I first read Cynthia R. Wallace’s Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering in graduate school when I was working on a seminar paper on eco-feminism and eco-theology in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians. More recently, I reread Wallace’s work on suffering and wrote this essay in the midst of two events that resonate well with Wallace’s subject: COVID-19 and my mother’s tibial fracture. Because Wallace so successfully interweaves her own personal narrative into her literary analysis, I begin this essay with a brief reflection on these two recent events. Then, guided by Wallace’s focus on “critique and embrace,” I transition to a short reading of agricultural labor and suffering in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians. I conclude with an invitation for more sustained conversation about a pedagogy informed by Wallace’s literary ethics of suffering.

The suffering caused by COVID-19 is obvious, with more 356,000 deaths—and continuously climbing—at the time that I write this. As I read Wallace’s reminder to remember the specific gendered and racialized components of suffering, I read tragic articles about the impact of COVID-19 on women and people of color. In their recent article “How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers,” Campbell Robertson and Robert Gebeloff document how frontline workers are predominantly women—and specifically women of color:

From the cashier to the emergency room nurse to the drugstore pharmacist to the home health aide taking the bus to check on her older client, the soldier on the front lines of the current national emergency is most likely a woman. One in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential, according to a New York Times analysis of census data crossed with the federal government’s essential worker guidelines. Nonwhite women are more likely to be doing essential jobs than anyone else.

Likewise, Helen Lewis warns of another way that this pandemic will inflict suffering on women: “Across the world, women’s independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic” as they are forced to take on the extra unpaid labor of childcare.1 I would love to hear more from Wallace about her reading practice and what it can teach us during a pandemic. Would she adjust her model of literary ethics at all? What parts of her reading practice seem particularly relevant for our current circumstances?

While I read about the global suffering and death caused by COVID-19—and our lack of adequate systems to swiftly confront such a crisis—I have had a more personal experience of suffering. Two weeks ago, I learned that my father was hospitalized for what he thought was a heart attack. While he was hospitalized, my mother fell off a ladder and broke her leg. She army-crawled back into the house to call an ambulance. Every few feet, I later learned, she cried out in pain, rested a moment, and then resumed crawling.

During the week of my mother’s hospitalization, I repeatedly heard friends and family exclaim, “She’s a tough woman. She doesn’t give up.” I agreed. Because of COVID-19, the hospital didn’t allow any visitors. My mother and I spoke often on the phone, and I would ask her about her pain: “Is your pain any better? Is it still a nine?” How could I understand her suffering? How could I read it? And how could I respond?

I find Wallace’s entire work provocative as she seeks to understand and answer these kinds of questions about reading and responding to suffering. What I find most refreshing about Wallace’s reading is her refusal to present clean and straightforward solutions. Her analysis does not conclude with a step-by-step how-to guide for reading suffering; instead, she emphasizes that reading and rereading is a messy, risky process:

I am calling for us to try. I am calling for us to admit that we will be wrong at times. We will approach texts that may do us harm, that may trick us, as not every book is for the world’s good, and the language available to us belongs just as much–and much more–to the oppressor. . . . I am calling us to try not to be paralyzed by the need to be right, by the need to be best, by the endless array of choices that confront us. (230) 

Again and again, in Of Women Borne, Wallace concedes that her analysis isn’t—and shouldn’t be—all-encompassing; she insists on the difficulty of interpreting: “The writings I have been studying both do and do not represent in any sense of the term, and that is one of their primary ethical lessons: the limitations of any reader’s reading, the way justice is called for, again and again, and yet continues to slip just over the horizon. We both can and cannot recognize ourselves in texts. We both can and cannot learn from them what we ought to do” (214). Reading and responding to suffering is difficult, risky, and messy. I really appreciate Wallace’s recognition of our human limitations, even as she urges us read, act, and learn from each other and from literary texts.

