Nothing Can Be Said of Being Butch

A queer friend in graduate school told me about being questioned about the absence of butches and the visibility of trans masculinity in queer community. The question came from a lesbian professor at a private university.

“Where have all the butches gone?” First, I refute you thus: I am butch and I'm here, responding. Second, I would prefer to unravel the question than answer it.

There is a saying, “Nothing can be said about the Tao.” To say one thing is to exclude another. Merely to use the word “butch” excludes some of the people who are invested. To decide against using the word excludes some other people who are certainly also invested here too. To take any action toward concrete knowledge excludes other possibilities and truths. I am tempted to refer to those involved as stakeholders- people whose identities and truths may be included or excluded by our definitions and decisions. I prefer this approach because it suggests that we consider everyone with a sincere interest rather than everyone who has the correct identity.

The act of defining an identity excludes other possible definitions. To give up the desire for linguistic precision allows for a more comprehensive explanation of the concept of butch than any conventional define-defend-conclude style of discourse ever could. I am not going to define masculinity or butch or genderqueer or any other terms here. My attachment to these concepts is too great and too dearly held. I want to let go. I’m now convinced the best and healthiest and most liberating thing I can do is to take up the identity question more lightly than ever.

I identify as a woman, the same gender I was assigned at birth. Yet when I looked up the words "woman-identified-butch,” most everything I found was transphobic towards trans men, trans women, or trans* everyone. Seeking other butch women online brought me to a bottomless stinking cesspool of transphobic hate and self-loathing. If there is any singular phenomenon causing queer people to no longer identify as butch, it may very well be the stench of transphobia.

The truth is I myself do not personally know many butch-identified people at all, and sometimes I think I’m only holding on to the word for sentimental reasons. It’s one of those words I’ve looked at so many times that I’ve lost the sense for whether it is even spelled correctly, let alone means anything.

As opposed to naming an identity, living in the world with my actual masculinity is something I've grappled with my entire life, and yet also done effortlessly or even sometimes accidentally. I aim for self-acceptance rather than self-loathing or self-esteem, both of which have their flaws. Self-loathing is miserable, self-esteem was attractive at first and got me through some hard times but falls apart when it comes time to take risks or make mistakes or learn new things. When I get my self-acceptance right, my masculine self-expression includes adoring women, being feminist, and being at peace in my body. Where my self-acceptance can sometimes get derailed is when I’m someplace like the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference and I have this alarm bell going off in my head, screaming “no.” Some part of my brain becomes obsessed with reminding me I’m not a trans man and I’m not really an outside-the-binary genderqueer either, so what am I doing here or anywhere, ever. Not to mention it becomes challenging to interact socially and behave somewhat human when a fire alarm is sounding in your head at top volume. So I spent as much if not more time sitting by myself or with loved ones near the conference as I spent in the conference.

A similar yet more nauseous alarm often sounds “fuck no, not like that, never like that” when I read butch/femme anthologies, or blogs, or pretty much any lesbian narratives about being butch. Yet somehow still I keep the word, always insisting I can be butch in my own way. All these alarms are aggravating! It is noise pollution that no one else can hear. But I kind of have to just hear them and continue to insist I belong somewhere in every queer, lesbian and trans masculine community anyway.

***

But back to our professor and the disappearing butch: The only real points I would want to make to her are that gender is informed by class and that there are some observable changes to masculinity in the larger culture that inform queer masculinity too.

In an alternate universe, the same professor might similarly find herself wondering where all the cowboys have gone. I'm skeptical about the idea that there ever were many working class butches on this professor’s college campus, or for that matter, many men who express that same kind of masculinity. I wonder if she feels lonely or is trying to imagine whom she would want to date if she were her student’s age. I wonder if she sees nerdy butch college students as butch, or if I’m guessing accurately and she is actually looking for working class masculinity in all the wrong places. Where I grew up, masculinity included going to work, paying the bills, then spending the weekend fixing your busted car and drinking beer or doing yard work. I hated the incredible conservatism I grew up around but I can’t deny the influence of the men who were directly in front of me during my formative years.

Though he has changed these habits now, during my childhood my father used to drink himself to sleep in front of the TV every night and work on one of those jug-sized gallo wines all weekend. He liked to spend time alone and believed that filtered cigarettes were as pointless as decaffeinated coffee. He taught me gun safety and handling when I was tiny and even now at 77 he takes me to the firing range sometimes. Don’t mistake this for a sentimental relationship, I learned misogyny and homophobia from him too and we still keep our distance. Do the daughters of men like this usually end up at private liberal arts colleges in the classes of lesbian professors? If you aren’t finding any butches, maybe your school needs to provide more scholarships, maybe you are looking in the wrong place, and maybe your butch template is outdated.

***

Butches do not exist in a vacuum, just being born and expressing masculinity the same way as we did in the past forever and ever into the future. Part of the reason masculinity in the larger culture has changed is that a lot of it is so profoundly unhealthy and destructive.  A lot of it is embedded patriarchy and misogyny, and there’s been some improvement in those areas. Obama made it OK for a big manly world leader to be an affectionate dad and even relax a little around gayness. When I have the opportunity to spend time with straight black men and boys in my education work environment, I can see the impact of his influence everywhere. And for a few decades now, some white men, in some places, are learning from feminism and don't express their masculinity the same way our fathers did. I’m not saying feminism won here, just acknowledging some small victories. Some of those wealthy white third wave straight women got their husbands to push the stroller and change diapers, and it’s something. On top of that, lots of liberal white men are constantly being infantilized in movies and TV where hyper competent women care for them in exchange for being taught how to laugh. And there are all the man-child movies too. Bottom line is the John Wayne shit I was raised with doesn't fly in all circles anymore, and no one’s masculinity exists in a bubble, let alone butch masculinity.

I imagine that butches grow into our masculinity in our own ways, but in some ways similarly to how boys and men do, by mirroring the men who we see in our lives, the media, and in the larger culture. We reflect the aspects of masculinity expressed by the men we admire, or maybe more often, the men we wished would be around. My relationships with cis and trans men provide a constant stream of what to do and what not to do, in terms of expressing masculinity. There’s a feedback loop in my relationships with men, and I’m pretty sure some guys I’ve been really close with have had their masculinity informed by mine as well. And there is a part of me that relates to straight cis men much more closely than I often care to admit, how about that for some dirty laundry.

