Writing through the Body

Abstract

Writing through the Body Eileen DiPofi (bio) A Review of The Small Book of Hip Checks: On Queer Gender, Race, and Writing by Erica Rand. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. 152. $89.95 cloth, $23.95 paper. In her latest monograph, Erica Rand brings the intimate writing style and focus on the embodied experiences of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability that characterized her previous book, Red Nails, Black Skates (2012), expanding her scope beyond the skating rink and in provocative new directions.1 The Small Book of Hip Checks argues for the hips as an overdetermined corporeal site where multiple histories, cultural norms, social processes, and identifications collide. Rand asserts that "as racialized and classed markers of gender and sexuality, hips bear weight and meaning, fate and contradiction" (1). With careful attention to the ways in which hips are socially constructed as texts, Rand resists essentializing discourses that assume the body always precedes its gendering. Opening outward from the hips, she explores the body as a nexus of expression and regulation. The Small Book of Hip Checks analyzes cultural sites at which individual bodies come into contact with the systemic forces of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, largely focusing on popular and material culture (including sports, films, memoirs, and sex toys) but also with attention to how practices of activism, public mourning, and individual resistance negotiate embodiment. In part a work of cultural analysis, and in part autotheory, Rand explores her own subjectivity within these structures of power. [End Page 225] However, what is most innovative about The Small Book of Hip Checks is Rand's attention to the embodied experience of writing itself. By structuring her book through short chapters that prioritize juxtaposition over flow, bringing seemingly disparate objects into conversation, Rand prizes an "embrace of redirection, revisitation, and interruption" (15) rather than a traditional linear argument. This approach demonstrates the unexpected insights to be gained through approaching writing as a queer practice. Queer and feminist thinkers have long sought to foster unexpected intimacies between texts, sparking insights that might be otherwise imperceptible within normative academic frameworks. For example, Carolyn Dinshaw posits a methodology of "touching" that puts different historical moments in contact to produce "connections between incommensurate entities."2 As Ann Cvetkovich observes, such a methodology enables erotic and affective intimacies to emerge between historical and contemporary bodies.3 In a similar vein, Gayatri Gopinath employs a tactic of "queer curation," which "stages 'collisions and encounters' between aesthetic practices that may seem discontinuous," revealing insights and inspiring affective responses that might otherwise go unnoticed.4 In The Small Book of Hip Checks, Rand resolutely marks her place in this tradition, placing texts in conversation that might normally be separated to see what insights their proximity might inspire. Importantly, Rand does not reduce the bodies she studies to objects, but rather places her own body in conversation within them, reflecting on how her own gender, sexuality, and race have signified through her hips, and how, as her body has changed, this signification has, too. As such, the book balances an analysis of the intersecting processes of gendering and racialization on differently classed and sexualized bodies alongside Rand's meta-analysis of her own body as writer and social subject. Rand grounds her study through three interpretations of hip check: as "point of inspection," as "flirtation device," and as "sports move" (2). Respectively, these three distillations encompass Rand's concerns with the policing of bodies, embodied forms of resistance, and queer approaches to writing, commingling throughout the text to produce intimacies between writer, readers, and objects of study. Rand's first interpretation of hip check, as "point of inspection," evidences her commitment to analyses of how bodies are disciplined along the lines of race, gender, size, and sexuality. Rand provides a plethora of short readings demonstrating how hips are sites of judgment regarding a body's conformity to normative ideals, with hips—and, by extension, other [End Page 226] body parts—deemed too wide, indicating feminine, racialized, and classed excess that demands regulation. Rand's case studies demonstrate her attention to how gender policing is amplified and differentially applied "for people read as gender-nonconforming and/or...