:執迷於身份認同的一年1
A few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. Anne Hathaway was in ‘‘The Intern,’’ perched on a hotel bed in a hotel robe, eating from a can of overpriced nuts, having tea and freaking out. What would happen if she divorced her sweet, selfless stay-at-home dad of a husband? Would she ever meet anybody else? And if she didn’t, she would have no one to be buried next to — she’d be single for all eternity. And weren’t the problems in her marriage a direct result of her being a successful businesswoman — she was there but never quite present? ‘‘The Intern’’ is a Nancy Meyers movie, and these sorts of cute career-woman meltdowns are the Eddie Van Halen guitar solos of her romantic comedies.
幾周前，我坐在電影院裏，臉上泛起笑容。《實習生》(The Intern)裏的安妮·海瑟薇(Anne Hathaway)穿着客用浴袍坐在酒店牀上，正喝着茶，吃一罐貴得離譜的堅果，顯得六神無主。如果跟在家帶孩子的無私甜心丈夫離婚會有什麼後果？還能找到這麼一個人嗎？如果找不到，是不是得孤獨終老了——就這麼一個人度過餘生。而她的婚姻問題，難道不正是作爲一個成功女商人的下場嗎——因爲人在但心不在？《實習生》是南希·邁耶斯(Nancy Meyers)的電影，像這種可愛的職業女性崩潰戲，在她的浪漫喜劇中就如同埃迪·範·海倫(Eddie Van Halen guitar)的吉他華彩段落。
But what’s funny about that scene — what had me grinning — is the response of the person across the bed from Hathaway. After listening to her tearful rant, this person has had enough: Don’t you dare blame yourself or your career! Actually, the interruption begins, ‘‘I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us. … ’’ Hate to be because the person on the other side of the bed isn’t Judy Greer or Brie Larson. It’s not Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon. It’s someone not far from the last person who comes to mind when you think ‘‘soul-baring bestie.’’ It’s Robert freaking De Niro, portrayer of psychos, savages and grouches no more.
然而這場戲最有意思的地方——讓我發笑的地方——是在牀另一頭那個人的反應。聽着她的飆淚吐槽，這人終於受不了了：你憑什麼怪自己，怪你的事業！事實上，此人是用這麼一句話打斷她的：“我們兩個人裏，女性主義的居然是我，我可不想這樣……”之所以不想，是因爲在牀另一頭的那個人不是朱迪·格里爾(Judy Greer)或布莉·拉爾森(Brie Larson)。不是梅麗爾·斯特里普(Meryl Streep)或蘇珊·薩蘭登(Susan Sarandon)。你無論如何也想不到讓這個人來擔負“有話直說的閨蜜”角色。是羅伯特·德尼羅(Robert De Niro)啊媽媽，那個整天演瘋子、狂徒和暴脾氣的傢伙。
On that bed with Hathaway, as her 70-year-old intern, he’s not Travis Bickle or the human wall of intolerance from those Focker movies. He’s Lena Dunham. The attentiveness and stern feminism coming out of his mouth are where the comedy is. And while it’s perfectly obvious what Meyers is doing to De Niro — girlfriending him — that doesn’t make the overhaul any less effective. The whole movie is about the subtle and obvious ways in which men have been overly sensitized and women made self-estranged through breadwinning. It’s both a plaint against the present and a pining for the past, but also an acceptance that we are where we are.
作爲一個70高齡的實習生和海瑟薇在一張牀上的他，不是Travis Bickle（《的士司機》），也不是《拜見岳父大人》裏那堵油鹽不進的人肉牆壁。他是莉娜·杜漢姆(Lena Dunham)。他那一副傾聽者的樣子，嘴裏吐出堅定的女性主義言論，正是本片的笑點所在。邁耶斯把他塑造成閨蜜的意圖十分明顯，但這並沒有絲毫減弱這個角色的顛覆效果。整部影片就是要微妙而明顯地表現男性的過度敏感，以及女人在成爲家庭經濟來源後的自我疏離。它既是對當下的哀嘆，也是對往昔的懷戀，同時又有一種對現狀的承認。
And where are we? On one hand: in another of Nancy Meyers’s bourgeois pornographies. On the other: in the midst of a great cultural identity migration. Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are. If Meyers is clued into this confusion, then you know it really has gone far, wide and middlebrow. We can see it in the instantly beloved hit ‘‘Transparent,’’ about a family whose patriarch becomes a trans woman whose kids call her Moppa, or in the time we’ve spent this year in televised proximity to Caitlyn Jenner, or in the browning of America’s white founding fathers in the Broadway musical ‘‘Hamilton,’’ or in the proliferating clones that Tatiana Maslany plays on ‘‘Orphan Black,’’ which mock the idea of a true or even original self, or in Amy Schumer's comedic feminism, which reconsiders gender confusion: Do uncouthness, detachment and promiscuity make her a slut, or a man?
