Sex and the City: Ari, August 16 (Part 1 of 2)

Crown Heights, Brooklyn

Dear Andrea, Lakshmi, and Ned,

"I'm not gay," Miranda announces in the Sex and the City season one episode "Bay of Married Pigs," committing a speech act that, as is well known, convinces all prospective listeners that the speaker is definitely not gay.

In the episode's central plotline, Miranda's coworker, misreading her as a lesbian, tries to set her up with a cute butch at a law firm softball game. The misrecognition spirals into a comedy of errors when Miranda's indifferent boss takes a sudden interest in her and her assumed-to-be partner and invites them to a dinner party; eager for the professional opportunity, Miranda goes along with the charade, and her amiable beard goes along for the ride. Alas, the subterfuge hits a wall at the barrier of desire: Miranda does eventually kiss the girl, but she does not, unfortunately, like it.

It is the nature of the closet, of course, to produce double vision in the eye of the beholder: is Miranda a straight woman passing as a dyke, or a dyke passing as a straight woman, passing as a dyke? The genuinely uncanny thing about the episode, though, viewed twenty years after it first aired, is the way that the closet here is itself doubled by our retrospective knowledge that its doors were in the process of swinging open. Ellen had come out a year earlier on Ellen; Will and Grace had just begun. Two opposed interpretations of the episode thus seem equally plausible. Is "Married Pigs" in fact doing exactly what it claims to be doing and using Miranda's queer affect as bait for a send-up of what would soon come to be known as homonormativity? Miranda's hijinks inspire Carrie to argue, in her column for the week, that the homo/hetero division has been displaced by a "secret cold war between marrieds and singles"; polite society no longer cares about the gender of your dinner date, as long as it's got you "figured out." (Shortly after beginning these speculations, Carrie runs into an ex and his male partner. Without skipping a beat, they ask if she'd consider donating an egg.) Maybe Miranda really isn't into pussy, and doesn't owe anyone an explanation for her perfectly reasonable habits of wearing overalls and hating men. On the other hand, maybe the episode is just a plain old no-homo routine, where the joke is simply that Miranda is a lesbian hiding in plain sight. Which is the surface reading, which is the depth?

The pivot between these readings is Cynthia Nixon's disarming performance as a smart woman stuck in a very dumb social order, an ancien régime as richly sketched and hermetically sealed as an Edith Wharton parlor, if not, perhaps, as carefully preserved by the flash-freeze technology of satire. ("Welcome to the age of un-innocence," Carrie quips in the pilot, making me shudder with the memory of those years when some fervidly entropic cultural force seemed to be ironizing its way straight out of irony.) Miranda is incoherent to herself, or coherent only as a comic figure whose power femme visage raises eyebrows but not hackles, so clearly ill at ease is she with actual power: regardless of what it is she wants, she seems resigned to not getting it. A figure who—and let's recall here that Miranda's job is to advocate for the legal rights of corporations—might be described as gutsy but not particularly brave. For all of Carrie's outré performance of narration, it's Miranda who winks us into the Sex and the City universe by seeming to float above her own life in astonishment that this is what it's really like. As Lakshmi, Ned, and Andrea all noted in their first reflections on SATC, Miranda gives the distinct impression that, regardless of whether we've got her "figured out" by the end of any given episode, she seems in a larger sense to be on the wrong show.

In 2004, shortly after Sex and the City ended, Nixon became romantically involved with Christine Marinoni, a New York community organizer who is today her wife and coparent. If it strains perception now to read Miranda as not-gay, it is in part because the closet was about to open for Nixon, too. Except that that's not how Nixon talks about her life at all. In 2012, the actress—by then an organizer herself—caused a minor dustup by refusing an interviewer's attempt to write her into a coming-out story of same-sex desire hidden and revealed. "[P]eople think I was walking around in a cloud and didn't realize I was gay, which I find really offensive," she told the New York Times, adding that she identified as a lesbian not because earlier relationships with men had been illegitimate, but because of the political work effected by the term. "Why can't it be a choice?"It would be another fourteen years before Nixon came out again, this time as a socialist—but I think she'd probably wince at that description the second time, too.

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Cynthia Nixon announced her newly minted political identification early last month while bidding for an electoral endorsement from the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The organization's membership and visibility spiked in June after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx-based grassroots candidate it had supported, won a longshot Democratic congressional primary against powerful incumbent Joseph Crowley. Nixon wanted the endorsement badly, and the organization was sharply split over whether it wanted her back. In a series of closed but well-publicized debates over the course of several weeks, members weighed Nixon's platform—which includes universal rent control and health care, and has pushed Governor Andrew Cuomo to the left on issues like marijuana legalization—against her class position and ties to developers, in light of broader questions about electoral strategy. At a Brooklyn branch meeting that I attended in late June in my neighborhood, a key issue for members who opposed the endorsement was that Nixon had never identified herself as a socialist. Why, they argued, should a political body committed to the dismantling of capitalism support a candidate who was not? (I sat in as a member of the organization; the press was not invited, but this was a month ago already, and they didn't say anything about historians.)

