Trans Literature Book Reviews: the Prince and the Dressmaker

Watch the Review of 
the Prince and the Dressmaker

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The Trans Literature Youtube Channel is continuing! 

Check out the review of "the Prince and the Dressmaker" by Jen Wang about the double-life of a young person who yearns for a life of gorgeous dresses while carrying the responsibility to be a marriageable royal man. The book also features the aspirations and work of a dress-maker who stands by the Prince as their partnership evolves and deepens.

Comment to offer suggestions for upcoming reviews!

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Visions of the Dark Ages: Eclipse & Cloud of Unknowing

"They must be playing with the blind-spots in your vision"

Eclipse, Stephanie Meyer

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Working in trans, queer, and disability theory in the field of medieval literature, I have found myself compulsively seeking what Eve Sedgwick calls "reparative readings" of rejected persons, narratives, cultures, and even time periods. I have come to firmly believe that a smart reader makes a book smarter. While Twilight has been a public success, it remains an abject or guilty pleasure for many serious academics. In many respects, however, the things that attract readers to Twilight queerly reflect much of the allure of medieval literature; including shared relations to time, conflicts and magical realisms. Pulling Twilight and Medieval-Early Modern Literature together becomes not only a queer project of appropriating from the mainline but a medieval project of messing with the archive. Enjoy!

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In the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer, Eclipse distinguishes itself by dimming the vision of the character of Alice Cullen, a sort of walking plot-device, whose ability to look into the future rail-roads many of the plot-lines in the series. The "Alice-has-a-vision" moment marks the beginning and nearly all the significant plot points in the series. It is because of Alice's vision that Bella will one day be a vampire that Bella and Edwards romance is allowed by the Cullens and the Vultori, the vampire ruling class. Alice's vision is the mechanism by which Edward is brought back in the second book after his long absence. Attentive readers of the books remain suspicious of whether the "Team Edward" or "Team Jacob" love triangle is ever a real conflict, given Alice's consistent predictions that Bella eventually joins the world of the undead.

The most tense moments in the Twilight books all play upon "blind-spots" or uncertainty in Alice's visions. Because there is free-will, explains Edward, the future that Alice sees is constantly changing. She has to focus on persons to foresee the results of their life changes. If Bella's enemy, Victoria, means to attack, Alice brags "I would have seen her decide," but not before then. She can also watch other enemies choices at the same time, like the Vultori through "Aro's decisions." There are persons that live in the dark spots of her sight. She cannot see the were-wolves, says Edward, because they are like change incarnate. Alice can only be looking in so many directions at once. By focusing on certain people's futures, the decisions and consequences of other people remain outside her vision. Rather than crediting her with omnipotence, Meyer liberates her plot and her character by acknowledging that epistemological truth that "every way of knowing is a way of not knowing something else." (Robert McRuer, "Queer Austerity and Excess: Cripping the Crisis; or, the Rise of Disability Capitalism." the University of Maryland, Feb 7, 2013. Keynote). In addition to recognizing diverse ways of knowing, there is a kind of queer vitality given by unknowing. 

Once time becomes dim, more things seem possible. This seems to be the promise of Eclipse for its young adult readers. In this book, the plot hinges in the second act on "Alice-not-having-a-vision," or rather having suggestively incomplete knowledge of the plot of neighboring vampires seeking vengeance on Bella and the Cullen family. By deploying unknowing against a the certainty of previous books, Eclipse speaks to young adult readers who have just left the relative certainty of childhood and adolescence behind. In previous posts I have examined how these moments in childhood development are mirrored in the first two books of Twilight. Nearly a hundred years younger than Edward and less physically (and socially) powerful, the progress of Bella's relationship with her lover mirrors that of a hyper-protective parent of their child. In Eclipse, the reigns loosen a bit and provide some space for Bella to make her own choices. The personal conflict of this book is that it marks the point in the series where Bella is making her "final" choice between a life as a human (presumably with Jacob) and an unlife as a vampire (decidedly with Edward). Towards this end, Alice's vision needs to be dimmed in order to allow a real choice to be made.

For young adult readers, the feeling of leaving a childhood behind and being initiated into the liberal position of a self-governing subject, brings with it the dangers and joys of unknowing. This may account for some of the attractiveness of the Twilight series as a kind of coming-of-age story. Yet for Alive and Bella, entering into the dimness of the future is a relatively passive event that they try to break past as soon as possible. How might turning to literature that revels in the thought and promise of the "dark ages" might liberate our reading the Eclipse as an active process of unknowing?

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In the fifth chapter of the Cloud of Unknowing (c 14th century), the unknown author describes a method of mystic contemplation called the "cloude of forgetyng" (5.423). Participating in an ontological argument of God, sometimes called negative theology, the "cloude" prescribes the dismissal of all things, "good or ivel," from the mind in order to experience "the nakid beyng of Him" (5.431-447). 

