unreflected, in different
ways, in the crude categories of race. When Snow goes to
HANNAH BLACK
a bar with black friends, a stranger mistakes her for white,
asking why a girl like her is hanging out with them, and she
falls into self-protective silence. Meanwhile, Bird grows up
among white people and must search for images of blackness. Race shadows the characters, but because of its insubstantiality it can’t grab hold of them. A plot twist towards
the end of the book suggests that gender, too, is unstable
and at heart immaterial. Race and gender, like money and
magic, are “real abstractions,” figments given substance by
belief and experience.
According to the Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter,
as the West became secular, race supplanted faith as the
new, ostensibly scientific answer to the question of what
it meant to be human. Whiteness—in opposition to its
­antithesis, blackness—became the basis of European identity, operating as a retrospective justification for European
exploitation of the rest of the world. What is race? At heart,
it’s an empty place, a pretext. Yet it must be filled with content: cultural habits, physical attributes, aptitudes, and so
on. The conceptual incoherence of race is advantageous to
white supremacy, as the benefits of whiteness can be extended or retracted pretty much expediently. This is how
Jewish people, for example, once considered a subhuman
burden on European civilization, have survived to stand
shoulder to shoulder with their newfound white brothers
in the fight against brown Muslims. One cannot live the
truth of race, because it has no truth, but we all live its terrible emptiness.
Anti-blackness and white supremacy are co-­
constitutive, as Oyeyemi sketches out with remarkable
gentleness. The U.S., founded on the innovative concept of
the secular state, drew on a racial rather than religious model of birthright to make use of the barbaric free inputs of
slavery. If whiteness was how Europeans reinvented colonial pillage as racial destiny, then America is where this “rational” ­anti-blackness reinvented itself as national culture.
The blog Stuff White People Like, for example, ironically
posits everything from tattoos to bottled water as the par-
43
adigmatic tastes of white America, but what white people
really like best of all is this: not being black. Blackness and
whiteness circle each other in an unevenly lethal dance of
mutual misrecognition.
As the West
became secular,
race supplanted
faith as the new,
ostensibly
scientific answer
to the question
of what it meant
to be human.
Value, as Marx noted, only appears to inhere in
things; in reality, it must be extracted, either from nature or
from proletarian lives. Similarly, race authenticity does not
spring up from the mere fact of certain physical features—
it has to be mined from others. Mixed-race identities are
fissured only in relation to the lie of integral blackness or
whiteness. Still more problematically, white beauty needs
44
its frame of black ugliness, a structural flaw that reveals its
guilty origins.
Adorno read the original Snow White as a longing
for death: “The queen… gazes into the snow through the
window and wishes for her daughter in terms of the lifeless, animated beauty of the snow-flakes, the black sorrow
of the window-frame, the stab of bleeding; and then dying
in childbirth.” Whiteness is always framed by black sorrow, and its purported beauty is a scandal that Boy is right
to try to protect her daughter from. “Snow’s beauty is all
the more precious … because it’s a trick,” she concludes.
“When whites look at her, they don’t get whatever fleeting,
ugly impressions so many of us get when we see a colored
girl—we don’t see a colored girl standing there … I can
only … begin to measure the difference between being
seen as colored and being seen as Snow. What can I do for
my daughter?” She sends Snow away.
The logic of race renders even apparently wholesome
abstractions like love or beauty white supremacist. The slavers’ gaze still informs white visions of black women, who
are widely represented as dumb, angry, fleshy, fertile, and
strong; no coincidence, then, that the beauty of white women is the inversion of this, founded on charm, purity, and
delicacy. The U.S.-inflected racial categorizations of porn
suggest how deeply embedded race (with its logic of visibility, of public spheres) is in that supposedly most private
space, sexual desire. The ontological scaffolding of race also
holds up sexuality, not simply as preference (for similarity or
difference) but as its ground. How else are we to recognize
ourselves, if fucking is self-recognition, self-authentication?
The churn of Western sexual politics has always required an exotic outside against which to test and rediscover
itself. When the white world had reason to celebrate chastity, people of color were imagined as sexual savages; now
that whites have discovered erotic pleasure as good health,
they have invented a nonwhite world full of genital mutilators, sexual oppressors, and homophobes. Without the energizing illogic of race, whites, like pandas, might die of their
IN A MIRROR, DARKLY
lack of interest in each other. Yet in Boy, Snow, Bird the pill is
sweetened by that cute title, by fairy tale and a happy ending. Bird and Snow learn to love other despite Snow’s problematic beauty. The evil stepmother turns out to be good after all. When a magically animated American flag traps Bird,
it turns out all it wants to do is kiss her. And yet the form of
the fairy tale suits, because lived experiences of racialization
themselves lack realism, though not reality—even in real
life, race unfolds like fate out of accidents of birth.
When Snow’s aunt shows her a map of the U.S. and
tries to explain racist legislation, the girl flinches: “I thought
that if I accepted what Aunt Clara was saying, then that map
would apply to me, that map with the hideous borders…
So I grabbed both her hands and smiled at her, to try to get
her to go along with me, and I said, ‘No, no, don’t say that
about me. That’s awful. It can’t be true.’ ” I think every child
who finds herself suspended between multiple forms of racialization knows this urge to turn away from an ambivalent
destiny—a betrayal for which, like Snow, many of us struggle to forgive ourselves, although others, like Bird, learn to
laugh instead. But we are always betraying someone. Given
the choice between whiteness and blackness, how do you
choose blackness, when even a child already knows that it is
generally synonymous with ugliness and stupidity among
the whites who arbitrate our lives? Given the choice between whiteness and blackness, how do you choose whiteness, when any child can already tell that whites are the
agents of the darkness that they insist we introject?
Race marks the weight of history, or the portion of it
you have to bear. Snow is beloved not because white skin is
inherently beautiful—beauty is just as socially determined
as morality, with which it is often subtly twinned—but because whiteness, like new snow, wants to disavow its birth
in blood and dirt and present itself as a clean slate on which
history-as-progress can be written. But in a partisan world
full of mess, shame, love, joy, pain, Oyeyemi persuades us,
we should be suspicious of anything that finds itself beautiful in the image of neutrality.
Imp Kerr