I think writing kind of burns out the flaming question. Sometimes it might feel like when you're living with certain paradoxes and they're unarticulated, you feel pressure to choose. I feel more comfortable living in the paradoxes that I've named and laid out, whereas when I started they might have felt like real agitations. At least I see them more clearly after having sketched them for myself and made a place to stand in relationship to them that felt okay enough to last through the course of a book.
Maggie Nelsonlabels can be fun! Some people are like, "As a card-carrying bear, where I also have a little bit of fairy in me..." People have fun collaging these; there's a fun people have with their identifications. The irony of them can be lost if you're just wholeheartedly anti-identitarian.
Maggie NelsonI feel excited in that I think boys born to feminists have a leg up. At least, the ones I've met seem like they do. There's something really vital about that exchange. I think I'd only imagined, beforehand, handing down a feminism to a young girl. But I'm newly excited by the challenge of raising a boy.
Maggie NelsonWhenever you get involved with talking about rights, you're talking about being a citizen. You're talking about being a citizen in capitalism; you're talking about what rights are granted to what identities, under what laws, and all that is a big mix. Marriage is, among many other things, a formality to channel capital through a family. And that's why the big DOMA lawsuit was about paying too many taxes! "I wouldn't have had to pay all these taxes if Theodora had been Theo" - that was the big tagline. It's all about protecting assets.
Maggie NelsonI love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.
Maggie Nelson