Izumi Sugiyama
For almost everyone, parents are our first examples of societal roles. From speaking to creating social bonds, our parents are meant to teach the first lessons for life. Mothers, as the primary childrearers in a patriarchal society, often bear the brunt of this teaching. As such, mastery of sexuality and gender is learned through the body of the mother during childhood. Thus, time binds are created between the maternal body in childhood and the actualization of gender and sexuality in adulthood. By viewing the mother who they see as having already mastered her own sexuality and gender, children model that same mastery in their exploration. This is strikingly apparent in Justin Torres’ We the Animals, as the narrator’s experiences with the maternal body helped form his understanding of his sexuality and gender identity. Due to the feminizing of his body because of his queerness and refusal to adhere to patriarchal gender norms, the narrator’s mastery of gender is more relevant to the experience of his mother than his father. Torres also displays how queer time is most apparent in early childhood in which the mother and child are most isolated.
In We The Animals readers can closely observe actualization through time binds between the narrator and his mother. Elizabeth Freeman describes time binds as a process in which “…naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation: binding is what turns mere existence into a form of mastery” (Freeman 3). She further explains that within societies “people are bound to one another, en grouped, made to feel coherently collective, through particular orchestrations of time: … chronobiopolitics, or ‘the sexual arrangement of the time of life’ of entire populations” (Freeman 3). In the case of We the Animals, this arrangement of time is primarily familial, specifically centered around the mother. In childhood, all one does is in the pursuit of mastery, there is little a child has mastered in any category. Chronobiopolitical roles are then established through experiences with the parents who have experience with these roles. By focusing on the exploratory period of childhood, Torres provides readers with a story in which such mastery is a constant narrative pursuit. Torres tells the tale of three boys learning about the world, mostly through consumption and sensation. Much of the novel follows the narrator and his brothers through early childhood, the three feeling out the world for the first time through their family unit. The isolation of the family by being mixed race in a white neighborhood results in the three boys growing up in an insular world in which their parents are their only models of social and physical mastery. This insular experience of queer time with their parents, henceforth referred to as a temporal pocket, allows the narrator to develop and actualize his social skills in a way that does not adhere to a single perception of time.
Amanda Montei describes the plight of mothers as they exist both in and outside the temporal pocket: “In the United States, parenting is performed intensively in isolated nuclear family units without access to a national parental leave policy or affordable childcare. New mothers often find themselves caring for children all alone, pushed out of careers…” (“When I Became a Mother”). Torres depicts this maternal isolation in We the Animals through the mother’s insular relationship with her children. Without childcare or a fully present father, their mother is alone. Their mother’s constant night shifts leave her unable to properly tell time, allowing the boys to experience queer time through her. It is with their mother that the boys are in their most primal state, learning through her and her body how they must grow or remain static. This experience of time as a feeling rather than a measured scale creates a bubble in which the children and the mother exist outside of institutionally metered time. Freeman describes how “ emotional, domestic, and biological tempos are, though culturally constructed, somewhat less amenable to the speeding up and micro-management that increasingly characterized United States industrialization” (Freeman 6). During the time when the children inhabit their mother’s temporal pocket, they can exist outside the timeline of capitalist industrialization. As their days are not categorized neatly into physical time by activities such as school or daycare, they escape the pressures of capitalist time and live only in the time of their family unit.
Their mother’s disrupted circadian rhythm and subsequent confusion create a space outside the linearity of growth and puberty the boys face. Her power over them and their love for her allows them to experience a childhood in queer time. The boys do not allow reality to infringe upon the temporal space created by their mother. Rather society forces them to adapt as they face new challenges. Perhaps the most impactful scene is when their mother begs the narrator to “stay six forever” and remain in the temporal pocket created for their family. However, it is not the progression of time, but the experience of maternal rejection that expells the narrator from this temporal pocket. Despite her recent surgery, the narrator grabs her face to kiss her. The result is that “…pain opened up her pupils into big black disks. She ripped her face from mine and shoved me away from her, to the floor. She cussed me and Jesus, and the tears dropped, and I was seven” (Torres 17). His injury of the maternal body and her subsequent rejection of this injury forces the narrator into the adult sphere of accountability. She is no longer accepting of injury and pain (as accidental as it may be) from him, taking him out of the role of an innocent child and into one of an older person who must face social consequences. Thus, the narrator is expelled from the Eden of childhood and into reality.