I have done some hard work to leave the macho baggage behind. Lately I want to talk about my feelings all the time! In fact I’m doing it right now! I'm not the least bit concerned this makes me less masculine. The reason I bring this up is because I'm slightly concerned that when people bemoan the disappearing butch, they might be looking for some unhealthy qualities in a kind of nostalgic utopianism about how butches used to be. I don't long for the substance abuse or bar fights or pissing contests or competing with men. I don't aspire to stoicism or have shit to prove. I refuse to romanticize anyone being stone as much as I refuse to pathologize it. And I've never been cool, detached or tough, and what a relief it was to stop trying. I’m thinking of a dyke I used to know who got nerve damage in her hand from punching a wall. I’m thinking of my own swollen knuckles the time I punched a trash can on a subway platform ten years ago. That’s not butch, it’s idiotic, but thankfully it motivated me to get some much-needed therapy. I am in no way nostalgic for all that rage seething beneath the hardened exterior. It was miserable. It may have made me appear more butch on the surface but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, nor would I wish for more of it to be in our community.

***

Yet it’s actually a good thing this professor asked her question. The queer theory or activist style answer might be to send her to do her own research and overcome her ignorance. My first draft of this response included resources and shout-outs to Bklyn Boihood and Cathy Opie and Butch Voices. But doing research all by oneself doesn't always help. Maybe it was actually wiser to ask for help from my queer comrade, however clumsy the question might be. Real learning is often a social activity.

Obviously I am more interested in this conversation as a lens for my own journey with gender. The butch/trans border lives and breathes in my body. I will defend this professor’s right to question that blurry border with good intentions, if that is indeed what she is attempting to do. If we are to be a healthy community, we need to have a dialogue. I don't want to live with an elephant in the room. I want to have this conversation with all the people who are stakeholders.

I want her to be able to ask this crappy, tedious question and not have it shut down with a stack of books and websites. I believe it is possible to have this conversation without being transphobic, but there are a lot of pitfalls along the way. We must take care not to end up in the Gendercator.

On one hand, there has to be a better way to respond to the persistent question of the supposedly disappearing butch. On the other hand, there has to be a better way to value masculinity in women than being a transphobic fucking idiot.

It occurs to me the professor is asking this question because she feels grief and loss over the changes to lesbian culture and the blurring of its identity boundaries. That blurring is something that makes me freer, so if it is causing her a problem, maybe I should ignore her and live my life. But freeing as the blur is, it’s still not entirely unproblematic for me either. Her question makes me angry and sympathetic at the same time. And I could just respond by pointing to the excellent essay by Amy Fox in Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme  but I’d rather go on engaging myself here. (If there is any hope for us all, it lies with butches like Amy Fox.)

I could not help but wonder if our professor goes around asking this question of all her young students in our stakeholder group. And what impact questions like this might have. If people don't feel comfortably butch, they shouldn't feel any obligation to identify with it. Please don't pressure young queer people to fit into a model that isn't working for them! Formal authority has an amplifying affect. When you are a professor and go around your campus asking why there are no more butches, it has an impact on young queer people who trust and respect you. It might even make them feel inadequate. Then they get resentful of the pressure you are putting on them to live up to some imaginary ideal/outdated butch standard just because they have a little bit of masculinity in their complex identity. I doubt you would ask tender young cis men to be more masculine or anything other than what they are. It would be painful for any human to have their gender evaluated, but if feels like betrayal when it comes from a trusted queer professor. And then later your students graduate and move to Brooklyn and I get to feel alienated at the big gay party because my butchness triggers some paradigm of gender failure that you enforced with your not-so-innocent questions, then they act all weird and uncomfortable around me. No thank you.

***

So now let’s acknowledge an increase in visibility for trans masculinity. Part of what I think has changed with the increased visibility is not a decrease in the number of butches but arguably a shift in the surrounding environment. Where before our gender was observed in the context of femme genders and against het genders, now the context also includes trans men. Where before we were perceived as the “real” lesbians now we are perceived as the ”not real” trans men. Both of those constructions suck ass. I can’t think of any examples of where “realness” is used without dehumanizing somebody through comparison.

The context changes and the community struggles to evolve (or fall apart, or just yell about how we are not all one community, or turn cynical and claim there has never been a community.) Some queers deserve some credit for creating a lot of space and acknowledgement for trans masculinity. At the same time, we are struggling to evolve in another way with our massive transphobia and misogyny towards trans women. And even in evolving towards being more inclusive of trans men, we also sometimes get sloppy and started attaching male pronouns and conventional trans narratives to everyone presenting as masculine. That's a mistake and it sometimes feels erasing, at least it is to me when I’m the one being mistaken... but I’m not offended, I understand why it happens. Like most other movements, our evolution is erratic and thriving in some areas but stunted in others. The people on the receiving end are usually those with the compound marginalized identities, and when the fuck will we ever learn?

The idea that butches are pressured to transition should be given some air and light. Instead of dismissing it as transphobic nonsense, which it very well may be, I still want to sit with it for a while. I need to consider if I am experiencing internal or external pressure to transition, or both. Usually this conversation leads someplace where my agency is taken away and I am somehow the property of vigilant lesbians who deep down actually believe I would transition in a heartbeat if they let me get away with it. Or that trans guys are pressuring me simply by going around with all that annoying hard-won self-acceptance and comfort in their own skin.

Let’s take our question to one of the experts for a moment. "Now there is a visible community of transgender men. There are now fewer masculine women as the shift is away from that "in between" position. Female masculinity is seen as a step towards transitioning and the transition is seen as a way to resolve the discomfort of female masculinity for some. A young person coming out now has much more images of trans men to choose from, and there is less stigma around that choice." This is J. Halberstam being interviewed in Diva magazine. 

I am so impressed by this authoritative declaration of facts! But unfortunately I was not called for the gender census and was not aware that we know for a fact that there are fewer masculine women these days. I see masculine of center people all the time because I live in Brooklyn and work in Newark. I see studs most everywhere, so with the evidence before my eyes I must question the idea that there are fewer of us masculine women. While it is indeed true that there are now more images, and ways to access information about physical transition and more trans narratives and more unconventional trans narratives, we probably cannot ever know just how many people are in an actual identity at a given time.

