Inappropriation Page 6

  So now that that is underway, Ziggy feels ready to learn more about her new culture. She dives into some rudimentary online reading—from Dictionary.com to Wikipedia to Teen Vogue’s advice column. Ziggy learns the categories, studies their criteria, then wades deeper into the memey esoterica of queer social media, where she discovers many more variations. You can have a vagina, dress like a woman, and still identify as agender. You can call yourself a heteroromantic homosexual, meaning you have crushes on the opposite gender but only have sex with your own. You can be a homoromantic pansexual, denoting, Ziggy thinks, a boy who prefers cuddling boys but will happily have sex with everyone. There are demisexuals, who only sleep with people they have a strong emotional connection with. Some of the labels seem a little premature. Heteroromantic asexual just sounds like a twelve-year-old girl who still plays with Ken and Barbie.

  Tessa has talked of a site where men go to share their fears and dreams in a rich patois, dense with meanings, harrowing with misogyny. A place that seeks to critique, intimidate, and silence. A place where excluded white men go to exclude. “Stay away from Reddit,” Tessa has warned. “It’s like online dating for date rapists.” Ziggy has mostly heeded her friend’s advice. But sometimes Jake leaves the home page open on the family PC, and scanning the website’s side panel, Ziggy has noticed other more tolerant subreddits. Typing in a few key words, she quickly finds a message board for queer women of color. Most of the users are American—she can tell from the way they spell people of color and marginalized. Ziggy is excited to ask them about their high schools and how much they resemble Gossip Girl. Apparently not very much.

  Still, it’s cool talking to authentic Americans,

  she posts, and is assailed by a chorus of lowercase admonishments.

  authenticity = problematic

  authenticity < humanity

  sorry,

  writes Ziggy.

  i meant “real”??

  plz ↑. this = a fetish-free space.

  Chastised, Ziggy stops posting and watches for a while. She is amazed by the subreddit’s aggressive commitment to empathy and their bullish imperatives to respect each other’s feelings. It makes her think of having to wear knee- and elbow pads as a kid in the sandbox. How cumbersome and overcautious it all seemed until they’d discovered the joy of jumping off the side and smashing into one another.

  Eventually Ziggy starts to chat with people about her tormenting inner voices. How Hitler Youth tell her she is flat-chested and worthless. Ziggy is surprised to hear a similar thing happened to theyRus. And natty19. Apparently, boys who want to look like girls are often force-fed by Nazis-of-the-mind. But along with niggling taunts, Ziggy’s queer allies also have strong inner convictions. The transmen actually feel male. Even the fluid people have more than just a cruel Aryan chorus. Ziggy only has the mental bullies, and no real sense of herself as anything. But her new queer allies are supportive, even, of uncertainty. You do you, they encourage her. Ziggy didn’t expect to have a self to do so soon. She has been deferring it for an imagined future time when she won’t have to compete for emotional primacy with her mother.

  does any1 else have problems w/ vulnerability?

  she asks the subreddit. The response is emotionally overwhelming—everyone here is scared for their lives. Which only adds to Ziggy’s confusion. She wanted to know if they also found it hard to share their feelings.

  Ziggy chats all night, but by dawn, the only category she can commit to with any confidence is bisexual genderqueerness. A kind of placeholder. Anything more specific seems to require rejecting all gender norms or embracing them wholeheartedly. If she is genderqueer, Ziggy doesn’t need to take hormones or wear a baseball cap or even call herself a he. She doesn’t need to get her period. Bisexual genderqueerness is wonderfully diffuse, dissolving all boundaries. In fact, the only uncyborgian thing about queer culture is that every category gets its own flag. Ziggy logs off as the consulate lawnmowers fire up. Outside her window the red and white Polish eagle whips against a blazing blue. It is a beautiful day to start her new life as Kandara’s sole bisexual genderqueer secular Jewish person.

  Chapter 3

  That morning when Ziggy gets to school, she encounters four stoner girls in the common room, playing cards. Lex buys her weed from the one with the knotty hair who is presumably aspiring to dreadlocks. Ziggy takes a seat on the sectional sofa behind them and listens to their game. One of the girls is losing badly and keeps threatening to withdraw. The other three berate her bad sportsmanship and eventually move on to her character at large. What is striking to Ziggy is not the stifling animosity within which these girls can sit and play a card game—their bodies so close that knees and ankles touch—but the way they keep diffusing it with song. Each time one girl starts humming, the other three—even the besieged loser—join her in a sweet, soprano harmony that sets the aggression back to zero. “Let’s get together and feel all right. . . .” Listening to them, Ziggy has the first feminist thought of her life. Men could never do this.