While I enjoy all of Wallace’s readings, her reading of Castillo’s works still stands out to me. Selfishly, I want to hear more from Wallace about the environmental suffering depicted—and potentially redeemed—in the novel. Throughout the chapter, Wallace notes the impact of environmental racism on Latinx people: “Interwoven with many Chicanas’ enculturated expectation of suffering are numerous concrete material sufferings that attend their raced, classed, and gendered subject positions: environmental racism, sweatshops, and deathly migrant work, enforced sterilization, urban violence” (137).

I keep reading and rereading Castillo’s The Guardians through Wallace’s argument that Castillo’s novel and other texts “manifest a paradoxical stance of both critique and embrace of Christianity, of particular cultures, and of suffering itself as both bound up with oppression and source of empowerment for ethical action” (xiv). Throughout The Guardians, the land simultaneously serves as a source of suffering and a source of empowerment. As Castillo’s novel makes clear, agricultural labor results in a disproportionate number of pesticide-related illnesses. Of course, many of these laborers have been Latinx workers, and, as Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacón recognize, many of these laborers have been women: “In the years 1930–1950, women comprised up to 75% of all food processing workers in agricultural industries. In California, the majority of these were Mexican, both citizens and otherwise” (277). Regina’s experience, as a “little girl” “work[ing] in the fields” reflects this historical reality. She critiques the suffering caused by a system of agricultural work that does not care about the workers themselves. “All the summer crop dusters will fly low, spraying pesticides on the nearby farmlands, not to mention on the workers” (48).

Contrasted with this oppressive agricultural suffering is an ethically-engaged practice of farming. On the same pages that she critiques the use of pesticides, Regina presents alternatives, like “farmers’ market[s],” “pesticide-free vegetables,” composting, and “container gardens” (48, 50, 52). Regina shows how labor-intensive farming and gardening can be, and how this activity surely results in tired bodies, but the labor is a “productive pain” (to use Wallace’s term) that sustains life for others. Because of The Guardians’s intertextual references to Paradise Lost (through, as Wallace explains, characters named Milton, Uriel, Gabriel, Michael, and Rafael [157]), I find it difficult not to read the novel’s reclamation of agricultural labor as a response to God’s curse of painful toil and labor in Genesis 3.

As I use Wallace’s theories to guide my reading of Castillo’s novel, I hear Wallace warning to remember that “there is a content to literature, that literature does importantly point somehow to enfleshed reality” (35). Too often, in my own readings, I allow my theoretical lenses to guide—or perhaps take over—the literary texts. Thus, I find Wallace’s attitude toward “high” theory inspiring even if challenging. Although Wallace clearly engages with—and remains guided by—“high” literary theories, she insists on turning away from the “body of theory” to instead “attend to women’s literary writing” throughout the body of her work (xv, xvi). Wallace’s approach—engaging with “high theory” primarily in her first chapter and then shifting attention toward women’s literary writing—is impressive, and the result is a series of intelligible and sophisticated close readings. Wallace’s scholarly approach—in addition to her reading practice—is one to emulate.

I want to hear more from Wallace about the place of her reading practice in the classroom. On the last pages of Of Women Borne, Wallace calls us to “walk into our classrooms, create our syllabi, humbled by the fact that there is always more we are leaving out of the reading list or the lecture or the discussion, usually without even realizing it” (230). Instead of falling into paralysis over our inability to craft the most representative or socially just syllabi, we need to create the syllabi that we can, while remaining open to change. Wallace’s ethics of readerly attention reminds me of David I. Smith’s understanding of charitable reading (in contrast to consumerist reading). Smith’s 2011 essay offers a variety of classroom interventions—from reducing students’ reading loads to focusing on specific “longitudinal thread[s] throughout the semester’s readings” (20). Smith’s strategies resonate with Wallace’s call for us to “seek communities (or seek to create communities) that will bring together differences and allow us to challenge each other” within the classroom and other spaces (230). As a writing center administrator and writing teacher, I would love to learn more about what Wallace’s reading practices mean for our pedagogical practices. How do we teach a risky, attentive practice of reading? How might we apply such a practice when reading students’ writings? How would Wallace’s ethics of reading challenge some of our current teaching practices?

