booklog
The Queen of Whale Cay, Kate Summerscale. I have so many thoughts and so much conflict about this book.
This is a somewhat clumsy biography of Joe Carstairs, named Marion at birth but who, according to her own self-mythology, renamed herself Joe at age 5. She had independent wealth to be able to essentially live however she wanted. She was an ambulance driver in WWI, a world-class motorboat racer in the 20s and 30s, and then bought an island in the Bahamas and lived there as essentially the leader of her own tiny world for several decades. She was a lesbian who kept a scrapbook with photos of over 120 girlfriends. She was kind of jaw-droppingly racist. She dressed in men's clothing and wearing her hair shingled in the 19-teens. She had a doll named Lord Tod Wadley, given to her by one of her longtime girlfriends, who she used as kind of a surrogate self, as he would always be young and male. She referred to herself as a "self-made man" and other phrases indicating that she framed herself as male as much as she possibly could.
And yet I'm still using "she" as the pronoun all through there, because that's the pronoun used through the book and I don't know if Carstairs would have wanted it otherwise. The book notes all of the facts listed above but doesn't dig into them or attempt any kind of gender analysis at all, really; there's an observation at the beginning that Summerscale wants to present Carstairs' life as just another person and not through a reclaiming-lesbian-history lens, or a feminist lens, or several other lenses, which is valid, given the question of if it's meaningful to apply modern identities to figures who lived in different times with their own set of identities to choose from, but... I don't know. I wanted at least acknowledgment of genderqueer or trans as concepts that might be relevant, instead of this opaqueness around the whole subject.
Umm, other things... the racism, holy shit. I'm not sure if some of the more jaw-dropping quotes were included for gratuitous shock value or to keep the reader from getting complacent/falling into the ~romance of the times~ trap (obviously that interpretation assumes that Summerscale was assuming a white readership), or... what. But they didn't really ADD anything content-wise, except "Wow, Carstairs was super-racist."
I liked the sections around Paris in the teens and 20s, where Carstairs and her friends (like Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar, who WORKED that familial link to have a good time) kind of floated at the edge of the salon society of lesbian writers and artists. They weren't popular with the set, being neither writers nor artists but just kind of in it for the drinks, drugs, and hookups, but that's kind of an awesome glimpse of the whole thing, since usually you do only read about it through the filter of creative people being deep together, and there was also the WHOO LET'S PARTY AND GET LAID thing going on at the same time. Not that the creative types WEREN'T partying and getting laid. I don't know. I just liked the other glimpse of it.
I guess overall, it was an interesting book but a bit shallow. It could have been more.
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comments. Comment there or here, as you like!
This is a somewhat clumsy biography of Joe Carstairs, named Marion at birth but who, according to her own self-mythology, renamed herself Joe at age 5. She had independent wealth to be able to essentially live however she wanted. She was an ambulance driver in WWI, a world-class motorboat racer in the 20s and 30s, and then bought an island in the Bahamas and lived there as essentially the leader of her own tiny world for several decades. She was a lesbian who kept a scrapbook with photos of over 120 girlfriends. She was kind of jaw-droppingly racist. She dressed in men's clothing and wearing her hair shingled in the 19-teens. She had a doll named Lord Tod Wadley, given to her by one of her longtime girlfriends, who she used as kind of a surrogate self, as he would always be young and male. She referred to herself as a "self-made man" and other phrases indicating that she framed herself as male as much as she possibly could.
And yet I'm still using "she" as the pronoun all through there, because that's the pronoun used through the book and I don't know if Carstairs would have wanted it otherwise. The book notes all of the facts listed above but doesn't dig into them or attempt any kind of gender analysis at all, really; there's an observation at the beginning that Summerscale wants to present Carstairs' life as just another person and not through a reclaiming-lesbian-history lens, or a feminist lens, or several other lenses, which is valid, given the question of if it's meaningful to apply modern identities to figures who lived in different times with their own set of identities to choose from, but... I don't know. I wanted at least acknowledgment of genderqueer or trans as concepts that might be relevant, instead of this opaqueness around the whole subject.
Umm, other things... the racism, holy shit. I'm not sure if some of the more jaw-dropping quotes were included for gratuitous shock value or to keep the reader from getting complacent/falling into the ~romance of the times~ trap (obviously that interpretation assumes that Summerscale was assuming a white readership), or... what. But they didn't really ADD anything content-wise, except "Wow, Carstairs was super-racist."
I liked the sections around Paris in the teens and 20s, where Carstairs and her friends (like Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar, who WORKED that familial link to have a good time) kind of floated at the edge of the salon society of lesbian writers and artists. They weren't popular with the set, being neither writers nor artists but just kind of in it for the drinks, drugs, and hookups, but that's kind of an awesome glimpse of the whole thing, since usually you do only read about it through the filter of creative people being deep together, and there was also the WHOO LET'S PARTY AND GET LAID thing going on at the same time. Not that the creative types WEREN'T partying and getting laid. I don't know. I just liked the other glimpse of it.
I guess overall, it was an interesting book but a bit shallow. It could have been more.
The Dreamwidth copy of this post has
comments. Comment there or here, as you like!