I Dreamt My Body

Or: Reflections of an Mres (cultural & gender studies) Student 

I dreamt my body in a warehouse

Hanging from the ceiling.

We planned to leave me there long enough for the lie to be read as truth.

I looked down on my feet, swaying, high above the floor and I feared, the deception being seen through, my body being shot, just to be sure.

I woke, my toes cold, and uncovered,

My quilt tossed aside.

Rub-a-dub dub, three masters students in a pub,

In a corner, dark and damp,

By the low light of a lamp,

One lass proclaims:

I kind of always hoped I’d grow up a lesbian.  Except the thought of going down on a girl is kind of unappealing.

and I respond, sure, but the thought of doing those things to a man isn’t much more exciting.

I stare at the wall. At an actual, literal wall. But maybe a metaphorical one too.  So many years of romance novels, of love songs, of wishing for a happily ever after, of being a morally good evangelical, of running from Cixous and De Beauvoir, of feeling offended by the liberals, coming home to the socialists, squirming at the radicals, but never ever pausing to consider what was beyond the veil of compulsory heterosexuality, because cloaked in the veil I had been unable to see it. And perhaps I will crawl back to them and utter, excusez moi, je vais ecrire maintenant. And I will write, this is all well and good, but what if, after years and years of being this person I rejected her, and, constituted a sexuality that is not one?

We see our bodies as a landscape

Of borders and unknowable terrains.

I planned to leave myself unknown until such time as…

… But now it’s been over a year since the first time the last man held my body against his, and maybe there will be another, and maybe there won’t.

In his kitchen, blues music, softly sweetly, and my cheek, my chest against his, and then suddenly but not surprisingly my lips against his.

Another day, I would drive away from his house and feel some sense of obligation to record the first time he crossed the borders of my body, but I left that page blank.  

On a Saturday night, a tired broken girl lies in the arms of a broken boy, and she wonders what it would be like if those arms were somebody else’s arms. He rolls over and goes to sleep and she lies awake and in her mind summons a vision of the face, the eyes of another. Tries to imagine their smile, wonders whether she would delight in undressing, in being undressed, in their company.  Would she delight in removing the veil, in uncovering herself? And if she takes out her phone, and sends a message in the middle of the night, will she be glad in the morning, will she want to stand somewhere proud and say, this is who I am, or softly, slowly, silently sink back under the sheets, the blanket, the quilt, wrapped in the warmth of the covers.

An intelligent woman, a beautiful woman, a research student, a teacher, starts dating someone. She says, it is so wonderful to be with someone who makes me breakfast in the morning. Someone who wants to shout out from the rooftops how great I am. Another woman says how nice it is to be with someone who listens when she cries. Elsewhere a woman steps out of the shower and cries for no reason in particular. Another crying woman imagines a new life taking form in her body, but immediately replaces the dream with one of loss, and tries to comprehend losing a life that never was. Across town another woman will sleep alone, afraid of the man she has left, because given a chance he would squeeze the life out of her. And we say don’t kiss frogs, but sometimes we only see the prince. Because despite everything, life teaches us that happily ever after is there for the taking. And maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But the ending, which is not an ending, is that we are here, the quilts tossed aside, our toes, our bodies, ourselves uncovered. It is that we are living and that we lived. 

One in One Hundred: a Christian’s experience of negotiating Faith and Homosexuality

I was in my tiny London box of a bedroom getting ready for work in the West End. It was a Wednesday morning, between Christmas and New Years’ Eve, 2012. This is a strange time of year for me. In 1999, at the age of 17, I spent this week on the Mid North Coast, 600km from my Sydney home, living on a campsite with a group of evangelical Christians, telling children and teenagers the enduring good news that Jesus loved them. I did this for ten years.

While planning the 2007 evangelism trip I met Andy. Kind, intelligent, musical, dedicated to God, he quickly became one of my closest friends. He stayed my friend for the two and a bit years I dated an atheist. With amazing empathy, he listened to whatever I threw at him.

And then on that Wednesday morning in 2012, we caught up via skype, and I asked him how his Christmas was, and he said, “Oh, really nice, until I told my family I was gay.”

Sorry, what? I type.

Yeah, not a typo, He replies.

Something was wrong here.

Having grown up in the Anglican Church, I confess that in my late twenties, I carried some unquestioned narrow opinions on sexuality. I had no problem accepting that people, out there, in the world, might be gay. For goodness sake, I worked in theatre. But Christians. They weren’t gay. It was something I assumed could not be possible.

 Later, in Sydney, Andy would tell me he also had assumed being gay was not an option. He was twelve when he started experiencing what most churches will only describe as same-sex attraction. Believing this was sinful, he worked to push those attractions aside.

 While at uni, he dared to ask his closest Christian friends to pray for him. He never said he was gay, or even that he was same-sex attracted, instead, he told them that previously he had found gay porn a temptation. He’d struggled with it. He’d ask them to pray that the struggle wouldn’t come back. But the reality was the struggle, or temptation, or whatever you want to call it was always there. It never went away.

At some point he was going to have to admit he wasn’t a straight man with a misplaced inclination for gay porn. He was, in fact, gay.

Never having heard his quiet prayer to be released from the temptation of gay porn, not having known he’d spent years seeing a councillor in an attempt to banish his same-sex attraction, Andy’s seemingly nonchalant typed coming out message that January morning took me by surprise. I didn’t know what to do with the information he was telling me. What did it mean for our friendship, for his faith? Andy assured me that identifying as a Christian remained his priority, which meant he had to reconcile two supposedly competing and incompatible aspects of who he was.  

Earlier this year, at the start of the Easter break, I drive round to Leichhardt to see Andy, and ask how the process of reconciling his faith and sexuality is progressing. We’re both back living in Sydney. Two years have passed since he began telling people he was gay, since his grandfather said he would go to hell, since a Baptist minister told him it would be best if he never spoke to anyone about his sexuality and a theology student told him he was questioning if it was time to ‘hand him over to Satan’.

I sit on the low brick wall at the front of Leichhardt Uniting Church waiting for him. A sandwich board on the footpath lets me know the church is open, and that justice is found here. Andy texts to say he is running late, but he turns up within five minutes carrying several packets of black sheets that will be used to cover the windows of the church during the candlelit Maundy Thursday service that evening. We leave the sheets inside the church, then head next door to the church owned residence where Andy lives.

In the kitchen he shares with twenty-two other adults, Andy flicks the kettle on and offers me left over gluten free vegetarian lasagne. I decline. We take our Earl Grey back to his room. I sit on the only chair, and Andy sits cross legged on his bed opposite me. It’s my turn to listen.

Andy’s Christian story begins in a similar way to that of many children born to church going parents. He grew up in a Christian family, as had both his parents. There was constant exposure to Christian influence. His family, however, always encouraged him to question what he was taught, and not to take everything for granted.

                “I think,” Andy pauses, “I think I was a pretty snobby kind of Christian, a culture Christian.”

                “A snobby Christian?” I ask, “As in, what you thought about God or how to do church was right and other Christians were wrong?”

                “Perhaps. Well, probably more that I thought being a Christian was definitely better than not being a Christian”. He laughs, “That I was enlightened”.

                Like other enlightened Christian boys, Andy knew God required a strict sexual ethic, but unlike the others, feeling like he was attracted to guys and not girls, was going to make life trickier.

                “So what did you do?”

                “I spent a large chunk of my life trying to get rid of that side of me, and trying to understand where it had come from, and what on earth I had done wrong. I believed, theoretically, that God loved me, that I was a Christian. But I also felt that I was gay. So, I reasoned that therefore, I had to not be gay because I couldn’t be both”

                Andy is not alone in having felt that because love for God was his number one priority, the fact that he was gay, had to be silenced. At my own church, I am told there are some people who identify as same-sex attracted, but when I asked to be put in contact, I was informed they didn’t like to talk about it. I can only wonder what stories they might be able to share.

                 Psychologist Stuart Edser in his 2012 book Being Gay, Being Christian: You Can Be Both, writes of his own pain in reconciling faith and sexuality. As a psychologist he sees many people who experience depression, guilt and shame because they are gay. His writes that just as we can’t be sure how many gay and lesbian people there are in wider society, we can’t really be sure how many are in the church, yet there is no reason to think or believe gay Christians don’t, or can’t, exist. He references several surveys which have tried to determine the percentages of gay and lesbian people in the general population. Most are not conclusive, but suggest around 3% of people are homosexual, however some report up to 10%. When I consider that over a hundred people attend my church, chances are that there will be someone who doesn’t fit the heteronormative ideal, and even if it’s only one person, does not everyone in the flock of one hundred matter?

                Before finding his home at Leichhardt Uniting church, Andy had been going to an inner city Baptist church. He started attending this church in 2006 after moving to Sydney to study at the Conservatorium of Music.  Though he made friends and was involved in the activities of the church, his unfading, but unspoken, attraction to men always made him feel more sinful and less loved than everyone else. Christians believe we’re all inherently sinful, but Andy felt that his sin, the sin of who he was, was worse than the secret failings of others. Yet unlike other character flaws like greed or lack of compassion, the fact he was attracted to men seemed impossible to control.

                On the recommendation of his church, Andy went to counselling, with the goal of understanding, and overcoming, his same-sex attraction. He didn’t call himself gay. In fact, he didn’t think anyone was actually gay, just that some people had been conditioned to think they were. The theory being that without the right kinds of male influences in youth, the need for male affirmation had become sexualised.

                “Did this help?”

                “A bit, because it made me feel less like the way I felt was my fault. But it didn’t solve anything. People would assume I must have had a bad relationship with my dad, been neglected or abused. But my relationship with my dad was great, so the only other theory the counsellor had was peer pressure.”

Without experiencing any real results, Andy persisted in counselling, in asking for prayer, in hoping for change. At the end of 2009, changes did start to come his way, but not in the way he’d expected. Instead, Andy found opportunities to leave Australia.

                Andy travelled the world with many varied motivations. He went to South East Asia to take part in humanitarian projects helping with community development; he want to Germany to attend language schools; he moved to London for teaching experience. One of the unexpected, though perhaps not all that surprising, outcomes was the opportunity to experience different expressions of Christianity, and as a consequence rethink his own faith. The snobbery he had felt in his secure, educated, mostly middle class existence began to fade.

                “I met a lot of different types of Christians. They practiced Christianity differently. They had different theological understandings to me.”

                “How where they different?”

                “Oh!” Andy, makes a long exclamation that is part sigh, part a gathering of thought. “Experience of the Holy Spirit. That was a really big one. I couldn’t understand why so many of these really solid, so called bible believing Christians, who really had their faith built around an academic understanding of Scripture, could brush away so much of experiential faith.”

               

The Christians Andy met while travelling, were all experiencing their faith within the bounds of their own cultures. All these people were living and worshipping in different countries, in different spaces and with different influences. But they were united in experiencing the Holy Spirit as a reality in their lives. Belonging to God was perhaps bigger than belonging to a particular denomination, and physical local church.

                The process of analysing his faith enabled Andy to reconsider the expression of his sexuality within the context of that faith. When Andy came home in 2012 he wanted to get on with being committed to the church, to mission, to serving his community, to caring for those who were in need. But now having seen so many other types of church, as Andy sat back within the walls of his Sydney church, it didn’t feel like home anymore. He wanted to be able to talk honestly about his sexuality, and for it to be ok for him to admit who he was. He wanted to stop cagily talking about a weakness for gay porn, and stop pretending he was still looking for the right woman to cure him of illicit desire, and be his wife.

                Over the winter his church took a break from regular weekly bible study meetings and ran some topical sessions. Working with a local ex-gay ministry organisation, his church hosted some sessions on Christian responses to homosexuality. Curious, Andy went. On the final night the main speaker, a man now married but who had previously identified as same-sex attracted, said he’d never met a same-sex attracted man who’d had a good relationship with their father, implying that the key to a successful ministry was to first deal with the broken relationship.

                Andy was uncomfortable.  People had been telling him this for years now, and it ignored the complexity of his situation. At the end of the session, he walked away from his friends and went to confront the speaker.

                “You can’t use that line with integrity anymore. You’ve now met a same-sex attracted man who has a great relationship with his dad. Me”

                 

                Reflecting on the talk, it occurred to Andy that this man, who was married, was confessing to the fact that sometimes, just like everybody else, he still had to resist temptation, to be careful with the material his eyes strayed upon while he was online. That sometimes, the lure of gay pornography still called. People in the audience had nodded along, but suddenly Andy thought, hang on, most men, would be choosing to turn away from graphic pictures of women, not men. And maybe if the attraction is still there, even though you married a woman, and had children, maybe you’re not ex-gay at all. Maybe you’re actually gay. Andy was done with lying. He wasn’t going to change, he’d tried for fifteen years, and he’d had enough. He was gay.

After this Andy spent around six months reading and considering the passages of scripture that seemingly spoke against homosexuality. Still cradling his now cold cup of tea, Andy looks at me.

“At that point I thought, this is just kind of like a disease or something, perhaps like being born disabled. It’s something that’s not necessarily part of the natural order, but, something that just is, and therefore we find a way of dealing with that.”

I simply nod.

 “I thought, you know, people weren’t designed by God to move about in wheel chairs, they’re designed to walk on two legs, but, we’re in a world where bad things happen. People can be born disabled, through no fault of their own, through no external circumstances either, and we find a way of coping.”

For a while Andy framed his homosexuality within this context. Ideally he would have been straight, but he lived in a fallen world, and he was gay. He would admit to it and live with it. He would be different to everyone else.  He would choose to be celibate which would be tough, but that seemed the only way forward. The alternative, seeking a gay relationship surely meant leaving the church, and in his heart, Andy knew he wanted to stay. The church, well more accurately God, was his first love.

“I thought, God wants me to live a holy life, so that’s the kind of life I will live.”

                Andy began to accept who he was. But this reasoning pathologises homosexuality in a way that, long term, isn’t particularly helpful. Celibacy is a difficult calling. Whether freely chosen for the sake of committing to mission, or in the case of the Catholic Church, entering the priesthood, or because you’re single and believe the only right expression of sexuality is within a heterosexual marriage, it is a difficult road to walk.  If your community does not support you, or is structured in a way that implies single life is somehow less valid, committing to celibacy will not only be difficult, it will be isolating and unappealing.

                Andy went to see his minister to talk through his concerns.  The conversation was abrupt. If he wanted to stay in the church and stay on ministry teams, he was to be celibate. Andy laughs dryly as he tells me the line from his minister was “the day you enter a relationship with another man is the day your relationship with this church ends”. He decided to leave before that happened.

                Many people might never have stepped into a church again. But Andy searched for a church that welcomed gay and lesbian people, and he found Leichhardt Uniting. The church website advertises that they are a safe and affirming church, welcoming people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex.  The church leadership seek to be loving and supportive of all the people in the congregation, regardless of their background, status, ethnicity or sexuality.  

                The reverend Dr John Hirt, who leads the congregation at Leichhardt knows several ministers who are quick to acknowledge they have friends who are gay, or that there are gay and lesbian people in their churches. However, it often transpires these people are on the periphery of parish life. Dr Hirt, however, strives to include gay and lesbian people in all aspects of church life, to demonstrate that he believes all members of his congregation are equal in the eyes of the Lord. If people in his congregation have gifts and talents that can be used to serve the community, if they live in a way that demonstrates the reality of their love for God, if it appears that the Holy Spirit is shaping the character of an individual, these are the things Dr Hirt looks at, not their sexuality.

                Being welcomed by Leichhardt Uniting gave Andy a place to continue living as a committed Christian, without feeling ashamed of his sexuality.  He met and talked with other gay Christians. One couple, have been together for a decade. There are gay Christians on the leadership team, leading music, contributing to decision making and planning. They readily admit that being able to be so involved at church keeps faith at the centre of their life.

                In a community that so happily recognises gay and lesbian Christians, Andy finally felt he was allowed simply to be. Rather than be questioned for even daring to think he might be gay, or might want a relationship one day, Andy could be supported in coming to terms with the tricky passages on immorality, and the apparent sinfulness of homosexuality. He grappled with definitions of sin. After much prayer, bible reading, meditation and reflection, it seemed sin was something that was damaging. Either to himself, to others, to his relationship with God or to his ability to witness. According to this understanding, being gay did not seem sinful, and ultimately nor did the prospect of going out with another man. He questioned what he believed about salvation. He was not saved by not being gay. He was saved through faith in Christ.

                “Do you ever feel angry at God?”

 “No, not angry. I used to feel disappointed that I couldn’t be straight. Now I’m disappointed in the response I sometimes get from other Christians,” Andy looks down. “Sometimes there is a happiness in ignorance. Sometimes you can go along to church and think you’re thinking about things, but you’re not really.”

                It’s now dark outside. My tea is finished. The Maundy Thursday service will be starting soon. I want to give Andy so many hugs to make up for all the years where, because he felt unable to talk about his sexuality, I wasn’t able to be as supportive as I would have liked to have been.  It’s a good thing I have this life and the next to make it up to him. 

Gin Tears

Oops. Double shot. Summer in London. Christmas a year ago or a year to come. It doesn’t matter.

Exhibit A. After midnight. On the kitchen floor. No more, no more joy for her world. 

Exhibit B. The dying days of winter. But before the April sun has fully risen. A text message at three in the morning, to Exhibit C. Why, why, do I sabotage my own…

                  Sabotage (From the French) n & v. Deliberate damage to productive capacity, esp as a political act.

Like her facebook usage. She’s giving up her Australian passport if (when) the Liberals get in. 

In London, exhibit B reads The Guardian. Making her open minded, intelligent, concerned, yet unattractive to a certain class of boys.  Nice boys. Suits. Country homes. Lunch in the City. Tweed. Not for you Guardian reader. Go quietly home and cry them, cry your gin tears.

Cry them for yourself. Cry them for what will never be. But much more so, cry them for the underprivileged. The voiceless. The nameless children on the streets in Syria. The protesters in Thailand, Kiev, Egypt. Cry them as a political act.

                  ..especially as a political act…

                  French from saboteur ‘make a noise with sabots, bungle wilfully, destroy.’

Exhibit C. Exhibit C, Also a Guardian Reading Ranting Dissatisfied Leftie. In the North. Years ago, weeks old snow packed on the ground. Darkness descending by the time you’ve cleared away lunch, or soon enough after. In the early hours of the morning, or the late hours of the night, The Monster sat on the end of the bed. The Monster read the right paper. He made her seem conservative. She loved him once.  He would only disappoint, he insisted. She really ought to cut her losses and run, run back to the sunshine. Hurt, she ran, she ran home to the south to cry for the years that would never come back, but that outcome was inevitable, really.

Exhibit B is planning a holiday. To Cornwall, or Scotland or the South of France. It doesn’t matter.

France. 1789.

Originally the idea of Right and Left stemmed from the seating arrangement of the National Assembly after the French Revolution. The deputies on the left of the chamber wanted to carry the goals of the revolution  - liberty, equality and fraternity – through to their logical and radical conclusion. (Mc Knight: 2005: 3)

Exhibit B is away for the summer. She doses under a tree, mild sunlight slowly thawing her fingers and toes and cooking her milky white English skin. Another summer, in another time, in another place, there was someone who lay beside her and pulled little daisies from the ground, ripping, tearing, shredding, removing their tiny petals. What are you doing? She’d asked. But hadn’t heard his answer. In her mind, he’d confessed to his unoriginality, apologised for being a literary trope, a metaphor a device. Taking the petals off daisies, then casting them aside. For god’s sake. Then it was September and they had to go their own ways, she had to leave, had to do more important things. Study things. Write things. Be things. Though not be her writing, or perhaps always be her writing. She wasn’t sure if she was dead or not.

But, perhaps foolishly, she was sure she had to grow up and leave the boy and the broken daisies behind her, like everyone else before her. She was not, there was not anything new under the sun. 

 Gin. Why. Double shot. Again. Oops.

