The release of L. Timmel Duchamp’s story collection Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air was accompanied by a new essay written by Duchamp and shared on the Aqueduct Press blog. Titled “What We’re Fighting For,” the essay contextualises the book’s publication amidst the horrors of the second Trump administration. Duchamp focuses on the epistemic violence of the current US government, which has openly attacked individual rights and sought to rewrite history. She argues that “the longer such attacks go on, the more likely our episteme will be dramatically, drastically altered.” That concern with epistemic violence is born out in the pages of this collection. The antagonists of these stories are often, in the words of one character, “dying to remove everything they think doesn’t belong there.” That three of the book’s four stories were originally published in the 1990s does not dilute their applicability today; if anything, they show how deeply rooted our current battles really are.
The collection opens with “Motherhood, Etc.” Originally published in 1993, it is one of two stories Duchamp expects to “read a bit differently now, given how much farther most of us have come in our understanding of gender.” It opens with the protagonist, nineteen-year-old Pat, being interrogated by government agents about her relationship with her boyfriend, Joshua. Pat initially refuses to be drawn, but over the course of a dozen or so pages we learn that the two have engaged in non-penetrative sexual activity, and that, seemingly as a result, Pat has grown a penis. Blood tests performed on Pat without her knowledge reveal her to be carrying a novel infection which can alter the chromosomal structure of those with whom she comes into contact, adding “[a]n XY pair for female blood, and an XX pair for male blood.”
It is a potentially salacious premise, but Duchamp treats Pat with dignity throughout, and the character’s feelings about her situation develop as implications continue to unspool. Pat is initially unnerved by what is happening to her: “it makes her queasy every morning when she wakes and finds all of it there, between her legs, crowding and sweat-making.” But as its reality sinks in, she begins to take pleasure in her altered body: “And sometimes a secret voice in her head says there’s something neat about being a freak.” Duchamp positions the story’s horror not in Pat’s body, then, but in the ways that overwhelmingly male medical and governmental systems seek to control it. In one memorable scene, the medical agents interrogating Pat are horrified to discover she has an erection. Pat, by contrast, is overwhelmed with pleasure, and cracks a joke about it:
“I guess Freud was wrong, hunh? When he said that little boys feel threatened with castration when they discover that a woman or a girl doesn’t have a penis. Because if that were true, wouldn’t men feel less threatened when they saw that a woman did have a penis?” At which Wagner, cursing, screaming at her to “shut [her] mouth,” charged at her. And then suddenly Sam and Shelley were pulling her out of the chaise lounge and hustling her off to the bathroom, Sam all the while lecturing her about “behaving” herself and threatening her with “57 different kinds of hell to pay” if she didn’t.
The problem here is not Pat’s unconventionally sexed body but the male agents’ unwillingness to countenance it.
That said, the story is not a one-dimensional celebration of Pat’s difference. The question remains of how she got this way, and the answer carries disturbing implications. The latter part of the story sees Pat reunite with Joshua, who explains that he is a member of a hermaphroditic alien species. He has transferred his own physical condition to her and given her the ability to pass it on to others. Pat is, as before, excited by the changes in herself (“At last, she thinks, she knows what is wrong with human beings. Sexual dimorphism, it is obvious, has been nothing but a disaster!”). But that excitement is cut with a deep misgiving: “she keeps herself from thinking much about his admission that it is he who’s caused her to change and that he chose not to ask her if she wanted him to.”
Duchamp lets the reader sit in this ambivalence. Pat is changed. She is happy with some aspects of the change. But it is not something she chose. When she decides at the story’s end that she will infect other humans, becoming “mother to the Age of the Hermaphrodite,” it is easy to feel intrigued by the promise of a remade society. But we are also invited to wonder if Pat is reproducing the same violence that Joshua first visited on her. “Motherhood, Etc.” is a fascinating story, which asks thoughtful questions about the possibilities of queering the human body, but is honest about how little say the possessors of such bodies often have over them.
Later in the collection we have “Welcome, Kid, to the Real World,” first published in 1996. Where “Motherhood, Etc.” centres on a nineteen-year-old whose binary gender identity is complicated by a science fictional intervention, in this story we almost have the opposite. The protagonist, J. L., is a nineteen-year-old “kid” of no fixed gender identity, in a society where coming of age means a “transition” into either a male or female identity. For J. L., choosing a gender also means choosing a career path. While in theory there is nothing stopping a male person from choosing a traditionally female occupation or vice versa, we are told that “[t]o deliberately put one’s occupational design at odds with one’s sexual choice would … get one labeled a pervert from Go.” This is, of course, far from the most outlandish concept in the story.
