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On Children

This article weaves together performance and critical writing to consider the heteronormative values that mainstream western family seems to put forward. Considering the compulsion towards reproductive futurity, it argues that women’s desires are multiple, flexible and ever-changing and do not necessarily include having children.

Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20 On Children Eirini Kartsaki To cite this article: Eirini Kartsaki (2018) On Children, Performance Research, 23:4-5, 16-19 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1511043 Published online: 29 Oct 2018. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprs20 A R E S P O N S E TO VO L U M E 23 I S S U E 1 : O N C H I L D R E N On Children EIRINI KARTSAKI ■ My sister and I on the boat. © my dad 1. In July 2017, my sister and I presented a performance entitled All the Voices at the Birmingham European Festival, UK. We began by describing an image of the two of us, ages 8 and 9, on the boat on our way to Kefalonia, Greece, my mother’s hometown. My sister, at some point in the performance, relays a recent dialogue with our mother: Mum called me the other day. Mum called you the other day? Mum called me the other day. She said she wants a grandchild! A grandchild? A grandchild. Which means, one of us should have a baby. A baby? A baby! A baby? A baby! I don’t want to have a baby! I don’t want to have a baby! But, Mum said: Call your sister; make up your mind which one of you is going to have a baby! 1 For a discussion on compulsory happiness, see Ahmed (2017). 16 2. I just want you to be happy. My mother repeats again and again. I just want you to be happy. Somehow, her words imply not only a desire for me to be happy, but also an uncertainty as to whether I am capable of happiness; that is, an inability perhaps to know in advance what will make me happy. And within that inability lies the implication that she may know – that she may know what would make my life happier than it is right now.1 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 23·4/5 : pp.16-19 http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1511043 PR 23.4-5 On Reflection - Turning 100.indd 16 Every summer, when I visit my parents in Greece, we have the same conversation. And we always end up arguing. Because my mother does not want me to ‘wake up one day’ and decide that I want children. Because then, well, it may be too late. (I have to mention here that my mother is a doctor and has helped many women conceive, when they had trouble conceiving.) But what does my mother’s phrase (‘I just want you to be happy’) really mean and how come she knows better? Of all the things she has done, she’s told me many times, having children has been the most rewarding. And here is the problem. I cannot argue with that. Because she knows what that feels like, but I cannot possibly imagine, since I do not have children. So, how can I be sure? But what my mother is doing in that moment is undercutting my ability to make decisions for myself. We are kind of stuck in the space of childhood: Don’t touch the oven; you will burn yourself. Don’t go near the cactus; it will prick your fingers. Not too near the edge of the cliff, or the boat bars or the deep end of the swimming pool; you will fall, kill yourself and drown. Her lack of confidence makes me doubt my own feelings; she loves me, she is older, she must know better. And this is precisely what is so problematic about the exchange: she must know better, just because she is older, just because she has had children. Articulating my desire not to have children has been really hard during the last few years. Defining oneself through a negative (I do not want to have children) in this particular context of familycentred, religious, Mediterranean culture seems rather odd. Because the heterosexual culture I have been brought up in is a space of heteronormativity – a space of linear, straight time, in which the normative expectations circle around a career, a long-term, monogamous relationship and children. It is a space in which the heterosexual woman is ‘forced to function as a model of conformity’ (Halberstam 2012: 82). The specific ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 14/10/2018 14:11 cultural and historical moment in which I am asked again and again whether I want children is one of a heterosexuality that is dependent on institutions of marriage and parenthood, allowing no space for anti-normative desires for ‘new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds’ (Muñoz 2009: 1). Heteronormative space clashes with my feeling that marriage and parenthood is not enough, that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing; it clashes with my feeling that we can do this differently, that I do not necessarily have to define myself in strict, prescribed notions of majoritarian belonging; that my desires are greater than the claustrophobic definitions of straight culture. Because straight culture ‘depends on a notion of the future’ that I do not embrace, and its heteronormative maps point towards a futurity that ‘is indeed the province of normative reproduction’ (Muñoz 2009: 28). Although there has been a massive decline in marriages in Euro-American households, a rise in divorces and more people are having children outside of nuclear families and in all kinds of combinations, the values of the nuclear family appear, in some cases, unquestionable. In the above context, a future based on the happiness that family can bring seems impossible to refute. But what that argument does is impose its own logic on to people’s lives and renders unthinkable any other possibility for the future and alternative types of families.2 The future, Lee Edelman posits in his articulation of a queer politics of resistance to mainstream culture, is intrinsically connected to children and fighting for our children means fighting for the future (2004: 2). But what would it signify not to fight for children? What social structure would accommodate my desire for NO MORE CHILDREN, for greater pleasures and better worlds? What