那麼我們的現狀是什麼？一方面：我們身在南希·邁耶斯的又一部布爾喬亞色情片中。另一方面：我們正經歷一場文化身份認同大遷徙。性別角色正在合併。種族在蛻變。過去大概六年裏，尤其是2015年，我們看到我們就是一羣跨性別、多性-兼性-全性戀者。如今連邁耶斯都插手來理這一團亂麻，你就知道它已經擴散到每一個角落了。我們可以在迅速躥紅的《透明家庭》(Transparent)裏看到這一點，該劇講了一個家族的族長成了一個跨性女，大家都管她叫“媽爸”；或者是今年在電視上頻頻露面的凱特琳·詹納(Caitlyn Jenner)；或者百老匯音樂劇《漢密爾頓》(Hamilton)中棕色皮膚的美國白人開國元勳；或者《黑色孤兒》(Orphan Black)中塔提阿娜·瑪斯拉尼(Tatiana Maslany)飾演的衆多克隆人，對真實甚或原始自我的概念進行了嘲弄；或艾米·舒默爾(Amy Schumer)的喜劇女性主義對性別困惑的重新思考：她的粗野、超然和放蕩，讓她成了一個蕩婦，還是一個男人？
We can see it in the recently departed half-hour sketch comedy ‘‘Key & Peele,’’ which took race as a construct that could be reshuffled and remixed until it seemed to lose its meaning. The sitcom ‘‘Black-ish’’ likewise makes weekly farcical discourse out of how much black identity has warped — and how much it hasn’t — over 50 years and across three generations. ‘‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’’ turns selfhood into a circus, introducing us to a lower-middle-class Native American teenager who eventually succeeds at becoming a rich white lady, and to other characters who try out new selves every 10 minutes, as if they’re auditioning for ‘‘Snapchat: The Musical.’’ Last month, Ryan Adams released a remake of Taylor Swift’s album ‘‘1989,’’ song for song, as a rock record that combines a male voice with a perspective that still sounds like a woman’s, like Lindsey Buckingham trying on Stevie Nicks’s clothes. Dancing on the fringes of mainstream pop are androgynous black men like Le1f, Stromae and Shamir.
從最近完結的《Key & Peele》中也可以看到，這部半小時小品喜劇集把種族當成了一種構造，可以打亂、重混，直到失去其本身的含義。同樣，情景喜劇《喜新不厭舊》(Black-ish)也用每週一集的滑稽言語，述說跨越50多年、三個世代的黑人身份出現了哪些的扭曲——又有哪些始終未曾改變。《我本堅強》(Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt)將自我變成了一個馬戲團，向我們呈現了一個最終如願以償成爲富有白人女性的中低階層美國土著少女，其他的人物也是每隔10分鐘換一個新自我的類型，彷彿他們在給一個叫Snapchat的音樂劇試鏡。上個月，瑞恩·亞當斯(Ryan Adams)發佈了泰勒·斯威夫特(Taylor Swift)專輯《1989》的翻唱版，把所有歌曲都改成了男聲搖滾樂，但聽起來依然像一個女人在唱歌，就像林賽·巴金漢姆(Lindsey Buckingham)穿上了史蒂薇·尼克斯(Stevie Nicks)的衣服。還有遊走於主流流行樂邊緣的半男半女黑人男性Le1f、Stromae和Shamir。
What started this flux? For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae. We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism. After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.