  “Ugh, is there anything whiter than Bob Marley?” Tessa has crept up behind Ziggy and sits haughty at her back, on the other side of the sectional. “Did you hear what happened to the prime minister this morning?”

  For a moment Ziggy is confused. Was their PM heard singing Bob Marley? Would that make her too white or not white enough or else prove something about her disloyalty to the coal miners?

  “What happened?” she asks Tessa.

  “The leader of the opposition pinched her bum.”

  Ziggy feels somehow responsible. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  Ziggy isn’t sure. “As an ally to women,” she tries.

  Tessa nods vaguely then looks suddenly incensed by the cardplayers. She faces them. “If you’re going to sing reggae, can you please not do it like Anglican choir girls?”

  IN FIRST PERIOD, their English instructor informs Ziggy’s class of the prime minister’s vile sexual assault and the country’s larger problem with misogyny.

  “Australian men might call you ‘mate,’ but they are not your friend.” Dr. LeStrange runs a frantic hand through the flop of her undercut. Her hairstyle, paired with loose, tailored pants and boxy dress shirts, gives their teacher the look of an indolent teenage boy conceding to smart-casual. It is widely rumored that Dr. LeStrange is a former student of Kandara who won History prizes and played cello solos and slowly wallflowered herself lesbian. Ziggy understands why she might be triggered by the sexual harassment of a childless woman who wears ill-fitting pantsuits, holds the highest office, and has a husband who identifies as a heterosexual male hairdresser. But starting a mature feminist dialogue with a class of Kandara’s most patriarchally internalized is bound to be disheartening.

  “Why would anyone even want to pinch her bum?” is the opening insult from Cate.

  “Her suits are so baggy,” Kate agrees, crinkling her button nose in distaste.

  Dr. LeStrange’s teaching methods are unconventional. Instead of giving the girls a feminist lecturing, she marches them all down to the drama department; tells them to don long, debilitating rehearsal skirts; and makes them act out scenes from A Doll’s House. Ziggy sees the therapeutic value of this approach. Their teacher is trying to get the girls to tap into historical pain. Perhaps her syllabus is designed to be a year-long constellation.

  In the empty assembly hall, they are divided into pairs and allocated a small section of stage. Ziggy is partnered with Lex, but her excitement dies fast. Instead of rehearsing, Lex sits in a greenroom beanbag and Snapchats the rapper, angling her phone over a swathe of upper inner thigh where her skirt meets her panty line. On her leg, Lex has sketched an arrow pointing upward beside the acronym YOLO. Each time she receives a message, she squeals and slaps her thighs together. Ziggy can imagine how celebrity-gaze might feel thrilling, sending the skin into rapturous tingles. But she is annoyed with her friend. It seems an insensitive day to send half-naked photos to powerful me
n.

  “Did you tell him about the prime minister?” Ziggy asks.

  Lex laughs. “We don’t talk about stuff like that.” She shoves the phone under Ziggy’s face. “With the kitten ears or without?”

  Ziggy feels a heavy wave of exhaustion. The filter makes Lex’s eyes sparkle and her cheeks a rosy pink. “With,” says Ziggy, wondering if Lex’s rapper has ever seen her face without graphic augmentation.

  Surprisingly, when it is their turn to perform, Lex rouses to emotionally tortured life. Ziggy’s friend gives a moving performance of Nora the oppressed housewife. Ziggy is less successful. As the destitute female friend, she stumbles over her lines in a droning monotone. It is embarrassing to say words like delightful and darlings and pooh! in front of the other girls. She thinks it sounds draggy. Ziggy may not be quite ready to come out today.

  Tessa also embodies the play’s florid language, delivering anguished good graciouses with passionate flourishes of her arm. She has also been cast as Nora and paired with Cate, who is playing Torvald, her paternalistic husband. Though, it is quickly obvious that Cate is not engaging with the text.

  “Ms. Lansell-Jones,” says Dr. LeStrange. “Is there a reason your performance is so uncharismatic?”

