i was leaning out

"And it’s no accident, I’d add, that the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her. Take Agnes, the pseudonymous transsexual woman who famously posed as intersex at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic in the late fifties in order to obtain access to vaginoplasty. Agnes’s case was chronicled by Harold Garfinkel ([1967] 2006) in an article that’s now taught in trans studies courses. (It’s the sixth entry in The Transgender Studies Reader.) Agnes is regularly celebrated as some kind of gender ninja: savvy, tactical, carefully conning the medical-industrial complex into giving her what she wants (see, e.g., Preciado [2008] 2013: 380–89). What no one wants to talk about is what she actually wanted: a cunt, a man, a house, and normal fucking life. Whatever intuition she may not have had about gender as a “managed achievement” was put toward a down payment on a new dishwasher (Garfinkel 1967). If there’s anything Agnes “reveals” about gender, it’s that actually existing normativity is, strictly speaking, impossible. Norms, as such, do not exist. (If Gender Trouble knew this, it did a poor job explaining it.4) That doesn’t mean that norms don’t structure people’s desires; what it means is that the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity. Agnes was a nonnormative subject, but that wasn’t because she was “against” the norm; on the contrary, her nonnormativity was what wanting to be normal actually looked like. Like most of us, Agnes was making do in the gap between what she wanted and what wanting it got her.

We can argue, and people have, about whether queer theory is possible without antinormativity (Wiegman and Wilson 2015). But whatever comes after trans studies—can I suggest transsexual theory?—will be impossible with anti-normativity. The most powerful intervention scholars working in trans studies can make, at this juncture within the academy, is to defend the claim that transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm—by desire, by habit, by survival."

Andrea Long Chu in conversation with Emmett Harsin, "After Trans Studies"

“The queerness of Mother 3 is a complicated thing. It’s ever present but just how much is supposed to be played for jokes and just how much is to be taken sincerely remains unclear. At the center of this is our protagonist, Lucas. Lucas is an absolute softy, a total mama’s boy. He is not fast, strong, or brave. All of those qualities are held by his adventurous twin brother, Claus. When their mother, Hinawa, dies, Claus swears revenge and embarks on a journey, but Lucas just cries. He visits his mother’s grave daily. He’s not looking for adventure or vengeance, he’s just sad.

It’s through these early sections of grief that Lucas’s queerness begins to appear. He’s incredibly close with his mother. His father, Flint, is generally absent and when he is present seems more concerned with finding Claus than raising Lucas. Lucas is sensitive to a fault and in opposition with the world around him, one where boys play outside trying to tackle dinosaurs all day. As his village, Tazmily, leaves behind its early idealism in favor of a more commercial existence, its citizens become darker, more sinister. They’re meaner, harder, and also apathetic to the changes around them. The more they change the more it highlights how different Lucas is. He stays soft, he cares so much, he just wants to help.

…

Lucas’s greatest strength is his softness, his kindness. …In the final battle of the game we see him, alone, fighting a brainwashed Claus with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Claus launches attack after attack, but Lucas will not hit him back no matter what the player does. Instead Lucas can guard, he can heal himself, and he can believe in his brother. He can even cry a little.”

— Dave Tomaine, “Mother Is Mothering: Grief, Queerness, and Softness in Mother 3”

"What I really realized about some of my ideas of freedom is that they were like neoliberal fantasies. It's like, 'let me choose everything,' 'leave me alone all the time,' 'don't put any demands on me--only I will make demands.' It's a dark vision, and it really took me a long time to understand that the things that I'd been taught by the capitalist 80s to believe were unfreedom are freedom. Having people who mean something to you, who you have duties towards, is not unfreedom; it's freedom. It's actual existence...To be free of meaning is not freedom. Now my life is full of meanings, sometimes they're difficult, sometimes they're painful, but it's absolutely full. I don't think children are the only root to that kind of meaning, but I absolutely think you have to find something other than yourself to focus on.

...

When I meet a lot of other lady writers, I know, when we first had children we spent our whole time talking about how we were somehow trapped or imprisoned, but that's the most superficial idea of what a relation with other people is like. Now I consider all my relations--my friends, my dog, my husband, my family--as things that liberate me from myself. They are absolute freedom to me, and without them I would just be completely lost. A dog can do this for you, a cat can do this for you, going down to the larder and volunteering can do this for you. You just need to be among other people at some point, because otherwise it's hard to find in yourself (or for me anyway) a reason to go on.

...

It's a question of what does that freedom involve. I notice with the 'children thing' is that, at least in my own case, you spend so long battling to try and retain your own space. Then, when you look at what you've battled for, it isn't very much. These children are about to grow and disappear so quickly that you're going to get what you want sooner than you can imagine. All of these things are so out of sync with our capitalist discourse which is about 'you do you,' 'get what you want.' When it comes into conflict with this other thing, I guess we have in our heads, 'Am I become some kind of Victorian or old-fashioned person who is domesticated and a traditional woman.' We fight against that as if there's no liberating version of being connected to other people. That is the triumph of capitalism: it convinces you that it's just you and the shops, it's just you and the phone, and that's all that there is. Where there is an older vision of solidarity between people, within families, between children, between men and men, women and women, men and women--a community that is freeing. It's not a trap. It's like the only thing that brings joy.

...

I also think that's one of the tricks of the patriarchy: it makes you feel that all the traditional, supposedly feminine arts are humiliating. But why are they humiliating? In my house, it was the other way around. My dad was the cook. My dad was the cleaner. My mom was working a lot. My dad did a lot of those things. They're not humiliating when a man does them, apparently--[Interviewer Annie Macmanus: They're noble.]--He's been dead a long time, and sometimes, I can think of a meal he used to cook me, and it will bring me to tears. It was an art. And it was nourishing. And it was beautiful. And I'm so grateful. It was an act of love. I can't cook like that. My children will never have those memories of me. But, it's not nothing. It's the art of living. If it was a supposedly traditionally male art, you'd be getting awards for it...So I really resent the idea that these things are humiliating, even when I am picking up pants off the stairs, I think, 'I'm doing something for somebody else.' There is something noble in that, I hope.

Of course, the frustration is real. I think men suffer it just as much as women. I think to the credit of many contemporary men, they are doing absolutely the same amount of work...So the frustration is no longer purely female, which might be one of the triumphs of feminism. It's now something that lots of people have to experience, men and women. It's not that it's not real, but I have come to realize that [the frustration]'s not entirely debilitating. When it comes to art making, frustration can be really useful. Not being able to write, having your hands tied for part of every day, when I get down to my desk, I can't wait. Whereas when I was twenty-seven, I do remember embarrassingly moping around saying, 'Oh, I've got writer's block,' 'Oh, I've got ennui.' That to me now is like a comic thing, a ridiculous person who can't be taken seriously."

Zadie Smith, interviewed on Changes with Annie Macmanus