這股洪流從何而來？過去十多年裏，我們的手邊有了電子遊戲和社交媒體平臺這樣的個人科技，可以幫助我們創造別樣的或輔助的表象人格。此外，這些年我們每天都被那些“改頭換面”類節目吸引着，這種節目會找一組專家來改造你的個人形象、你的家、你的身體、你的配偶。電視上還有最佳時裝設計、身體繪畫、易裝皇后的競賽。其中某些化妝易容的形式，現在已經見怪不怪——對此也有專門的電視節目去呈現。我們的重新發明有一種歡快和釋放的感覺——這與某種本性中的美式樂觀主義息息相關。千百年來女人靠着男人生活，各種族比鄰而居，而現在——儘管只是名義上——我們堅守的性別和種族邊界終於開始崩塌。我們能感到一種流動與包容性，二元論正在被瓦解。我們正成爲彼此。是的，我們本就是彼此。但現在不是。
In June, the story of a woman named Rachel Dolezal began its viral spread through the news. She had recently been appointed president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane, Wash. She had been married to a black man, had two black sons and was, by most accounts, a black woman. Her white biological parents begged to differ. The ensuing scandal resurrected questions about the nature of identity — what compelled Dolezal to darken her skin, perm her hair and pass in reverse? She might not have been biologically black, but she seemed well past feeling spiritually white.
6月，一個名叫蕾切爾·多爾扎爾(Rachel Dolezal)的女人頻頻見諸報端。她前不久被任命爲有色人種協進會(NAACP)華盛頓州斯波坎市分會主席。她和一個黑人男性結了婚，有兩個黑人兒子，她本人被大多數人認爲是一名黑人女性。但她的兩位白人生身父母提出了異議。隨之而來的醜聞再次引發了有關身份本質的爭論——是什麼促使多爾扎爾加深自己的膚色，燙捲髮，進行反向種族冒充呢？也許她生理上不是黑人，但精神上似乎早已不覺得自己白。
Some people called her ‘‘transracial.’’ Others found insult in her masquerade, particularly when the country’s attention was being drawn, day after day, to how dangerous it can be to have black skin. The identities of the black men and women killed by white police officers and civilians, under an assortment of violent circumstances, remain fixed.
有人稱她爲“跨種族”(transracial)。有人覺得她的僞裝是種侮辱，尤其想到這個國家正日復一日地注意到，一身黑皮膚會帶來怎樣的危險。黑人男女被白人警察和平民在各種各樣的暴力情境下打死，這樣的身份認同始終牢不可破。
But there was something oddly compelling about Dolezal, too. She represented — dementedly but also earnestly — a longing to transcend our historical past and racialized present. This is a country founded on independence and yet comfortable with racial domination, a country that has forever been trying to legislate the lines between whiteness and nonwhiteness, between borrowing and genocidal theft. We’ve wanted to think we’re better than a history we can’t seem to stop repeating. Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration: It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her.
但在多爾扎爾的身上卻又有一種奇怪的吸引力。她用一種瘋狂而又懇切的方式，表達了超越我們的歷史過往和種族化當下的渴望。這個國家在獨立中誕生，卻可以對種族霸權心安理得，這個國家一直費盡心機通過法律明確白與非白、借用與滅族盜取的區分。雖然總是無法避免重複歷史，但我們曾認爲自己沒有看上去那麼糟。多爾扎爾毅然決然地認定自己是個黑人，說明了她對種族融合有何等的信心：彷彿她已經搶先到達了某個未來世界。
It wasn’t so long ago that many Americans felt they were living in that future. Barack Obama’s election was the dynamite that broke open the country. It was a moment. It was the moment. Obama was biological proof of some kind of progress — the product of an interracial relationship, the kind that was outlawed in some states as recently as 1967 but was normalized. He seemed to absolve us of original sin and take us past this stupid, dangerous race stuff. What if suddenly anything was possible? What if we could be and do whatever and whoever we wanted? In that moment, the country was changing. We were changing.
這種置身未來的感覺，美國人不久前剛剛領略過。貝拉克·奧巴馬(Barack Obama)的當選將這個國家炸得四分五裂。那是一個瞬間。無與倫比的瞬間。奧巴馬爲某種進步提供了生理證據——他是一個跨種族關係的產物，而就在1967年，這樣的產物在某些州還是非法的，只是被常態化了。他似乎赦免了我們的原罪，讓我們可以把那些愚蠢而危險的種族問題拋諸腦後。要是突然之間一切皆有可能了呢？我們可以做任何事、成爲任何人？那一刻，這個國家變了。我們變了。
Before Obama ran for president, when we tended to talk about racial identity, we did so as the defense of a settlement. Black was understood to be black, nontransferably. Negro intellectuals — Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and James Baldwin, for starters — debated strategies for equality and tolerance. Some of them asserted that to be black was also to be American, even if America begged to differ. For most of those many decades, blackness stood in opposition to whiteness, which folded its arms and said that was black people’s problem. But Obama became everybody’s problem. He was black. He was white. He was hope. He was apocalypse. And he brought a lot of anxiety into weird relief. We had never really had a white president until we had a black one.
