My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak. Shirley Geok-lin Lim More Quotes by Shirley Geok-lin Lim More Quotes From Shirley Geok-lin Lim As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually. Shirley Geok-lin Lim brother mother father If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act. Shirley Geok-lin Lim crazy sound writing Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero. Shirley Geok-lin Lim might-use identity thinking When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female. Shirley Geok-lin Lim female writing world When you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides of Christ. Christ is the bridegroom. In these symbolic actions, rather than in physical actions, where a male reaches sexuality or participates in intimate exchanges, if one uses a different term - there's often a heterosexual figuring that takes place. The male poet invokes a beautiful female muse. The virginal nun consecrated invokes the male bridegroom, Christ. Shirley Geok-lin Lim males female beautiful What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy. Shirley Geok-lin Lim female-writers energy desire My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me. Shirley Geok-lin Lim muse mind I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power. Shirley Geok-lin Lim resisting muse I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet. Shirley Geok-lin Lim muse hopeless powerful I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me. Shirley Geok-lin Lim problem If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over. Shirley Geok-lin Lim over-you struggle long I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back. Shirley Geok-lin Lim silence writing thinking "Time" does not mean "occasion." Shirley Geok-lin Lim occasions doe mean The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act. Shirley Geok-lin Lim physical-body body From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant. Shirley Geok-lin Lim males writing book Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim daughter girl children Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that. Shirley Geok-lin Lim feminine stuff class When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers. Shirley Geok-lin Lim moon brother boys I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected. Shirley Geok-lin Lim pants growing-up running For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along. Shirley Geok-lin Lim growing-up house boys
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