“We Carry this Map of Ourselves Around”: Mapping the Queer Body
“I have become used to wearing, it seems, the constant pose of the foreigner.”
(Zambreno, Heroines: 17)
In the introduction to his book New World Borders, Guillermo Gomez Peña attempts
at encompassing his multi-‐faceted identity by recurring to geographic locations and
to travelling-‐related vocabulary: “I am a nomadic Mexican artist/writer in the
process of chicanization, which means I am slowly heading North. My journey not
only goes from South to North, but from Spanish to Spanglish, and then to English
(…) and from a static sense of identity to a repertoire of multiple identities.” (Peña,
1996: i). The author also focuses on the relevance of the production of culture within
a certain milieu, grounded on politics of location, as he enquires “what does it mean
to be alive and to make art in an apocalyptic era framed/reframed by changing
borders, feracious racial violence, irrational fears of otherness and hibridity, spiritual
emptiness, AIDS and other massively destructive diseases, ecological devastation,
and, of course, lots of virtual space?” (Peña, 1996: i). In such statement, the
responsibility of the artist and the responsibility of the citizen become one, as the
notion of a politically engaged art calls for the need for a dilution of the spaces for
the production and consumerism of art, for the approximation of private and public
spheres. By calling attention to these changing borders and the fear of otherness and
hybridism, Peña also recalls for a shift of the gaze that tends to be equivalent to
dominant, for this change of borders, limits and spaces also call for a change in the
space that one identifies him/herself with -‐ the Other might become the Self rather
easily (Bhabha). Measures like what had started during the 90s and found its most
radical achievement during the Bush administration, the construction of a wall
equipped with surveillance cameras and motion detectors by the United States,
which would stretch to 1/3 of the border of this country with Mexico -‐ the so-‐called
Tortilla Curtain, by T.C. Boyle (1995) -‐ seems to embody both the figurative and
metaphorical boundaries intended to be built between nations and cultures, as that
same wall becomes both a physical obstacle and an abstract boundary to the
affluence of Mexican individuals -‐ and consequently, cultures -‐ to the reluctant
virtually communal, public ground of the United States becomes a closed, private
entity for unwanted Mexican and other immigrants. Peña addresses this subject in
an essay entitled “Border Hysteria and the War Against Difference”, as he focuses on
the different views on the wall, both by those outside it and inside it: “Outside this
country of the US everyone asks: ‘Why does the US need more walls and more
isolationistic politics? Aren't they isolated enough already?’ But within our borders
Washington incessantly chants: ‘National security! Homeland security!’ More walls,
laws, and border patrols!” (Peña, 2008: 196).
The image of a wall becomes then a complex metaphor for notions of
surveillance, belonging, gazing and periphery. The wall itself becomes less relevant
and easier to overcome than the effective power and symbolic meaning that it
embodies. The narrative of the other that is constructed by the United States and its
politics of surveillance and anti-‐terrorism are then constructed under a certain tone
marked by fear, relying on the immigrant to embody the guilty for all “social and
cultural ills” (Peña) and such discourse will define who is to get in the country and
who gets to be left out: “this is the new brand of immigrant hysteria: bigger, better,
whiter” (Peña, 2008: 195). Defending borders, both physical and metaphorical,
becomes the first step toward a sense of establishing the other, while attempting to
define oneself through the wrong exploration of an original and authentic national
and cultural identity always in contrast with one; a nation defines itself for what it
isn’t rather than for what it is.
Wafaa Bilal’s performance And Counting… draws attention to another rather
controversial activity taken into action by the United States: the war in Iraq. The
piece consists in tattooing over the artist’s body a map of Iraq constituted of 105,000
dots, one for each soldier, both American and Iraqi, that has perished during the
conflict. The artist, who is Iraqi-‐American and therefore, places himself in between
both participants of the conflict regarding his sense of belonging, seems to embody
the notion of “private voices, public spaces”, as his body will work as a personal
space for the performance and re-‐enactment of a large scale conflict which takes
place in the public, national stage. Yet, with Bilal’s performance, one is forced to
understand the implications that national conflicts do have upon the personal and
becomes then the body of the artist; the privacy of the artistic body is set on display
at the art gallery, as the boundaries between private and public spaces become
more fluid, having the body of Bilal as a mean to perform that crossing of
boundaries. Quoting Robert Harbison’s Eccentric Spaces, “maps simplify the world
somewhat in the way that a heavy snowfall does, give the sense of starting over,
clarify for those overstimulated by the ordinary confusion. Each path in the snow
shows, the ground keeps a record but also makes one feel there is a manageable
amount going on” (Harbison, 127).
