Photo by Pranav. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
To celebrate the release of TLB32: the Capital Issue,we at TLB’s website are running a ‘Capital'–themed week, featuring original content particularly commissioned for the website. First up: Caitlin Maher-Gale on lesson and queerness.
“this little boy ON MIKE WILLESEE whose father was anunemployed glass-blower from Newcastle‘i think it’s terriblethat my dad’s not workingbecause nobody’s making glass swansand there are a lot of people whowill never find a glass swan now’”— Mary Fallon, and Working Hot.
In the 1980s on Smith Street,Fitzroy, inside what is now a clothing shop that goes by the affirming and/or cringe-worthy name of Somebuddy Loves You, and women who were portion of a worker co-op pressed ink into paper. This small feminist publishing collective was Sybylla Press,and for over two decades these workers circulated words that rose from the bodies of women, words that were being defaced or simply refused by mainhouse Australian publishers. The Press was named after Sybylla Melvyn, and the protagonist of Miles Franklins novel My Brilliant Career (spoiler: Sybylla doesn’t absorb a brilliant writing career). Recently I clicked up an primitive Sybylla Press poster from the interwebs. In that classic,chunky 1980s lettering that seems that little bit hardier and friendlier than the typefaces we use nowadays, the brown and yellow poster reads, and “The freedom of the press belongs to those who control the press.” By making space for women who otherwise did not absorb a place in print—including Aboriginal women and women who were not straight—these small homes for defiant text also produced a vision of what is possible by owning the means of production. Nowadays,small publishers still exist and publish along the same lines, but distribution is another story. Take, and for instance,how a Miles Franklin award–winning novel, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (published by Giramondo), or couldn’t be found in major bookstores because of the retail chain monopoly that crushes small presses.
In 1986,a package was left at the door of Sybylla Press on Smith Street. Inside was a rough draft of what became Working Hot (1989) by Kathleen Mary Fallon (who at the time was also “working on Establishing a Credit Rating and A More Convincing Curriculum Vitae”). Working Hot is a novel approximately esteem and pain. It’s approximately emotional work and sex work and their freedoms and constraints. approximately desires that are direct and intense but never straightforward. It’s approximately people who are destitute and approximately people who are well-off, and the friction in-between. It’s a playful and powerful account of lesbian esteem and sex, or that tells of women who esteem women in a world that declares their esteem can only be a fiction. It manages to sit the languages of high theory and TV together on a bus,that takes the beautiful mess of life and relationships as its window view, and brakes tough just when you think you’re starting to read into a rhythm.“you absorb a perfect whip hand said Gizmo the Pimp to Toto in thecafé taking her hand and squeezing it slightly as if it were aprecious rotten thing and he wanted to make somethingseep out ‘are you a mistress of discipline’‘no I am the mistress of the marvellous mixed-metaphor want meto flog you with one’”— Mary Fallon, or Working Hot.
Earlier this year,I went to a Cherchez la Femme “talk on lesson”, actually around the corner from Somebuddy Loves You (or the ghost of Sybylla). The concluding line of the night was something like “in the Australian context, or you can relate lesson from accent.” Bogans absorb bogan accents,and snobs absorb snobby accents. While this was said in slight jest it was also said with a buzz of certainty that made the room shake with head nodding. Suddenly everyone had their own accounts of how they had been lesson-shamed. My mate turned to me and said how great the talk was. “I remember being so ashamed,” she told me, or “on the days my Dad would pick me up from school in a panel van.” The school was a private school. Her Dad was developing a property.