Structurally, the story follows a familiar coming-of-age template. J. L. and friend N. A. struggle with their gender/career choices, until their final decisions place them at odds with one another. It’s affecting stuff, but “Welcome, Kid, to the Real World” is most interesting for its thoughtfulness about language. The word “kid” functions like a pronoun for the non-aligned J. L., with male or female pronouns reserved for the time after kid has chosen the gender that kid wants. Similarly, J. L. is given initials rather than a full name, and when kid eventually decides to join in with the current “fad for being female,” kid lands on “Gisele Jensen-Lamarke.” The initials are respected but also added to, an expression of J. L.’s personality even as kid conforms to the gender regime of kid’s society. It’s an interesting detail in a story full of them, and while it’s difficult to say how this story was received back in the nineties, in the present day it makes for a lively and compelling companion piece to “Motherhood, Etc.”
The collection’s one new story, “The Last Nostalgia,” is unfortunately the least successful. The story lays out a Borges-esque city, sitting at the intersection of “the Real World” and “the Excellent World.” Variously referred to as “The Middle Ground” and “The Place of Wrongness,” the City is a rationality-defying space, “impossible to pin down and dissect,” which the Real and Excellent Worlds simultaneously fear and rely upon. It’s a good central image, invoking contemporary discussions about political radicalisation, urban-rural divides, and the possibility or even desirability of mapping out all the world’s complexities. However, the images are so foregrounded that the protagonists’ lives end up feeling rather perfunctory, and the reader is kept at arm’s length throughout.
The story is also victim to a bizarre bit of structuring that reads so randomly it could well be a copyediting mistake. The narrative is broken up into discrete sections, most of which are numbered, except for the fourth and fifth sections, which, while clearly distinct from the sections around them, nevertheless go unnumbered: Section three is followed by these two unnumbered sections, and when they are done we resume the numbering with section six. As a critic, I find myself nonplussed. If a deliberate choice, I suppose it is fitting for a story about a city which defies rational order, yet beyond this, it seems to lack significance. If a mistake, it troubles the reader and yet has the rare distinction for an error of being thematically appropriate.
The collection’s final piece is 1994’s “When Joy Came to the World.” An epistolary narrative in which we read one half of an email exchange about a world-changing event, it is perhaps the most straightforward story of the bunch. The story begins with a mysterious alien “snow” falling into the Arno river, which eventually brings forth flowers whose “sweet citrus fragrance” turns the inhabitants of Florence into sexually liberated hedonists. This joy, we surmise, soon encompasses the entire planet, and the story caps off with a future “Respected Narratologist” extolling the value of the documents we have just read: “We must never forget what we once were; nor the first touches and steps and words of the child learning to taste and touch life—even if that child is a biologically developed adult.”
This is classic star-man imagery, the human encounter with the alien bringing forth collective enlightenment; let all the children boogie. As with the previous stories in the collection, there are notes of ambivalence. There’s a blackly comic air to the protagonist reassuring her correspondent: “Nick, you MUST NOT worry about this scent … I appreciate your concern, but if you could smell it, you’d know it couldn’t possibly be anything noxious.” And yet it’s difficult to escape a sense of the emerging society being more desirable than what came before. It’s telling that the story’s protagonist, an American graduate student working in Italy, loses her sense of American chauvinism as the flowers’ scent takes hold, going from complaining about shiftless Europeans to calling US workmanship “shoddy” as communications break down. Even more revealingly, the flower-filled Florentine idyll gives the book its title image:
Listen, it’s really truly beautiful here, more beautiful than I’ve ever known any place to be. This afternoon a myriad little bees & butterflies suddenly appeared in the air, mixing & meshing with the lovely white petals. Like shards of rainbows cut loose in the air, darting this way & that, shimmering with the purest, most intense colors any painter has ever had on his or her palette.
Duchamp says that “When Joy Came to the World” is a story about “the destabilization of capitalism that results when pleasure and joyosity take priority over unquestioned routine and commerce.” It’s an appealing vision, particularly at a time when unquestioned routine and commerce feel as hegemonic as they have ever been. Because if the Trump administration is right, and the episteme can be radically transformed by applying sufficient pressure … what is to stop us from transforming it ourselves? Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air offers four visions of pleasure in political, social, and biological change. In doing so, it presents a welcome pick-me-up in a reactionary wasteland.