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Joseph also weaves in a range of cultural references to the likes of David Hockney, Bette Davis, Barbara Streisand, Maggie Nelson and Friends. In this act of writing I am making something new: one part biography, one part fiction, two parts slash, and in this new world, the world on the page, the world the writer has so steadfastly overseen, you are still alive. Later, in one of the novel’s most dramatic scenes, JJ tells the disdainful Thomas that she is writing autofiction, explaining that
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In the prologue, JJ asks Thomas: “When did you know you were dead?” In the first chapter, JJ takes out her computer and writes this line. I appreciated At Certain Points We Touch for its playful, experimental style and tone, and the way it incorporates autofiction into the plot. I’m a millennial, so maybe a “millennial novel” just reads like a novel to me. For a supposedly “millennial” novel, it is surprisingly detached from the internet, apart from emails being central to JJ and Thomas’s correspondence, along with many letters. Some of the press around Joseph’s debut has focussed on it being queer and millennial. Part of what makes the novel so compelling is wondering how this complex relationship lasted as long as it did, with Thomas’s internalised homophobia and self-loathing often directed at JJ.įriday essay: transgenderism in film and literature I can’t ever imagine you calling yourself queer (though your sexuality definitely was), and there’s no way you would ever have allowed yourself to be spoken of as pansexual, or marched under any nom de guerre that carried hints of discourse or wafts of patchouli. While Thomas was, perhaps, ambivalent to “specifics of the body” in his sexual partners, we learn about the conflicting ways that JJ and Thomas viewed sexuality and queerness: Your ambivalence, when it came to the specifics of the body you were attending to, made my own gender, for the first time, feel weightless and irrelevant, and I’m so grateful to you for that, my blue-eyed bastard. On her relationship with Thomas, she muses: Some of JJ’s descriptions of her romantic and sexual encounters are, however, revealing about the way she wants to experience her gender in the world. This makes At Certain Points We Touch different to many novels about transgender and gender-diverse identities – by trans and cisgender authors – that have had mainstream success. Her gender identity is not something she questions or wonders about at length. It is interesting to note that JJ’s gender is, in some ways, in the background of the story. Pages and prejudice: how queer texts could fight homophobia in Australian schoolsĪs a gender-diverse writer and researcher, I spend a lot of time thinking about how gender and sexuality are represented in literature. If he was at all likeable before this, our sympathies most likely end here. These revelations are hurled at the reader via Thomas. You were the kind of gay man who would have said that refugees who drowned crossing the Mediterranean had only themselves to blame, who would have agreed that all those UKIP dickheads were simply saying what needed to be said, and sometimes I’m almost glad you died before you had the opportunity to vote for Brexit, or start bemoaning the destruction of the English language as brought on by people who used neutral pronouns. JJ speaks cuttingly of Thomas’ politics, just as he always spoke cuttingly of her political and activist leanings: You were mean about anyone campy or swishy, unless they were nailing you, of course. You had sex in a certain way, but you weren’t defined by it, certainly you had no loyalty towards other queer people, and absolutely no interest in the fight for visibility or equality. Their intimacy was passionate and explosive, but also made JJ wary of how Thomas perceived her and other queer, trans and gender-diverse people. Much of Thomas is uncovered in JJ’s retelling of erotic scenes between the two. Her descriptions of Thomas are blunt, unflattering and shocking. JJ’s account is loving, lustful, furious and regret-filled. The novel reads, as a result, as a second-person narration, drawing readers into their doomed relationship, as though we are all Thomas. She is addressing him in the wake of his death. The narrator, JJ, is mourning her lover Thomas James, who called her “Bibby”.