Kathryn Bond Stockton

I have been reading Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer" by Kathryn Bond Stockton. I am roughly halfway through, and so far it is fantastic. Here are some of my favorite quotes and phrases:

"...those who elect to wear the sign that trails abuse may attempt to say, 'You gave me regulations, I made something else. ... Read it if you can (though I don't fully care if you do or you don't).'" (31)

She describes both skin and clothes as being "worn on the bone." (33)

"But I want to ask about an unexamined switchpoint between 'black' and 'queer': the switchpoint between these nonelective skins and what are for some queer women and men the highly preferred, habitually chosen, strongly valued, almost sewn-to-the-bone cloth skins that we call clothes." (39)

She calls Jean Genet novels "aesthetic texts of such dense weave, such lyric sheen" (42), whereas in The Well of Loneliness, "no sentence is transforming." (48)

"... it is queer to know a cloth wound when you see one." (46)

Referencing Barthes: "...unlike authors, theorists are not dead..." (72)

I also am quite fond of her term "switchpoint:" "The switchpoints in the texts I examine in this book may act to elucidate incommensurabilities, not cover over them. I emphasize the obvious switching of signifying tracks that occurs when a sign that is generally attached to blacks, let's say, flashes in the signifying field of 'queer'; when, for example, the sign of stigmatized skin flashes in the domain of queer clothing, or, to flip directions, the sign of anality flashes along the track of blacks' economic burdens. Each switchpoint is a kind of off-rhyme (to employ a different metaphor): a poitn at which we intellectually sense how one sign (the stigma attached to the surface of skin, especially its color) lends its force to another (the stigma attached ot the surface of cloth), which we know to be distinct. (An off-rhme, as a term from poetics, means a near or partial rhyme - for example, the rhyme between 'laws' and 'because' or 'down' and 'own.' The reader's ear hears something similar but distinct in these sounds that are not identical.)" (32-33)

Whenever she writes about switchpoints, I think of the Kid Sister song "Switchboard," which is the song with a mini-video stuck at the end of the "Pro Nails" video:



Or the whole song is here. But I kind of just like the part at the end of "Pro Nails."