For the chance to think through these multiple sites of questioning with a deeply thoughtful dialogue partner, I am grateful for the opportunity to revisit Wallace’s work. The entire text is engaging and thought-provoking, but the conclusion is so rich, as Wallace outlines and wrestles with her model of literary ethics. I want to keep reading and learning from Wallace, just as her work concludes. I suppose her conclusion is the point, though. Wallace does not have—and does not pretend to have—all the answers, and she invites readers to join her in thinking through a literary ethics of suffering. The final sentence of Of Women Borne turns toward the reader, asking, “What will you do, once your hands are again free?” (231). I look forward to the conversation.

Works Cited

Castillo, Ana. The Guardians. New York: Random House, 2007.

Davis, Mike, and Justin Akers Chacón. No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Chicago: Haymarket, 2006.

Lewis, Helen. “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism.” Atlantic, March 19, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/feminism-womens-rights-coronavirus-covid19/608302/.

Robertson, Campbell, and Robert Gebeloff. “How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers.” New York Times, April 18, 2020. https://nyti.ms/2xuWTes.

Smith, David I. “Reading Practices and Christian Pedagogy: Enacting Charity with Texts.” In Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning, edited by David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

The Coronavirus pandemic rounds out everything we do these days. For some of us it’s pushed to the forefront: those who live in certain cities, work certain jobs, have elderly relatives, or are immunocompromised. Others of us make it the focus of our daily lives by inhaling too much news. The group to which I belong have begun to invest in comparisons; we read dystopic literature to turn our imaginations on. Why not raise the psychological ante with a little Oryx and Crake or Station 11? I, and maybe others who belong to this group, want to know what’s at stake in all of this. What are we missing out on? What can we learn? How should we be acting? How much worse will it get? Instead of plunging into our screens, we are trying to make meaning of our dangerously-close-to-absurd lives. There must be a lesson in here somewhere, and books have the power to dig it out for us. Most of these lessons come in the form of fear and imagination. What really makes a human life human? asks Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake. Is the past worth keeping alive? asks Emily St. John Mandel in Station 11.

Even before the pandemic, Cynthia Wallace was a questioning and imaginative reader, virtues on full display in Of Women Borne. Wallace is asking specifically about the suffering of women as it is displayed in literary texts, and her questioning is not satisfied by simplistic unitive narratives. Wallace reads books for their questions too, specifically about the suffering of women. She is not content to dismiss women’s suffering under the umbrella of patriarchy or oppression. There is more to it. Wallace is excruciatingly careful to locate and avoid philosophical mines like romanticizing women’s suffering, and pithy sayings like “it happens for a reason” and “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.” She addresses the overanalyzed suffering that Eve apparently brought on for all women in a way that doesn’t feel boring or overwrought. Like many of us are doing right now, Wallace turns to literature to help us find truth, in part by calling upon Chimamanda Adichie’s assertion that fiction is true (168). For both Wallace and Adichie, we can learn from characters who never existed. Thus, Wallace uncovers some of the truths behind the suffering of women, and even if you haven’t read the four main authors she discusses, you can still learn something about how to read (and avoid reading) the suffering of fictional women. Along with Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Adichie, Wallace pulls from philosopher Simone Weil as well as various figures from decolonial and feminist theory.

Wallace begins Of Women Borne asking about the connection between suffering and compassion (3). She points us to Annie Dillard, who says that an author suffers to bring about something good for her readers, and she challenges the now widespread aversion to and suspicion concerning voluntary suffering (8, 10). The conversation had been all but closed: women’s suffering is bad and we need to end any discussion that dares to ask after its value. Wallace refuses this easy narrative and plunges into the dangerous possibility of the redemptive power of suffering. At every step Wallace is careful, reminding me of someone who walks on hot coals without getting burned. She reminds us at crucial intervals not to mistake her local conclusions for global ones, and not to assume she’s repeating age-old (and now discarded) clichés about the power of pain. Wallace reads not just novels but commentaries on them and literary criticism in adjacent fields, like feminist theory and liberation theology. Wallace states that she is

concerned not just with the structures of ethical reading but also with the question of suffering as a theme, of women’s suffering and sacrifice as a social phenomenon making both texts and bodies. What of bones and flesh, of political rhetoric and labor relations, of the hands that hold the spines? (33)

Of Women Borne asks after reader and author, and how suffering brings them together.