  Cate scowls at their teacher. “Maybe it’s because you’re making me play the man?”

  Dr. LeStrange chuckles, and the whole class enjoys a unifying giggle at Cate’s surprising misandry. But the eponymous clique leader looks afflicted. She jostles her leaden rehearsal skirt.

  “A Doll’s House is dated,” she announces. “Like, maybe it’s still relevant to women in Afghanistan, but my mum would just be like, Um, get real.”

  “My mum wouldn’t eat so many lollies,” comes Fliss’s simpering solidarity.

  “Yeah,” says Cate. “Nora can’t be that ambitious.”

  “If you think about it,” says Kate Fairfax, chewing seductively on a hot-pink highlighter pen, “Nora is basically a bored housewife who can’t be trusted with her husband’s credit card.”

  Dr. LeStrange snaps her playbook together. Her small, quick eyes blink rapidly in frustration. “What you girls are talking about is postfeminism. Which is what happens to a movement when everybody in it dies or a new generation doesn’t bother to learn the achievements of the one before.”

  “If you want to liberate us,” Cate says with theatrical disdain, “let us take off these stinky old skirts.”

  The sartorial mutineer receives a raucous round of cheers. Dr. LeStrange hangs her head in despair. She speaks in a voice utterly drained of idealism:

  “Who has heard the term ‘feminist intersectionality’?”

  Silence, then Kate’s giddy attempt: “Is that where you dissect a feminist?”

  Laughter echoes through the empty auditorium, but their teacher remains impressively sober. “It’s where you analyze feminism to see where class, race, gender, and sexuality complicate it for different identities.”

  “Sounds complicated,” says Kate, snorting.

  “And what’s the point of it?” whines Cate.

  “The point, Ms. Lansell-Jones, is to expose how our privilege implicates us in other people’s oppression.”

  “This is an English class,” says Cate. “Can you please speak English?”

  Dr. LeStrange glares at her smiling challenger. “We use intersectionality to see how our experience of being female is different from other women’s.”

  “Ohhh,” says Cate, slapping her hands to her thighs in mock-bumpkin epiphany. “Like when it’s obvious you have nothing in common with a nineteenth-century Norwegian housewife?”

  Kate gleefully waves her playbook. “Feminist dissectionality actually proves that A Doll’s House isn’t relevant to anyone born this century!”

  “Unless,” says Cate, “you’re like a Muslim girl from Punch-bowl.”

  Dr. LeStrange glances between the two girls with trenchant disgust. “And do you know what it’s called when you don’t want to hear other people’s stories?”

  “Busy?”

  “White. Patriarchal. Narcissism.”

  Cate eyes their teacher testily. “Are you calling me a narcissist, Dr. L?”

  “Your actions are narcissistic,” the woman says carefully. “And the patriarchy, obviously, is not your fault.”

  The Cates glower at their teacher. They will surely send a petition around to have her fired or at least ban her from turning Advanced English into Gender Studies. The bell sounds and the girls fling off their rehearsal skirts and then flee to the doors. Ziggy hears Kate whisper to Cate: “She probably just has a crush on you.”

  Walking back to class, Tessa has commentary.

  “The Cates think female empowerment means finding the right cut of jeans for your body type.”

  Lex shudders in agreement. “Or a formal dress that looks like something Cate Blanchett wore to the Oscars.”

  “Or just going to the formal.” As the words leave her mouth, Ziggy knows they are wrong. The air curdles. Her friends withdraw.

  “Everybody goes to the formal,” Tessa says brusquely. “You just have to come up with a personalized outfit and a complementary date.”

  “But I don’t know any boys.”

  “You could take a girl, Ziggy.” Tessa’s tone is magnanimous. “Or even Alexa or a Google Assistant. It doesn’t matter. You just have to be true to yourself.”

  The sentiment is right, but Ziggy doesn’t fully believe her.

  “Who are you taking?” Ziggy asks Lex.

  Her friend is again swiping at her phone. “Him.” Lex points to her screen, where a close-up of the rapper’s crotch shows his erection faintly contoured through his jeans. “He’ll come if his girlfriend dumps him, which the internet says she will.”

  Tessa smiles a little condescendingly at Lex. It is obvious she has other plans for both of them.

  “And what about you?” Ziggy asks Tessa.

  “There’s a guy I like at Randalls,” she replies. “We did a play together last year.”