future would that be and what would it look like? And what social structures would I be excluded from in that case? There is no positive way in which one may want no children – so how can we make this an opt-in rather than an opt-out choice?3 If I am opting out from having children, then how can I frame this in a positive light? If not this, then what? And how to engage with such an absolute logic of reproduction that points towards futurity and holds within it the figure of the child as the ‘telos of a social order’ (11)? This is, partly, a generational issue and demands new ways of thinking about the following: what it means to be an adult, what signs or symbols would replace family, parenthood as markers of adulthood and what structures would accommodate desires beyond family and reproduction. Although there are no positive ways in which existing structures accommodate the decision not to have a child, individuals may position themselves against the prevailing attitudes and make that decision themselves, sometimes at great personal cost. And, of course, there are people unable to have children, who also, in some cases, experience social prejudices from others who crudely assume that this has been a selfish decision. The compulsory narrative of reproductive futurity compels me to argue: The problem is not that people are having children. The problem is that having children creates a logic that refuses to be superseded – a logic that compels us to consider ourselves in relation (and only in relation) to it; it compels us to define ourselves in relation to it and to make life decisions alongside it. The logic that having children gives rise to, shapes who we are; this logic sets the terms of the discussion, which impose an ideological limit to other life narratives and that render unthinkable anything beyond it. What would it mean not to fight for children, but to fight for oneself? What would it mean to perform a desire (a queer desire according to José Muñoz) beyond the here and now? What would it mean to not be rational, calm and composed but rather to wobble, to not fit in, to not grow up and settle in or settle down? What would it mean ‘to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt’, to abandon the neat, normative and rational expectations for a future that looks nothing like the future I have in mind (Halberstam 2005: 824)? Queer theory has identified the so-called antisocial thesis, which supports that insofar as queers ‘fail to reproduce the family in a recognizable form, queers fail to reproduce the social’ (Dean 2006: 826). According to Muñoz, to ask for, desire and imagine another place and time ‘is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer’, even within straight time (2009: 26). My uneasiness with a heteronormative future has also to do with the way people perceive KA RT S A K I : O N C H I L D R E N PR 23.4-5 On Reflection - Turning 100.indd 17 2 There are examples of alternative families, of course, that have been very influential, but these appear as exceptions to the rule, rather than another alternative. See Maggie Nelson, Jack Halberstam, and so forth. 3 Many thanks to my friend and colleague Johanna Linsley for a great conversation after a paper I gave at the University of Roehampton (in London), 2017. 17 14/10/2018 14:11 my identity and the assumption that if I am in a relationship with a man, then I will move in with him and have children. So, my perceived heterosexuality seems directly linked to a future of children. And yet, the homo/hetero binary and the male/female divide seem too narrow in the light of the massive shifts in the way we do gender and sex in the West (transgender bodies, gender fluidity, queer families and so on). In that sense, heterosexuality cannot be singular or stable; a global template for heterosexuality surely does not work, as women’s desires are multiple, everchanging and fluid. Heterosexualities thus can be fluid and non-normative. For example, I do not want to partake in the banalities of straight culture or the ‘repetitiveness and unimaginativeness of heteronormativity’ (Halberstam 2006: 824). I do not want to partake in the dominant ideologies of the neoliberal patriarchy, which sees my future bound with compulsory, heteronormative reproduction and permanence, the way that my mother envisions it. I want to make a mess, fuck shit up, be loud, unruly, impolite, bash back, speak up and speak out – in other words, disrupt the neat, normative agenda of patriarchy. I want to make my own decisions and invent new structures to accommodate these decisions – new structures that may appear in the margin, but protrude into the mainstream, in order to make space for the people who do not share heteronormative values of permanence, stability, longevity and so on; people who envision life narratives beyond the institutions of heterosexuality, family and reproduction, which bring with them other markers of adulthood, maturation and safety (Halberstam 2005: 2). And these people, like lots of my close friends, may also be parents, but their project of parenthood does not or cannot rely on safety nets of steady jobs, mortgages, private properties, property ladders or career ladders. They (and we) occupy a space that is on the edges, that accommodates non-normative behaviours, a space that has no concern for structures of longevity – a space that opens up possibilities for new life narratives. My ideological and empirical project is that of other ways of being in the world. In that sense, my identity and the way I have chosen to live is more queer than straight, more complex than my mother imagined it. It is perhaps closer to Halberstam’s heteroflexibility, a term that can 18 replace heterosexuality in that it acknowledges the flexibility of desire and opens up new possibilities for the future. Heteroflexibility, in this case, resists a prescribed logic of the ‘normative’, the ‘right’ or ‘conventional’. It challenges assumptions about heterosexual female desire, which may be, for some, heteronormative, but for others antinormative, wild, unpredictable and, most of all, unstable. My uneasiness with heterosexual culture stems