In chapter 4, Wallace studies Ana Castillo’s written relationship to Roman Catholicism, particularly to liberation theology. The problem is obvious by now: Catholic Latinas are supposed to be made in the image of Mary, the mother of God, which in Tey Diana Rebolledo’s words, means “dutiful mothers, wives, daughters, teachers, nurses, and other helpful, nurturing, compassionate figures of all kinds” (134). But Wallace also notes that the tradition of Latinx feminist theology (and, I would add, mujerista theology) argues that Catholicism also empowers Latinas. This results in what Wallace calls “ambivalence” but also “optimism” towards Catholicism (134). For many Latinas, including myself, Catholicism is somewhat of a pharmakon: it stirs up trouble and also soothes it down. Wallace’s reading shows how in Castillo’s books, Catholicism is neither fully rejected nor fully embraced. It is critiqued and shown to be liberatory.

Castillo and other feminists critique classical liberation theology on several grounds, one of which is the absence of the “feminine principle” (146). Mujerista theology doesn’t suffer from quite the same sin, says Wallace reading Castillo, but it still may place too much emphasis on a theology that some Latinas reject (147). But the field of liberation theology seems equipped to handle criticism and the range of religiosity of its readers. Following Gustavo Gutierrez, Wallace reads liberation theology more as a method than a set of beliefs. To engage with liberation theology, one need only invert one’s attention and adopt a point of view that privileges those at the bottom. In doing this, one can always read a given situation from the ground up, watching what is going on to, from, and about those in the lowest rungs of society. Despite Castillo’s ambivalence toward Catholicism, her books still privilege some of the least consulted actors, like the M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints) in So Far from God (147, 154). These are women who have lost a child to oppressions of various kinds, “sacrificed like lambs in the slaughterhouse of various oppressions” (155). The M.O.M.A.S., as well as some scenes from The Guardians, pick up on common themes in Roman Catholicism: martyrdom, piety, love, miracle, and most importantly, suffering. Wallace ends her chapter by linking reading from the perspective of the poor or oppressed can give a person the courage to act. She concludes that reading alone doesn’t bring about justice, but it can inspire us to seek justice (167).

Can reading inspire us to seek justice today?

Right now, as the death toll in the US climbs past 100,000, we could use some of our time to contemplate human suffering. We need not conclude that the pandemic happened for a reason, nor that those who perished from it are atoning for the sins of their fathers. But what do we tell our children? Is it an act of God? Nature? Crake was the god of Snowman’s stories told to the non-human children in Oryx and Crake. They loved to hear about their “creator,” as do some of us. We are storytellers and readers, both, and we can—right now—look to literature for ideas about how we might think through this time. Ours is not the first pandemic in history, but it might be the first that Wallace has witnessed. Hopefully she will write a sequel using the literature that is certain to arise from the ashes of Coronavirus.

Wallace ends Of Women Borne by writing about her personal suffering, the miscarriage she suffered as she was editing the book. It must have been unreal to have meditated on the suffering of women, especially as it pertained to pregnancy, miscarriage, labor, and delivery and then to experience one of those things. No doubt Wallace got challenged by the words she had written, even while she was still pregnant when life still held together. The miscarriage was unexpected, she tells us, it happened at a time deemed relatively “safe” by doctors. Wallace’s courage in writing about how her suffering tested her beliefs inspires me to write about a suffering that awaits me and threatens to upend me any day.