I don’t experience pressure from trans men to transition and I do not have any illusions that passing would resolve the stress of being a masculine woman. (Besides, that stress forged me.) On the contrary, what I actually experience is a form of adult peer pressure. Here is how it works: Certain gender identities are celebrated in the community. Celebrating queer genders can be deeply subversive, fun, sexy and empowering. But we don’t always get celebration right. We are all at least somewhat traumatized by oppression and that can totally fuck with our capacity to look, notice, and see each other. We end up with this sloppy validation where the celebration starts to smell like popularity and favoritism instead of affirmation or inclusion. All the celebration starts to feel like tediously repetitive self-congratulation and tramples right over some of the folks it supposedly aims to include.

We get sloppy when we assume any masculine-presenting person is trans. This happens to me occasionally when it's assumed that I am on my way to some other identity, when I get weird back-handed compliments about how I'd make a hot guy. I've gotten that one from gay men, both cis and trans. It's OK, I know it is meant well, but it's a sloppy celebration of trans masculinity that erases the fact that I'm a woman… a fact that isn't temporary or transitory. So occasionally an effort to respect trans masculinity is disrespectful to me as a butch. I do not hold this against trans men, but our community needs to take some responsibility for not automatically assuming my masculinity means that I’m trans. We need to improve on just listening and noticing each other better all around.

On the contrary to a celebration of trans masculinity, I’ve observed an increasingly popular and very specific narrative around glitter and fabulousness expressed by trans masculine people and any and all other queers. Having a sparkly gender on a boyish identity is constantly being admired, photographed, blogged about, and equated with being queer. This celebration sets an expectation that really stresses me out! I can no more play with being glittery and feminine now than I could play with ribbons or be girly as a child. I am not going to playfully undermine my masculinity in order to meet some new standard for belonging. I’m not boyish or effeminate or dapper or dandy, either. And I love my radical faeries but I am not one. The new peer pressure feels entirely too similar to what I experienced as a kid, like constant disappointment in my perceived drabness/lack of femininity. It feels like my mom urging me to wear more color or teachers telling me to smile.

I imagine that when one identifies as a man it might get tiresome to be expected to constantly undermine one's own masculinity with glitter or nail polish in order to be understood as having good gender politics. I imagine that it would be a huge pain in the ass to be in queer community space as a man because sometimes I can barely stand it as a butch. This is not to assume that all trans masculine people ID as men, but only to point out that trans men per se are not being celebrated and neither is masculinity per se. What is being celebrated is a very particular way of presenting oneself as beyond the binary. Sometimes I imagine this is what it is like to be femme, to show up with your femininity but not be recognized because you are not dressed sufficiently slutty or because you are not subverting or undermining or playing with femininity but actually living in it.

My freedom doesn't resemble boyish wonder, or flamboyant in-between gender worlds, but it is no less my freedom. It looks like being grown up and masculine, every single day and not only in queer community but also in corporate environments, schools and non-profits, just being a butch woman.

So "radical queers" need to stop demanding conformity in exchange for recognition. We probably want so much to belong to something that we mistake sameness for community. That's a tragic error, because healthy communities affirm difference.

I think the pressure of these queer expectations comes from a misplaced desire to celebrate ourselves, to feel good about ourselves and so on. We screw things up because we are going for self-esteem rather than self-affirmation. So then what does my own self-affirming gender freedom even look like? Not like the emotionally crippled masculinity I grew up with, and not like the mushy white liberal masculinity in our pop culture. Not the retro butch tuxedo situation, much as I respect that as groundbreaking. Again I have to come back to just being free to be butch the way I like it, accept it, then I won’t need to look to others to celebrate my gender, I won’t need to hate myself, I won’t have to swing on that pendulum at all anymore.

We need to do a better job with noticing one another. We need to get out of our own heads and struggles with identity to actually see the people right in front of us. Beyond just asking for everyone’s pronouns, I often wonder what it would be like if we were actually attending to each other and what it will mean to be in community together. We could do each other a real service towards liberation to just calm down and notice.

***

I need options. I need to live in this body and this identity before I can speak to anyone’s anxiety about lesbian gender identity expression. I may seek physical changes to make my body into a place I can enjoy more and occupy whole-heartedly or with some degree of ease. Ease! It took me a long time to think I had any claim to that, with all the body dysphoria in our drinking water. I may alter my body to remain a masculine female who can live with herself. Not to transition to anywhere but to remain standing right here. Even at risk of queer people in my community thinking they knew it all along about me. Even at risk of straight people having less of a sense of what to make of me. Even at risk of confirming some fears that all the butches are disappearing.

What I chose to do with my body is up to me. I won't have lesbians read me as a self-mutilating betrayer and trans people/cis men/radical queers read me as a man or an incompletely transitioned guy. Or maybe I will have all that, since I have certainly had it all before. In fact, people can believe any or all of those things but it doesn’t stick. If people can’t find me on the map they may need to put it down and navigate the actual landscape. But I will help with that navigation since I want to be seen and understood as much as anyone else does.

I feel so relieved that it is possible for me to make physical changes. I am so grateful it is possible even if I never do it. It makes me feel better about being butch. It makes it easier for me to relate to the disappearing butch questions with compassion. There are trans men who choose no hormones and no surgery, and have no less right to their identity for this choice. Conversely I'm a butch woman who may very well choose hormones and/or top surgery, and I am no less a butch for these decisions. Identity doesn’t lie with these physical interventions any more than with the words we choose.

Either way I’m still just straddling the line on this imaginary border. And thinking about how the blurry border, and these discussions, and offensive questions, all arose as a consequence of people trying to have their own visible, nameable identity and understand others through a visible, namable identity. People want to be seen for what we are, and feel human and connected and understood. Much as I obviously love a lengthy discourse on gender, I think we can actually accomplish the connection and understanding through being more attentive in community and by loosening up on the boundary definitions. The words can point to the truth about us but they can never actually be the truth. 

Titans

In October 2011, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler and Avital Ronell came to New York and gave a panel called Disruptive Kinship. In December 2011, Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino came to New York and gave a talk and a performance. 

Ron Athey 

•    Influenced by Throbbing Gristle making a collage

•    Translating visual images into live performances

•    Five hits of acid and whiskey

•    Facing the grotesque

•    St Sebastian. Mishima brought me to him. Always revived during times of plague.

•    Drawing a graph of AIDS, a long journey from immanent death to Frankenstein drugs.

•    Post AIDS, what does it mean.

