Book Review: How We Desire, Carolin Emke
Dec. 29th, 2018 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricI think this might have been the first e-ARC I read via NetGalley, and oooh boy, do I have opinions! The text, an English translation by Imogen Taylor of a work first published in German, came out in May 2018, but NetGalley had it marked as to-publish 2019, so I was conscientiously putting off posting my review until I realised my error.
I was very interested by this book - fascinated, even - and in places validated by it, but not satisfied. It offers an engaging personal account of the way that desire can fluctuate and shape identity, without necessarily being coterminous with identity. However, there are serious limitations in Emke’s perspective and the ability of this book to present something more than a personal coming-of-age narrative.
The strength of this book is, by far, Emke’s storytelling (facilitated by Imogen Taylor’s translation). Recollecting events from her childhood, Emke mixes vivid descriptions of particular details (the woods behind her family home feature frequently) with lyrical recounts of repeated, almost ritualised activities. I was struck, for instance, by her description of early teenage parties, where she and her peers danced and made out without, apparently, much discrimination as to who they made out with, aside from the consistent boundary of gender. Descriptions of music lessons, of learning to deconstruct music as a text, are exquisite. Emke makes deft metaphorical links between music and experience of sexuality - she writes, for instance, of repetition and variation, and the inability to identify variations if one has never heard the theme isolated and defined, as comparable to her inability to recognise lesbian desire without an example thereof in her life.
I also really enjoyed Emke’s take on sexual identity formation - she writes of becoming gay, as a result of discovering her desire, rather than of her status as gay (which she prefers to lesbian, although she also uses lesbian throughout the book) being an innate thing which she discovered. She writes of how her adolescence - marked by gender-non-normative pursuits and by an affinity with a gay male friend - could be interpreted as full of ‘signs’ that she was ‘really gay’ all along, but she insists on the valid experience of eroticism and ‘falling in love’ with men throughout that time. I did feel, as I often do with memoir, that either some aspects of this aren’t fully interrogated, or that the balance between truth-telling and privacy has produced an odd result. Emke writes, insistently, that she desired and fell in love with men, but she never describes doing so, not as she describes desiring her first female partner or falling in love with her long term partner. She describes eroticism with men as entirely depersonalised, her male age peers interchangeable. If she desired any of them specifically, and she insists she does, she doesn’t describe it. What was the experience of falling in love with men like, and how different from women? I feel like I want to buy her a beer and pry these answers out of her.
The biggest problem I have with this book, however, is that it is not what it says on the cover. It is not a book about how we desire. It is a book about Carolin Emke’s experience of desire, contextualised with sharp insights into the experience of her age peers (although the insights are mostly reserved for her male age peers - while she has a knack for describing heterosexual male culture, she has very little to say about straight teenage girls, let alone women. There are some notes there about her alienation from her female peers, but other than that…). This is a memoir, not an academic or even journalistic survey of broader experience. Emke’s work as a journalist in non-western contexts crops up occasionally, but primarily in the context of how she feels and how she navigates alien cultural environments (complete with some not particularly nuanced reflections on her felt responsibility to Represent to those ‘oppressed by the norms that constrain them’ who may not even have a word for lesbian). The one flash of real complexity here is when she recounts the experience of her friend, a translator from Gaza, who after obtaining refugee status in Europe on grounds of his homosexuality, feels not liberated but repulsed by his experience of western gay culture. But this story is not interrogated - not linked up with any of the actually quite substantial writing on how common this experience is, or with her anecdotes about her friend Tom who desired the love of a man and was blindsided by his experience of lust, or of a Muslim female friend who enjoyed the freedom to drink in public in Europe.
Emke’s treatment of trans people, intersex people, and sex work is brief and dismissive. There are language issues - the one intersex person mentioned is introduced as a hermaphrodie, ‘transexual’ appears on a list of (in Emke’s view, restrictive) sexual identities alongside homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual even though one of these things is not comparable to the others. The terms transsexual, transvestite and transgender are all used, and I would be interested to compare to the German and see how accurately Taylor is transmitting Emke’s vocabulary. I know that cognates of ‘transexual’ are more commonly used in European languages than in English (and my impression is that continental trans communities have not been quite so strongly opposed to the usage - but cognates of transgender are coming into use and can be preferred for similar reasons to the English term), and if I were translating from French usage myself I would find that an interesting conundrum - transmit the original although the term is much more jarring to english audiences, or adapt? That’s a translation nerd question, though: the reality is that Emke mentions trans and intersex people as adjuncts to gay experience, primarily as case studies that illustrate the porousness of gender binarism: she does not actually engage in any meaningful way with trans experience, or with questions trans experience might raise about desire.