In a Strange Room (2010), a novel by the South-‐African author Damon
Galgut, provides an account of a journey across Europe, Asia and Africa by a rather
unreliable narrator, who alternates between an “I” and the third person singular,
whose name “Damon” might indicate a certain autobiographical tone of the novel.
The book’s first chapter, named “The Lover”, opens with Damon’s (the character,
and perhaps the author) stroll through a deserted street, only to find another man
who mirrors him, heading in a different direction. The two end up by travelling
together eventually, a trip marked by alienation, homoerotic desire and the eventual
parting. Damon, who seems restless and unable to feel at home in any place,
describes travelling “a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You
go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there” (Galgut). Such statement recalls what Stuart Hall writes in Minimal Selves, as he states that “migration is a one way trip. There's no 'home' to go back to.” This notion of traveling as a process of “restless interrogation” (Chambers, 1994: 2) is largely written on by Galgut: “As a result, he is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is never going towards something, always away, away.” Such can also be found in Middlesex, a novel written by Jeffrey Eugenides, in which a young man named Cal, who was born an intersex and shifts between male and female identities, as well as Greek and American ones as a third generation immigrant, is to decide between becoming a women through a sex reassignment surgery or embody his male identity, the one that he identifies with. Middlesex’s complexity can be found in the link between gendered and national
acculturation, often influencing each other mutually, working together for the construction of one another. The acceptance of Cal’s male identity is done through a journey in which he engages, which will take him to Berlin, and his adult, male life is marked by a desire, as it happen with Damon Galgut’s characters, of “never wanting to stay in one place” (Eugenides), as he becomes a border Sisyphus (Peña, i). This identification between subject and space is common to Cal’s identification with a fragmented Berlin, which resembles his own divided body. The road becomes an extension of the body of the individual, a physical metaphor for the changes and the path which one has to walk in order to attempt at a construction of an identity, often by trespassing the borders of what is safe. This abandonment of what is known and familiar can be both freeing and frightening, as it is reflected upon by Galgut:
He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere. (Galgut)
perhaps to advance with a theory which connects the process of traveling and travel writing with the process of writing about nomadic subjects and hybrid identities, often connected with fragmentations of gender and national configurations, both given by the extrapolation of the limits, on the one hand, of the body, and the nation/country on the other. The identification between body and space, particularly to the city of Berlin can also be found in the John Cameron Mitchell’s film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The work of an intersection between the glam rock of the 70s,
which was in itself marked by androgyny, cross dressing and a dilution of gendered categories, Plato’s Symposium and a love for the kitsch and the camp, the film draws a rather interesting account of a sex reassignment surgery that goes terribly wrong, leaving Hedwig, a young woman born man, with the angry inch of the title as her genitals, neither corresponding to what is expected of a man neither of a woman’s anatomy. In the beginning of the film, Hedwig, still pursuing the dream of singing professionally, compares herself to the wall that, until 1989, separated Germany in
half. As it was previously stated on this paper, the figure of the wall serves as metaphor and imagery for both an abstract and concrete separation between nations (and bodies) and such can be found in Middlesex, as Cal identifies himself, toward the end of the novel, with the city of Berlin. It is difficult not to find a parallel between Hedwig and Cal’s words, as both find in Berlin both identification and strangeness, for if Cal feels comfortable in a place that was once divided and is now, even if only metaphorically, united, Hedwig claims to embody in herself that same division, encompassing though, both sides of the wall. While Berlin used to be ‘home’ for Hedwig, even though she didn’t feel comfortable living in only one side of the city but in between both, the city becomes for Cal, who is a foreigner, a new home, or at least a new place to be regardless of that constant need to change, travel and start anew. Cal’s nomadic identity seem to only find relief and a place for its practice in a city like Berlin, marked by immigration, division and cultural hybridism, as the map of the space and the cartography of the body converge and overlap:
faces are the same, too, seamed, dark-‐eyed, significantly boned. Despite family history, I feel drawn to Turkey. I'd like to work in the embassy in Istanbul. I've put in a request to be transferred there. It would bring me full circle. (…) I watch the bread baker in the doner restaurant downstairs. He bakes bread in a stone oven like those they used to have in Smyrna. (…) Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany, this Gastarbeiter, as he bakes bread on Hauptstrasse here in the year 2001. We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me. (Eugenides, 2002: 440)
Traveling -‐ and travel writing -‐ the crossing of physical borders and this identification between the body and the surrounding space seem to function then as a recurrent image for the path that a queer identity must walk toward the construction of that
same identity. For example, in Valencia (2000), Michelle Tea accounts for her trips with her female lovers through San Francisco and in every stop the narrator, who
seems to share with In a Strange Room an autobiographical tone, collects yet
another tattoo, another mark on the map of her body, signalling the process of
travelling, both within and beyond the limits of the narrator’s body. Kate Bornstein,
a relevant figure in queer studies, wrote seven different versions of her biographical
account for the book O Solo Homo: the New Queer Performance, (1998), a
compilation of transcriptions of several performances, edited by Holly Hughes and
David Roman. Besides the “boring” one, Bornstein playfully describes herself as:
KATE BORNSTEIN has called over fifty-‐five geographical location ‘home’. Identitywise, she has transioned from boy to man, from man to woman, from woman to lesbian, from lesbian to artist, from artist to sex worker, and it’s taken her nearly fifty five years of living to discover that she’s actually more comfortable transitioning than she is arriving at some resting place called identity (…) KATE BORNSTEIN, travelling. (Bornstein, 234-‐235)
Bornstein will serve has a settler for the main argument of this paper: the
homelessness of both a place to call home and a body reduced to the simplicity of a
male/female set of codes provide the artist a possibility to fully engage with the
surrounding milieu, as she or he prefers to travel instead of settling, both physically
and ideologically, as identity is then faced not as the finish line but as the path that
These examples, though distinct from the others when it comes to their
geographical production, author and theme, have here the purpose of calling
attention to the relevance of travelling and to the imagery of the nomadic subject as
a recurrent vocabulary for the writing of identity, especially, one may conclude, an
identity that does not obey to the dichotomies of male/female,
heterosexual/homosexual. Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room is marked by an
homoerotic undertone; Michelle Tea’s characters are a group of lesbian and bisexual
women who explore their sexuality in an urban space; Kate Bornstein is a well
known male to female transgender and Cal, the main character in Middlesex is a
hermaphrodite. Hence, travelling and the concept of being a nomad seem to work as
a proper metaphor for the writing about identity which does not obey to categories
and gendered notions of identity. Cal’s self imposed exile in order to escape his sex
reassignment surgery will result in a new Cal, one that “was fleeing myself [Cal]. I felt
that I was saving myself just as definitively. I was fleeing without much money in my
pocket and under the alias of a new gender (…) I was becoming a new person.”
(Eugenides, 2002: 443) According to Said, “the exile knows that in a secular and
contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose
us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons, and are often
defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought
and experience.” Such can be linked to Foucault’s concept of “crisis heterotopias”
and “heterotopias of deviation”, given that Cal’s categorization as both an
adolescent and a hermaphrodite assumes two status capable of being restricted to
spaces which attempt at controlling that same crisis or deviance, turning his ‘home’
in a space of reclusion, being possible then to read Cal’s body as “the heterotopia (…)
capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in
themselves incompatible” (Foulcaut, 25).
