The Small Book of Hip Checks: On Queer Gender, Race, and Writing

by Erica Rand

In The Small Book of Hip Checks Erica Rand uses multiple meanings of hip check —including an athlete using their hip to throw an opponent off-balance and the inspection of racialized gender—to consider the workings of queer gender, race, and writing. Explicitly attending to processes of writing and revising, Rand pursues interruption, rethinking, and redirection to challenge standard methods of argumentation and traditional markers of heft and fluff. She writes about topics including a trans shout-out in a Super Bowl ad, the heyday of lavender dildos, ballet dancer Misty Copeland, the criticism received by figure skater Debi Thomas and tennis great Serena Williams for competing in bodysuits while Black, and the gendering involved in identifying the remains of people who die trying to cross into the United States south of Tucson, Arizona. Along the way, Rand encourages making muscle memory of experimentation and developing an openness to being conceptually knocked sideways. In other words, to be hip-checked.

Genres: Feminism

152 pages, Paperback

Published January 7, 2021

About the author

Erica Rand is a writer, critic, activist, and Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Women and Gender Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, ME. She also serves on the editorial board of the journal Radical Teacher. Her book, The Ellis Island Snow Globe, won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award from the Modern Language Association's GL/Q Caucus.

Reviews

[Zefyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is kind of all over the place. Some essays are literally about social constructions of/around hips, checking what we think about hips. The first essay, "If Men Don't Have Hips, How Can They Hip-Check?" introduces the concept of a hip check from sports, but otherwise uses the irony that women's sports are the ones that generally ban the practice as a way to explore the way in which hips are gendered and racialized: "Consider the use of 'boyish hips' to refer to slip-hipped adults perceived as women. If adult men properly have no hips, you might expect that the dominant convention for women would refer to adult men. Yet man-gesturing adjectives travel with connotations unsuitable to the task. Mannish, the apparent adult counterpart to boyish, functions more as a counterpart to efffeminate...Boyish also suggests childlike, as if women with boyish hips never mature. If you believe some evolutionary biologists, artists through the ages and people around the world, ranging from plugged-in urbanites to rural farmers, value protruding hips on women, judged by waist-to-hip ratio, as a mark of prime fertility. But properly feminine, properly raced women shouldn't have too much of a good thing either. With big hips, depending on skin color, you might look undisciplined and overindulgent, like someone who eats chips for lunch instead of a salad. You might seem asexual, like mammies, or formerly desirable, with middle-aged spread, or hypersexual, excessive even for a little jiggle augmenting athletic tone. Jennifer Lopez, looking at editing done on her 2002 music video 'I'm Glad,' discovered that editors had shaved down her hips even though she had asked them not to." (p 25-26)

Other essays are the "hip checks", in which Rand explores some idea and then investigates assumptions held or tropes used in that exploration. I found this often frustrating, in that the essays meander to the point of feeling in need of an editor, and the collection itself follows the same trend: the essays and collection don't read as intentional, but rather like a blog, with interesting ideas in development. The benefit to this approach is to make the "hip check" idea more tangible: Rand occasionally describes this process of editing and rethinking, how it forces her to reach more deeply into the concepts she is working on. But it's not always clear that she's doing so.

This editing ambiguity means that some essays seem so focused on second-guessing a particular point that they lose track of the point they wind up making, and so either have no point at all, or end up in some rather questionable ideas. The point of "Queer Indirections", it seems, is to talk about ways in which queer and trans people may become unexpectedly legible: "While some thinking I considered queer was not queer in the least, queer connections may happen when you don't expect them." (p 84) This is argued through two stories of trans people being read as cis: one, a trans man on hormones, reading as a cis man in a rural area with low awareness of trans people; the other, a trans woman read as a cis woman, in context of other trans women apparently being read as cis men. To call these queer connections is deeply frustrating, and gets at an infuriating contradiction experienced by many trans people: cisnormativity cuts always, and when it functions to erase our transness it also functions to expose the transness (or misread the gender) of someone else. Many trans people do share stories like this, with biting humor, particularly to examine this contradiction: that having our genders assumed correctly can be deeply and critically gender affirming, yet having our genders assumed in the first place represents persistent psychological and sometimes physical violence, where "passing" is perhaps better understood as passing quietly by that violence. The joke is that if we have a gender that fits well enough into the binary, and if we can pass for that gender sometimes, and if we can find a space where people don't know enough about transness that clocking is relevant, then we can simply be our genders without having to persistently defend that existence. We might not have access to resources, we might be in dire danger if we have to go to the ER, but the 7-11 is safe. Calling this a queer connection seems bizarre. Later, "Cis-Skeletal" considers "cis-skeletal privilege: traveling with purported gender markers that work as gender-identity markers" (p 102), namely with regard to the way in which undocumented immigrants crossing borders sometimes die in the process and have their identities declared through cisnormative interpretations of their bones. It gets a bit closer to what "Queer Indirections" perhaps tries to get at and misses: "...I am also wary about locating correctives to normative presumptions in strategies of visibility. Despite common notions that visibility represents, advances, or is required for liberation, visibility is no simple good. Legibility often harms rather than assists trans and gender-nonconforming people seeking to cross borders, legally or illegally." (p 101) However, this is not an argument for illegibility; it is an argument for a more complex understanding of legibility, an argument against confusing legibility with liberation, and an identification that sometimes illegibility offers a space to hide in plain sight.

I go back and forth on this collection. The essays function better as stand-alone rather than part of a collection, and taken that way, there are many good and even some excellent ones. "Clocking the Unnatural: on the History of the Lavender Dildo" is a delight that gives exactly what the title promises, and "Page 27 of The Godfather and the Evidence of Memory" is rich in its investigation of how we learn from what we remember: "When did two of us turn macaroni into spaghetti? On the spot? A week or decades later? What did any of us misread versus misremember? Thus, overall: What are the limits of identifying sources of influence and information without enough information about what they mean to whom and when?" (p 76) But as these essays are largely very short, few ideas are well-developed; often, these seem more to be lightly-developed ideas (though compelling) with interesting citations. I wish Rand had focused on a few of them to develop further.

[Madelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Matchups confer privilege; they don’t constitute proof of identity. Clare writes, too, that valorizing “normal and natural” or “an original state of being” contributes to defining disability as a problem, exalting cure, and manufacturing targets for it"

Not sure exactly that this book knew what it wanted to be when it grew up. Certainly had some interesting examples, but I was looking for something more literally about the hips.

[Cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

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