we are done by one another.
a note on aging and intergenerational belonging | + lists, links, recs <3
Today’s note is free for everyone. Normally it’s paywalled (either entirely or right before the roundup of curated Reading/Watching/Listening links); but today, everything for everyone! Happy birthday month to me, and lots of gratitude to you. <3 If you dig this whole thing, good news: I’m running a sale! For the next two weeks, you can subscribe at 11% off the normal subscription cost. But/and, as always, if cost is prohibitive, just email me to say you want a free subscription and I’ll happily comp you, no questions asked. <3
Dear ones,
In a stained-wood cafe that smelled of curry and compost, I sat across from a woman in a denim button-up; she had long gray hair and a tanned, leathery face. We were surrounded by a dozen or so activist-types who were all coming from a talk at a radical space around the corner, and someone suggested that we all go to the beloved co-op to keep the discussion going. I was just barely 22, and at this point I was becoming adjusted to the fact that I’d sometimes be in spaces with people of different ages. Fresh out of college, though, I had still mostly been socializing with people whose median age was 20. This woman was in her 60s, and she was interested in what I was saying— I remember how she asked follow-up questions in a way I wasn’t accustomed to. I’d long been having grown-up conversations with family members, but they were family; I could communicate easily with older professors, but that was school; I had fucked some guys in their late 30s, but that was sex.
This woman, me and her talking at the table, was something different. I made a stupid comment about class being an invisible marginalized identity, compared to race and gender, which you could see. She gently pushed back without making me feel bad. “Clothes are pretty telling, no?” she asked and sipped some coffee. “And teeth. You can always tell by our teeth.” She flashed a crooked-toothed grin and I covertly slid my tongue along the mess that is my lower dental situation. I was awed by her wisdom, but even more moved by her desire to keep talking to me. That evening I learned about her time organizing against the Vietnam War, and about her father. She asked me questions about the anti-war group I was in, and my family and school. I had never experienced making a new friend with someone so much older. I’d certainly been self-aware of my age in situations before this one, but this was uniquely energizing, and though we didn’t stay in touch, I will never forget how that conversation felt to me.
I turned 39 years old this week. “Last year of your [teens, 20s, 30s...]” is always kind of a biggie, at least for me and my sometimes painful predilection to dive deep into reflection at every meager opportunity. Throughout this birthday month, I was also reading the new highly anticipated Justin Torres novel, Blackouts. I loved the book for so many reasons — the genre play, the real life bits of history that invite the reader down rabbit holes, the wild Emma Goldman-adjacent anarchist trivia, and perhaps most of all, the tenderness with which Torres portrayed the intergenerational queer friendship between the two main characters. Juan is old and dying, and Nene, in his late 20s, is by his side the final days, each of them sharing stories, each of them learning from each other and also creating new meanings from their combined experiences. Being immersed in this story while also approaching the end of my 30s catapulted me into thinking about what it means to be in an in-between space, with friends and comrades and colleagues both younger and older than me. I am noticing more significantly how the experience of age is shifting how I show up in movement and cultural spaces. How it is subtly altering my writing and teaching and friendships.
Since that day at Heartland Cafe with the old hippie, I’ve had many other short- and long-term relationships with queer elders, movement mentors, and some very close friendships with Gen Xers. Movement spaces and queer worlds are often — though not always — rich with these possibilities for cross-generational connection. Until recently, though, I was always in the role of the young one. I was learning from the person who cut their teeth in the early anti-globalization days, or listening to stories from the old gay couple who met cruising in Central Park before Giuliani made a mess of the city by ‘cleaning it up.’ Somewhere in the last few years, I realized that I became the one telling the stories. Importantly (though not always instinctually), I’m still also listening: not only to the people in my spheres who are older, but also to the younger ones — my students, my friends in their 20s who have already acquired years of experience fighting pipelines and defending forests, the kiddos of my friends who teach me different ways of understanding everything from the pandemic to technology to how brains work.
I don’t have an entirely peaceful response to my getting older — I am wrestling a lot with gender and beauty things alongside it, I am feeling the weight of what it means for my book writing. But this whole part about getting to have shifting relationships with younger and older people? I’m finding it beautiful. More importantly, I’m finding it transformative. This new terrain of relationality is reminding me how fundamentally non-individual we are; how our identities and ideas are contingent on who we’re around, and how that changes as you age. As Sara Ahmed says in Queer Phenomenology:
“Neither the object nor the body have integrity in the sense of being the same thing with and without each other. Bodies as well as objects take shape through being oriented toward each other, as an orientation that may be experienced as the cohabitation or sharing of space.”
Judith Butler similarly remarks that we are “undone by one another”--but we are done by one another too.
I have been thinking about this a lot in relation to organizing around the genocide in Palestine. Since October 7th I have experienced a thought process that I think is a clear testament to my age (and thus enough time on earth to have been part of movement work for two decades): first, a terror because I had seen it before (a version of it in Iraq, protesting an Israeli escalation in Lebanon, supporting organizing against countless Israeli aggressions on Palestine before this one). Then, I’m afraid to admit, some self-righteousness: listen to your elders, I wanted to tell every young or new-to-the-movement person; as we learned during Iraq and Afghanistan, the marches won’t work, and government officials will never be forces for peace. Far more promising are the direct actions and port blockades that stop the manufacture and shipping of weapons.
Finally, when I made myself listen to young and new voices (and the voices of my less-stubborn peers), humility: things are different this time with social media — Palestinians can see the marches, the actions, and many have said these symbolic feats matter to their energy for survival. I also remembered how much the marches and organizing that ultimately failed to end the war still radicalized millions of people, many of whom are still active in organizing work today. This will be the case again, and thank goodness.