•    Images in response to people's death

Helene Cixous

•    We expect that we will listen in an affinitive way, with hospitality. In a kind of in translation that permeates body and soul.

•    Matter does not exist without interaction. Between atoms there are interactions. One would wish this would happen between living beings.

•    Things that interact become one, like with gluons, in between. Not only among humans. Translating into other species. Not having affinities before. My mother became a kind of cat. She expresses herself catly.

Julie Tolentino

•    Finding my way through activism. Training as an activist, I understood this as a dancer, the deep spaces of relationship

•    Clit Club multi race and multi class

•    Friends disappearing. Going to ACT UP but also trying to find artistic outlets

•    Memorial work that was personal and not performed.

This is a test. Can I hang with the graduate school lecture crowd, being a garden variety intellectual with a state college education?

Judith Butler 

•    Forms of kinship that are disruptive, what are they meant to disrupt?

•    Kinship a way of ordering relationships? Reordering one that needs disruption?

•    Or maybe kinship rests upon a certain disruption.

•    Kinship emerged in feminist anthropology to ask about exceeding the family.

•    Modes of intimate alliance that take neither conjugality or reproduction as their means.

•    Not all intimate bonds are kin, so how do we distinguish?

•    Foundering on the categories.

•    Do we only know them through the breach? Nexus of greek tragedy.

•    At what moments does one get recognized as or become kin?

•    Oedipus could not recognize mother or father, or at least not consciously.

•    Drum one's own subconscious if one is to make sense of kinship.

Ron Athey

•    I forget sometimes I worked with a cast of 25 before I ever did solo. Not a minimalist.

•    Understanding the flesh and navigating it differently.

Avital Ronell 

•    The traumatic way in which we bind to each other

•    Pulling together, we show up in what severs and cuts describing us. Cut to each others size.

•    Stuck with old names and old ways of naming. You may want to advance but language lassos us back. Limits us.

•    Without is connected in-stoppably to with. Even if there is a severance, we are still WITHout. A structure that holds us.

•    Why do we say "all alone"? Isn't it shitty enough to be "alone"?

•    Elective affinities. A question of how people might relate in ways that cannot be substantialized.

•    Adoptions, enrollments, offering a dismal set of nonstarters.

Thought about my kinship with my former coworkers, how these relationships were not friendship or family. But the breaking apart that happens in lay-offs, a forceful disruption of affiliation, it has an impact on our society, to have so many people who have experienced being let go, having their attachment to colleagues severed. I mean, I had an especially emotional attachment to my coworkers after processing so much around racism and homophobia and exclusivity and so much more that was in the air in our work, then suddenly I'm ass out and all those problems are none of my concern anymore. I loved these people who were not my friends or family. But even with people you don't like that much, seeing them every day they grow on you and you don’t want to be parted from them. Maybe it is in our nature to grow attached to those around us. At least I know it's in my nature. What are the psychic implications of having the relational disruption of lay-offs happen on a massive scale across the country?

Julie Tolentino 

•    Supposedly you are learning about your body in dance... but if you keep exploring you learn an inside-out understanding of what it can do and how it can change... challenging your body to go to a place where you don't know what you have... making changes in modes, duration, embedded texts

•    Rope containing myself and containing the situation so it does not become spectacle

Wealth and whiteness of the New School crowd and the Kara Walker installation on stairwell, as we waited to see Butler, Cixous, Ronell we stood by silhouettes of slavery’s horrors among students with individualistic eyewear. 

Ron Athey

•    Presented as a living corpse. Dead yet sexualized. Elements of sex show in non-sexy way.

Helene Cixous

•    Myths are with us all the time, we are them.

•    Maybe we do not want to think or believe that murder and family are similar. We prefer to think family is love, but love is also murder.

•    It is terrible to be of the same blood. Even if we do not think in those terms, it is with us.

•    When I kill my kind, I shed my own blood. And blood does not climb back into the veins.

•    When you kin with other work, related to predecessors and those who will follow. Intertextuality. Graft other works inside the work. When you read Proust, the whole of french lit is there. Swallowed and thrown up, preserved and buried. You can adore the other without killing, if you swallow the other, you can't kill somebody who is dead, which is why I prefer to deal with fictitious people, dead people.

•    There is enough distance between us for us to be close without biting one another.

I was dog sick during the talk and bodily fluids were about to escape me. Not to mention I could have simply taken out my tampon to instantly make this a more bloody happening.

Avital Ronell

•    Aversion of the gaze, evasion. At the very moment you want to acknowledge a profound proximity.

•    When does it get too close or too far, when you think you are really close you might have abysses to clear.

•    New York was invaded by the united states of america 10 years ago

•    You're so cute I want to eat you up.

Judith Butler

•    Transference systems link us and tear us apart

•    When we undergo transference, we get signed up.

•    Transfer and transform and transference

•    Finding oneself transformed into something else.

•    Iterability defined by its ruptures and elaborations

Wanting so much more about personal connections and loneliness, the most striking thing was brief mentions of loneliness. No, the most striking thing was Helene Cixous discussion of her relationship with Derrida, where he insisted he was connected to death and she was connected to life, and she always said inside NO but he was so insistent that she started to identify with it despite herself.

Julie Tolentino

•    Take a signature work and archive it into my body.

•    To curate work I want to see, here are the five artists I am interested in.

Ron Athey

•    Post AIDS. How many dead people I know, guilt that I don't keep them simmering somehow.

Judith Butler

•    Kinship beyond the blood but also the metaphor of blood, the most fictive moment in ethnography

•    Differences between adopting, grafting & cannibalizing

•    Interactions that produce metamorphosis of another kind

Julie Tolentino

•    I really do appreciate seeing my body joining Occupy Wall Street. I'm interested in how the local is coming through. More issues around race are coming up because people are trying to find ways to be together. To be a body on the line with my full experience.

•    I even said in the performance- I'm bleeding- carpeted the room and described where the cutting would happen. All the things you cannot do. I did a cutting before the performance while you were giving your pre-performance talk

Ron Athey

•    Economy of self mutilation. Boxing is OK, sport is OK, I'd rather be mutilated than punched

•    Bodily fluids are here right now, just beneath the skin

Community Action Center

Community Action Center is screening at MIX 24 on Sunday, November 20 at 3 PM. 

This screening will probably be sold out because every thinking, feeling woman in NYC who has any interest in lesbian sexuality will be there. Every lesbian in NYC will be there to watch and discuss CAC because exactly how often do we get to see explicit images of dyke sex on a big screen with an audience full of queers? Almost never! 

