There's that layering of selves that we can have with someone else across a long relationship. I go to the baths, the Korean spa. I love looking at the maps of people's bodies. The women have so many mastectomy scars and ectopic pregnancy scars and stretch marks, and all these things are amazing and wondrous to me. I guess I find it stranger not to attend to flux than to attend to it. But in a relationship it's also scary - you don't know where you're going to end up when you go through change.
Maggie NelsonIn life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.
Maggie NelsonThere's that layering of selves that we can have with someone else across a long relationship. I go to the baths, the Korean spa. I love looking at the maps of people's bodies. The women have so many mastectomy scars and ectopic pregnancy scars and stretch marks, and all these things are amazing and wondrous to me. I guess I find it stranger not to attend to flux than to attend to it. But in a relationship it's also scary - you don't know where you're going to end up when you go through change.
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 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 know that a lot of feminist fears about the trans movement have been, "Wait, we never got to the part where we focus on women! We tried for a minute, but we don't want to lose the category all of a sudden. We haven't heard yet from the females with children called mothers, we haven't heard yet from all these groups!" On the one hand I'm very sympathetic to that, but the category of Women or Mothers, any of these categories, are on shifting sands and always have been.
Maggie NelsonMost of the bio men on earth were born to women, so it's pretty ordinary! But I think because I had come from a matriarchy - my father died when I was young, and I only have a sister and a stepsister - when I told my mom and my sister that I was having a boy, they were both like, "That does not compute within our family relation!" It was like, "Girls only here!" Now that all seems very strange to me.
Maggie Nelson