Body Incorporate (i)
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007
I suppose it’s when you have a lover that you really get in touch with what it means to have a body. At least that’s how it was with me. And when I was giving birth I remember everything else in the world faded to insignificance. I do use my body for other things – typing at the keyboard, digging in the garden, writing on the whiteboard, painting furniture …. But lately I’ve felt a curious disconnection between me and my body.
This is not the first time I’ve experienced such dislocation. It’s a fairly common sensation for anyone who has suffered physical trauma. And for those familiar with falling dreams, these happen when one’s wandering spirit is pulled firmly back into the body.
When I sat down to start this piece, I pulled up one of the handy online dictionaries and checked out the entries for corporate / incorporate and corporeal / incorporeal. It was immediately clear that all of these terms now relate to law, economics and the industrial world. Now who was it, in my distant past that harped on continuously about how a person was so much less powerful than a corporation? And how when it comes to holding an entity responsible for its behaviour, and making an entity accountable for its actions, it is well nigh impossible to treat a corporation in quite the same way that one can treat an individual human being.
I can’t recall who this was, but it is in any case a tangential train of thought… perhaps if I keep writing, my original intent will merge with this, and maybe not.
It was during my most recent conversation with my current PD – the one I would like to take home with me and make part of my family – that I caught a glimmer of something that intrigued me anew, in my meanderings of trying to puzzle out the why simultaneously with the whens, the whats, the whos and the whiches. I had sent him an email with my fantasy-idealised version of how I would like things to go between us in terms of making babies. I said in my email that I felt I was asking to have my cake and eat it too. His response was that since it’s my body, I ought to be able to do what I wanted with it, and that it wasn’t anyone’s business to tell me otherwise.
Now when he said this, I felt a distinct Jonathan Livingstone Seagull sensation, as though I were pulled from one plane onto another. There was a Zing! or a Click! or a StingPZZT! Everything was draped with a freshness and clarity that masked the bleary ordinariness of the previous moment.
Talk of the rights to do with my body what I want to do with it have entered my world from two directions
(a) reproductive rights, which to me have always felt like the right to access free and safe abortion, and
(b) reclaim the night and the right to be safe from sexual harassment and assault. The right to bear children independently of all the heterosexual legal romantic nonsensical rigmarole is something different again. The freedom I experienced at that moment was a removal of the shroud of secrecy, shame and self-doubt that has coloured my efforts to have another child until now.
One of the things that have happened to me in the last couple of months is an opening up of conversations about my intentions. Naturally, the more I talk and share, the more possible my intentions become. I understand this dynamic intimately, though understanding it does not remove the barrier of fear that stops me from making use thereof!
I received a phone call recently from one of the presenters of Aqueerium, a radio program here in Adelaide. It promotes itself as a program which “celebrates GLBTIQ culture in Adelaide and promotes equality throughout all of Australia and the world” (website accessed 19/8/2007).
The presenter called me after receiving a letter I distributed through my email channels, which was an appeal to sperm producers of Adelaide to engage in conversations about sperm donation and the creation of family. She wanted to interview me about my journey to have another child. She thought this would be an appropriate and interesting subject to address in her next show. Was I interested? Yes I was.
She checked out that I consider myself part of Adelaide’s queer community – clearly from my (anonymous) letter there was no indication of my sexual or gender orientation other than I didn’t produce my own sperm – and proceeded to question me about my partner. I explained that I am single, whereupon her attitude towards me took an abrupt u-turn.
“Well, that puts a very different spin on the whole issue, doesn’t it,” she said (or something like that). “I’m not really sure that’s where I want to go with the topic. Can you give me a few hours to think it over, and I’ll get back to you with a definite yes or no.”
What were a few hours to me when a few minutes previously I’d never heard of the woman?
She decided it wasn’t somewhere she wanted to go and I found myself floundering for a while, flagellating protazoa-like but with definite overtones of self-punishment verging on self-harm. How pathetically vulnerable I am to the judgment of others!
I have Lesbian_Parents_Australia to thank once again for supporting and encouraging me to find my feet again. This is part of what I posted:
It feels like my motivations are being questioned, as though I am some seedy, shady character who would rather form relationships with children, than with my peers. Someone who uses my children as my social group, instead of socialising with adults. Someone who is slightly off, because she is single. Someone clearly unacceptable as a candidate for sperm donation.
Further clarity also arrived via Sonja Vivienne’s Family Values website, where she writes of herself that
“I’m single. I’m queer. I’m a mum. For most of my life I’ve tried to ‘fit’ and because I can blend into the wallpaper, I’ve managed pretty well… Now I’d like to have another child… For the first time in a long time I’ll be visible…
Why this is me to a ‘T’, except that I vacillate between an intense need to be invisible and a strident need to be acknowledged and recognised as lesbian, jewish, single mum.
Anything wrong with that?
(more later)