At 39, I have insight to bring to movement work, but I also have things to unlearn, and new things to which I must adapt. I feel so much gratitude for how much possibility this allows, not just for me, but for all of us dedicated to building new worlds. We have so much to tap into — novel strategies and well tested plans, energized young people on the front lines and tired-but-committed old timers who can better serve the carework behind them.
A major component of Blackouts is the discovery of an old (real) book called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Behavior. The book, which Juan passes along to Nene, is based on the research of Jan Gay, a queer woman, but whose work was co-opted by a committee with no mention of her name. Juan defends Gay’s research, but is unhappy with the end result of Sex Variants, which seems to have pathologized the subjects that Gay was trying to humanize. The copy Nene is given is full of redacted lines, a blackout poem of sexual deviance or sexual glory, depending on who you ask. Without giving any spoilers, I will tell you that Juan and Nene, together, create something new with this well intentioned but sullied research. Their two generational perspectives make way for the kind of storytelling (myth-making?) that offers an imperfect way forward, a mercurial map.
This is how it feels in the in-between. So much of what we need to know to age as individuals and as a movement, to weave together a whole world’s worth of perspectives and needs, is blacked out. But together we can fill in what was lost and compose the wholly new lines that every generation, every year, every day will require of us.
I love you.
love & solidarity,
raechel
Reading + Podcasts.
I discovered this richly dense essay from scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva from a compelling Instagram post (always grateful when someone takes the time to add citations). Da Silva is pushing against some really entrenched academic norms through her anticolonial Black feminist writing, and although I won’t project the label on her, it’s also very anarchic. She travels through Kant, Foucault, Boas, and others to reject notions of separability and towards a theory of entanglement. She wonders: “What if, instead of The Ordered World, we could image The World as a Plenum, an infinite composition in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time.”
This lengthy and immersive Leslie Jamison piece had me enthralled. It is about her early days of motherhood and it is about the slow decay of her marriage. It is also about work, and ambivalence. I will never tire of women writing about the weight and complexity of making choices.
This interview with Saeed Taji Farouky about film as a tool of resistance is thoughtful and inspiring; he’s unapologetic about wanting his films to push people towards solidarity, but also notes all the ways that filmmaking can be defanged. (Shoutout to Zeba Blay’s newsletter for the link share.)
I’m thinking a lot about style lately, as I’m noticing a bit of a crisis of my own (essay to come). As I think through it, I’m grateful that I’m not alone in the pondering. Here’s a great piece that draws on Bourdieu to reflect on what taste means in the age of the algorithm.
Some recent podcast episodes I’ve appreciated include: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on Between the Covers; Tyson Yunkaporta on For the Wild; Justin Torres on LARB.
Watching.
The new buzzy Jacqueline Novak comedy special, Get On Your Knees, is definitely unlike anything I’ve seen before. Novak is frenetic and very smart in her reflections on the minutiae of giving blow jobs and absolutely everything adjacent to it — what teen girls are taught/warned about them; the fear; the doing it; the doing it regularly; the hindsight about it; the poetry and banality of it. It’s hard to explain how intelligent (and chaotic) this is through a summary. It’s also consistently laugh-out-loud funny, and ultimately a refreshingly candid look at teenage girl sexuality.
Listening.
My pal Matt has excellent taste in music, so I’m always stoked when I get a link from him to check out. This week it was, as he described, a Songs:Ohia copycat. Extremely accurate, and thus mega up my alley. Though some songs sound like a straight up Jason Molina coverband (in a good way!), other songs just evoke his essence and also pay homage to early 00s instrument-heavy sounds (think Neutral Milk Hotel and Beirut), and also slips in some nods to mathy hardcore (think Deafheaven). Truly a recipe full of all things I love.
Joy & Attention.
gray days. ⇼ a very adorable shuffleboard gathering with my rhizome crew. ⇼our little lake neighbor and its beauty in the fog.⇼ the most vibrant lichen. ⇼a sweet visit with my momma on my bday, hearing more details about my birth story (I picked a snowstorm to arrive). ⇼friends and sweet birthday wishes.⇼ the library. ⇼my cute feme writing group. ⇼laughing. ⇼therapy. ⇼voice notes.⇼ tea with honey. ⇼less time on instagram and turning off the messages feature for a bit.⇼ Bill Callahan. ⇼birdsong. ⇼lighting candles in the early morning dark. ⇼black seed oil (it seems to have miraculously fought off a cold that wanted to come; thanks to Binyamina for the tip of having some on hand).⇼ a lovely book club discussion on Blackouts. ⇼long walks. ⇼the moments i feel excited about syllabus planning instead of entirely stressed out. ⇼the kitties.⇼ & all of you, thank you. <3
Aging as a femme is so weird. On one hand (I'll be 41 next month) I feel like this is my most powerful decade yet so far, and on the other...well, even I can't entirely escape societal norms and I do have Many Feelings about getting older and what that means. But mostly I'm choosing to embrace it. Older means wiser, means more life and more experience...how can we not be grateful for that??
Also I'm really keen to read Blackouts & Queer Phenomenology. They're added to the list! Working on reading more and staring at my phone less this year :)
Happy birthday Raechel! Grateful as always for your sharing.
Reading this has reminded me how I find the mixing of ages one of the most precious prefigurative parts of movement organising. Age segregation is such a blatant product of the over structuring of our lives. Great to break that. But really it’s just personal gratitude for getting to see the size (and weird shape) of life through friendships across ages, and discovering how rare such an obviously beautiful thing is...
I hope the beauty and gender questions are generative challenges for you!