Scales of Captivity by Mary Pat Brady

Author:Mary Pat Brady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press

The movement of capital is registered here as a changing relationship to the nearby. This kind of engagement with the valley bespeaks a sense of relationship with a place, an acknowledgment of place as enmeshed in sociality and not simply a notch on a vertical hierarchy where real living happens elsewhere. Individuals, the stories teach, are not outside of places; they are not apart from the “dense materialities that compose sites,” nor are they the “transcendental author of those sites.” 69

This sense of people and place as interanimating does not give much room to a social imaginary that isolates individual actors with heroic coming-out accounts. Instead, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue highlights a set of intermeshed relations far more in sync with Mary Gray’s argument in Out in the Country . There Gray persuasively shows how the politics of visibility that has emerged as a product of the contemporary gay rights movement depends for its political utility on urban living. Visibility and the closet therefore are inadequate metaphors for approaching an understanding of nonurban queer cultures. As she argues, “At the moment, queer desires and embodiments are popularly and politically tethered to prescriptions of exacting kinds of LBGT visibility. These politics and practices, however, fail to recognize the price rural LGBT -identifying youth pay for this ‘claustrophilia.’ ” 70 Understanding queer cultures beyond urban locales entails refusing the normalizing mechanisms of queer visibility and assembling such a sensibility via other mechanisms and technologies. Gray suggests that rural queer youth “constantly reworked boundaries” without queer visibility as the normative or utopian end marker. 71 In rejecting the universality of visibility politics, Gray shifts the focus “away from the private world of individual negotiations of the closet” so that we learn how queer identities can be understood as “collective labor” and as “work shared among many rather than the play of any one individual.” 72 That many includes place and the complex of relationships among beings (including orange trees and lizards).

Three stories in The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue in particular illustrate Gray’s concept of collaborative labor by suggesting that what characters move toward is not a named identity but rather a sense of living and working together, collaboratively pursuing fulfillment or survival. The stories show that such mutuality entails a carefully wrought series of negotiations in which many characters labor together to find room for each other’s approaches to living, carefully acknowledging, in keeping with the collection’s interest in empathy, how bodies in motion and materialities have an impact on each other. Put differently, to understand queer identity as a collective labor is also to understand how dense relations emerge from indebtedness, from a knowledge of responsibility and shared vulnerability. To see identity as collaborative is to undo the individuating logic of market capitalism. The scaffold imaginary doesn’t have any leeway for collaboration.

In “Bring, Brang, Brung,” the narrative follows Mart í n after he has reluctantly returned to his hometown in “the Valley.” A single father whose lover has recently

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