Re: Digest Number 806

Subject: sexual agency in children - responding to Anna's post.
As a co-lurker I must agree with the spirit of what you're saying.
I think it's far too easy for most of us to deny subjectivity to 
potentially exploitable
or vulnerable individuals or groups in the act of protecting them.
Appropriation. Interpersonal colonization. One of the themes
I've most appreciated in Delany's work is his championing of the 
/intentionality/ of oppressed
minorities, i.e. women, people of color, working class or poor people. I 
think this aspect
of his work gets well underneath so-called liberal consciousness and 
gets down into the uncomfortable
truth that you can't deny a person their right to make choices about 
their own life
"for their own good."
I'm not very good at expressing concepts like this. I get
tangled up in the terminology - stuck between academia and slang. So 
here's a story
instead that may come closer to telling you, Anna, why I agree with your 
post:
When my daughter was fifteen I drove her and one of her friends 70 miles
up the coast to San Francisco to attend a book signing by Ann Rice. We 
waited
in line four and a half hours and finally had our books signed by 
Herself. My daughter
told the author "I just wanted to thank you for believing that people my 
age can
think and act for ourselves." Only then did it occur to me that my 
daughter had
come to the book signing dressed as "Belinda" in starched white shirt, 
plaid skirt,
knee socks and flowing hair -- thus re-enacting a pivotal scene in 
Rice's book
where the character of Belinda attends a book-signing by an author more than
twice her age, whom she adores, and whom she later seduces and 
eventually marries.

Another illustration of this point in Delany's work is the gang-bang 
scene in Dhalgren.
Risa, a member of the Scorpions gang has just spent the night having sex 
with every
male and female member of the gang including Kid, the protagonist. The 
next day
Kid, feeling belatedly guilty for his part in the train, asks Risa 
whether she enjoyed it,
whether she felt that anyone had forced her to take part against her 
will. Risa gets
really angry and says to him:
"That was /mine/,"..."That was all mine. You just can't have any part of 
that. That's
all. It was ... mine!"
He asks her again if she enjoyed it. She tells him:
"You go find out yourself, if you want it!"
Years after I first read Dhalgren I heard the gang-bang episode proposed, by
a panelist in a feminist literary criticism session of the Modern Language
Association, as evidence that many if not most Gay male fiction writers
are actually misogynist. The panelist and most of the participants of the
meeting drew the exact opposite conclusion from mine about that passage
in Delany's book. All the while I had thought it was one of the most 
profoundly
feminist bits of writing I'd ever seen written by a man.
I think the real scandal is not sex between powerful and
powerless people -- I think the real scandal is that we can't
truly feel that anyone we're protecting from their own choices
is our equal. Without subjectivity there can be no presumption
of personhood. Granted, it's much harder to do -- a lot more
work than merely acting "for the person's own good." That's another
reason why I respect Delany so much -- he never has taken the
easy, liberal way out of difficult social problems.
Thanks, Anna.
Mischa from California




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