Adrienne Rich and Sex as Resistance (or not)

On Adrienne Rich's Seven Skins, disability, queerness, and transphobia

Hello! Thought I’d write about something not the midterms in case you all felt like a brief break from anxiety. As always, consider contributing to my Patreon if you want me to keep on scribbling. And/or, if you would subscribe to a paid substack, let me know! Trying to figure out if I should try to monetize this in some way…

In the meantime though!

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Adrienne Rich’s Seven Skins is a three part poem from Midnight Salvage, her 1999 collection. You can read it here in full.

The poem is about a narrator, who may or may not be Rich, looking back on her relationship in graduate school with a disabled Jewish veteran named Vic. In the first narrative section, the two flirt and think about sex:

Dating Vic Greenberg you date
crutches and a chair
a cool wit an outrageous form:
“—just back from a paraplegic’s conference,
guess what the biggest meeting was about—
Sex with a Paraplegic!—for the wives!—”
In and out of cabs his chair
opening and closing round his
electrical monologue the air
furiously calm around him
as he transfers to the crutches

However, when Vic asks her to his room, she refuses, because that’s what women are supposed to do. The second section of the poem is a lyrical evocation of the narrator’s pre-sexual, naive, and also apolitical innocence:

What a girl I was then what a body
ready for breaking open like a lobster
what a little provincial village
what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells
what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud
what a gone-and-come tide pool
what a look into eternity I took and did not return it
what a book I made myself
what a quicksilver study
bright little bloodstain
liquid pouches escaping

The final section is a series of rhetorical questions to Vic, asking what sex between them would have been like, and by extension, what they could have become together, or what new shape the narrator’s life might have taken if she had pursued the relationship.

...in what insurrectionary
convulsion would we have done it mouth to mouth
mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anus earlobe to nipple
what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts
what tears boil up through sweat to bathe

what humiliatoriums what layers of imposture
What heroic tremor
released into pure moisture
might have soaked our shape two-headed avid
into your heretic
linen-service
sheets?

The missed (delayed?) sexual awakening here is also a missed or delayed political awakening. Vic, as a veteran and a disabled man, offers the narrator an opportunity to understand America and marginalization in different ways, from a different perspective. (“Is there an American civilization?” Vic asks her.) Her rejection of sex with him, half from thoughtlessness, half from stigma, is also a refusal of “heroic tremor”—of letting herself be altered.

The poem just about demands to be read in light of Rich’s biography; she famously started out as a talented lyric poet, before embracing her lesbian identity and a concomitant radical politics. The “insurrectionary convulsion” she imagines missing with Vic is also the insurrectionary convulsion she embraced in her own life by turning to queer love and queer politics. So while you could read the poem as an overly literal example of disability inspiration porn, you could also see it as a call for solidarity, which draws parallels between the ostracism of queer and disabled people, who are together exiled from an idealized heterosexual, able-bodied sexuality, and in that exile can find pleasure, community, and resistance.

It’s worth pointing out here that Rich’s advocacy had some real limits. She was a friend and supporter of Janice Raymond, whose book, the Transsexual Empire, is a an early, influential vicious, genocidal transphobic “feminist” screed. Rich never specifically attacked trans women herself, that I know of, but the close association with Raymond speaks for itself.

In that context it’s interesting that Rich positions her narrator here as someone who is, perhaps semi consciously, affected by bigotry and swayed by stigma. She’s attracted to Vic, but also put off by, and nervous about the mechanics and the uncertainties of sex with a disabled man (and possibly with a Jewish man? Rich was Jewish herself, though again, it’s not clear whether she and the narrator are one and the same.) The poem is about the transformative power of acceptance, sex, and love, but it’s also about the power of stigma and prejudice to keep us inside our seven skins. “[W]hich fear of mine would have wound itself/around which of yours,” she asks. It’s a poem about the erotic and visionary power of connection. But it’s also a poem about the political power of foreclosing love, and a poem about failure.