I remember…
A queer childhood means never growing up, being HAUNTED.
The Troyan Horse. Is a tree.
CLICK HERE FOR A LINK TO AN ARTICLE I WROTE ON STALLGÄNGET PÅ TUVA
I find the writings of Elsbeth Probyn. There is a text called:
Girls and Girls and Girls and Horses: Queer Images of Singularity and Desire
(I don’t know what to do with it I feel soo emotional so I just… here are some quotes and my thoughts I capital letters about it if the notes are incomprehensible its because I translated from Swedish and some things might have gotten lost in translation BUT THAT IS EXACTLY THE POINT because I think being with horses is also a trans-late-ion…)
I want to briefly outline a model of thinking identity through singular images of desire issues of 'be- longing.' In fact, I find the term 'identity' rather staid; 'be-longing' may be kitch, but it captures for me some of the movement of desire, longing, nostalgia, and sheer 'being' caught up in the processes of wanting to be. Thus, this is a project of being and longing, as a girl within a culture of girls, as a woman within the historied line of desiring other women (mounted or not)
TO RETURN, GIRL-LORE, PUBERTY OR PRE-PUBERTY, THE TEXTS ON HORSES AND GIRLS THE MOVEMENT FROM FANTASY TO REALITY: THE VERY DREAMY NATURE OF THE HORSE GIRL CONCEPT, THE DREAM THAT SERVES AS MATERIAL FOR DESIRE.
THAT THERE ARE NO BOYS. // DET ATT INGA POJKAR FINNS. I can only remember girls and girls together with horses, and not a boy to be seen
I THINK I CAN UNDERSTAND THIS MY LONGING FOR HORSES AS A GROWING-SIDEWAYS, A CHILDHOOD THAT NEVER ENDS BECAUSE THE GIRL'S LOVE FOR THE HORSE IS SUPPOSED TO TURN INTO BOY-CRAZY, AND I FUCK IN TIME.
THIS: In my own queer route through adolescence to thirty something-dom, I never got over my best friend and it took me a hell- ishly long time to wend my way out of compulsory hetero-steadiness in order to realize the significance of women and women and me. The line about owning/being a horse vividly recalls for me the image of how girls get together with girls around horses and of how my best friend and I seemingly consciously chose each other and our ponies over boys.
body against body against body
If in Colette's description, lesbian movement flows more freely once mounted, then, in The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall substitutes horses for girls in order to aid the flow of lesbian desire. Hall effectively tran- substantiates the body of Stephen Gordon's first object of desire, Collins, the housemaid, with that of her first horse: "Laying her cheek against his firm neck, she said softly: 'You're not you any more, you're Collins"' (42). As Hall puts it, "Collins was comfortably transmigrated" (42). In a later passage, horse and desire are folded upon themselves, as body upon body converse "in a quiet language having very few words but many small sounds and many small movements, that meant much more than word" (Hall cited in Whitlock, 571). As Alison Hennegan aptly states, it is a "description that can easily apply to satisfactory love-making" (cited in Whitlock, 571).
HOW I REALLY REMEMBER THESE PASSAGES FROM THE BOOK. HOW YOU LEARN TO FORGET, HOW YOU LEARN NOT TO READ AS LOVE, HOW YOU LEARN TO LAUGH AT EMOTIONS.
Quite simply, The Well of Loneliness makes clear that inverts are ultimately doomed to asexuality even if, following Havelock Ellis, they are of the natural order. As Jean Radford puts it, "though her inverted love is God- given, she [Stephen] is not, it seems, allowed to enjoy it" (107). She is, however, allowed to enjoy her love for women through her horse. While Hall is caught in the discourse of her time, she nonetheless effects an important discursive shift. THE GOD-GIVEN LOVE: I THINK OF THE HORSE AND THE GIRL - AS A GOD, ONLY A GOD MAY YOU SUBMIT TO.
De Lauretis raises the paradox (and at the same time the very condition of lesbian representation) of escaping gender by either "so disguis[ing] erotic and sexual experience as to suppress any representation of its specificity" or "by fully embrac[ing] gender, if by replacing femaleness with masculinity, as in the case of Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness, and so risk to collapse lesbian homosexuality into hommo-sexuality" (160). That Hall effects this collapse is undeniable. However, I would also argue that the displacement of relations of lesbian desire from women to horses produces images of "coupled ones that do not impale themselves on the poles of sexual difference or metaphysical values, but constantly seduce the sign system" (Case, cited in de Lauretis, 168). WHAT TO DO WITH THE SIGN SYSTEM ::: EXECUTE.
In this scenario, the horse returns as a sign, as an interruption of the sexual relation of women to women. Against this reading, I want to propose another way of seeing images (equine and other), hence, another way of reading lesbian desire. To do so I will turn to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and consider the rhizomatic work of specific images. The rhizome is the regime of pure multiplicities: "an arrangement [that] in its multiplicity forcibly works on both semiotic flows, material flows and social flows" (Guattari, 65). It is thus an arrangement that no longer holds with the structuring terms, what Deleuze and Guattari call the 'three errors' of lack, law and signifier: "from the moment lack is reintroduced into desire, all of desir- ing production is crushed, reduced to being no more than the production of fantasy; but the sign does not produce fantasies, it is a production of the real and a position of desire within reality" (Deleuze and Guattari, 111-112). Perhaps not surprisingly, the Qukbkcoise lesbian writer, Nicole Brossard articulates this idea in a rather more elegant way when she states: "the image is a vital resource that forms complex propositions from simple and isolated elements. Each time an image relays desire, this image thinks, with unsuspected vitality, the drift of meaning. So it is that images penetrate the solid matter of our ideas without our knowledge" (196)
THINK OF THIS IN RELATION TO LISPECTOR'S AND CARRINGTON'S (Leonora Carrington - Wikipedia) HORSES, AS IMAGES, AND FURBERG'S IMAGES, THE BEAUTIFUL IMAGE, THE IMAGE AS AN IMAGE, A PAINTING, WANTING AN IMAGE, BEING DEPENDENT ON THE IMAGE ---.
THIS: DRAWING HORSES!!!
In this way, the image becomes that with which we think and feel our way from body to body, as vectors thrust forward by the energies created in their different relationships. The critical mode that can capture this movement is one that I call, after Lee Lynch's descrip- tion of "cruising the libraries," a project of cruising images (410) IS THIS WHAT I DO IN MY READING WHEN I CAN ONLY READ HORSES, WHEN HORSES ARE IN ALL TEXTS!
As Le Doeuff argues, if one looks carefully at a given philosophical or discursive system, one comes across rather errant images, images that refer to other images and knowledges outside of the text. In this movement, they allow us to see what the system cannot bring itself to say. Thus, as we consider the Hall's images of horses from our current realities, we can see them winking to the lesbian sexual relations that Hall herself could only formulate as inversion. WHAT CANNOT (YET) BE ARTICULATED.
To return to the image with which I began, images of girls and girls and horses have no essence, no fixed reference; they may individuate but they are not individual, they may be common but they are not universal. While they should not be allowed to condense into categorized notions of being, they can, however, express longing; they do throw us forward into other relations of becoming. For example, in a poem by Ruthann Robson, an image of a "stampede of wild horses" throws the narrator forward into a realization "that what you want is to become."
Or again, in Gloria Anzaldua's story of a woman who finally realizes she can love her lover, the final image is one of how "It would start here. She would eat horses, she would let horses eat her" (388). Images of hope and horses. Images as vectors of be-longing, as modes of carrying me over from me to you. Images creating and expressing what Foucault called the sorts "of relationships we can set up, invent, multiply or modify through our homosexuality" (4). Images that carry with them the singularity of my mother's subjunctive statement: "if wishes were horses, women would ride."
THIS POEM, SHE WHO WAS PART HORSE - EAT THE HORSE AND LET IT EAT YOU (I'LL READ MORE ABOUT THE FOOD, I THINK PROBYN WROTE ABOUT THE FOOD... WHAT TO DO WITH THE HOPE - THE JUMPING HORSES....
I borrow all other texts by probyn… I take this notes. (it’s al about horses)
SEXY BODIES: anthology… sexuality: not predefined. Ist RISK. Not knowing before ... the text makes sex ... finding new alliances… the strange & bizarre.
2: desire for me is not a metaphor it is a method of doing things, of getting places
// Elizabeth grosz: animal sex – s. 294: erotic desire… is a mode of surface contact w. things & substances, with a world, that engenders and induces transformations, intensifications, a becoming something other.
CARNAL APPETITES.. FOODSEXIDENTITIES. :: 7: eating. Feelings, hopes, pleasures, worries.
D&G…. what to do w them… bodies ideologies 59: when is eating sex? Eating the other (a reopening of this, ?? ) carole adams: that meat is the patriarchy. Shame, disgust and anorexia...
BLUSH
Writing against the pride movement...:::: shame upon shame....
Writing shame. 130: there is a shame in being highly interested in something and unable to convey it to others…
/// academic anxiety!!!///
SEXING THE SELF:: ang JAGET!!! Kön & jag… What to do with oneself?
CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO READ, JUST BROWSE A LITTLE. FEEL A STRONG INTEREST BUT HAVE NO ENERGY AT ALL. CAN'T STAND READING BOOKS, CAN ONLY READ ON THE COMPUTER, SHAME.... OH. WANT TO READ BUT CAN'T BE BOTHERED. THE HUNT. THE HORSE. SHAME. THE FOOD. IT MOVES ALL THE TIME AROUND WHAT IS ME AND MY INTEREST... THE LESBIAN DESIRE IS WHAT HAS FUCKED ME UP IN THIS SHAME THIS MEASURING THIS M. SURFACES O DESIRE, AND WRITING, MUST WRITE THE SHAME.
SKAMMEN.