My elderly parents live one block away, and my now-demented father with a battered heart and roughed-up lungs is convinced that he will die from Coronavirus. Every day I have to make the decision whether I should visit. The choice is risky, which Wallace says is necessary. Do I risk life as a potentially asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic COVID-19 carrier, or do I stay home and not spend time with my parents in what may be my father’s last days? Wallace writes, “We suffer because we are vulnerable to cultural norms, to social expectations, to bodily limitations” (225). The expectations of a daughter are that I honor my parents. I want to spend time with them daily and did so before the pandemic. But now, when social distancing has become cast as a moral imperative, how do I decide what to do from day to day? How do any of us?

Wallace says that reading about miscarriage changed her experience of miscarriage, and I believe that reading always does—indeed, it must—change our experience. I assume the opposite is true too: our readings are informed by our experiences. If Wallace had had the miscarriage first, she would surely have read Purple Hibiscus differently. Reading Of Women Borne has forced me to think about my imminent suffering. How will I—and all of us—deal with the suffering that has touched some of us already and will find the rest of us in the coming months? Wallace asks, “For whose sake will I choose to suffer?” (227). I would suffer alone for my parents’ sake if necessary, but I can’t know. How many of us are inadvertently waiting for death to take our loved ones? What are we doing, then, cooped up in our boxes willing time to pass only to screech on the brakes when someone coughs? What are we to make of this time, which passes in slow motion but kills in a matter of hours?

Wallace writes, “The suffering that results from the human condition of limitation and frailty, or the suffering that is inescapable, cannot be assuaged by someone else’s suffering, but redemption can be found in the meaning we derive from our own suffering: we can buy back the good by learning to learn from pain” (228). Suffering can be redemptive, but Wallace insists that there is no one meaning for all suffering. Only an individual can create a kind of meaning and narrative around their own suffering. Whatever happens with my parents, I will have to be able to look back on it and say that I chose what I thought was best in the face of a lack of evidence. I will need to learn from the pain, which, if they die in the coming months, will be severe.

Like the characters in Ana Castillo’s books, my parents are Catholic. They are comforted by the types of platitudes that Wallace dismisses: Everything happens for a reason. It was my time. This belief of theirs is the thing I hold onto more tightly than anything. If I accidentally pass on a virus that I don’t even know I have and they die from it, they will die believing that it’s their time. This is the most comforting belief I could ever imagine. They will not blame me, nor will they judge me. This belief, which at first glance the least risky is in fact the riskiest: it helps me decide if I should visit or not. They may be the only two people around who, afterward, won’t have believed that I killed them. The rest of the world might judge me for not exercising enough caution, for being selfish, for not seeing what was right in front of my eyes. But like good Catholics, my parents will have seen through this world to the next and have staked me right into God’s plan. My parents are not liberation theologians but their theology is liberating. Reading Of Women Borne has changed the way I see reading and suffering, and though I do not walk away with a mistaken sense that all suffering hides deep meaning, I have become more open to the idea of situating, and even narrating, my certain future suffering.

Dear Cindy,

I have been asked to write in response to Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering. I am addressing you in a letter because this discussion is personal. I met you in my first semester teaching at Loyola University Chicago, having just given birth to my first son, still recovering my own physical integrity and mental independence. I had also just “given birth” to Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature; suffering was at the front of my mind. You, writing your dissertation (the first iteration of Of Women Borne) a couple of years later, experienced both loss and pregnancy. If then I presumed to link my own suffering with yours, it was a shared feeling that I could only presume. If I want genuinely to bridge my work with yours now, I need to engage you in dialogue, not presumption. I need to hear your voice.

Do you remember Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Letter to Third World Women Writers” (published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color)? She explains:

It’s not easy writing this letter. It began as a poem, a long poem. I tried to turn it into an essay, but the result was wooden, cold. . . . How to begin again. How to approximate the intimacy and immediacy I want. What form? A letter, of course. (Anzaldúa 165)

It wasn’t easy writing this, either, and took me a long time to get started. Any critique of Of Women Borne feels like a cheap shot delivered too late, ideas I should have had while you were still writing. And summary seems appropriative and presumptuous. What I hope instead is to continue the conversation we started eleven years ago and expand it in today’s light. I want to rejoin our thoughts about pain and suffering with old and new interlocutors.