Year round at MIX NYC we leave no stone unturned in our desire to provide our audience with access to images of women fucking. Images that were not designed to be sold, not designed for straight wankers, and god help us, not designed to educate anyone. Because we know we can do better than all that. We can do better. Every dyke in this city needs to see this film and talk about it with her lovers and exes and BFFs and even with dykes she hasn't met yet. We need more dialogue about sexuality, and we need to have it in public places, not just in our homes and parties. Not just on our blogs and various online feeds. Not just those of us who publicly write about sex online but those of us who privately think about sex all the time. We need to sit together in the dark with other lesbians and watch 69 minutes of porn, and look at pussies and assholes and and dildoes and nipples then stay there and then discuss it together. Stay right the fuck there and talk about it. 

Whether it is to say, "Oh I was turned on by the scene by the railroad tracks," or "Oh this doesnt represent me, I don't see anyone with my body type here" and "Oh, I don't ever want to have sex like in that one scene, but I liked the piercing," and so on and on. Love it or hate it, pornography made by and about lesbians is too important to ignore. Because Jesus Fucking Christ, there is a real dearth of this material. And there is not enough of this dialogue. And you know deep down lesbians always want to talk about the politics of representation while thinking about getting it on. And of course you can look at videos online all day but you will not find anything like this and besides, you will be at home looking at your computer and what is that all about anyway? 

In utopia, a diverse and inclusive community of queers of all genders watch porn together all the time. In the real world, cisgender fags should see this film too. So many dykes I know watch gay porn because we love you and your sex turns us on. And suffice it to say that our watching pornography together is powerful. Every step we take towards better understanding of each other improves us. (That does not mean you can look at, comment upon or touch my boobs.) 

We often want to start our community building conversations in identity and movement aspirations. Maybe grounding our conversation in the pleasures and displeasures, the politics and erotics of looking, can get us started too. How are overlapping identities represented? How does inclusion work in friendship as well as in community as well as in screen time?

Community Action Center self-consciously takes up the challenges of representation that are a huge part of feminist discourse associated with what is commonly referred to as the second wave of feminism. By locating some of the scenes in nature, CAC connects itself to a tradition of cultural feminism around the feminine being rooted in nature and the earth, being all wild and ritualistic and so on. In the 1980s lesbian porn had titles like Erotic in Nature, and even straight mainstream porn with lesbian themes was often on the arty side. The S/M scenes in CAC bring to mind the feminist schism of the 1990s where S/M and pornography were hotly debated and feminism painfully struggled to contain and sustain disagreement, to become large enough to hold contradictions. So many of the same challenges have been hanging around in lesbian pornography since we started the problematic project of controlling our own images and asking whether objectification could be done without dehumanization. CAC often takes these themes over the edge, going just that one step further. With the images like the archetypal witch and her literal broomstick ride, CAC overstates the problem of feminist representation of women's sexuality and reminds us of the lengthy history of this debate. Is there a way out of the conundrum of being the object of desire and the desire to be more than an object? The feminist project of liberation is alive and well here, as CAC surfaces this puzzle with equal parts earnestness and irony. 

There is a tone of serious parody that I personally enjoyed a lot about the film. The pizza boy from the straight porn world makes a guest appearance. So does a busty woman washing a car, in a kind of classic tacky erotica tribute that goes on long enough to make you think repeatedly about what exactly you are seeing here. What is the meaning of invoking these images, in a way that is simultaneously humorous and humorless? What about pubic hair that is long enough to braid? A send up on the idea of feminists and lesbians being humorless, here we have the comedic and the dead-serious appearing simultaneously.

So mark your calendar for the CAC screening. Right by where you marked for when you are expecting your period, or going to therapy, or your haircut. Brace yourself to see some dyke sex for real. Because if we don't watch this now, how can we be sure work like this will keep getting made? If we don't show up to see images of ourselves, who the fuck will? We are not seeing shit like this on TV or cable or the movies. If our sexuality never leaves the confines of our apartments, does it really make a sound? What are you so busy doing, anyway? Assembling lists of suggestively homoerotic scenes from otherwise straight pop culture? Replaying the scene where Shane fucks Rosanna Arquette with a strap-on? Watching your well-worn VHS tape of Bound? Rifling through old issues of Leg Show?

Public dyke sex is critical not only for our liberation, but also just to have our own sexuality and dialogue about it and to have that documented and real and public and collaborative and important and prioritized and of course critical, and of course political, we are dykes after all, aren't we? So I don't give a fuck if you already saw this on a loop in a gallery, and I don't care if you already saw it at the center or in park slope. I don't care if you loved it and can't wait to see it again or if you jerked off or if it made you uncomfortable or if it offended you or even if you found it pretentious. I'm not asking you to take your pants off though you are welcome to, but just to show the fuck up and watch some women get it on. Just get your ass to this screening. Every dyke in NYC needs to be there because prioritizing our pleasure, our bodies and our sex lives is revolutionary. And at a time when the state and its corporate masters are shutting down our speech and regulating where, when and how our bodies may meet and assemble, it might do us some good to assemble around the body itself and all its potential pleasures.

Bodies and Technologies in Resistance

A conversation with scholar and grassroots activist Sarah Roberts about participating in and documenting the protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's "budget repair bill," underway at the State Capitol in Madison, WI. All photographs by Sarah. We met on Facebook.

A sign greeting Capitol visitors, late night, February 20th

Sloan: At what point did you decide to head to the Capitol? Was there a specific issue, pivotal statement or moment where you decided?

Sarah: Actually, my first response with regard to Governor Walker's egregious actions of February 11th was to take part in a small rally the very next day.  This was called for Saturday, February 12th at noon, and announced, naturally, on Facebook, in response to Walker's late Friday afternoon pre-weekend "budget repair bill" announcement - a tactic used to mitigate the potential for response.  The event at the UW Campus's Memorial Union had about 100 turn out.  I went with a friend.  We listened to a few speakers and talked between each other about what to do.  The plan to deliver the valentines to Walker on Monday, the 14th, was underway at that point.

On Monday, I joined about 2000 or so people who had convened in the Rotunda.  The majority of these people were affiliated with the University - TAs, students and faculty (and staff).  After that, I had to leave town on Tuesday afternoon and did not return until Thursday. I was desperate for news from the ground, and so began to heavily utilize Twitter, as well as Facebook, to connect with others.  At this point, larger scale protests had begun and I felt I had to get home.

