Shirley Geok-lin Lim Quotes - Page 4

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.

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.

Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.

With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

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.

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.

My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.

In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.

I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.

You need to be distracted.

In short, for me - I'm kind of projecting onto you - distraction has become a modus vivendi, a way of life. Rather than complaining, I am recognizing that I couldn't do what I wanted to do because I'm distracted.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.