The most powerful woman you can see
Art, female saints, living in Iowa, and other links for your Sunday
This week, I wrote about Melissa Febos, whose new book The Dry Season is about her year of celibacy
You can read the full essay here.
I also had the joy of interviewing Melissa at Prairie Lights in Iowa City. I spoke with Melissa about her work, her perspective on religious saints, and living in a female body. I also asked her about why she remains committed to living in Iowa, a red state that is openly hostile to LGBTQ rights.
Melissa Febos on existing in the world as a female body…
I've been a feminist my whole life. I've been queer my whole life, and there was part of me that thought that I was inured to heterosexual conditioning to some extent, because I had done so much fucking consciousness-raising in therapy and politically through my work. So I think if you had suggested to me that my relationships were still sort of functioning in a sort of compulsory heterosexual model, I would've been offended.
But of course, that's exactly what I got to where I was like, something is amiss. And as has happened many, many times before in my life, the sort of curtain pulled back and I was like, “You again, patriarchy.”
Lessons from a year of celibacy…
One of the greatest takeaways of that year was the experience of feeling like I reentered my body and sort of moving from a body for others to a first-person body, to actually feeling embodiment.
I think one of the consequences of being oriented to the gaze of other people is self-objectification.
I was always looking at myself through other people's eyes. And when I removed that, suddenly I felt so much more present in the world and for the kind of sensual pleasures that had nothing to do with my interactions with other bodies. They had to do with my interaction with a perfectly ripe piece of fruit on the right day, or sleeping in on clean sheets or eating pickles in the middle of the night, or the erotic experience of becoming attuned to my own body and what it wanted and delivering on that in a way that no other person ever could.
On everything being political…
Everything we do, from sex, to how we do our shopping, to how we treat other people in various contexts, is an extension of who we are. And I think in many ways, that's the point of the book, is that it's all connected. And we have this way of talking about our lives, where we silo — we love categories.
And there are really grave consequences for that. And we talk about “my sex life”, “my dating life,” “my work life,” “my home life” as if they're separate lives. It's all the same thing. And the way we do all of those things are in conversation with each other.
And so, when I stopped putting all so much of my energy in this one area of life, that energy got distributed in every single other area of my life. And I thought, oh, I can bring the same passion and presence and sense of the erotic to my friendships and my family relationships and my activism and my creative life.
On religion and spirituality…
I've never been a religious person, but it is a place that I often end up in my writing because I think I define “spiritual” in a pretty broad way. Everything that has to do with my spirit, which is to say everything. I see my spiritual life as holistic.
It is the foundation of my creative practice and my relationship and even my teaching, certainly my relationship to my body, it comes back to the spiritual, my connection with the universe, the same way that we fantasize about this kind of really intense individualism, especially in this country. It's not real. It's a fantasy. We are profoundly connected to other animals and nature and the earth and the cosmos. And that is a spiritual outlook, spiritual concern.
And I sort of got back to that in this book through kind of the back door, which is I thought, “I need new role models in my love life.” I started with women who were voluntarily celibate throughout history, and then they turned out to be these incredible role models for everything because celibacy for them, ultimately for me, was just this doorway to a self-actualized life, a doorway to a spiritually active life, which meant active in terms of community and activism and mutual aid and spirituality and creativity and community with other people.
I was reading about these little girls or adolescent girls in medieval times. They would compete for sainthood and be, they would be whipping themselves with nettles and starving themselves — it was like little girls trying to get into the Olympics, because that was the most powerful woman they could see.
On living in Iowa..
It has been so incredibly rewarding for me to show up for the classes I teach here for my queer and trans students, for all of the little Iowans, like most of our undergrads, especially our locals, they come from Iowa, they come from these farm towns. They haven't been exposed to much. Sometimes they've been exposed to things that have hurt them, and they show up in my classrooms. And I feel so incredibly lucky to be the person that they are open to, that they come to feeling teachable and I would do anything for them.
And that feels so, especially being who I am, doing the work that I do, married to the person that I'm married to, happy art-making couple in this state. All of this feels so much more meaningful than it did in New York. There are some things I really miss about New York, but I also love living in Iowa and I love my students.
I want to be here. When those students come to Iowa City for college and they're looking for community and they're looking for role models and they're looking to have conversations that they didn't feel safe having in their hometowns, that's so important to me to be there and be part of that. And there's a hundred examples I could give where it just feels like the impact here is more meaningful than it is in a lot of other places. And also Iowa City is the sweetest place. The people are genuinely fucking nice here, and I like that. It feels good. And there are people working incredibly hard for the rights of other people here, and I feel really proud to be a part of it.
We did a big audit recently a few years ago where we were like, are we staying here? And we thought about the pros and cons and made our lists and thought about the good things we've experienced and the relationships we've built here and the community we have here. And there really wasn't much of a conversation about it. We were like, oh, this is where we belong right now.