Meanwhile, my friend (with whom I'd attended the Saturday rally) was featured on Democracy Now! and asked Noam Chomsky to comment on the situation in Wisconsin. As Professor Chomsky so rightly pointed out, the program being unleashed by Walker is part of a larger fabric of Shock Doctrine-esque economic policies designed to decimate the middle classes, extract all capital for the profiteers and to browbeat the populace into submission via the unleashing of so many terrible policies at once. Prof. Chomsky also, quite rightly, called out the national Democratic party, whose absence has been conspicuous, by identifying their compromised position as bedfellows with Wall St. What was also immediately clear to me was that this was a coordinated effort and that this boilerplate legislation, undoubtedly formulated at the level of the Republican Governors' Association and bankrolled by wealthy oligarchs, was the trajectory for Walker's campaign all along. I believe this fact has been born out by the unveiling of nearly identical legislation across the country, in Ohio, Idaho, Indiana, and many other states.

So, it wasn't that there was a pivotal moment, but more so that the series of events, beginning with the outrageous "budget repair bill" (usually just a cursory mechanism passed without much fanfare) and escalating over the following days, absolutely demanded a response. All I could do was converge up on the Capitol.

The February 12th demonstration at the Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison campus

The Capitol Rotunda, two days later, February 14th

Sloan: How long were you present, and have you been staying overnight or going home and returning?

Sarah: Since I was diagnosed with an illness and required frequent treatment last fall, I am now dividing my time out of state for part of each week for work and school, with the rest of the time spent in Madison, where I have medical and familial support systems.  I have been on site at the Capitol in some capacity each day I've been at home since February 12th.  That has, at times, taken the form of 10-hour days inside the Capitol and out, sometimes it's meant coming in the evening and staying inside the Capitol until 3 AM doing my own work there, sometimes it's been delivering supplies donated from my graduate student-employee union at my university to the University of Wisconsin's TAA (of which I was a member during my Master's degree), and so on.  I have elected not to actually sleep at the Capitol, although I have spent many late nights there, because I am in recovery from serious illness and need to rest at home for health reasons.  Many of my close friends have spent nights there. 

The scene inside the Capitol has been unbelievable.  It's been orderly, peaceful, community-oriented, self-sustaining and clean. I actually suspect that it has confounded and frustrated many GOP legislators, who could not fathom nor stand such an organic and organized outpouring of ingenuity and people power - without corporate intervention or authoritarian policies. This has included such innovations as the creation of a medic station, a daycare, food stations, rotating bands of volunteer cleaning brigades, tampons stocked in the bathrooms, hand sanitizer distributed throughout the building, free socks, toothpaste and toothbrushes, a lending library, the entire of the Capitol covered in handmade informational posters (put up using special low-residue tape).  The Wisconsin State Capitol is a _revered_ building, and those occupying it have certainly treated it as such.  It was an amazing thing to have experienced.  Of course, this has now all been dismantled, and Walker and his cronies are illegally restricting access to the building, in the face of a court order and the State Constitution that prohibits this.

Rep. Hulsey's door, covered in thank-you notes from pro-union Capitol visitors, February 20th

Sloan: What are some of the qualities of the protesters? What are the conversations and daily interactions like?

Sarah: As you can see from this video I put together, the protesters are truly an amazing and diverse group of people.  On the two Saturdays, we had tens of thousands of people (a realistic estimate from last Saturday, Feb. 26th, is around 100,000 on site) from all walks of life.  Many are union members, but the membership runs the gamut from bricklayers to musicians to teachers to electrical workers, teamsters, public employees, airline pilots, firefighters, police, service workers, and so on.  It's extraordinary.

I have yet to have had an unpleasant encounter with a union supporter. The atmosphere has been one of jovial camaraderie, mutual aid, sharing, thanks, and respect.  Have you ever heard a chorus of 100,000 people spontaneously shouting "thank you" in recognition of a positive act on the part of a politician, speaker, musician or leader?  It's something I can't describe in words.  People's creativity has also shone through, evidence of which you can see in the video I made.  I can assure you, however, that the sorts of reports I've been hearing in the mainstream press are, by and large, completely inaccurate and mostly useless.  Fox News has been the worst with this. For example, I saw last night that they'd made a report, aired on the O'Reilly Factor, about attacks from unions, into which they'd disingenously spliced in footage from another incident, only slightly changing the caption in order to obfuscate the origin of the video.  I mean, there are palm trees in the footage.  Have you ever seen palm trees in Wisconsin?  In February?  Yet, in the short time period in which that footage airs, how many viewers of O'Reilly's program actually notice the palm trees, or notice the slight change in caption and differentiate this event from the wholly peaceful days of protest in Madison?

The magnitude of the deliberate media manipulation in the above example is unconscionable, but in just as many cases, the issue has been a lack of accuracy about the situation on-site, such as CNN's significant underestimate of the crowd size from last Saturday. As a critical digital media student and scholar, with a focus on digital labor issues, I am fairly wary about claims about the purported power of social media to effect change when they feel too strongly technologically-deterministic.  Yet I cannot express how important these media have been to me, and my fellow resistors, as we've endeavored to get a more accurate picture out about what is actually happening, including using the embedding of real-time media such as photos and video.  Blogs and CMS-driven sites (e.g., http://www.defendwisconsin.org/), Twitter (hashtag #wiunion, among others), Facebook - these have been invaluable tools and will undoubtedly continue to be.  Cell phones, smart phones, cameras with video capabilities, relatively inexpensive flip cams, and so on, have been critically important tools for media production as well as for quick and immediate information dissemination - breaking legal decisions, maneuvers by the GOP to manipulate protestors' access to the building, flash actions, etc.  My own Facebook page, too, has been given a radical makeover and now serves as a clearinghouse for information, news articles, others' photos or videos, requests for action, and so on, that I've personally curated.  I've lost a few Facebook "friends" in the process who may not be as captivated by these events as am I, but gained a lot more, including connecting online with numerous state legislators.

Beyond the dichotomy between mainstream mass media and organic, amateur and local citizen-media, there has also been a great void for accurate news reporting being picked up throughout the unfolding of this situation by alternative media outlets.  Democracy Now!, for example, has covered the legislative battles and ensuing protests, almost daily on their program.

