Jacqueline Rose

Where is trauma meant to lodge itself when the mind, like the body, in shreds or shot to pieces, is no longer anything that might remotely be called home? The very persistence of horror in South Africa tells us that thinking about trauma in relation to language, circling endlessly around the question of whether or not it can be spoken, which has tended to dominate academic discourse, is not enough.

Reading the stories of sexual harassment both here and in the US, I have started to feel that all the attention has served not only to bolster the urgent call for a better world but, oddly and at the same time, as a diversionary tactic to help us avoid having to think about sex. Or, to put it another way, if harassment and sexual violence are, as a certain version of radical feminism would have it, the whole story of human sexuality, then we may as well lock the door on who we are and throw away the key. How can we acknowledge the viciousness of sexual harassment while leaving open the question of what sexuality at its wildest – most harmful and most exhilarating, sometimes both together – might be?

The Lesser Bohemians, McBride’s second novel, sets itself a challenge: how on earth does anyone ever manage to talk to somebody else? How close in language can, or should, you try to get? The issues of sexual, and of linguistic, proximity turn out to be one and the same thing. McBride has said that in writing and rewriting the novel, she was most worried about the representation of sex: ‘Actually,’ she then qualifies, ‘it was really about trying to maintain the connection between the inner life and the physical life.’ What makes this novel so powerful is the way she jams the bodies into the speech.

Today, trans people – men, women, neither, both – are taking the public stage more than ever before. In the words of a Time magazine cover story in June last year, trans is ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’. Perhaps, even though it doesn’t always look this way on the ground, trans activists will also – just – be in a position to advance what so often seems impossible: a political movement that tells it how it uniquely is, without separating one struggle for equality and human dignity from all the rest.

On 3 March 2014, the first day in the trial of Oscar Pistorius for the killing of Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa made her way across courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria slowly and haltingly. She suffers from severe arthritis and for the duration of the trial she sat on an orthopaedic chair, much smaller than the vast leather seats of the two assessors on either side. Judge Masipa’s entry couldn’t have been more different from that of the defendant she was there to judge. According to one observer, Pistorius ‘strode’ up to the dock.