How we are seen

I've been doing a lot of reading/writing/thinking about identity lately, how we construct our ideas of self, how we discern how other people are constructing us and how we coordinate those dynamics. Some of it is in very personal contexts ("I am the strong one") and some of it is about how we interpret and enact more collective identities -- nationality, queerness, what it means to be female.

Yesterday I bought something that lets me "perform female gender," as Judith Butler would have it, at a level that I've never attempted before -- gold strappy tall party sandals. A convergence of all sorts of different contexts -- B's upcoming wedding I need black tie for, a yen for a Betsey Johnson dress for years and suddenly finding myself right at the store after a lunch, too much Sex and the City, playing with different versions of self, including the one that my online pals are jokingly calling StraightCate. (Who is, according to my ex, "fancy"). Tropes of an exploration of a kind of version of self that might be open to possibilities I've never contemplated before.

I was buying the shoes (and a fantastic, too expensive, pair of dresses, about which no more will be said) at the same time that a little yellowed newspaper clipping lay on my desk. One of the bits of ephemera I retrieved from my grandmother's house after the funeral, it's the newspaper obit from my grandmother's mother. It reads:

Mrs. Calixte Seguin
With her brother, Very Rev. Raymond Piche, OP of Fall River, Mass., officiating, funeral services were held in Assumption Church on Wednesday for Mrs. Calixte Seguin, lifelong resident of this district, who died Saturday at her home, 3229 Baby Street, after a long illness.

Mrs. Seguin's nephew, rev. Norbert Chateau of Detroit, assisted as Deacon... [long list of priests, deacons and subdeacons who were all part of the funeral mass].

Ladies of the Altar Society of which she was a member attended in a body. Pallbearers were her nephews: Ernest Piche, Alvin Piche, Paul Piche, Hector Renaud, Arthur Langlois and Ernest Seguin. Burial was in Assumption Cemetary.

**

Nowhere. No. Where. in the obit does it actually mention her actual NAME. Maria Seguin, nee Piché. Nor her three children. Nor her grandchildren. It locates her inside her husband's identity, within a huge phalanx of priests and other male representatives of the church, her male relatives who were her pallbearers. It mentions a clump of ladies as a body, also Church related.

Despite my fairly extensive reading on the history of marriage, and my finely honed interpretation of the possibilities and limits of the institution, and my lengthy engagement with the implications for the queer world of the legalization of marriage, this obit was shocking to me. This was 1944, when my parents were both young children, and in the public record, in the narrative that sums up her life, her identity was completely subsumed to the men of her world.

I try to put my strappy little sandals with the gold bows in the same world as this obit where my great grandmother doesn't even get a name or any details from the life she lived out, only the institutions she was situated in. The truism is about the depth of change over those decades. Neither marriage nor the Church look anything like they did six decades ago in terms of how they structure people's lives.

On one level, the institutions still have the same basic frameworks and literal meaning -- and in another, they have a completely different social force. It provides an interesting dilemma for us, in the 00s or whatever we're calling this decade. We can recoil from the institutions, recognizing the historical force and purpose of them, rejecting the tenets wholesale -- and we can also engage with them as fluid constructs, living embodiments of the way that contexts shift and the meaning of what we take for granted shifts.

All of my work on same sex marriage left me with some unease about a wholehearted embracing of an institution that a mere six decades ago pretty much erased my great-grandmother's identity. And, it's also clear that that version of marriage was part of its specific historical context. Recognizing the historical version of marriage and its force and engaging with it as a place to look at our relationship paradigms, what we mean when we "do" commitment, provocations to what we take for granted about gender -- we can also reinterpret the institutions.

I'm not sure that at any previous point in my life I would have been so unadulteratedly pleased to be witness to a fairly traditional marriage ceremony, would enjoy the costuming. But I'm really happy to be part of B's wedding. Maybe the point is that the revolution of the past half century is that we can also hold multiple truths in the same fist, making a world where my dykely self forged over two decades can coexist with straightcate and her fancy shoes, making me, in context, constantly shifting.