Sloan: What has the queer presence been? I saw a fleeting rainbow flag in your video, but I am wondering about how all the issues are intersecting in real time?

Sarah: I've seen a number of rainbow flags, and a "Lesbians for Labor" sign. Mostly, people seem to be identifying and/or affiliating based on their unions, so they'll be marching under the banner of "Milwaukee Area Teachers Association" or "SEIU" or "Teamsters Local xxxx."  I can't say I have necessarily felt this as a lack, but more that people are coalescing on the issue of labor, and bringing their personal and political identities to bear under that umbrella.  Certainly I see people I know from many different corners of social justice activism on the ground in Madison, so people are obviously clear how this draconian legislation will touch them, whomever they are.  As the saying goes, oft repeated these last few weeks, "an injury to one is an injury to all."

"Lesbians for Labor" at the Capitol

Sloan: Skip this if it is too personal or out there, though I think you were getting at this already in a lot of what you said. Can you comment more on the decision to protest with physical presence? Specifically, when I became aware (via Facebook) of your participation in the protests, I immediately thought about how you had recently been in the hospital. Followed by thinking... Sarah has too much integrity to sit this out. Sometimes our values make decisions for us. But what does protesting with our bodies mean in a culture so fixated on interacting through technology?

Sarah: This is actually a compelling and astute question, and I think it's worthy of thought, so I appreciate you asking (and thank you for the kind compliment).  As you know, I spent November and December dealing with acute illness and had a very serious brush with death and a prolonged hospital stay.  Since I was discharged from the hospital at the end of December, my health has been my primary focus (whether I've wanted it to be or not).  This has meant dealing with the physical implications of having been sick - loss of stamina, fatigue, healing, etc. - as well as with the somewhat unexpected mental health issues of this experience - healing from fear, grief, the shock of going from wellness to illness, etc.  Frankly, I've often wryly laughed to myself in recent days that I owe Scott Walker one for getting my mind off my illness for the first time since I was diagnosed - thanks, pal.  Meanwhile, issues of health care funding and costs are obviously at the forefront of my mind (NB: BadgerCare funding, an erstwhile model program for state-level health care for those who cannot obtain it elsewhere and frequently a matter of life and death for those who rely upon it, is on Walker's chopping block).  As I described earlier, the process of becoming active in this resistance movement was organic for me; I really just showed up that first day, February 12th, out of a sense that it was the one thing I could do. From then on, being physically present on the Capitol grounds felt like an important component of my act of resistance.  Body count has mattered throughout these events, particularly as a number of mass media outlets have mysteriously seemed to underreport the number of people on site (particularly last Saturday, Feb. 26th, when over 100,000 people amassed on the Capitol grounds and inside the building).

Interestingly, I've noticed that my own negotiation of physically present vs. acting through technological intermediaries has not been simply dichotomous.  Rather, I've found myself at the Capitol in the midst of the unfolding events, chanting or marching with the crowd, with phone in hand for reporting out to Twitter, while holding onto a handheld HD digital video camera to record the scene - then quickly rushing to my laptop to upload the media, usually in a raw form, on the spot.  I've also been watching others do similar things; both protestors and documentarians of the events as they unfold.  It's a process of immediate documentation, media production and dissemination.  I've been asking myself why it's so important to me, personally, to carry out this process of documentation, and I had the answer handed to me quite concisely when I saw the now-notorious Bill O'Reilly clip describing (decrying) the "riots in Madison" as mentioned earlier. So, it's a rather common sight to see arms and hands extended above over the crowds wielding video and still cameras.  Some of these media make their way to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, but a lot of it is simply being dumped onto hard drives and into personal digital archives.

All of this is to say that physical presence as an act of visible resistance has been and continues to be critically important to those in Madison.  But for those who cannot be - whether due to fatigue and a need to recharge at the end of a 10-hour day spent in sub-freezing weather in protest, or to being dispersed throughout the country (and world), online engagement has offered a critical outlet for people who want to hear testimony or view evidence from people on the ground. The relationship between the online resistance efforts and those on the ground is absolutely symbiotic, with each enhancing and extending the reach of the other.  But because of my close physical proximity to the events, as well as the direct impact on me and loved ones of the proposed measures, I was unable to be content with participating solely online. I am deeply grateful, however, for the ways in which those tools and platforms have allowed me to narrate what I see and do in near-real-time, wherever my physical body may find itself.  It also allows for people to participate physically to the extent of their abilities (such as people who might have illness, may become fatigued, may have different physical abilities that make longterm on-the-ground action difficult, and so on), and to carry on the work in the online paradigm.

Generations

Generations. 2010. Barbara Hammer & Gina Carducci. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s film Bridges Go Round (1953), Hammer and Carducci use two Bolex cameras to capture the final days of Coney Island’s Astroland amusement park. Generations is playing at MIX 23 NY Queer Experimental Film Festival on November 12, 7 PM

The first time I met Barbara Hammer was at CUNY’s 2009-2010 Kessler Lecture. Sarah Schulman was delivering a talk as the recipient of the Kessler award for making a substantial contribution to the field of queer studies. I was attending by myself, and apparently so was Barbara. When she came in, I recognized her and smiled, so she came over and sat with me despite the fact we had never met. The lecture was fabulous, a mind-blowing break from conventional thinking about homophobia that was disorienting in its radical reframing of the meaning of queer community.

The first time I met Gina Carducci was a few years earlier on March 21, 2007 at the Nobody Passes book launch event at Bluestockings, a feminist lefty book store/info shop in the Lower East Side. I was reading an excerpt from “The End of Genderqueer,” something I wrote about the tension between social and revolutionary purposes in identity poltics and queer community building. The reading was my big atheist religious moment, to stand and read in the same very same place where so many of my personal heroes have stood and read. Though I’ve been told no one could tell, my knees were shaking so hard I feared I might fall over. I met Kate Bornstein after the Q&A, and got to tell her how profoundly her writing had affected me. Later that night I met Gina through the good graces of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

A film maker looks at a film maker looking through a camera at a spectator/subject...

Generations is a film about making a film.  Two queer film makers collaborate to create an experimental film that shows the process of them shooting and working with the film itself.  We see each filmmaker with her Bolex, and we see the equipment used in developing and printing. We see them filming each other on the subway, at Coney Island, and in the film lab; some images are beautifully saturated with color and manipulated into abstraction, some are relatively straightforward and contemplative. But images are only the beginning of the elaborate parallel meanings and connections in Generations.

When Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci agreed to make a film together, they planned for a highly structured creative process. They decided on Astro Land at Coney Island as their location and shot the footage together, each with her own 16mm camera. Each artist started with the complete footage but edited privately, neither seeing the other’s work until it was complete. The two complete works were joined into a single film, one after the other, and premiered at the MoMA Barbara Hammer retrospective.  Each of these facts about the process has a bearing on the final film and its meaning, as does the fact that Hammer’s retrospective opened with a screening that featured four films made in the spirit of learning and collaborating with other women. Hammer lives her feminism, so clearly that even her retrospective, traditionally a celebration of an individual artist, began by sharing the spotlight with other women.

Coney Island is in a beautiful state of disrepair that recalls its history as one of this country’s original sites of recreation when recreation was a new concept. Coney Island always seems to be in jeopardy of either destruction or renovation, either of which would signify an ending to what the place is and has been. Film itself is a medium that is used less and less. Both the subject matter and the medium speak to mortality, the passage of things we hold dear, their beauty is in jeopardy of being lost.

Barbara Hammer is the creator of over 80 films.  Her work has taught queer audiences about experimental film and experimental film audience about the politics of queer sexuality.  Not only have Hammer’s films captured lesbian feminism and culture from the 1970s to the present, in a very real way her films have contributed to the creation of that culture.  Gina Carducci is a radical queer filmmaker who hadn't made a film for five years when she met Barbara. Carducci works in a film lab but her own camera equipment was idly stored in various places at the time. Clearly this was not to be a collaboration of equals, but a mentor-student relationship. Mentoring is woefully absent in the queer community, perhaps because it is so perilous, perhaps because we have been too busy in the struggle to make its cultivation a priority. Mentoring between queer women needs to be handled carefully, since we sustain some wear and tear from constantly coming up against sexist and homophobic power dynamics. Our experiences with being excluded from power make it difficult for us to make the imbalance of a traditional mentor-student relationship work well. It is hard to receive guidance or worse yet, advice; it is also hard to take up our power and guide others without being stifled by self-doubt and second thoughts.

An innovative idea to undermine this traditional power dynamic was to shoot the film together and edit separately. This idea doesn’t make the teacher and student equal, nor does it seek to.  But it does undermine the possibility of Hammer exercising undue influence while also creating the opportunity for Carducci to get back into film making, get creative, and essentially go to town stylistically while knowing her work would be seen by an experimental film audience at MoMA. The rules of their process freed Carducci from the potential perception that being mentored by Hammer made her work derivative, while simultaneously allowing Hammer to mentor somebody less than half her age without overshadowing and thereby authentically pass along some of her wisdom. This working agreement was still to be a mentor-student relationship, but not fall prey to the inherent inequity in that dynamic. The collaborative process they came up with subverts the traditional mentor-student relationship without denying that it exists, but rather by taking it consciously and deliberately into account.

Carducci edited her film on a flatbed editor, a mechanical process involving literally cutting and splicing film. Hammer opted to scan the film then edit on a computer. Here the elder shows us the potential of the new, and the younger remains loyal to the structures and demands of the old. Each works with the footage alone, on her own terms, in her own style, and with her own priorities present. The individual pieces were joined together to form one continuous whole, with one showing after the other. It is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Gina told me up front that her film was first, but I’m pretty sure I would have been able to tell that from the formal structure of Gina’s work and the playful tone of Barbara’s. And with a nod to Bridges Go Round, the soundtrack is very different in each part of the film.

The early portion of the film has a visual pattern of numbers from the carousel and repeated safety instructions in the soundtrack. There is a level of abstraction that seduces the viewer into a fascination with details, with close shots of Barbara’s hands winding the Bolex or repetitive images of the old signs that linger around the changing Coney Island. In her portion of the film, Gina includes Barbara voicing the advice to shoot more from the “emotional body” and less from the “measuring mind,” and she begins and ends with images of Barbara.

The latter portion of the film exhibits some of my favorite elements of lesbian culture with footage of the two filmmakers beneath the boardwalk, each hiding behind columns trying to sneak footage of the other. There is simply no pretense of coolness. There is Barbara Hammer sticking two fingers up behind Gina’s head just to make some careless mischief. I admire her consistent lack of irony and utter refusal to be detached or distant from her subject matter. In fact, I had the pleasure of admiring her joyful presence in her films through out the screenings I attended at the MoMA retrospective. At one of the Q&A sessions Barbara mentioned that the editor pleasures herself in what she chooses to include in her film. In her half of the film, the editor is surely full of pleasure with her love of the beach, the camera, and Gina.

In the pleasure and admiration each film maker shows in her choice of images of the other, Generations touches on the radical potential of queer love.  On screen, the filmmakers present as artists at large in the world, but also in their own smaller world of queer friendship. In my imagination of our community, “queer friends” are the opposite of “just friends.” Queer friends are not necessarily lovers yet they retain all their love and sexuality in relationship to one another. In queer frendship there is a grounding recognition of all that we share. It is moving to see a queer friendship across ages documented here, especially at a time when the only queer relationships that seem to reach the public eye are those that aspire to heteronormativity.  (Generations comes chronologically on the heels of a particularly vile mainstream movie about wealthy white married lesbians and their sperm donor, from a lesbian director who is so deluded about the meaning of representation that she claims this portrayal is apolitical.)

And finally as the title suggests, Generations is about generating culture: how we make a culture for ourselves, how we create a legacy and how we express our values.  How do queer people pass along our culture when it is never along bloodlines? The film literally shows its own creation, the filming, the work in the lab, the friendship. The making of this film is a political action in that it is preserving queer culture, in particular, our fabulously different friendships. I totally enjoyed witnessing this difference, this homo/mentor/student/friend relationship full of creativity and love. It reminded me of how much I appreciate the precious utopian moments of interconnection in my own life, like back at that lecture and at the bookstore. The Hammer retrospective at MoMA was overflowing with such moments, with utopian imaginings and deep connections between art, community and the emotional body. Generations invites us to pause and actually feel the meaning of our relationships and legacies.

“Big Mom sat in her rocking chair, measuring time with her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth there on the Spokane Indian Reservation. She sang a protection song, so none of the Indians, not one, would forget who they are.”
-- Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues