Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And now here they actually were in Lendon, established at a quiet and expensive hotel; but the problem of Angela’s birthday present had, it seemed, only just begun for Stephen. She had not the least idea what she wanted, or what Angela wanted, which was far more important; and she did not know how to get rid of her mother, who appeared to dislike going out unaccompanied. For three days of the four Stephen fretted and fumed; never had Anna seemed so dependent. At Morton they now led quite sepa- rate lives, yet here in London they were always together. Scheme as she might she could find no excuse for a solitary visit to Bond Street. However, on the morning of the fourth and last day, Anna succumbed to a devastating headache. Stephen said: ‘I think Ill go and get some air, if you really don’t need me — I’m feeling energetic! ’ ‘ Yes, do — I don’t want you to stay in,’ groaned Anna, who was longing for peace and an aspirin tablet. Once out on the pavement Stephen hailed the first taxi she 186 THE WELL OF LONELINESS met; she was quite absurdly elated. “ Drive to the Piccadilly end of Bond Street,’ she ordered, as she jumped in and slammed the door. Then she put her head quickly out of the window: * And when you get to the corner, please stop. I don’t want you to drive along Bond Street, I’ll walk. I want you to stop at the Piccadilly corner.’ But when she was actually standing on the corner — the left- hand corner — she began to feel doubtful as to which side of Bond Street she ought to tackle first. Should she try the right side or keep to the left? She decided to try the right side. Crossing over, she started to walk along slowly. At every jeweller’s shop she stood still and gazed at the wares displayed in the window. Now she was worried by quite a new problem, the problem of stones, there were so many kinds. Emeralds or rubies or perhaps just plain diamonds? Well, certainly neither emeralds nor rubies — Angela’s colouring demanded whiteness. Whiteness — she had it! Pearls — no, one pearl, one flawless pearl and set as a ring. Angela had once described such a ring with envy, but alas, it had been born in Paris. People stared at the masculine-looking girl who seemed so in- tent upon feminine adornments. And some one, a man, laughed and nudged his companion: ‘ Look at that! What is it?’ ‘ My God! What indeed? ’ She heard them and suddenly felt less elated as she made her way into the shop. She said rather loudly: ‘I want a pearl ring.’ ‘A pearl ring? What kind, madam?’ She hesitated, unable now to describe what she did want: ‘I don’t quite know — but it must be a large one.’

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He was six feet tall and had white blond hair that covered darker layers as though his head were a hay mow. He had a hearty manner irrelevant to his surroundings, for I was murmuring in my usual vague, ironic way, whereas he was replying with loud, strangely definite emphases almost as though he’d been paid to exclaim in a commercial. He gave the impression of having been scrubbed very clean. Even his cheeks glowed ruddily. I thought he wouldn’t smell of anything if I sniffed his body. He laughed loudly when I said something sort of amusing, but his restless eyes roamed over my little kitchen as though he found nothing worthy of his attention. He leaned forward when he spoke. He seemed to be one of those people so anxious that they don’t listen to anyone else and only worry about their own next statement. He appeared to be Polish, or my idea of Polish. The back of his head was flat, as though a Polish grandmother had molded it that way so he wouldn’t roll out of his cradle. His eyes were too small to be handsome, but his skin was so taut that there was only a single fold under his eyes and not a hint of darkness. The pure skin ran right up to the edge of the pale lashes and framed the sort of pale blue eyes that in a flash photo come out pink as a rabbit’s. His skin reminded me that the French word for complexion is carnation. When he strode about my little kitchen he kicked his legs straight out. He happened to mention his father was a billfold distributor in Ohio, and I realized that although he was talking books and ideas, his way of talking was a traveling salesman’s—insistent, unstoppable. If I stopped him and took exception, he had an easygoing way of shrugging, laughing at himself, and trying a new tack, as if to say, “Since you didn’t fall for that one, try this one on for size.” When I spoke at any length, he frowned. He winced with concentration, just as though he were a nutcracker and my words a giant nut. I processed everything he said in several different ways.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  If at the time we’d been called on to make a comment about this anonymity, we would have said it was “sad” or “pathetic,” but a second later we would have been smiling and feeling that surge of popularity as we walked down Christopher greeting one guy after another, adding another detail to the mental dossier we were compiling on each acquaintance (Oh, Blondy is with Spare Parts—I wonder if Spare Parts is keeping him. No one’s ever figured out till now how Blondy can afford so many new cashmere crewnecks on a dental hygienist’s salary. Oh, and there’s Mike the Barber with his ratpack. I wonder if Mike will say hi to me when he’s with that glam bunch—he did!). On Saturday afternoon while I was working out, a handsome stranger in a bomber jacket came in, walked slowly, arrogantly through the gym and locker room, came right up to me, shook my hand, introduced himself, asked me to pull up my T-shirt, which I stupidly did. He rubbed the back of his hand on my new washboard abs and said, “Nice. You’ll do. Here. Call me.” And he left. And I called the number on his printed trick card and went over, but the good part was just having been chosen like that at the gym. Sean looked sad and I said so. He smiled and stood. He swayed slightly and leaned on my shoulder as he passed me on the way to the window. He climbed out on the fire escape and pissed into the dark. “Did I say something wrong?” I called to him. He stepped back in and said, “It’s just—” “What?” Sean shrugged. “Oh, nothing.” “I’m strong. Don’t worry about hurting me.” “I just don’t see why you’re interested in me. All your friends sound like they’re so smart—I know Lou is. Besides, you’ve read a lot and you’re older.” “Why do you think I’m interested in you then?” “I don’t know.” He put his glass on the floor and smiled, but with an uneasy, baffled look in his eye, as though he were about to be hit. I came over and sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. He cleared his throat. “Do you think I’m intelligent?” “Of course.” “That guy Ted? He told me I was dense.” “Ted knew you were hung up on being intelligent, so he said you were dense. It was a way of holding you.” “Tell me your honest evaluation of me.” “I am being honest. Obviously you’re very intelligent.” “I don’t believe you.” “You get good grades, don’t you?” “That doesn’t mean anything.” “Do you know what your I.Q. is?” “No.” “Of course, I don’t see any difference it makes anyway. I recognize that you’re smart, but that’s not why I like you.” “Then why do you?” “Because you’re handsome and strong and natural.” “I don’t even know what that means—natural.