beefsteak & sex

‘What I call “feminine” and “masculine” is the relationship to pleasure, the relationship to spending, because we are born into language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would become just as closed, just as immobile and petrifying as the words “masculine” and “feminine” and would lay down the law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except to shake them like apple trees, all the time.’ Hélène Cixous

when i was researching my thesis last year, i came across a lot of writing about gertrude stein in terms of her sex. a typical analysis of stein’s work is that it is in opposition to the patriarchal conventions of narrative and poetic language: that is, it is does not follow the structures of a meaning-full*, rational, psychological language. it is not penetrative. instead, it is unknowable, disjointed, paratactic, mysterious, demanding. people who have written about stein, particularly her contemporaries (and mostly men), are dismissive of stein’s work and proclaim it unskilled and nonsensical. often, criticisms of her work are carried with a suspicion of her sexuality and her state of woman-ness. her work is understood to codify the sexual revelations of her relationship with her partner, alice b. toklas. this sensuality, a bodily joy drawn out in an oblique, discrete writtenness, can be ‘translated’ to represent a clitoris, a lip, an orgasm, or the opened-out sex of a woman’s body, but the translation is entirely interpretive. her work does not suggest a single interpretation, it offers the possibility of countless interpretations.

perelman says of stein, ‘her words displace all others’. her language is without an anchor, a vanishing point or a blueprint, it is radically geometric, radically decentred and radically spatialised. if public discourse idealises a static notion of a woman, then stein disputes this ideal radically. her work is not ‘feminine’, it is not emotionally revealing, psychologically self-reflexive, confessional, passionate or domestic**. i can imagine that it would have been an uncomfortable experience for the conservative male critic of the twenties to read stein, her language would have come up against the very limits of his linguistic understanding of a woman. his ideas of a woman’s softness, maternalism, emotionality and desire would have been challenged in an uncomfortable way. in this instance, the impossible nature of a woman’s sex as compared to a man’s ideal brings about a discussion of a woman’s art work and the failing of her femininity. by which i mean, when someone doesn’t ‘get’ stein, and they feel alienated by her poetics, they are likely to make a connection between her work and her person, her work and her sexuality.

any description of stein’s physical self is similar: she was broad, short-haired, stern-faced and wore dowdy smocks with strange indian sandals. her appearance apparently terrified many men, who saw her as a large, demanding, shrewd and loud woman whose ‘femininity’ came in a scary brand that borrowed from the certain traits of ‘masculinity’ that men felt empowered by. anne carson writes that her voice was ‘like beefsteak’, and that hemingway was scared of the sound of her laugh. her femininity, most likely fetishised by men in terms of her sexuality and her relationship with alice, was just as scary because it was unknowable, untouchable; it didn’t need a man. (no doubt a lot of her critics were flummoxed by the idea of what women actually did together, too).

though i am interested in the sex of stein’s work (as i am interested in the sex of all poetics), my own reading of stein is concentrated on the language’s surfaces, rather than its perceived inside-spaces and underneaths. whether or not there are clitorises and open thighs patchworked througout her language is not of particular concern to me. if i find, in the small poem-sentences of her work, a phrase which elicits a sensual response, then i enjoy the moment and move to the next. it is being present in her language that makes the experience of reading stein an experience of bodily and poetic pleasure.

* i use the word meaning-full here rather than meaningful to avoid the qualitative associations of the word ‘meaningful’. instead, in this instance, i mean quite literally, ‘filled with meaning’. this distinction was used by lyn hejinian, and i take it on with much appreciation.

** here i mean that her work does not conform to the historically gendered notions of femininity, it does not ‘express’ a desire for passion and an emotional interest in domesticity in the ways in which women are expected to. i am not implying here that stein is disinterested in desire, passion and the domestic space (tender buttons, for example, is a meditation on the poetics of domesticity), but that her interests are beyond the normalised understandings of women’s role in language (and in life).