Fantastic Metropolis

Josh B. Lukin: Another community you’ve long been associated with is the world of political activism, which you’ve made tantalizing mention of in online discussions. How has that connection appeared in your writing? I see in Rebecca Ore’s work, for example, scathing depictions of the gender imbalance in New Left political organization: have you incorporated experience or insight from such settings into fiction?

L. Timmel Duchamp: Although the classic trajectory of politicization for second-wave feminists originates with involvement in the Civil Rights and Anti-war Movements of the 1960s, proceeds to eventual revolt against the endemic sexist attitudes and practices that prevailed within those movements, and culminates in the birth of feminist consciousness and total break-out, this was not my experience. I began as a proto-feminist in the 1960s and discovered, in the early 1970s, through the flood of feminist literature suddenly appearing on bookstore shelves, confirmation of my own observations and feelings, as well as the tools that allowed me to forge a new way of thinking and acting. In the 1970s, I worked for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the wilds of Illinois; and in the early 1980s I put my analytic skills to work on the abortion issue for the Seattle office of NARAL. Although I turned out for marches addressing a spectrum of issues, I actively engaged with other issues only in the last half of the 1980s. My belatedness in politically engaging with nonfeminist groups stemmed from my unwillingness to put up with the sexism of activist organizations that weren’t explicitly feminist, which I knew through a few firsthand experiences, through blow-by-blow, personal accounts by feminists I knew, as well as through the New Left’s continual and open denigration and dismissal of feminism. But it also, to a small degree, had to do with the course of my own politicization.

I was raised by working-class Republicans. When I left home for college in 1968, I was well-indoctrinated in Republican attitudes (which were a good deal to the left of those of the Clinton-dominated Democratic party of the 1990s). Under ordinary circumstances, I suppose the kind of person I had been raised to be would have pretty much ignored politics throughout her college years. But given the times, politics got right up in my face. First, the man I fell in love with drew a low lottery number for the military draft. (Later, he received a draft notice, and we ended up taking extreme—possibly insane—measures to resist, which I won’t go into here.) Second, in the spring of my sophomore year, tanks rolled onto my campus, and we were occupied by the National Guard. Although the National Guard killed no one on our campus, the sheer fact of occupation suddenly made me part of an “us” in a way that I’d never before been. (I will admit that the few anti-war marches I’d participated in had been psychologically awkward rather than inspirational affairs for me.) An in-your-face military occupation, even one that doesn’t drop bombs on or bulldozer civilians’ homes, hails every individual, telling them that they are a member of a collective regardless of the particularity of their identity; it forces individuals to perceive themselves as members of a collective entity under pressure. As such, we were slapped with a curfew, and one block from my dorm a National Guardsman stood on the steps of Smith Music Hall, holding a rifle. The campus went on strike and held teach-ins. We knew that students were being killed on other campuses. Mass numbers of people on our own campus were being arbitrarily arrested and held in the football stadium. For the first time in my life, I began to read the newspaper and pay attention to all things political with the critical—rebellious—attitudes that I had always applied to everything else. And when I happened on the Frankfurt School thinkers in the mid-1970s, my critical thinking took on a sharper and more coherent shape. It’d be no exaggeration to say that my first readings in the Frankfurt School at once put everything social and cultural on the table, in a way that complemented feminism’s putting everything “personal” under close and constant scrutiny. My engagement with Frankfurt School scholars rendered my critical understanding of the world not only more complex, but also edgier and more confident. I began looking at every text (whether verbal, visual, or kinesthetic) as if it were a whole broiled trout from which one could, with practice, detach and lift out the entire spine and all its bones in one neat extraction. Needless to say, that sense of mastery did not stand up in the long run. But I see it as a stage through which I needed to pass in order to get to where I am now in my thinking.