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Holland is not perfect. Girls are still more likely than boys to report having been forced to do something sexually. They are more likely to experience pain during sex or have difficulty reaching orgasm. Although they express equal interest to boys in pursuing both lust and love, and can freely admit to sexual desire, Dutch girls who have multiple casual partners or one-night stands do risk being labeled “sluts.” Schalet found, though, that the word didn’t carry the same sting or stigma that it does in America. The Dutch boys she interviewed, meanwhile, expected to combine sex and love. They said that their fathers had expressly taught them that their partners must be equally up for any sexual activity, that the girls could (and should) enjoy themselves as much as boys, and that, as one boy said, “of course you should not be so stupid to [have sex] with a drunken head.” Although she found American boys often yearned for love, too, they tended to consider this a personal quirk, a trait their peers, who were always DTF (“down to fuck”), did not share. Getting Down and Dirty—and Ethical “I’m comfortable talking to my parents about sex.” Charis Denison watched as the ninth-graders began to move. Those who agreed with the statement she had just made headed to the north end of the room; those who disagreed went to the south. Denison had made clear that staying in the middle was not an option: the point of this exercise was to force students to take a stand, to defend or maybe even change deeply held beliefs. In this case, however, nearly everyone chose “disagree.” “My parents are weird,” one girl explained, seeming to speak for the entire group. Some of the statements Denison tossed out during this lesson seemed like ringers. When asked, “If a teen does have sex, he or she should use a condom every single time,” everyone obviously agreed. Then Denison said, “Oral sex isn’t real sex.” A few kids tried to stick in the center of the room, but Denison wouldn’t let them. “Sometimes in life,” she told them, “you have to make a hard choice. You don’t get to stay in the middle. Sometimes you just have to bust a move.” In the end, the class was divided. “Well,” said a girl who had reluctantly disagreed, “it’s not really sex. But it’s not really not-sex, either. It’s kind of . . .” She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.” A boy standing next to her added, “I think you have to be able to get pregnant to be having actual sex.” Denison raised an eyebrow. “So, my thirty-five-year-old friend who is a lesbian and has never been with a guy is a virgin?” she said. At that, the boy looked confused. “No,” he said, slowly, “but . . .”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Like Holly, Megan described her behavior as “liberating,” even as she struggled with its limits. During another conversation, she insisted, “I’m not a slut. Some people probably would consider me one, but I don’t consider myself one because I don’t carry myself like that. . . . When I think of a slut, I picture that girl who has the really thick black mascara and smoky eyes and wears two bras to push up her boobs.” On another occasion, she told me, “I love being single,” and a few minutes later confided, “No boys want to date the slut.” Back and forth she went, between resisting and submitting to age-old ideas about girls’ sexuality. Talking to Megan sometimes felt like watching someone trying to shore up a sand castle whose walls kept collapsing. Megan had less transcended limits than tried to legitimize herself within them, despite them. “I think,” she told me at one point, “that every girl’s goal is to be just slutty enough, where you’re not a prude but you’re not a whore. Yeah, you have your one-night stands. Yeah, you’re experienced. But you’re not sleeping with every guy in the fraternity. You’re not making brothers ‘Eskimo brothers’”—when two or more fraternity members have intercourse with the same girl. “Finding that balance is every college girl’s dream, you know what I mean?” Like Holly, Megan had her own agenda for our conversations: she, too, wanted an opportunity to make sense of a sexual history that had progressed quite differently from how she’d once expected. Also like Holly, she described herself as a “good girl” in high school—not even kissing a boy until she was seventeen, by which time she was eager to move forward. “I really wanted to get rid of my ‘firsts’ with a boyfriend,” she said. “And all my friends had already kissed guys, already given blow jobs. I was behind.” During four months of dating her first boyfriend, she “caught up,” performing oral sex that was never reciprocated. “I didn’t even think that was an option,” she said. She lost her virginity the summer before college with another guy she was dating, though, she said, they were never “Facebook official.” She was relieved to get first intercourse over with, and remembers the experience fondly.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  She knows they can count on me for loans, like for this abortion. They already have three kids. I like her and she knows it. We all go bowling together in Rogers Park when she’s not wore out.” “Then what’s the problem?” I asked briskly to cover my confusion. His novel way of looking at things was so human and unconventional. You could say he wore down the spikes of moral imperatives by holding things—dangerous explosive things—in his soft hands and turning them this way and that. At least right now, sitting beside me, he spoke of his cop, the wife, the abortion, the loans, the bowling evenings, with such domestic sighing familiarity that I took them all in the same way, his way, touched them all over in a friendly way. “The problem, my Poor Little Rich Girl, is money, moolah—not that you’d understand,” and he ruffled my hair and smiled with fond exasperation, his eyes supplicating heaven for patience. I didn’t feel spoiled; I felt neglected. Nor did I choose to step into the role he was holding up for me. I took his hand and said, “But I do understand,” and I did. Then, out of a reflex of good manners, he cocked his head to one side speculatively. “But tell me, Baby Doll, what are you looking for in a man? What kind of sex? Start with that.” “Sex?” “Do you like being screwed—we call that being browned, and the person is a brownie queen.” When I looked embarrassed he politely turned philosophical. “That’s more European, of course. It’s your Continental gentlemen who like to brown each other. We Americans are better known for giving blow jobs. Are you a suck queen?” The pink velvet felt as rough as wool under my legs. “Can I ask a dumb question? Do you actually blow?” “You suck, silly.” Tex turned away to hide his laughter, but his skinny back started quaking and then he was sobbing into his hands the way my Texas grandmother did, a big country woman who’d weep with merriment. I smiled in mild resentment at the wonderful joke I’d become. “You suck, silly, but”—he wiped away his tears—“ooh-ee, I needed that!” Suddenly serious on a downbeat of breath: “But gently, not like a Hoover. The main thing is plenty of spit. The juicier you make it, the better they like it.” He straightened his tie fractionally and flicked a glance at the street. “Will you listen to me, teaching you, and you just jailbait, how to service peter, and me not even a chickenhawk. That’s what we call the young stuff—chicken. Honey, I’ll have to give you a demonstration one of these days; I can’t believe how naive you are.” He sang out the rhyme and gave the impression he was as pleased by his own worldliness as by my innocence. “Me, I was never naive. Your mother was a born slut.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  All kinds of Black bodies appear in Cooper’s work. In one moment, she uses embryonic imagery to describe the race as being “full of the elasticity and hopefulness of youth” and as having a “quickening of its pulses and a glowing of its self-consciousness.” 12 In another moment, Cooper characterizes the race as a twenty-one-year-old Black male, “just at the age of ruddy manhood.” This young man, who is eager to make his way in the world, challenges several stereotypical notions of Black males as lazy, perpetually immature, and unmotivated. She characterizes this state of maturity as a moment of profound possibility for both Black people and for America, and as a critical moment for “retrospection, introspection, and prospection.” 13 This young man’s youthful, healthy, sanguine complexion, exemplified in Cooper’s use of the term ruddy, situates him as a positive addition to American life. Neither a rapist nor a potential criminal, he is a person who now has the freedom to mature to adulthood and pursue life’s possibilities. Her invocation of a young male body ready to encounter the transforming American body politic intentionally concedes the value of Black manhood, in stark opposition to an ideological system bent upon alternately infantilizing or criminalizing Black men. Cooper also daringly “writ[es] her body” onto the pages of her own book. 14 In one incident, she searched for a ladies room at a train station. When she found the bathroom, one door was marked “for ladies” and the other “for colored people.” This created a moment of cognitive and experiential dissonance for Cooper, who was left “wondering under which head I come.” 15 Elizabeth Alexander reads this as a moment of textual resistance for Cooper, who is faced with a choice that will necessarily “eras[e] some crucial part of her identity.” The options presented to her “render her a literally impossible body in her time and space.” 16 In this moment, “Cooper reminds her readers ... that she lives and moves within a physical body with sensations and needs.” 17 The discursive technologies of race that operate in the signs “for ladies” and “for colored” inherently constitute discursive and textual acts of misrecognition for Black women. The only way to achieve any recognition is to insert a body into the text that challenges the identities signified in the labels. The insertion of her body also demonstrates the ways in which public space was designed not only to render Black bodies as inferior, but Black female bodies as unrecognizable and unknowable in civic terms. Where Black women’s bodies had been inherently publicly knowable under the conditions of slavery, after freedom and the conferral of citizenship, Black women did not fully fit into the categories propagated under Jim Crow. Yet, Cooper’s colored and female body ontologically challenged the epistemological claims that those signs made. In other words, Cooper’s textually present Black female body demanded to be known, in the very ways the signs attempted to foreclose.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  6 When He came to Simon Peter, he said to Him, “Lord, are You going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus replied to him, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but you will [fully] understand it later.” 8 Peter said to Him, “You will never wash my feet!” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with Me [we can have nothing to do with each other].” 9 Simon Peter said to Him, “Lord, [in that case, wash] not only my feet, but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “Anyone who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, and is completely clean. And you [My disciples] are clean, but not all of you. ” 11 For He knew who was going to betray Him; for that reason He said, “Not all of you are clean.” 12 So when He had washed their feet and put on His [outer] robe and reclined at the table again, He said to them, “Do you understand what I have done for you? 13 “You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you are right in doing so, for that is who I am. 14 “So if I, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet as well. 15 “For I gave you [this as] an example, so that you should do [in turn] as I did to you. 16 “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than the one who sent him. 17 “If you know these things, you are blessed [happy and favored by God] if you put them into practice [and faithfully do them]. 18 “I am not speaking of all of you. I know whom I have chosen; but [this has happened] in order that the Scripture may be fulfilled: ‘H E WHO EATS M Y BREAD HAS RAISED UP HIS HEEL AGAINST M E [as My enemy].’ [Ps 41:9 ] 19 “From now on I am telling you [what will happen] before it occurs, so that when it does take place you may believe that I am He [who I say I am—the Christ, the Anointed, the Messiah]. 20 “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, the one who receives and welcomes whomever I send receives Me; and the one who receives Me receives Him who sent Me [in that same way].” Jesus Predicts His Betrayal 21 After Jesus had said these things, He was a troubled in spirit, and testified and said, “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, one of you will betray Me and hand Me over.” 22 The disciples began looking at one another, puzzled and disturbed as to whom He could mean. 23 b One of His disciples, whom Jesus loved (esteemed), was c leaning against Jesus’ chest.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  “The Inverted Sex Instinct and Other Questions”While a patient at the Long Island Rest Home, on December 14, 1937, Pauli Murray struggled to understand what might be the cause of her recurring bouts of severe mental distress. She wondered if her self-described “psychosis” was a result of wanting to have her own way in a distressing mental and emotional battle about the nature of her sexual and gender identity.1 Frustrated by the lack of definitive answers from her doctors about why she, a biological female, experienced sexual attraction to women and preferred a masculine gender identity, Murray responded in her relentlessly inquisitive fashion, peppering her caretakers with questions, requests, and demands. Two days into her stay, she was finally ready, after some hesitancy, to name the cause of her “mental and emotional conflict.” In her questionnaire written on December 16, Murray wrote out a series of questions. She wondered about the kind of women she seemed to like—hyperfeminine and maternal. She asked about her own counter-narrative of her gender identity—her belief that she was male—even though it ran counter to existing medical understandings of sexuality and gender.2 She inquired both earnestly and humorously about her preference for masculine clothing and her desire to be a man among men. Perhaps, she concluded, her “problem” was hormonal.3 A civil rights activist, feminist, attorney, Episcopal priest, poet, and writer, Murray’s work on behalf of antiracist and feminist struggles places her within the most active traditions of Black women’s leadership. At the same time, her struggles with queer and nonnormative sex and gender identities no easy identification with either Blackness or womanhood. In this chapter, I juxtapose her early and fervent belief that she was physiologically an intersex person with her later refusal to classify herself in terms of a binary Black-White racial classification system, in order to suggest that her later racial theorizing reflected her desire to expand the universe of racial leadership possibilities for queer-identified Black women. As a young woman who was, in many ways, mentored by Mary Church Terrell and other early-twentieth-century racial leaders, Murray’s life and writing provides an opportunity to consider the intellectual and political legacy of the NACW School of Thought for succeeding generations of Black women race leaders. In particular, because much of the work of the NACW focused on giving form and shape to social conceptions of Black womanhood, Murray’s own struggles to both inhabit the bounds of middle-class racial respectability and to embrace her gender nonconformity to accepted ideals of Black femininity, challenge the terms upon which the conception of the race woman proceeds into the latter half of the century. More precisely, her failure, indeed her refusal, to inhabit the category of respectable racial womanhood in socially accepted terms exposed her to a mode of institutionalized gender disciplining and discrimination that she came to name “Jane Crow.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  In the long winter afternoons when the skies would turn as cold and silvery as fish scales, I’d sit in the painters’ studios and smell the espresso cooking down in nickel-coated pots on hot plates and try to find in their work what they’d secreted there. At first I’d struggle to see things, guess at what was being masked by all that fudge-thick impasto, that haze of flung drops, but I discovered very quickly how “bourgeois” my interpretations—or any interpretations—seemed to the artists. I also learned to say “painter” not “artist.” I was so eager to please (an extension of the high-school urge to Be Popular) that after only a few hasty observations of how the painters responded to each other’s work, I’d mastered their technique. I, too, would sit on a high wood stool, itself piebald with spattered paint, and look and look without saying a word. That was the trick: say nothing, show nothing. A senile radio would be muttering to itself. The smell of oil paint and turpentine (for acrylics had not yet been introduced) stung my eyes and made my nose run. Windows climbed one wall, floor to ceiling, and through them I could see the silver-lined gray clouds boiling and descending like a deity about to abduct an extremely willing shepherd. I looked and looked at the painting, trying to figure out what was there to be seen. Was it a sort of chess problem to be solved, a visual riddle, or was it a cat’s cradle of tensions (I’d heard someone talking about “push” and “pull”)? Or was I being too “intellectual” (a fault, as I’d gathered)? Should I regard the painting as a spiritual X-ray, a glimpse into the painter’s unconscious ecstasy or agony? Or was it something like a football field on which conflicting teams of thoughts and feelings had skirmished and left this muddy aftermath of the action (for people spoke of “action painting”)? The painters themselves weren’t quite sure, I realize now. After all, they were students in a provincial school and had nothing to go on beyond occasional visits to New York and perusals of stylishly inscrutable art magazines in which the celebrated genius of the moment intimidated everyone with grim whimsies (“If a bull wants to sit down in my arena, let him!” a gaunt young art widow, herself a painter, had recklessly declared). One of the student painters I met compared his work to jazz and I dutifully looked at his canvases while listening to the newest bop, those cool blue blips and pop-eyed blasts, muted ballads or zany calisthenics. Another guy, a smilingly ironic man who seemed to be Maria’s lover, said, “It’s a dance. I mean, you know, it’s when, you know, the painter moves toward the easel, like, and that is the real painting, you see, kind of like that.”

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Song also does not mention that Murray was passing as male when she and Mac were arrested.22 When asked by the police at the scene for her name and address, she told them, “Oliver Fleming.” Glenda Gilmore recounts that one of the passengers on the bus that day was a white sociology graduate student from UNC named Harold Garfinkel. The incident made such an impression on Garfinkel that he wrote an essay recounting it called “Color Trouble,” which was published two months later in Opportunity magazine.23 The fact of Pauli Murray’s femaleness was so undetectable as to entirely escape Garfinkel’s notice.24 The complicated gender performances that underlie Murray’s “respectable” autobiographical narration of this incident evince some tensions concerning how dissemblance operates within Black women’s leadership memoirs versus how it operates in public space. Murray’s self-presentation on the bus was an unapologetic public performance of gender nonconformity and female masculinity within the very racialized space—a segregated bus—that adherents to the culture of dissemblance and the politics of respectability would argue demanded Black women’s silence and allegiance to prescribed heterosexual and cisgender (one’s biological sex and gender performance are congruent) norms. However, when she narrated the events years later, Murray left out critical details, rendering her gender performance subordinate to the larger narrative of racial segregation. Though Garfinkel perceived them as a heterosexual couple, it is unclear whether Mac was Murray’s romantic partner. What is clear is that these two young racial activists engaged in gender nonconforming behaviors in the public sphere. Their performances invite us to rethink the limits of the culture of dissemblance and its regulation of Black women in the Black public sphere. Though it is true that nineteenth-century ideas about dissemblance and respectability had shifted significantly by the 1940s, it is also true that there was a demand for women in the civil rights era to be morally upstanding and without reproach. Gender nonconformity and any appearance of queer sexual identity would have been a significant violation of socially acceptable norms for Black women, especially those engaged in activist work. What emerges, then, is a more dynamic picture of the range of ways race women engaged in the public sphere and a challenge to the notion that women who aspired to race leadership never performed intimate subjectivity in public. The regime of respectability, which called into being a culture of dissemblance, proceeded upon the fundamental belief that it was detrimental for Black women to actively signal a sexual or erotic self in public, because such significations would make them vulnerable to rape. But Murray’s performance raises the question of gender passing as a form of resistance to the immediate threat of rape. It also highlights the inherent heteronorms and cisgender identity performances implied by respectability politics. How do these two women’s very public performances of queer Black female sexuality disrupt the narrative of racial (hetero)respectability? How did sexuality affect one’s ability to become a successful race woman?

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  12 Murray fundamentally rejected the idea that a “scientific” diagnosis was intrinsically accurate and, though she could not precisely articulate why, seemed to intuitively understand some form of disconnect between how her sexuality was being described (i.e., diagnosed) and what it actually was. As Michel Foucault has so carefully documented, homosexuality was a discursive invention, “a category ... constituted to codify normal and abnormal sexualities from the moment it was characterized” in 1870. 13 Murray tried at different turns to resist each of these discourses: first, rejecting science in favor of a belief in herself; next embracing science rather than psychiatry, which would have labeled her as deviant; and finally, turning to religious explanations coupled with experimental science. Though Murray evinced a tension at the labels that religion, science, and psychoanalysis all sought to impose upon her, she was also mired in the discursive in a way that absolutely exasperated her. The questionnaires in her archive, coupled with the copious amounts of research she did about available scientific treatments, demonstrate both legibly and tangibly that race women’s use of embodied discourse as a textual strategy was deeply informed by struggle and contestation. Although prior race women used embodied discourse to contest assertions of Black inferiority, the justifications for lynching, and the attempt to malign Black women’s morals, Murray literally struggled to make her masculine gender identity and her female sexual physiology adhere to accepted scientific categories. As Foucault has made clear, scientific categories of sexuality are discursive constructions that shape how we live and experience these identities. Whereas nineteenth-century race women used their autobiographies, speeches, and other writings to challenge derogatory social discourses about Black womanhood, Murray—in her private correspondence to doctors, campaign for hormone therapy, and later attempts to be admitted to the all-male Harvard Law School, along with her two autobiographies—used embodied discourse and, more specifically, the schisms around how she experienced her own embodiment, as a textual and social praxis that allowed her both to demonstrate her fitness for received social categories and also alternately to challenge those same gender and sexual categories. Though transgender people existed, the contemporary category of transgender or trans simply did not exist in any medically ascertainable form by 1940. 14 By challenging existing categories of sexual orientation, gender identity, and biological sex, Murray’s struggle presaged the very debates that would take place one decade later between John Money and other sexologists who began to grapple with the meaning of homosexuality, the relationship of gender to sex, the meanings of intersexuality and hermaphroditism, and a whole host of other terms. Unfortunately, Murray’s own ascent to race leadership outpaced advances in the scientific scholarship on biological sex and transgender identity, limiting her options and forcing her to make difficult decisions about her identity. She also struggled to reconcile her gender conflicts with her racial identity, wondering if perhaps she was really experiencing some kind of sublimated race conflict and an emotional response to racial segregation and repression.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Ps 16:10 ] 23 Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in His name [identifying themselves with Him] after seeing His signs (attesting miracles) which He was doing. 24 But Jesus, for His part, did not entrust Himself to them, because He knew all people [and understood the e superficiality and fickleness of human nature], 25 and He did not need anyone to testify concerning man [and human nature], for He Himself knew what was in man [in their hearts—in the very core of their being]. [1 Sam 16:7 ] John 3 The New Birth 1 N OW THERE was a certain man among the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler (member of the Sanhedrin) among the Jews, 2 who came to Jesus at night and said to Him, “Rabbi (Teacher), we know [without any doubt] that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs [these wonders, these attesting miracles] that You do unless God is with him.” 3 Jesus answered him, “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, unless a person is born again [reborn from above—spiritually transformed, renewed, sanctified], he cannot [ever] see and experience the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born, can he?” 5 Jesus answered, “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot [ever] enter the kingdom of God. [Ezek 36:25–27 ] 6 “That which is born of the flesh is flesh [the physical is merely physical], and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 “Do not be surprised that I have told you, ‘You must be born again [reborn from above—spiritually transformed, renewed, sanctified].’ 8 “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 9 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can these things be possible? ” 10 Jesus replied, “You are the [great and well-known] teacher of Israel, and yet you do not know nor understand these things [from Scripture]? 11 “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, we speak only of what we [absolutely] know and testify about what we have [actually] seen [as eyewitnesses]; and [still] you [reject our evidence and] do not accept our testimony. 12 “If I told you earthly things [that is, things that happen right here on earth] and you do not believe, how will you believe and trust Me if I tell you heavenly things? 13 “No one has gone up into heaven, but there is One who came down from heaven, the Son of Man [Himself—whose home is in heaven].

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Pauli Murray, a mid-twentieth-century race woman problematizes our easy imposition of the categories of race and womanhood on her body. While she is critically important to the intellectual histories of Civil Rights, the Women’s Movement, and Black feminism, she herself was also deeply ambivalent about what it meant to be Black and what it meant to be a woman. Thus, she attempted to understand her actual corporeal body within available social and scientific discourses, with limited results. Ultimately, while she demonstrated the gendered dimensions of Jim Crow segregation by pointing us to Jane Crow, and while she demonstrated that America’s past is more peculiar than exceptional, she also confronted profound limitations as she attempted to embody the social discourses around race and gender through which she was supposed to understand herself. Thus, she reasoned from race, through American peculiarity, toward a profoundly queer and embodied conception of what it meant to be Jane Crow. At the height of her struggle over what it meant to Black, African American communities renewed their debate about the role of women in intellectual and political struggle. Murray’s own defiant opposition to the racial and sexual politics of the Black Power era serve as a backdrop for the next chapter, which offers a picture of how Black communities both contested and constructed leadership roles for women during the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power. CHAPTER 4 The Problems and Possibilities of the Negro Woman IntellectualNegro women intellectuals share two responsibilities: to really be an intellectual (although she may not eat well, have friends and be credited with loose screws) and to help shape a new definition of femininity. —Ponchitta Pierce, Ebony Magazine (1966) In 1966, the year that “Black Power” replaced “Freedom Now” as the dominant slogan of the Civil Rights movement, Black communities struggled to determine the best leadership strategies for racial advancement. One year earlier, the infamous Moynihan Report had branded Black women as the denizens of Black racial pathology because of their alleged iron-fisted matriarchal rule of Black families. Whereas Black women’s ideas about building strong Black families had been the driving force of their political organizing in women’s clubs in the first half of the twentieth century, the Moynihan report indicated that the uplift infrastructure Black women had so carefully built had crumbled. Along with it came a resurgence of the cultural distrust of Black women’s political ideas and leadership abilities. The performance of respectable racial manhood and womanhood had failed to foster Black people’s full assimilation into U.S. civil society.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  CHAPTER 3 Queering Jane Crow Pauli Murray’s Quest for an Unhyphenated Identity “The Inverted Sex Instinct and Other Questions” While a patient at the Long Island Rest Home, on December 14, 1937, Pauli Murray struggled to understand what might be the cause of her recurring bouts of severe mental distress. She wondered if her self-described “psychosis” was a result of wanting to have her own way in a distressing mental and emotional battle about the nature of her sexual and gender identity. 1 Frustrated by the lack of definitive answers from her doctors about why she, a biological female, experienced sexual attraction to women and preferred a masculine gender identity, Murray responded in her relentlessly inquisitive fashion, peppering her caretakers with questions, requests, and demands. Two days into her stay, she was finally ready, after some hesitancy, to name the cause of her “mental and emotional conflict.” In her questionnaire written on December 16, Murray wrote out a series of questions. She wondered about the kind of women she seemed to like—hyperfeminine and maternal. She asked about her own counter-narrative of her gender identity—her belief that she was male—even though it ran counter to existing medical understandings of sexuality and gender. 2 She inquired both earnestly and humorously about her preference for masculine clothing and her desire to be a man among men. Perhaps, she concluded, her “problem” was hormonal. 3 A civil rights activist, feminist, attorney, Episcopal priest, poet, and writer, Murray’s work on behalf of antiracist and feminist struggles places her within the most active traditions of Black women’s leadership. At the same time, her struggles with queer and nonnormative sex and gender identities no easy identification with either Blackness or womanhood. In this chapter, I juxtapose her early and fervent belief that she was physiologically an intersex person with her later refusal to classify herself in terms of a binary Black-White racial classification system, in order to suggest that her later racial theorizing reflected her desire to expand the universe of racial leadership possibilities for queer-identified Black women. As a young woman who was, in many ways, mentored by Mary Church Terrell and other early-twentieth-century racial leaders, Murray’s life and writing provides an opportunity to consider the intellectual and political legacy of the NACW School of Thought for succeeding generations of Black women race leaders. In particular, because much of the work of the NACW focused on giving form and shape to social conceptions of Black womanhood, Murray’s own struggles to both inhabit the bounds of middle-class racial respectability and to embrace her gender nonconformity to accepted ideals of Black femininity, challenge the terms upon which the conception of the race woman proceeds into the latter half of the century.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Shortly after we arrived, we received letters of greeting from three generals, based in Hawaii, Germany, and France, each welcoming me to their post. The initial confusion about my posting led to many of our belongings being lost somewhere in transit, so we truly had a new start—we bought all our furniture and bedding from a garage sale in a single day. My army duty was undemanding. I spent most of my time in an inpatient unit with patients coming from various Pacific bases. In 1960, the Vietnam War was yet to come, but many of our patients had seen unofficial military action in Laos. Most of those with serious mental illness had already been screened out and sent directly to stateside hospitals. Hence, many of our patients were young men who were not psychotic but pretended to be, hoping to get a discharge. One of my first patients, a sergeant with nineteen years of service who was near retirement, had been arrested for drinking while on duty—a serious charge that might threaten his retirement status and pension. He came to me for an examination and incorrectly answered each question I asked. But every one of his answers was so close to the truth that it seemed that some part of his mind knew the correct answer: six times seven was forty-one, Christmas Day was December 26, a table had five legs. I had never seen such a case before, and through speaking to colleagues and searching the literature I learned it was a classic case of the Ganser syndrome (or, as it is often known, the syndrome of approximate answers), a type of factitious disorder in which the patient mimics an illness when he is not really sick but may be trying to avoid responsibility for some illicit act. I spent much time with him in his four-day stay (patients who needed longer hospitalization were shipped back to the continental United States), but could never make contact with his non-deceiving self. The really strange part, as I learned from my study of the literature on the long-term follow-up, was that a high percentage of Ganser patients did, in fact, develop a true psychotic disorder years later! Every day we had to make decisions as to whether some soldier was truly mentally ill or faking it in order to get a medical discharge. Almost every patient that came to us wanted out of the army or navy or marines—we treated all branches of the military—and my colleagues and I were troubled by the arbitrariness of our decision-making process: guidelines were unclear, and there were times when we were inconsistent in our recommendations. The duty requirements were exceedingly light compared to my internship and residency: after four years of being on call evenings and weekends, I felt I was on a two-year holiday.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Lacan continues the quotation cited above: Paradoxical as this formulation might seem, it is in order to be the phallus, that is, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the one to whom she addresses her demand for love. Certainly we should not forget that the organ invested with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish. (84) If this unnamed “organ,” presumably the penis (treated like the Hebraic Yahweh, never to be spoken), is a fetish, why should it be that we might so easily forget it, as Lacan himself assumes? And what is the “essential part of her femininity” that must be rejected? Is it the, again, unnamed part which, once rejected, appears as a lack? Or is it the lack itself that must be rejected, so that she might appears as the Phallus itself? Is the unnameability of this “essential part” the same unnameability that attends the male “organ” that we are always in danger of forgetting? Is this precisely that forgetfulness that constitutes the repression at the core of feminine masquerade? Is it a presumed masculinity that must be forfeited in order to appear as the lack that confirms and, therefore, is the Phallus, or is it a phallic possibility, that must be negated in order to be that lack that confirms? Lacan clarifies his own position as he remarks that “the function of the mask ... dominates the identifications through which refusals of love are resolved” (85). In other words, the mask is part of the incorporative strategy of melancholy, the taking on of attributes of the object/Other that is lost, where loss is the consequence of a refusal of love. 19 That the mask “dominates” as well as “resolves” these refusals suggests that appropriation is the strategy through which those refusals are themselves refused, a double negation that redoubles the structure of identity through the melancholic absorption of the one who is, in effect, twice lost. Significantly, Lacan locates the discussion of the mask in conjunction with an account of female homosexuality. He claims that “the orientation of feminine homosexuality, as observation shows, follows from a disappointment which reenforces the side of the demand for love” (85). Who is observing and what is being observed are conveniently elided here, but Lacan takes his commentary to be obvious to anyone who cares to look. What one sees through “observation” is the founding disappointment of the female homosexual, where this disappointment recalls the refusals that are dominated/resolved through masquerade. One also “observes” somehow that the female homosexual is subject to a strengthened idealization, a demand for love that is pursued at the expense of desire.