The narrator’s proximity to his mother often feminizes him in the eyes of his siblings and father. Additionally, his failure to adhere to the ideals of Western masculinity feminizes him in the eyes of his brothers. According to Meena and Gopal Savala in their article Body, Gender and Sexuality: Politics of Being and Belonging, “women have always received contradictory messages about their bodies. When expedient, it is glorified by ideal images of goddesses; honour of the nation/family/community and sometimes the same body is projected as shameful, embarrassing, vexatious, fearful and disgusting” (44). This classification extends to the narrator due to the feminization of his body. His family both resents and treasures him, both “fucked up” and a “golden egg” dangling between shame and glory. The description of him as a “pretty one” by his father feminizes and admires him in the tender moment in which it is said, but becomes dangerous as the narrator’s queerness develops (Torres 102). It is also the narrator’s refusal to engage in gendered violence that feminizes him. When his brothers discuss killing a woman and stealing her car, the narrator’s concern for his mother and the possibility of violence immediately others him from the masculinity of his brothers. In response to his concern, his brother mocks him by saying “‘Which woman?’ We only seen two women all day, that woman on the bridge and Ma. Unless he’s counting himself” (Torres 73). By choosing not to perpetrate violence modeled by their father, the narrator is feminized by his brothers for his sympathy. The narrator’s concern for the women reminds his brothers of his feminine status, making him an object of ridicule for them whereas it gains him favor with their mother.
Despite leaving the temporal pocket of early childhood, the narrator returns to this space throughout his teen years. His observation of his mother having little bodily or sexual autonomy reflects on him as he tries to explore his sexuality as an adult. Many of his early memories revolve around his mother’s lack of autonomy in her relationship with his father. She cannot resist the father, whether it be socially or physically. He rapes her when she will not indulge his sexual whims, and he ignores her when making financial decisions. This manifests when the father buys an impractical truck without consulting the mother. When she resists, causing a scene and trying to regain her power he physically hits and restrains her “until finally he clamped a hand across her mouth and pulled her to him with his free arm, pulled her snug up against him and said, ‘Shush, Mami. Shush'” (Torres 64). Thus, he silences her voice and removes her autonomy in this big life decision. Possibly in retaliation for her outburst, the father rapes the narrator’s mother before she goes to work. He again uses his physical advantage to remove her autonomy as “he lifted her feet off the ground and pulled her up the stairs, laughing at her anger” (Torres 66). He reminds her and the boys that they are all at his mercy physically, making a spectacle of the horrific act he is committing against their mother. The narrator reflects a similar lack of autonomy in his first “successful” experience cruising. He is entrapped by an older man and forced to submit to his sexual whims, incidentally similar to the story of his mother. This foray into sexuality mirrors the sexuality of his mother, thus binding this experience to the horror he witnessed in childhood. Freeman explains how this sexual taboo helps the development of sexuality, elaborating “…Freud identified taboo sexual practices as normal childhood behavior in which the pathological adult subject was simply stuck or frozen due to an inability to remember, conceptualize, or narrate past events” (Freeman 8). By reclaiming this taboo childhood experience and mastering it through this time bind he gains not only a greater understanding of his sexuality, but also of sexuality in general.
The feminization of the narrator also reinforces the cis-hetero capitalist nature of gendered bodies in which “The male body represents culture, rationality, the perfect creation, always in charge and ahead. In other words, female body represents all that needs to be tamed and controlled by the male agent who in society could be represented by the father, husband, doctor, priest, scientist, and so on” (Savala 4). Just as his mother must be controlled, the narrator’s body and sexuality must also be controlled by the traditionally masculine figures in their life. However, absent of the social and physical control men hold over women, the family controls the narrator through the use of the state. They not only feminize him but also return him to queer time by institutionalizing him to get him “fixed up” (Torres 123). His removal from society returns him to a temporal pocket and places him back in a setting where time is measured by internal actualization rather than a socially enforced metric. However, unlike childhood, this time is determined by the state and other institutional forces. He must submit to this capitalist time since he has been removed from the responsibility-free era of early childhood.
Throughout We the Animals, Justin Torres provides insight into how time binds form between children and the mother’s body. Through the exploration of gender and sexuality via the body of their mother, the narrator and his siblings master their gender and sexuality as they grow. These time binds especially help the narrator to navigate his own identity, as he is feminized for his queerness. By witnessing the mastery of his mother, he can further develop his gender and sexuality due to the feminization of his body mirroring his mother’s feminine body. Torres creates a beautiful narrative that emphasizes the importance of queer time and social mastery that explores the mother-child bond in a stunningly intimate way. Mothers, they make the world go ‘round.
Works Cited
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Queer and Not Now.” Introduction. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Montei, Amanda. “When I Became a Mother, I Lost My Body – and Realized It Never Belonged to Me.” The Guardian, September 11, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/11/motherhood-parenting-body-autonomy.
Savala, and Meena Gopal. “Body, Gender and Sexuality: Politics of Being and Belonging.” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 17 (2010): 43–51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25664384.
Torres, Justin. We the Animals. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.