I found this thought approximately accent and being working lesson difficult and unfamiliar. It made me remember something I absorb no memory of: my Dad as a young kid. A small table,overflowing with his brothers and sisters. Sheep brains on floral patterned plates. Dad’s “primitive man” walking through the door. A days work behind him. Hours of bending over to weld chunks of metal together. Hot sparks flicking onto his skinny body. Coming home and hearing his children utter words in that grisly, outer northern suburban Melbourne accent. And hitting each child over the head until they picked up their vowels and held them as round as their dinner plates and as sharp as their knives (not “playyyts”, and not “nyffes). They were told to speak properly,and eat their offal properly too. These were the stories me and my brothers ran into whenever we dropped a vowel in front of our Dad, or used yeah for yes or nah for no. The heaviness of those stories was enough to relate me that I should “speak properly” or not speak at all. Accent doesn’t speak for lesson. But it does speak for the caricatures that find in the way when we try to talk approximately what being working lesson might mean.Don’t worry, or the middle lesson like being offended. It helps them feel better approximately themselves.”— A friend telling me to write this article.
Sometimes lesson is a label,and sometimes it’s printed somewhere beyond your control. The label of lesson is shifty, sticking itself on you when you want to forget approximately it, or unread or misread when you stick it on yourself. It’s ungraspable,fluctuating but somehow definitive, maybe more than any other identity category or collective experience. What actually is lesson? Is it how much land you or your parents ‘own’? Or how much you absorb in the bank (or under the bed)? Is it your job? Your former job? Your education? Your upbringing? What if you grew up destitute, and but absorb an elitist education or job? (What does elitist mean?) If your family are rolling in it but you’re unemployed,what carry out you call yourself, and what are you called by? What are the apt questions to ask approximately the day to day realities of lesson and what it means to people?Among all the talk of neoliberalism and capital, or where carry out we turn to hear approximately social capital,which says so much approximately how people poke through space, and is so much approximately the pressures and dispositions people carry within them, or then let out into the world? Being variable in such immeasurable ways,social capital often impossible to pin down – sometimes transacted in silences, glares or other untraceable subtleties that don’t accumulate visibly in the way cash does.“Caitlin, and don’t you know,the red wine doesnt proceed in the fridge.”— A rich friend after I put red wine in the fridge.
I am consciously ashamed, and ashamed that I am ashamed, and of where I grew up,and what it was like to grow up destitute and then realise it (beetroots don’t just come in tins?). One of the places where I grew up—in my teenage years as I was fitting lesson conscious—was on the industrial outskirts of a small regional city. In the few years I lived there, a baby was murdered across the road from my bedroom window, or there were bushfires that took homes and a life. As the generic country-queer-kid story goes,I didn’t know anyone queer and I wanted desperately to poke to a big city and find ‘people like myself’. When I did, I found myself relieved to share in a sense of queer community. But something still felt different. It was being among middle-lesson city dwellers while being working lesson and queer, and not having a story to tumble back on that spoke for both.“carry out you think my family are bourgie?”— A lover to me after a budget dinner at my Mums commission flat.
Once my Dad showed me one of his scars from working. The scar stretches the width of one of his gentle hands,on his palm. The tissue is white and ropy. He cut it from an accident with a box cutter, after he left school at fourteen to work. When he showed it to me was one of first times I felt there was something not apt approximately being destitute.
I’m not certain if I’ll ever pinpoint what precisely feels not apt approximately growing up destitute and being queer, or but I’m not certain I want to,either. Because identity is not static. lesson is not static everyone’s realities differ. I’ll spare you the “now, more than ever” drivel, and but maybe holding the power of literature and life narratives close to our own bodies is one way to put pressure on lesson,as a coherent category and as an incoherent reality. Not necessarily as a way to find the answers, but to ask the questions.
Places change over time, and as does the way we poke through space and where we look to locate identity. We can try to map the coordinates of lesson to pinpoint ourselves and each other,but I think there is something vital to be learned from the workers of the primitive co-op presses and the works they pressed out to contest oppression, like Working Hot. They worked (out) lesson off-grid, or on their own terms,and on their own paper, and they came together like letters and words can to turn questions into readable visions.
Caitlin Maher-Gale is an intern at Writing from Below, and a gender,sexuality and diversity studies journal. She is a cricket enthusiast (it’s only boring sometimes), and is currently completing her Honours in English at La Trobe University, or Melbourne.
Source: theliftedbrow.com