Anzaldúa’s letter is addressed to a plural audience, “Dear mujeres de color, companions in writing—,” but this audience is unknown, generalized (as indicated by the absence of names and the unfinished address). The letter is collective, but written and received in apparent isolation:

I sit here naked in the sun, typewriter against my knee trying to visualize you. Black woman huddles over a desk in the fifth floor of some New York tenement. Sitting on a porch in south Texas, a Chicana fanning away mosquitos and the hot air, trying to arouse the smouldering embers of writing. Indian woman walking to school or work lamenting the lack of time to weave writing into your life. Asian American, lesbian, single mother, tugged in all directions by children, lover or ex-husband, and the writing. (Anzaldúa 165)

These women create individually and alone, naked, overheated, and overworked. They are removed from each other but “companions” in their shared efforts at writing. Anzaldúa (and Cherríe Moraga) tried to bridge these different women in This Bridge Called My Back, to gather them in one collective: “radical women of color.”

In Of Women Borne, you write about the first time you read Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (a novel by another one of my favorite Chicana writers). I can visualize you in your third-floor apartment. (Mine was third-floor, too: nice for the sunlight but difficult with all of those stairs and the baby carrier and the groceries and the unhealed wounds of delivery.) You say you felt “unbalanced,” unsure how to interpret this novel from a culture not your own, reluctant to presume anything (126). The “ethics of readerly attention” are so vivid here. In one paragraph, all six sentences revolve around the phrase “I read,” emphasizing your isolation. In the next paragraph, “I hear,” “I live,” and “I cannot see” (126–26). What you hear are sounds from outside, which soon take form as a procession in honor of Good Friday. It so happens that you are reading about the Way of the Cross Procession in So Far from God right as such a procession proceeds outside your apartment. But, because of the shape of your courtyard building, you cannot see the street. You are cut off, sitting on a windowsill, pushing against the screen, unable to “see a thing but brick and pitiful early spring courtyard grass” (128). What you hear is a collectivity: voices, wailing, singing, walking. A dozen references to “they” and “their” rub against your repeated “I”: “I hear their voices, which I do not understand, and yet I think I understand” (128). You are crying; you have been affected. Is this what it means to understand? You don’t understand the words (presumably in Spanish), but something got through. Did your experience leap off the page, beyond your private conversation with the words of Ana Castillo?

Your ethics of readerly attention is solitary: one reader being drawn through the experience of a book by the absent hand of a writer, one reader being shifted or expanded in some way. But what are the ethics of your encounter with the unseen parade? The implication is that you might be going to join it—“my body is asserting its need to move” and “I have to do it while walking” (129)—but we never see this happen. Did you join? What would that look like? This is a question I often have for myself, a non-Latina who studies, teaches, writes about, and walks alongside Latinx people. What does it mean to join? (I don’t presume an answer to that, either.)

The collision here is between cultures as well as between private and collective experiences. Reading and activism exist in parallel universes though their subjects intertwine. Your feelings come from reading words. Your understanding of the collective suffering of Catholics on Good Friday in Chicago, or of the Chicana/os and Native Americans bemoaning environmental pollution and economic injustice in Castillo’s fictionalized New Mexico, is at a remove but genuine. I am not suggesting that you should be of them, that we should all drop our books and head outside. I am not suggesting we presume to join every collective. Our personal feelings and experiences are not shared—or even sharable—with everyone. We need to feel the barriers before we presume to cross them.