Likewise, Emke’s primary engagement with sex work is as an illustrative example - marking her alienation from her male peers by the moment when she realised she could not join them in objectifying street walkers. She notes that it is not ‘done’ to criticise sex work in the contemporary argument, makes a brief comment to the effect that no one takes sex trafficking seriously, but spends the bulk of that episode describing her disgust not just at her peers’ attitude to sex workers but at the transaction itself. She conflates her disgust at the idea of transactional sex with the sex workers themselves being disgusting, even as she complains about the legalised sex industry’s knack for sanitising the transaction while objectifying and degrading the woman involved. It’s not even a well-thought-through case against sex work, it’s just an anecdote dressed up in the feeling of disgust.
Finally, for a book which casts itself as striking a bold claim for desire as fluid, identity as choice rather than innate quality, etc etc, where are all the bisexuals? Emke mentions bisexuals twice: once in the problematic list above, and once describing a lover as an attractive bisexual woman. That’s it. She seems to be completely unaware of a long tradition of bisexual writing on the very subjects in which she is most interested. Granted, a lot of that is in English, but Emke’s a journalist who works in English a lot of the time: it’s not as if this is inaccessible to her. That writing in English is not all from the US: there’s a whole book that arose from EuroBiCon in the 1990s.
On a positive note, despite the fact that the book itself disappoints me, I want to note how much I appreciate that the English translation exists. As far as I know this edition, by Text Publishing, is the only English translation of what has evidently been quite a popular book in Germany. I can think of many uses for it - it could be used to broaden a contemporary sexuality studies course beyond the Anglo-American sphere, for instance, and to give anglophone native speakers access to primary source account of 80s youth experience in Germany. That an indie Australian press is investing not only in Australian authors but in broadening Australians’ access to texts from outside the Anglosphere is remarkable and exciting, my issues with this book’s perspectives aside. I’m glad to have had access to the e-ARC via NetGalley, courtesy of the publisher.
I was very interested by this book - fascinated, even - and in places validated by it, but not satisfied. It offers an engaging personal account of the way that desire can fluctuate and shape identity, without necessarily being coterminous with identity. However, there are serious limitations in Emke’s perspective and the ability of this book to present something more than a personal coming-of-age narrative.
The strength of this book is, by far, Emke’s storytelling (facilitated by Imogen Taylor’s translation). Recollecting events from her childhood, Emke mixes vivid descriptions of particular details (the woods behind her family home feature frequently) with lyrical recounts of repeated, almost ritualised activities. I was struck, for instance, by her description of early teenage parties, where she and her peers danced and made out without, apparently, much discrimination as to who they made out with, aside from the consistent boundary of gender. Descriptions of music lessons, of learning to deconstruct music as a text, are exquisite. Emke makes deft metaphorical links between music and experience of sexuality - she writes, for instance, of repetition and variation, and the inability to identify variations if one has never heard the theme isolated and defined, as comparable to her inability to recognise lesbian desire without an example thereof in her life.
I also really enjoyed Emke’s take on sexual identity formation - she writes of becoming gay, as a result of discovering her desire, rather than of her status as gay (which she prefers to lesbian, although she also uses lesbian throughout the book) being an innate thing which she discovered. She writes of how her adolescence - marked by gender-non-normative pursuits and by an affinity with a gay male friend - could be interpreted as full of ‘signs’ that she was ‘really gay’ all along, but she insists on the valid experience of eroticism and ‘falling in love’ with men throughout that time. I did feel, as I often do with memoir, that either some aspects of this aren’t fully interrogated, or that the balance between truth-telling and privacy has produced an odd result. Emke writes, insistently, that she desired and fell in love with men, but she never describes doing so, not as she describes desiring her first female partner or falling in love with her long term partner. She describes eroticism with men as entirely depersonalised, her male age peers interchangeable. If she desired any of them specifically, and she insists she does, she doesn’t describe it. What was the experience of falling in love with men like, and how different from women? I feel like I want to buy her a beer and pry these answers out of her.