  Ziggy pictures a slim boy in a black turtleneck, performing a perfect sun salute.

  “He has cerebral palsy,” Lex informs Ziggy.

  “Is that why you’re taking him?”

  “We have a lot in common,” Tessa snipes. “But I haven’t asked him yet. There’s still ten months to go, and I also like this guy from acting class.”

  “Who’s legally blind.” Lex is smirking.

  “And he has a friend who might be good for you.” Tessa tilts her chin up in clement benevolence. “He’s half indigenous and does poetry slams.”

  Ziggy wonders what her friends have in mind for her. A water polo player? A newt? Dr. LeStrange? It is enough to worry about her own gender and sexual identity without having to find an appropriate dance partner. Her friends’ world is not as isolated as she had hoped. All day she worries about this special person, animal, or object that must accompany her to the formal. It seems your date must be your complementary opposite. An advertisement for everything unique and wonderful about you but in the opposing gender. Ziggy has encountered such ideas before: binaries in service to an ultimate, sacred synthesis. The ancient notion of twin halves completing a perfect whole and dissolving into Oneness with all of existence. The formal is a postfeminist event whose ideology overlaps with that preached weekdays in her living room.

  WHEN ZIGGY GETS HOME, there is a circle of scraggly, gray-haired women dancing around the sofa. Some are banging jembes, others are shaking rice-filled gourds, a few wave gnarly sticks strung with bells. African tribal beats blare from the sound system. Ruth stands on the chaise lounge, knees bent, arms extended, swinging her hips in a skirt that jangles like a festive horse saddle. Ziggy watches from the top of the stairs. As the percussion swells, her mother cries out to the women:

  “Let the music take you back to your primal animal-self! What is it? A tiger? A buffalo? A baboon?”

  The women stomp their feet louder.

  “Where does it live in
your body? Find its hooves, its claws, its huge, powerful thighs. Dance your animal!”

  Some women experiment with pawing motions and jerking turkey heads; others bull-charge the beanbags; a few get down on all fours, slinking like big lascivious cats. The music builds and the women grunt and roar and shriek. A dumpy lady in solar system tights sprints outside and dive-bombs the pool. She thrashes around in the shallows then does a few swift side-rolls. Ziggy’s guess is crocodile.

  Afternoons when the women occupy her house, Ziggy usually shuts herself in the bathroom closet with an onion and a bottle of vinegar. Thus far, Ziggy’s Nazi fantasia has been inspired by her father’s metrosexual jacket collection and her grandmother’s formative years. When she thinks of the Holocaust, Ziggy imagines gay leathermen leering over malnourished girls in paper-bag shoes. But today she wants to be a better person. Someone who has consensual sex, even when they are only masturbating. In her fantasies, Ziggy usually plays both parts—victim and abuser—which makes her feel that there is a split in her psyche. A self-contained sadomasochism or what Ziggy has recently diagnosed as her internalized misogyny. The cure she prescribes is heteroromantic bisexuality. If Ziggy can project her sexual desires onto a connected, loving Nazi couple, she can eliminate the objectification and violence.

  The obvious choice for this experiment is Rolf, with his rosy cheeks and heel-clicking passion for the Führer, and bright-eyed, amply bosomed Liesl, soaring over the gazebo benches in a graceful split. Ziggy starts as Rolf—her shoulders stiffen, closing in around a soft, silk-lined sports jacket. She pictures Liesl’s face over the monogrammed breast pocket—her cupid lips, button nose, fluttering eyelids—and moves in slowly, so slowly that she loses interest just before her lips make contact. Disheartened, she tries again, dipping Liesl’s back in a dramatic swoon over the tennis bags and laying her down on a stack of towels. This time, something about the way the sleeve is twisted rouses her and Ziggy pins the jacket to the closet wall. She presses hard against Liesl, pulling on her ponytail. Stop, Ziggy hears herself say to someone. She drops the jacket and buries her face in a hanging chambray shirt. Hitler Youth zap vicious thought-Tasers at Ziggy’s limbic system. Patriarchal sadist. Misogynist softcock. How can they accuse her of being both virile and castrated? It feels so unfair, and yet strangely familiar. The kind of insult Ziggy has been overhearing in her house for months. She slumps back between a pair of designer jackboots. And then the bathroom door opens.