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The relationship between the unknowable God and the incarnate Logos, who had brought all things into existence, must, therefore, be entirely different from a relationship between two created beings. If, like the Arians, you simply thought of God as another being, albeit bigger and better than us, then it was absolutely impossible for God to become human. It was only because we had no idea what God was that we could say that God had been in the man Jesus. It was also impossible to say that God’s substance was not in Christ, because we could not identify the ousia of God; it lay completely beyond our ken, so we did not know what we were denying. Christians would not have been able to experience the “deification” of theosis or even imagine the unknowable God unless God had—in some unfathomable way—taken the initiative and entered the realm of fragile creatures. “The Word became human that we might become divine,” Athanasius wrote in his treatise On the Incarnation; “he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father.”18 When we looked at the man Jesus, therefore, we had a partial glimpse of the otherwise unknowable God, and God’s Spirit, an immanent presence within us, enabled us to recognize this. Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene and summoned all the bishops to Nicaea in Asia Minor on May 20, 325. Athanasius managed to impose his views on the delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ, the Word, had not been created but had been begotten “in an ineffable, indescribable manner” from the ousia of the Father—not from nothingness like everything else. So he was “from God” in an entirely different manner from all other creatures.19 The paradoxical terminology of the Nicene statement revealed the new emphasis on the absolute unknowability of the “ineffable, indescribable” God.20 But this authoritative ruling solved nothing. Because of imperial pressure, all the delegates except Arius and two of his colleagues signed the statement, but once they had returned to their dioceses, they continued to teach as they had always done—for the most part midway between Arius and Athanasius. This attempt to impose a uniform belief on the bishops and the faithful was counterproductive. Nicaea led to another fifty years of acrimony, divisions, conciliar deliberations, and even to violence, as creedal orthodoxy became politicized. The Nicene Council would eventually become a symbol of orthodoxy, but it would be centuries before Athanasius’s formula was restated in a form that Christians were willing to accept—and even then there was no uniformity.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Even the inner circle of apostles lacked pistis. They made no comment at all when Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes; and when they saw him walking on water, Mark tells us, they were “utterly and completely dumbfounded … their minds were closed.”53 Matthew relates that the disciples did indeed bow down before him after this miracle, crying: “Truly, you are the Son of God,”54 but in no time at all Jesus had to rebuke them for their lack of faith.55 The miracle stories probably reflect the disciples’ understanding of these events after the resurrection apparitions. With hindsight, they could see that God had already been working through Jesus to usher in the Kingdom, when God would vanquish the demons that caused suffering, sickness, and death and trample the destructive powers of chaos underfoot.56 They did not think that Jesus was God, so did not argue that these miracles proved his divinity. But after the resurrection they were convinced that like any person of pistis, Jesus had been able to call upon God’s dunamis when he stilled the storm at sea and walked on the windswept waters. The rabbis knew that miracles proved nothing. One day, during the early years at Yavneh, Rabbi Eliezer was engaged in a fierce argument about a legal ruling (halakah) arising from the Torah. When his colleagues refused to accept his opinion, he asked God to prove his point with a series of miracles. A carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord, water in a nearby canal flowed backward, and the walls of the house of studies caved in, as if on the point of collapse. But the rabbis remained unconvinced and seemed somewhat disapproving of this divine extravaganza. In desperation, Rabbi Eliezer asked for a bat qol, a heavenly voice, to support his case, and obligingly a celestial voice cried, “What have you against Rabbi Eliezer? The halakah is always as he says.” Unimpressed, Rabbi Joshua simply quoted God’s own Torah back to him: “It is not in heaven.”57 The Torah was no longer the property of heaven; it had descended to earth on Mount Sinai and was now enshrined in the heart of every Jew. So “we pay no attention to a bat qol,“ he concluded firmly. It was said that when God heard this, he laughed and said, “My children have conquered me.” They had grown up. Instead of meekly accepting opinions foisted on them from above, they were thinking for themselves.58

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  A few people pointed out something really important about situations like these, though, and it’s that we don’t actually know why Anne’s friend cut off contact. A lot of the responders assumed it was because she didn’t want the relationship anymore. Others assumed it was because she was immature, manipulative, or even wanted Anne to beg for her friendship. Those are all possible, but there might be other reasons too. Remember, anger can be expressed in a lot of different ways, and a person’s expression style might not be intentional or planned. It may simply be what they are comfortable with or what they learned was the best way to express. What’s Driving It? It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as Anne’s situation above. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the person just flat-out avoids you. They don’t respond to calls, emails, and texts, and they ignore you when they see you in person. Alternatively, maybe they have just pulled back on their involvement with you, but not cut you off completely. They might still respond to you, but it’s become increasingly impersonal and your interactions are largely superficial compared to how they once were. Their anger toward you has had long-term negative effects that derailed the relationship. But the cause might not be what you think (at least, it might be more complicated than seems obvious at first). Yes, it started with a disagreement that led to anger, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the reason they have cut off contact is just that anger. When people stop communicating the way Anne’s friend did, it might be because they are mad at you, or it might be something else. Quick caveat, though, that almost all of the research on this topic has looked at “ghosting” * in romantic relationships – where one partner abruptly disappears instead of ending the relationship – so we need to extrapolate from that to other types of relationships. Here are a few different possible explanations. Embarrassment