The biggest problem I have with this book, however, is that it is not what it says on the cover. It is not a book about how we desire. It is a book about Carolin Emke’s experience of desire, contextualised with sharp insights into the experience of her age peers (although the insights are mostly reserved for her male age peers - while she has a knack for describing heterosexual male culture, she has very little to say about straight teenage girls, let alone women. There are some notes there about her alienation from her female peers, but other than that…). This is a memoir, not an academic or even journalistic survey of broader experience. Emke’s work as a journalist in non-western contexts crops up occasionally, but primarily in the context of how she feels and how she navigates alien cultural environments (complete with some not particularly nuanced reflections on her felt responsibility to Represent to those ‘oppressed by the norms that constrain them’ who may not even have a word for lesbian). The one flash of real complexity here is when she recounts the experience of her friend, a translator from Gaza, who after obtaining refugee status in Europe on grounds of his homosexuality, feels not liberated but repulsed by his experience of western gay culture. But this story is not interrogated - not linked up with any of the actually quite substantial writing on how common this experience is, or with her anecdotes about her friend Tom who desired the love of a man and was blindsided by his experience of lust, or of a Muslim female friend who enjoyed the freedom to drink in public in Europe.
Emke’s treatment of trans people, intersex people, and sex work is brief and dismissive. There are language issues - the one intersex person mentioned is introduced as a hermaphrodie, ‘transexual’ appears on a list of (in Emke’s view, restrictive) sexual identities alongside homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual even though one of these things is not comparable to the others. The terms transsexual, transvestite and transgender are all used, and I would be interested to compare to the German and see how accurately Taylor is transmitting Emke’s vocabulary. I know that cognates of ‘transexual’ are more commonly used in European languages than in English (and my impression is that continental trans communities have not been quite so strongly opposed to the usage - but cognates of transgender are coming into use and can be preferred for similar reasons to the English term), and if I were translating from French usage myself I would find that an interesting conundrum - transmit the original although the term is much more jarring to english audiences, or adapt? That’s a translation nerd question, though: the reality is that Emke mentions trans and intersex people as adjuncts to gay experience, primarily as case studies that illustrate the porousness of gender binarism: she does not actually engage in any meaningful way with trans experience, or with questions trans experience might raise about desire.
Likewise, Emke’s primary engagement with sex work is as an illustrative example - marking her alienation from her male peers by the moment when she realised she could not join them in objectifying street walkers. She notes that it is not ‘done’ to criticise sex work in the contemporary argument, makes a brief comment to the effect that no one takes sex trafficking seriously, but spends the bulk of that episode describing her disgust not just at her peers’ attitude to sex workers but at the transaction itself. She conflates her disgust at the idea of transactional sex with the sex workers themselves being disgusting, even as she complains about the legalised sex industry’s knack for sanitising the transaction while objectifying and degrading the woman involved. It’s not even a well-thought-through case against sex work, it’s just an anecdote dressed up in the feeling of disgust.
Finally, for a book which casts itself as striking a bold claim for desire as fluid, identity as choice rather than innate quality, etc etc, where are all the bisexuals? Emke mentions bisexuals twice: once in the problematic list above, and once describing a lover as an attractive bisexual woman. That’s it. She seems to be completely unaware of a long tradition of bisexual writing on the very subjects in which she is most interested. Granted, a lot of that is in English, but Emke’s a journalist who works in English a lot of the time: it’s not as if this is inaccessible to her. That writing in English is not all from the US: there’s a whole book that arose from EuroBiCon in the 1990s.
On a positive note, despite the fact that the book itself disappoints me, I want to note how much I appreciate that the English translation exists. As far as I know this edition, by Text Publishing, is the only English translation of what has evidently been quite a popular book in Germany. I can think of many uses for it - it could be used to broaden a contemporary sexuality studies course beyond the Anglo-American sphere, for instance, and to give anglophone native speakers access to primary source account of 80s youth experience in Germany. That an indie Australian press is investing not only in Australian authors but in broadening Australians’ access to texts from outside the Anglosphere is remarkable and exciting, my issues with this book’s perspectives aside. I’m glad to have had access to the e-ARC via NetGalley, courtesy of the publisher.