在奧巴馬參選總統之前，每當試圖展開種族身份的討論，我們總是會爲一種和解做辯護。我們懂得，黑人是黑人，是不可轉換的。以拉爾夫·埃裏森(Ralph Ellison)、阿爾伯特·穆瑞(Albert Murray)、詹姆斯·鮑德溫(James Baldwin)爲首的黑人知識分子曾探討爭取平等和寬容的戰略。其中一些人提出黑人也是美國人的主張，儘管美利堅不以爲然。在那幾十年間，黑白基本上是保持對立的，白人一方雙臂抱胸，說那是黑人的問題。但奧巴馬成了所有人的問題。他是黑人。他是白人。他是希望。他是啓示。他把許多的焦慮變成了奇怪的解脫。在有黑人總統之前，我們沒有過真正的白人總統。
This radical hope, triggered by Obama, ushered in a period of bi- and transracial art — art that probed the possibility that we really had transcended race, but also ridiculed this hope with an acid humor. During Obama's past year in office, those works of art have taken on an even darker, more troubled tone as we keep looking around and seeing how little has really changed.
這種被奧巴馬觸發的根本希望，開創了一個雙種族和跨種族藝術時期——其間的創作探究了我們從真正意義上超越種族的可能性，同時又用尖酸的幽默嘲弄了希望本身。在奧巴馬過去一年的執政裏，這類藝術作品開始有了一種更陰暗、不安的氣息，因爲我們環顧四周，發現其實沒有什麼真正的改變。
When the Dolezal story broke, I was partway through Nell Zink’s ‘‘Mislaid,’’ one of the four new satirical novels of race I read this year — Jess Row’s ‘‘Your Face in Mine,’’ Paul Beatty’s ‘‘The Sellout’’ and Mat Johnson’s ‘‘Loving Day’’ were the others. (I also read Fran Ross’s long-lost, recently reissued ‘‘Oreo.’’) But Zink’s was the only one that felt like an energy reading of Dolezal. Zink’s white heroine, Peggy, has run off with her daughter, Mireille, and decided to take the birth certificate of a dead black girl named Karen Brown and use it for Mireille, while changing her own name to Meg.
多爾扎爾事件剛曝光時，我正在看奈爾·津克(Nell Zink)的《遺失》(Mislaid)，那是我這一年看的四本新出版的種族諷刺小說之一——其他幾本是耶斯·羅(Jess Row)的《我臉中的你的臉》(Your Face in Mine)、保羅·比蒂(Paul Beatty)的《出賣》(The Sellout)和馬特·約翰遜(Mat Johnson)的《洛文日》(Loving Day)（我還看了弗蘭·羅斯[Fran Ross]那本被遺忘多年、新近再版的《奧利奧》[Oreo]）。但只有津克的書給我感覺像一本多爾扎爾的能量讀物。津克的白人女主人公佩姬帶着女兒梅瑞爾離家出走，並拿了一個名叫凱倫·布朗的已故黑人女孩的出生證，作爲梅瑞爾的身份證明，同時把自己的名字改成了梅格。
The next year, Karen was 4 years old going on 5 and still blond. Nonetheless registering her for first grade as a black 6-year-old was easy as pie.
第二年，凱倫剛四歲多、快五歲，而且是一頭金髮。但她還是輕而易舉地以一個六歲黑人孩子的身份入學，開始上一年級。
Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter and eyes of deep blue-green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P.
可能只有南方人才能理解金髮黑人是怎麼回事。弗吉尼亞的定居先於蓄奴，因此是很多元的。那裏有棕褐色皮膚、淺褐色眼睛的黑人。赤褐色頭髮、膚色似黃油、眼睛是深藍綠色的黑人。跟近年的某任NAACP主席相似的金髮、藍眼睛黑人。