After saying goodbye to his parents through a letter Cal runs away, in a
chapter adequately entitled “Go West, Young Man!”, cuts his hair, wears men’s
clothing, evoking the performative aspect of identity and gender. As he advances on
the road, Cal’s body suffers physical alterations that define him as a man, as each
identification between body and space, personal and public that has been discussed
in this paper:
After Ohio came Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. I rode in station wagons, sport cars, rented vans. Single women never picked me up, only men, or men with women. A pair of Dutch tourists stopped for me, complaining about the frigidity of American beer, and sometimes I got rides from couples who were fighting and tired of each other. In every case, people took me for the teenage boy I was every minute more conclusively becoming. Sophie Sassoon wasn't around to wax my mustache, so it began to fill in, a smudge above my upper lip. My voice continued to deepen. Every jolt in the road dropped my Adam's apple another notch in my neck. (Eugenides, 2002: 448-‐449)
Cal’s body becomes then a stage for the performance of several voices, being those
the discourses of gender, nation and sexuality. The relevance that is provided to
travelling also incites to the disruption of the physical boundaries of space, for Cal’s
nomadic state recalls for the ability of the private to meander through public spaces,
free from categories. The identification between body and space (and the
fragmentation of both) recalls for a new way of writing about body and space, in
which both are understood as spaces for the production of communal and personal
identities. Nation and gender, both aspects of an individual personality can also be
perceived as aspects at stake within the social environment, and the concept of
home can become as small as one’s body or core family or as encompassing as a
nation or a whole country -‐ in Cal’s case, home seems to rely on the self alone, as
homelessness becomes, almost paradoxically, the only giver of a sense of belonging
to Cal. Yet, even though these gender and national borders can seem to be easily
crossed, overlapped and even erased (the metaphor of the Berlin Wall fitting
perfectly in such notion), the alien category given to the illegal immigrant and the
queer body is yet to be reconfigured and placed, for it is often reduced to the
periphery, both abstract and concrete, often misinterpreted and misrepresented due
to stereotypes and preconceived social prejudice and constrictions. From Adrienne
Rich’s politics of location to Said’s orientalism and even to Bhabha’s creation of a
third space of representation, one must be aware of the relevance the placement
(and/or displacement) of subjects, of how discourse takes place within zones of
the writing of other identities, of alternative selves who escape the matrix of
bordered places of representation and enunciation, presenting spaces for the
practice of what is to be considered new and deviant ways of being. These borders
are not to be understood as merely metaphorical, neither are the peripheral zones
that both illegal immigrants and transsexual, intersexual and queer bodies occupy
within society meant to be seen as purely abstract. The recurrence to a vocabulary
which evokes mapping and travelling is not arbitrary, neither are the implications of
space and who has the right to occupy it purely inoffensive. The artists that were
mentioned in this paper, and many other, have provided in their way new accounts
of the illegal, the alien, the marginalized voices, both in the matters of what is
understood to be a national or a gendered identity. Such artists also seem to create
through their work -‐ which often implies the use of his or her body -‐ a bridge
between public and private spaces, between male and female spheres and one
cannot deny the entanglement between both nation and gender and the
performative aspect of both.
Providing a short yet complex view on the matters of the body and the space
which surrounds it, namely a nation, one could perhaps summarize such thoughts by
recurring to Al Berto, a Portuguese author who has definitely found through his work
a way to move across borders of thought. Lunário is an account of the trips of Beno,
a loner who measures his steps on the road by Velvet Underground songs, as he
accounts for the same entrapments that Cal has suffered due to a so-‐called deviant
sexual conduct, where relief can only be provided by the experimentation of the
body as it is. The country, nation or whatever other institutionalized construction
can only then be perceived as castrating, and its definition upon the map can only be
perceived as imaginary, for those who inhabit it no longer identify themselves with
it; the boundaries between space and body become fluid and liquid, the latter being
the place for the performance of a thought and discourse free from categorization:
The body, that somewhat habitable country, in which nothing reminded him of that other country geographically defined upon the maps, which everybody insisted in telling them that it was his country. The body always evoked another luminous place, distant, where he could act and breathe, think and move freely. (Al Berto. Lunário. Assírio & Alvim: Lisboa, 1988. p. 18)
References
Berto, Al. Lunário. (1999). Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2012.
Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. London, Bloomsbury, 2002.
Foucault, Michel: “Des Espaces Autres” [Conférence au Cercle d'Etudes Architecturales, 14 de Março de 1967], in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, Octobre 1984, pp. 46-‐49.
-‐-‐-‐. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1987.
Galgut, Damon. In a Strange Room. New York: Europa Editions, 2010.
Harbison, Robert. Eccentric Spaces. New York, Knopf, 1977.
Hughes, Holly and Román, David, Eds. O Solo Homo: the New Queer Performance. New York: Grove Press, 1998.
Peña, Guillermo Gomez. Border Hysteria and the War against Difference. TDR/The Drama Review, Spring 2008, Vol. 52, No. 1 , Pages 196-‐203.
-‐-‐-‐. The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996.