from the ways in which the compulsive logic of reproductive futurity as I experience it in the present, ignores such wildness and unpredictability. It also ignores the plurality and diversity of heterosexualities. Heteroflexibility addresses this unpredictability, scrambles the assumptions around female heterosexuality and recognizes that marriage and parenthood may be, for some, oppressive and not the end-all and be-all of adult lives (Halberstam 2012: 111). Not wanting children, therefore, occurs as another perfectly reasonable desire; it occurs as the desire to experience different types of intimacies with different people, choose alternative life paths, be open to possibilities beyond the experiences of cohabitation, marriage and parenthood. The space of heteronormativity, in my eyes at least, starts to collapse, gradually. Not necessarily back home, where all of my girlfriends from school are now married with at least one or two children, and with a husband that they either resent or have totally outgrown, but in places away from home, where I feel I can be who I am and I can account for my desires openly and without fear. No one back home would understand, of course, not least my father who, in protest against my life decisions, often exclaims, ‘Who is going to inherit all of my books? They will end up in a public library, I am sure’, as if this is the worst of all possible futures. 3. For the last two years, I have been working on a trilogy of works entitled No More Children, consisting of Herpes, Ladder and Bad Shit. In these works, I give birth to a number of objects: a piece of plywood, a turd, a smoked mackerel and my own arm. In these processes of birth giving, there is something that is not quite right. Apart from the obvious fact of the unlikely objects, there is a sense in which birth has thwarted my expectations of something. ‘Come on! Come on, push! Push! It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s blue and purple and beautiful! Come on … This, this is P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 23· 4/5 : O N R E F L E C T I O N – T U R N I N G 100 PR 23.4-5 On Reflection - Turning 100.indd 18 14/10/2018 14:11 not what I expected. What did you expect? I expected my life to be more beautiful than this, prettier than this, more handsome than this. I expected you to be just the way you are but me to be different’ (Kartsaki 2018a). But what are these expectations for and who decides that? Does that come from my own understanding of my life and desires or from the ways in which my understanding may have been influenced by social, political and cultural pressures? In this trilogy, which accounts for the complexities of dealing with the compulsion for a reproductive futurity from a personal perspective, I seem to become nostalgic of something I never had or wanted: ‘I take so long to decide whether I want to actually have a family that when I do, it seems too late. There is another solution, doctor says, albeit a little unorthodox. We can sever the toes of your left foot under local anaesthesia and plant them into topsoil. Are there any downsides of this method? Only that your baby will have a nail instead of face, which will require trimming regularly’ (Kartsaki 2018a). There is a kind of fear bound up with the decision to not have children – a fear that has to do with the idea of a full and happy future. Because, in this future the question may occur: What if I should have had children? And also: Will I have been right in the end? And at which specific moment in the future will I be able to look back and consider that question? 4. There are times when looking at my partner and his son play-fighting, I feel a little sad, knowing that I may never experience this kind of bond, this precious feeling of holding a child, squeezing them, pressing them against one’s body. That moment, it seems to me, makes life full, soft and meaningful. Somehow, in that moment, one is loved fully. And that’s really nice and good and I want to be loved fully. But something tells me that I should be wary of that fullness, that meaningfulness. Something tells me that this can be true for some, but that it is also a symptom of the kind of life I live, the context within which I live my life. And I want to be cautious. I want to be cautious of my own desires, because where I am at the moment also feels full, real and meaningful. I cannot dismiss the way I feel now, because there may be other choices that could make me feel happy or loved. And I cannot dismiss the way I feel now, because ■ Ladder by Eirini Kartsaki, Steakhouse Live 2018, RichMix. © Manuel Vason Western neoliberal aesthetics put forward a very specific image of my future, career and family situation. And I have to be very careful not to forget who I am and what I want, because very often I feel it is easier to follow the crowd rather than fight against it. I have to be careful not to forget the life I have chosen for myself, and to hold what I have dear to me, near me, to hold all of me near me, gently pressing against my body. REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara (2017) Living A Feminist Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Caserio, Robert L., Edelman, Lee, Halberstam, Judith, Muñoz, José Esteban and Dean, Tim (2006) ‘The antisocial thesis in queer theory’, PMLA 121(3): 819–28. Edelman, Lee (2004) No Future: Queer theory and the death drive, Gurham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. Jack (2012) Gaga Feminism; Sex, gender and the end of the normal, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Halberstam, Judith (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives, New York, NY and London: New York University Press. Kartsaki, Eirini (2018a) Ladder, Steakhouse Live 2018, Richmix, London. Kartsaki, Eirini (2018b) Bad Shit, AltMFA event at Guest Projects, London. Muñoz, José Esteban (2009) Cruising Utopia: The then and there of queer futurity, New York, NY: New York University Press. Nelson, Maggie (2016) The Argonauts, London: Melville House. KA RT S A K I : O N C H I L D R E N PR 23.4-5 On Reflection - Turning 100.indd 19 19 14/10/2018 14:11