She survives, but loses the use of her legs, torso, bladder, bowels, as well as partial control of her arms and hands. A branch lodged in the spokes sends her over the handlebars, smashing her face and breaking her neck. The evening ride that is supposed to relieve her stress and ready her for the week ahead instead rips her from one life and hurls her into another. The narrator, a professor of English and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and chair of the faculty at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, is busy preparing for three days of contentious administration meetings on the subject of faculty governance when her beloved bicycle is unexpectedly released from the repair shop.
This book - billed as a memoir on the cover but better described as an interlocking collection of personal essays - is not only a story of living on after spinal cord injury, but is foremost an examination of embodiment and the queer body, first made by sex, politics, leather pants, and love, and later irrevocably undone by calamity. In fact, until I typed out these words - A Body, Undone - I did not notice the significance of the comma in Crosby’s title. The advent of sex positive lesbian culture of the 1990s was not the first thing I expected to be thinking about when I began reading Christina Crosby’s book A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain. We did not stop to consider the ways accident, illness, or just time, might alter everything we took for granted then. The body, our bodies, in love and in sex, named themselves in this dance, these clothes, these moments.
Queerness, in our lives back then, was an explosion of embodied joy, dancing hip to groin, our arms around each other’s necks, my exposed cleavage, her big metal belt buckle, sweat glistening on our new tattoos. In the late 20th-century American dyke world, where my longtime lover and I fell in love, our sexy, and sex-positively, gendered clothes were our rebellion, our liberation, and our becoming.
0 kommentar(er)
