The Concrete Angel-Demon
Coming out of the garage and into the house
Dear friends,
This month is Pride and Night Vision Goggles is now listed over on the QStack directory, which has started me thinking about my own relationship to my bisexuality and its role in Night Vision Goggles.
Night Vision Goggles is a newsletter about seeing the complexities of how sexism and misogyny work in the shadows. Understanding these phenomena only in terms of institutional categories and statistics isn’t enough because misogyny involves dynamics with personal texture that fall through the cracks of policy.
But this is true of many other facets of life as well. We move through the public world in ways that are governed in large part by dynamics that live in the shadows, in the realms we consider “private,” and which are therefore inadmissible into public discourse despite their influence.
One of those dynamics is sexuality, and Pride is, it seems to me, an explicit refusal of the idea that what is private and shadowy is separable from public life. This is the conviction behind Night Vision Goggles as well.
If Kate Manne is right that misogyny is the law-enforcement arm of patriarchy, the punishments by which we keep a gender-based order in place, then my bisexual identity, insofar as it is an assault on that order, is under threat from misogyny as well. Bisexuality has the capacity to disrupt the gendered expectations that are so often handed to us through the norms of presumed heterosexuality so I should consider it a source of power in my attempts to loosen the scripts that hold me hostage.
For a variety of reasons, however, including patriarchal pressures, I have tended to keep it in the shadows. I have written the following reflection as a way to probe those shadows. Like my other more intimate essays, it’s behind a paywall to protect some people, but if you’re not able to pay and would like to read it, just let me know.
The Concrete Angel-Demon
My grandmother, like most members of my dad’s family, is an artist. When I think of her style, the word that comes to mind is “zany.” Her work - whether paintings, tapestries, sculptures, or paper-mache furniture - is full of princess-pink alien tentacles, black-and-white chequered patterns, hanging crystals, and female-presenting mimes with long curly lower lashes. I loved going to her house when I was a kid. I’ve always loved her work. I still do.