Then in early July, a few hours before Nixon and her running mate Jumaane Williams, a Brooklyn citycouncilman campaigning for the position of lieutenant governor, addressed DSA in person, Nixon did something unexpected: she publicly declared herself a democratic socialist.

As a candidate, Nixon tends to evince the same eye-rolling bemusement she brought to her role on Sex and the City, which her campaign has milked through Miranda-themed fundraisers even as Nixon has acknowledged the show's most obviously problematic aspects. Can you believe these people? Miranda seemed to be saying on SATC, though it was never quite clear why "these people" wouldn't also include herself. Can you believe this power structure? she seems to be saying now, asking her audiences to again allow her an exemption. Sometimes, they do. At a Staten Island brewery where I saw Nixon rail against private control of public transit one blistering Saturday afternoon last month, she killed it. She had just the right amount of star power; people wanted to touch her, and they could.

Speaking to DSA, though, in a Manhattan office space filled primarily with younger activists in the novel situation of having a celebrity candidate fawn over them, Nixon seemed nervous; it was as though the crowd had bored through the fourth wall that enabled her signature performance as an outsider on the inside. It came as no surprise, then, that internal debate was heated again that night after the candidates departed. And yet I was struck at first by the fact that some endorsement opponents who had objected the previous week to Nixon's lack of socialist self-ascription—members who had claimed at the branch meeting, in other words, that the signifier mattered in excess of any policy proposals in its service—were not placated by its arrival, however abrupt. Wasn't the whole idea of hegemony that the signifier would be empty—indeed for democratic purposes had to be empty—until everyone debated themselves silly calling a new political formation into being? Weren't failures of signification—in reviving the name of "socialism" after it was put out to pasture at the end of the twentieth century, as much as in denaturalizing gender by performing its norms off-key—central to the disruption of sedimented political realities?1 Wasn't it a win if Cynthia Nixon wanted to play a socialist on TV, and asked DSA to write the script? Yes, a bit cringe-inducing all around; but seriously, like, what is the political?

Then a young white man in a crisp white polo shirt came to the mic to voice his support for Nixon. After all, he said, "How many of you in this room can say you identified as a socialist five years ago?" Half the hands in the room went up. Amid the young people, the Bernie recruits, the rising would-be managerial class on Medicaid that needs to be very careful—and I include myself in this admonition—not to proclaim that the party's started because they've shown up, there were also almost certainly organizers present who had identified as socialists since before he was born. "Oh," he said, a bit hangdog, "that was more than I thought." And then I understood a little better. Nixon isn't polo shirt man, but she's a related kind of political actor who, as Corey Robin noted recently, tends to emerge in ideologically chaotic times, a subject who dramatically changes her worldview "without remarking upon the change, without explaining it, leaving the impression that this is what they believed all along." A kind of actor that any growing movement should welcome without interrogation, but whose insistence in the face of all evidence to the contrary that she is the master of her own politics, responding judiciously to the world as it turns, can be, as Robin put it, "unsettling, even eerie."Nixon, then, is in an odd position: given the unlikelihood that she will actually win the governorship, her bread is buttered on the side of speech acts; and yet even in her headline-grabbing moment of political rearticulation, she seemed determined to slide in to the performative, as though it were a sort of happy coincidence that her own preexisting positions "in support of a millionaires tax, Medicare for all, fully funding our public schools, housing for all and rejecting all corporation donations" just so happened to "align with democratic socialist principles."

And yet, in the days that followed, commentators—particularly conservatives perhaps hoping to remind us of something—regularly referred to Nixon's "coming out."

Well then: why can't it be a choice?

to be continued,

ari

Read Part 2 here

The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction

Lakshmi, July 10

Ned, July 18

Andrea, July 24

Andrea, August 30

Ari, September 13

Ivan Ramos (Guest Post), October 1

Lakshmi, October 13

Audrey Wollen (Guest Post), October 22

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The Slow Burn, volume 4, will run in this space all summer. Previous summers can still be found on Post45: 

2015: A Summer of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels - Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards

2016: Summer of Knausgaard - Diana Hamilton, Dan Sinykin, Cecily Swanson, and Omari Weekes

2017: Welcome (back) to Twin Peaks - Michaela Bronstein, Len Gutkin, and Benjamin Parker