Kelly At Large #137 The Citizenship Edition
In which I pray to Saint Geneviève the patron saint of Paris in the hopes that she has some pull with La Migra and will help me keep my trap shut.
Hello from Paris!
Last week, instead of studying the Livret du citoyen for an upcoming interview, I ate lunch with a friend at the Arènes de Lutèce, and beat a path between the local sporting goods store and the semi-chic bargain store Uniqlo trying to find a pair of pants that would convey my eagerness and fitness to become a citizen of the French nation without making me too self-conscious about my post-menopausal ass.
I did not succeed. Though, while at the Monoprix, I did find a flowery, summery shirt that will at least make me look less dour than usual when I try to persuade the immigration folks that I deserve French citizenship.
God I hope I can. I’m so terrified of blabbing incoherently I’m turning to prayer.
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Draft of A Brief Prayer to Saint Geneviève, protector of Paris from a dyke who loves it and is getting ready to brave the Préfecture
(Dear? Madame? your Holiness?) Saint Geneviève,
Please fill my mouth with tiny, grammatically perfect soundbytes, carefully modified with subjunctive, and help me control the complicated and paralyzing feelings that arise at questions linking the words French and citizenship and marriage.
Above all, please, please, puhlease! strike me dumb if I begin to rant about how stupid marriage certificates are for homos like me since the act has only been legal for same-sex couples in France since 2013, (in the U.S. since 2015, ) which means, since Ana and I have been together since 1993, that the tiny little scrap of paper we were awarded some time around 2016? does not nearly reflect the three decades we’ve lived together and just reminds me of all those years we didn’t have the same rights as other “citizens.”
Squash, too, any musing aloud on that word, citizen, and how in France women only won the right to vote in 1944, and weren’t anywhere near to legal equality until recently. Were they citizens before? Yes? Not really? With the right to mount the scaffold and hang but not speak from it? Or so someone said…
Breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold. Argh.
And if I can’t, if I start to babble, at least help me express delicately how I’ve always thought real citizenship had nothing to do with paperwork and interviews and the final word of the state, but how many times (in the best French tradition) your feet have traced the sidewalks and boulevards. Claimed the rights you were promised and denied.
And that if the country drives me nuts (though no worse than the U.S.), it’s not because I’m an outsider sneering from afar, but because I’m totally invested in it, right up to my very scaffolding exposed neck, having picked sides since I started coming here for long stretches in 2005, flyering in elections. Marching against the antisemitic murder of Ilan Halimi. Marching for the Gays, for Women, for undocumented immigrants when I was afraid of being deported myself. Always to demand that France fulfil the promises of liberty, equality and fraternity which to me remain just as beautiful as ever, and as worthy of defense, even in small things like helping an older woman use the elevator when she’s forgotten how. Or aerating the compost.
All of which is to say, (please help me remember) that citizenship makes sense for me because I believe in the ideals of France, and I’m at home and as integrated as I am anywhere (for what it’s worth). And for that matter—waking up once again to bites on my arms and face—I should get extra credit points for donating my blood to so many French mosquitoes you could almost say I have merged with the nation.
And dear Saint Genevieve, a new pair of pants wouldn’t go amiss…
In Other News
Victoria Smith is such a good writer, and generous in her thinking in pieces like How disastrous births haunt women
Mothers may long for control over birth, for which we are mocked; but we do not have it, for which we are blamed.
A wonky but really interesting look at public transportation and why subways work or don’t, and how vulnerable many systems are post-Covid.
An update on Ukraine
And last but not least, here’s an important essay, Gender is not a spectrum, considering the implications of gender and its theories for feminism and women’s equality.
‘gender is not a binary; it’s a spectrum’. What follows from this view is not that we need to tear down the pink and the blue boxes; rather, we simply need to recognise that there are many more boxes than just these two.
At first blush this seems an appealing idea, but there are numerous problems with it, problems that render it internally incoherent and politically unattractive
…
In reality, everybody is non-binary. We all actively participate in some gender norms, passively acquiesce with others, and positively rail against others still. So to call oneself non-binary is in fact to create a new false binary.
…
Once we’ve decoupled those behaviours and characteristics from reproductive function – which we should – and once we’ve rejected the idea that there are just two types of personality and that one is superior to the other – which we should – what can it possibly mean to continue to call this stuff ‘gender’? What meaning does the word ‘gender’ have here, that the word ‘personality’ cannot capture?
That’s it for this time,
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Disgruntedly yours,
xoxo K