In London, still in possession of her Australian passport, exhibit C refills the Pimms and Lemonade with Bombay Sapphire. Why? Why? Next you’ll be on the stairs, in tears. It is how this always ends. It always does, and always will. Again, and Again.

Or it could end like this. Two. To Marylebone. As the late summer sun is rising, and the birds sing an ode to 5am. Minimal sleep on an unknown floor. Fully clothed. Stockings and Heels and all.

Like a perfect pin up, Exhibit A is still in the kitchen. Neat skirt, perfect hair, stockings, heels, apron and all. Dinner is organic, always organic. She lived with a boy a while ago. In a haze of contentment, because he was just so perfect, you know. They could discuss the logical and radical until today turned into tomorrow. He had no intention of marrying her, but it didn’t matter.

But life moves on, and tomorrow fades into yesterday, and the haze of contentment lifts, until one day you find yourself cooking a dairy free, grain free, locally produced organic meal for one, and wondering what the appeal was. What your appeal was. Your baking, your stockings and heels? Because what man reclines on his pillow, afterwards, and looks into your eyes and says God, you’re intelligent.

Fucking Feminism. Quite literally.

Exhibit A sings carols again. Joy, joy, not necessarily happiness, to the world. Though, she’s fairly certain she’ll find herself on the kitchen floor at midnight crying the gin tears again one day.

And, so again and again, at 3 am we ask, Why, Why, do I sabotage my own happiness?

One Grain of Rice

I handed this in, for Cul340 : Genre Writing, at the end of Semester 1, June 2010. It was my little literary flirtation with the Avant Guard, its a short story with a dash of essay and a hint of Creative Non-Fiction.

Text: One Grain of Rice

Rosie Clare Shorter

Abstract

In assessing the links that exist between both language and identity formation, genre and gender, the following text will use a variety of foods as a metaphor for the vast and ultimately unknowable types of characters and personalities that exist both in fiction and reality, seeking to illustrate a latent gap that exists between language and cognition, suggesting that just as genre definitions can be inadequate in the reading and valuation of a text, so language is inadequate in the reading and valuation of identity.

One Grain of Rice

It makes you feel good. But only for the short term, so you wouldn’t want to indulge too often. You know how it is, the way you just really, really want it. Like how you’d really, really want me. No, not want, but need, or desire. And you’ll be some place inconvenient, snowed in at the office, or waiting for the train, and suddenly, out of nowhere you are overwhelmed by desire. You know you should just head straight home. Take no detours. No distractions. But, you can’t, not now, not now that you’ve had the thought. Not now that you’ve realised there is something missing in your life. You simply feel empty, you can’t resist. And then afterwards, you start to question your actions you think…

Is this about sex? Everything always is. But the first paragraph? unlikely. What if it is? What if…

I tell you about myself. [1]

I tell you I’m writing an essay, a prose piece, an experiment. At least trying to. Its only ideas at the moment.

I tell you, Hi I’m Annabelle, I have this crazy idea. I want to know what you’d be if you were a food, and why. You’d say, I’m nothing special. I’m boiled rice. Simple, plain, accommodating, forgotten.

Forgotten. Yes, that is exactly how Lucianne feels. Once she thought of herself as interesting and attractive. Then her friends got married young, and she didn’t, and now she felt old, but she was only twenty-four. No-one notices her. She is invisible. Of course she is not invisible, but she feels it. In the dictionary it says: invisible / in’VIZƏbƏl/ adj. 1. not visible to the eye, either characteristically or because hidden (invisible guardian angels; the stick insect was invisible on the twig). 2. artfully concealed (invisible mending)[2] . Perhaps she was invisible like the stick insect. She was nothing special or different, positively or negatively. Like everyone else, she blended in to an undifferentiated background of Luciannes and Annabelles, after all no one pays attention to any one grain of rice, but rather it exists as part of a greater whole, a base, something that fills you but doesn’t excite you.

Which is curious because, when Annabelle asked their friend Ben Doherty what kind of food he would be, he answered, potato, because it was something that filled but didn’t excite. Also because potatoes are small, irregular and often overlooked. But he didn’t say that. That would have been too much. And he was never the type of person who told you everything at once. If he did it would sound something like: my name is Ben university like theatre I wonder Lucianne writing an essay viola would she go out with me movies not really yes.

