A Dyke A Broad #39
Good news for a change, plus art! And stuff to read.
Hello from Paris!
I’ve got a little good news for a change. On the general front, the PMA bill finally passed the French legislature last week giving single women and lesbian couples the right to medically-assisted procreation, AKA: artificial insemination.
It’s been a hella long time in the works, initially introduced as part of a package of stuff by President François Hollande in 2012, but dropped like a very hot potato when legalizing same-sex marriage alone inspired massive, violent demos with marchers bussed in not just by the Catholic hierarchy but a protestant extreme right funded by Christian fundamentalists from the good ole U.S. of A.
It was promised again by President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, but delayed by a misguided attempt at political consensus which was always doomed to fail in this very conservative country whose deep Catholic strain is matched only by an equally patriarchal father-centric Freudianism, both outraged that there wouldn’t be a dad on the birth certificate. It was further backburnered by a cowed government facing major strikes, a populist upheaval, violent protests, marches, and, icing the cake, Covid-19. Now in 2021, it’s finally law. Dykes can breed as much as they like without running to Belgium or Spain, or relying on turkey-basters at home.
The most interesting thing about it, is that it got thousands and thousands of dykes on the street, many marching under the linguistic banner lesbian. I wonder if it will last, or if we homo females will sink back as usual into the mists of social invisibility and pornographic fantasy, only occasionally resurrected as a punching bag for our LGBTQ+ buds.
At any rate, the law’s conclusion led to some really great speeches about the rights of women to be or not to be pregnant, in fact to control their own bodies in every way.
Bodily autonomy, by the way, was also a global rallying cry at last week’s Paris Forum on Gender Equality.
If you read French, there was a wonderful interview in Le Monde with the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Natalia Kanem, defender of the rights of half of humanity. (For the woefully inadequate wiki bio in English which mentions nothing about being born in Panama where her father was the first black dentist, or how she moved as a kid to upstate New York.)
The autonomy of women and girls with regards to their own bodies is fundamental for their health, their flourishing, and human rights. I say it because our research shows that throughout the world, almost half of them do not have the ability to refuse sexual relations, chose contraception, or even consult a doctor or midwife. Those decisions are in the hands of the men of their family: their husband, son… That must change.
In April the UK cut their contribution to UNFPA’s family planning program by 85 % from $211 million to $32 million, and by 80 % their contribution to a UN program against AIDS. The good news is, France is contributing 90 million euros (about $107 millions) to UNFPA, which will go a long way to plug the gap.
In other news…
We left the house last week. Several times. And did things!
Sunday, we went to see an amazing show, Women in Abstraction. I’ll have to go back, because there was so, so much, that after almost three hours I felt wormy with ideas and overwhelmed with the humans, and left before I reached the end. Which was a shame, because almost every work was extraordinary.
I could have lingered in the very first room with work by Georgiana Houghton, a nineteenth century British artist steeped in the spiritualist movement, whose drawings were shaped by spirit guides. The colors reminded me a little of William Blake’s drawings more than half a century before.
And while I love Blake, (so seriously wonderfully weird), I thought how liberating it must have been, still is, to imagine god as an abstract spirit rather than as a giant male.
I made a few notes, then more notes, thinking about abstraction in general, and the concrete, the figurative, and of course how that works in language with words and labels pinning things down—you know, my usual obsessions.
That was just the first room, there were dozens and dozens of others—all revelations. Like the work by Hilma af Klint.
The whole question of abstract, the non-figurative, with uncertain meaning, continued thoughts I’d had after a conversation a few days earlier with a scientist Pal at a café when we started talking about those shit, arrogant doctors, who defend their turf from all comers even when they’re objectively wrong, partly because, as the Pal said, they probably don’t have scientific minds at all.
A real scientific mind, she said, contrary to popular opinion, isn’t necessarily characterized by a love of facts, or being right, but by a comfort with uncertainty, where words like possible and probable feature heavily, and you often say, “I don’t know.” Even those times when you think you finally do have the answer, you inevitably discover that you were asking the wrong question the whole time.
Abstraction and uncertainty are cousins. The opposite of fixed and final. Uncertainty is mystery. The shadows, the liminal. Not a river or dry land, but a bog. It’s the un-, and the anti-, hanging there alone. It’s the idea of now, but not forever. It’s the delighted or terrified land of “what if’s…?”
Random Stuff I’ve Been Reading
My new hero, Luo Huazhong, is the spark for a nascent counterculture movement in China that involves lying down and doing as little as possible, which unsurprisingly pisses off the Chinese government.
In case you missed this...
A few weeks ago we lost Madeline Davis, the first woman to speak openly as a lesbian to a major party convention.
Then there’s this great essay by Anne Applebaum about how Marxist literary scholars and popularizers of critical race theory have one thing in common with certain GOP commentators: a tendency to see their own view of the world as the only valid one. Harsh!
Here’s a really interesting piece about language and family which I might or might not explore further because if familects help us feel like family what happens when the language we adapt is created either by ideologues or marketers, and doesn’t emerge organically at all. I’m thinking here about words like butch and femme which emerged from the dyke scene and not a university, versus something like “non-binary”, not that even engineered words can’t pick up flavor and meaning when they’re adopted. But still, I have questions. And thoughts.
Familects help us feel like family. Private in-group language fosters intimacy and establishes identity. In a study on the use of idiosyncratic terms among couples, researchers found that personal language nurtures a feeling of closeness and often appears in attempts for connection or reconciliation. When people use familect terms, they reinforce the stories, rituals, and memories that hold them together as a group.
Almost last but not least one of the bloggers I like best, because she is angry and funny, too.
The shonky raunch feminism of the nineties and early noughties told young women they could own their own objectification. We were taught that the way out of the bind we found ourselves in was to tell ourselves we’d chosen it all along. What we have now is worse. We are told to own our own abuse, become our own abuser. If someone exposes themselves to us, we must lecture ourselves on how perverted we are to have noticed. If someone rapes us, we must remind ourselves never to report (carceral feminism!) and never to tell (weaponisation of trauma!). Whatever happens to us, we are always the privileged bitch who might, potentially, exploit it; in that sense, every assault is another trump card. Every time our stomach tightens or our breath shortens, every time a freeze or flight response sets in, we have yet more physical evidence of how awful we are. For fuck’s sake, Karen. Who’d want to rape you? Or, if you are raped, well, so what? They’re going to do it anyway. Stop clutching those pearls.
And just because I’m tired of activists equating statements that hurt one’s feelings with threats to do actual physical harm, like wishes for your actual, physical death in real life…
That’s it for this week.
Abstractly and disgruntledly yours,
P.S. Oh, and if you want an Avenger tee, you can get one for another few days. Though frankly I’d recommend the Lesbian Avenger Handbook: A Handy Guide to Homemade Revolution. Widely available.
Love this piece! You almost make me miss my country (almost)