When and where do private and public suffering come together? Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling (published in the year you defended your dissertation and three years after Encarnación) presents an example by moving between a beautiful first-person account of the author’s own experiences with depression and the larger public depression of the post-September 11 era. As I sit here and write this letter to you, Cindy, on one of those sunless late winter Chicago days, in the midst of a pandemic-driven quarantine and a presidential election in which an opportunistic demagogue holds power, depression reigns at the personal, cellular levels and at the largest ecological and structural levels. It collapses the distinction between individual and ecosystem. We meet strangers over empty store shelves and nod to neighbors outside as we walk past with our respective dogs. We share fleeting communality; we raise the flag of public mourning. But there remains a feeling that is incommensurable with others.

Cvetkovich writes:

A political analysis of depression might advocate revolution and regime change over pills, but in the world of Public Feelings there are no magic bullet solutions, whether medical or political, just the slow steady work of resilient survival, utopian dreaming, and other affective tools for transformation. (Cvetkovich 2)

At a very personal level, I chafe at the individual pathologization associated with depression and the utilization of chemical means to “happy up” the people rather than demanding change in the world that structures their suffering. Yet Cvetkovich shifts our attention from magical dreams of remaking our world towards reasonable ways we can reorganize our relationship to it. The Public Feelings movement attempts to “depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action” (2). “Feeling bad,” she suggests, “might, in fact, be the ground for transformation” (3). Allowing depression to assume a public or communal formation makes visible the linkages between environments, political structures, and synapses in the brain. But then what?

Rather than focusing on the line between good and bad feelings, diversifying the ways and the places in which we talk about feeling could loosen the binary. As Judith/Jack Halberstam writes in The Queer Art of Failure, in order to move beyond the stagnation of the present, we need to expand our archive of useable affects, tapping into feelings like “rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, over-investment, incivility, brutal honesty, and disappointment” (Halberstam 110). Though Halberstam embraces “queer negativity,” the affects they name are not inherently positive or negative. They include a diverse range of answers to the world: noise, affection, attachment, and struggle. These responses highlight friction; they “fuck shit up” (110). This phrase alone shifts affective ground and opens up new possibilities for expression by breaking the rules of politeness. Importantly, to be “civil” does not imply any particular code of behavior. Individuals in a group are, at some level, “civil,” relating rather than isolating, and Halberstam’s list highlights the diversity of ways in which such relation happens.

For me, the crux of this discussion is utility. In Encarnación, I focused on the productivity of pain as perceived by martyrs, saints, and sacrifice victims: the idea that their individual suffering elicits heavenly aid or alters social formations. I think your discussion of suffering, Cindy, resonates on this same chord of personal sacrifice for ethical transformation. But the utility of public feelings is different: like the Good Friday procession, they create community, not right action. Public feelings create a sense of being accompanied in suffering and a hope that solidarity will move some ground. While sacrifice operates according to an economy of exchange, public feeling operates more like a gift, presented with no certainty of response. Often it is precisely hopelessness that brings people together, allowing a therapeutic, even if dissonant, expression of frustration on a magnitude that commands attention. (The “Occupy Wall Street” movement is an excellent example of this.) I see this commanding frustration as a form of advocacy, keeping in mind that the outcomes of advocacy are open-ended. We might not be able to change the world, but together we can make noise enough to alter the weather. Is that enough? Honestly, I’m not so sure. What do you think?

Inside my copy of Depression, I found a tiny scrap of paper with a scribbled poem I barely remember writing about my experiences with post-partum depression. (“I am not making this up now in the writing. It is uncanny and true” (Wallace 128).) Most of the poem is not worth repeating, but two lines, about my fear that all of my feelings had drained out with the afterbirth, are relevant here:

Is it because there is not love enough to do this love,

or is it something ghastly and personal to me?

The answer seems more accessible now. Feelings are not the property of one; they are social in origin and interpretive context. In any community (or family), feelings are diffuse and unpredictable; we share them with known and unknown allies, seen and unseen forces, shouting and making space as we go.

Sending love from Chicago to Saskatchewan, and eagerly awaiting your response,

Suzanne

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. New York: Kitchen Table, 1983.

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. New York: Kitchen Table, 1983.

Bost, Suzanne. Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature. Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2009.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Wallace, Cynthia. Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.