It wouldn’t work. You could never hear everything. Having everything told to you at once would probably be just as confusing as withholding a vital piece of information. Like how in the opening paragraph the object wasn’t named. Like how later and Lucianne is now twenty five and she has been going out with Ben for a while but he doesn’t tell her about this other girl. Doesn’t tell her that he doesn’t want to see her anymore, because telling her might hurt her, but invisible Lucianne knows he isn’t actually looking at her, can’t see her, even though he is seeing her. Lucianne says, Ben this isn’t going to work. He never has to tell her about the other girl.

The other, other girl, Annabelle, is not going out with anyone because she wants to prove she is self-sufficient. She is still asking people what they would be if they were a food and collecting their answers to put together a collection about how we reduce people into small bite sizes so that we can understand them better, but hasn’t written it yet. She is not at all Ben’s other girl, but merely another girl, who, tonight, is meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. She is potentially his other girl but they both assume they are no longer attracted to each other, and that the threat will remain immaterialized. They are both wrong.

In the morning Annabelle wonders if it is somehow two years ago. It is not. She shudders and sends him home. He will let his feelings of guilt, remorse and confusion simmer on low heat for approximately six weeks before he breaks the heart of a wonderful woman when he relates this event to her. Annabelle doesn’t want to think about it, instead she reads about women and the writing of women, but the words scream at her like the angry accusations of a bitter old aunt:

Why don’t you write…

(I don’t have anything to say!)

Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, its reserved for “great men”… Besides you’ve written a little, but in secret; and it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way…[3]

She feels ill and shuts the book.

At home Lucianne, now twenty-five, is still not married, not going out with Ben, not yet working in a real job, not a mother, not finished her uni degree, and not going to clean the bathroom today. She is reading an article by Irigaray:

Her lot is that of “lack”… and “penis envy,” the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value. Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself: through her somewhat servile love of the father-husband capable of giving her one, through her desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy, through access to the cultural values still reserved by right to males alone and therefore always masculine, and so on.[4]

She is not entirely sure what it all means. She isn’t even sure, yet, if that is Irigaray’s position on the matter or if it is her summary of the accepted reading of life and that perhaps in a page or two she will turn it all on its head. The only appropriate thing to do in this situation is make a cup of tea.

Tea is a wonderful thing. Lucianne meets Annabelle for tea and cake one afternoon and says do you know it was a year ago we were sitting here, in this café and you asked me to compare myself to a food? Annabelle mumbles something incoherent. You never told me what you would be. Annabelle is taken aback because that’s where this whole conversation started.

Lucianne if I were a food I would be the most decadent piece of chocolate cake you can imagine. Rich, dark, creamy, bad for you. The type of chocolate cake that solves all your problems and makes you feel emotionally balanced. Cake that makes you feel good, but of course, only for the short term, so you wouldn’t want to indulge in it too often.

---

[1] Writing the self is merely one of many ways an individual comes to understand and express their unique identity, and is itself the realisation of the desire to be valued and considered significant. Shari Benstock says “This coming-to-knowledge of the self constitutes both the desire that initiates the autobiographical act and the goal to which autobiography directs itself”. Similarly, Kavita Hayton suggests that the practice of life writing “encapsulates both the desire of the writer to express an identity and the understanding that s/he is pursuing a deliberate, self-conscious textual reconstruction of that identity”

· Benstock, S (1988) ‘Authorizing The Autobiographical’ in Warhol and Herndl (eds) (1997), Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick)

· Hayton, K (2009)New Expressions of the Self: Autobiographical opportunities on the internet, Journal of Media Practice Volume 10 Numbers 2&3 © Intellect Ltd 2009)

[2] Moore, B (ed) (1993), The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press: South Melbourne

[3] Cixous, H (1975), ‘The Laugh of The Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Signs Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer 1976), pp875 – 893, The University of Chicago Press, accessed at http://jstor.org/stable/3173239

[4] Irigaray, L (1977), The Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Cornell University (1985), Cornell University Press: New York, pp 23-24