The argument for this emptying is not that knowing (i.e. attending to things with the mind) is bad in itself, "it be ful profitable sumtyme to think of certeyne condicions and dedes of sum certein special creatures," but that by attending to certain things you obscure your knowledge of other things (5.433-434). When one thinks on something, "thi soule is openid on it and even ficchid therapon, as the ighe of a schoter is apon the prik that he schoteth to" (5.436-438). The language of an archer here exhibits an exclusionary mode of vision whereby intense focus allows for certain objects to become highlighted while allowing other things to fall away. 

For the mystic's goal of entering more fully into the presence of God, any knowledge puts an object "bitwix thee and thi God" (5.439). The difficulty is that any knowledge will inevitably spur on other knowledge. Attending to any thing will cause one to not only think of the thing itself, but "alle the werkes and the condicions of the same creatures" (5.428-429). Seeing a person will spur thought of all that has made that thing and all that it makes happen. In this way, knowing makes a thing present in such a way that pulls the mind into the past (history) and into the future (prophecy). This suggests that all rational and metaphorical thought works like the power of dynamic prophecy. This works against being present in the moment with "nakid beyng."

What the Cloud of Unknowing describes here in terms of relating to God (as Being par excellence), can be applied more broadly to liberating the way one relates to the present. By surrendering the compulsion to know things, one enters into the darkness that creates between the influence of history and prophecy a moment in which choices might be made. The trouble with this cloud or darkness, warns the author, is that these metaphors will be taken as things in themselves rather than a process. "For when I sey derknes, I mene a lackyng of knowyng; as alle that thing that thou knowest not, or elles that thou hast forgetyn, it is derk to thee... it is not clepid a cloude of the eire, bot a cloude of unknowyng" (For when I say 'darkness,' I mean the lacking of knowing; as all that thing that you don't know, or else all that you have forgotten, it is dark to you... it is not called the cloud of air, but a cloud of unknowing; 4.415-419). Thus rather than being a means of dismissal or essential being, darkness becomes a critical mode of action by which one liberates one's self from the trauma of the past or the prescriptions for the future in order to assert one's power and presence in the moment.

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Considering the medieval canon, Alice's place in a history of mystic woman with prophetic visions is brought into focus. During her human life, Alice had been kept in a dark room at an insane asylum. This confinement and claims of madness resonates with the Book of Margery Kempe and the Showings of Julian of Norwhich, who found themselves, bound (by choice or force) to forms cloistering that become sites of mystic visions. For Alice, it was not until she was freed from the Asylum and made into a vampire that her gift of prophecy crystalized, but as with all special gifts in the Twilight Saga, it begins within human experience. The language of blindness and darkness takes on a more critically active role in considering Alice's prophecies. The hyper-ability of her sight inscribes into its center the work of isolating madness. To be a visionary in this way is to be a "super-crip" (Eli Clare, Exile and Pride). Disability is not excluded from ability, but subtends it. Ultimately, Alice's experience of the darkness is not dwelled on for its own sake but used instrumentally to provide Bella with her moments of choice.

The work of isolation then is to undo the chains of the history and futurity. This offers the potential for violence when committed against one's will or for liberation when adopted by choice. Undoing or unknowing seems to enact both dangers and hopes at once. For Bella, as young adults, there is consistent anxiety at the prospect of giving up either past lives or possibilities for the future. She would be saying good-bye to her mother and father, the stewards of the past. She would no longer being able to conceive a child, to act as a steward of reproductive futurity. "Every so many years, everyone you know will be dead." In this sense, becoming a vampire is to enter into a fixed present that never changes. She would "always be this. Frozen. Never moving forward." With Edward able to read Alice's prophetic mind, their life holds no secrets. As Bella tells Edward, "I know you know what she saw." Edward always seems to know. Unknowing does not come easily with him. To commit to him is to surrender "possibilities," to commit to a certain future where this critical moment of darkness is exchanged with the cloud of the air (i.e. the night). 

On the other hand, to chose to remain a human ties keeps her moored in the normative script that runs from high-school, college, marriage, children, parenting, retirement and death. Besides her super-natural companions, Bella does not seem to buck expectations in any peculiar way. If we account for her choice to stay human as aligning her with Jacob and the werewolves, her future may turn out to be more liberating. He is "flesh and blood and warmth" and she "wouldn't have to change" to be with him. As a werewolf however, he is hyper-mutable, "incapable of control." The danger of the beasts is that they are hyper-changing, emotional, creatures of the moment. Yet to give up being the "vampire girl" to be the "wolf girl" may only be a minor improvement as it still yokes her to a lifestyle determined by the animacy of another. No matter what she chooses, the thing begins to work backwards and forwards to contextualize her existence. The moment of darkness is broken no matter which way the spheres move. However she occupies this dark age, it is a precarious way of being.

This vicarious freedom and precocity expresses key tensions for young adults in the ages of unknowing. Danger comes in losing attachments to the things that provide the circumstances for life and choices to arise. Conversely, the state of unknowing is perhaps impossible to maintain. Even the choice to defer choosing has its consequences. Once a choice is made, things fall back into lines of sight and as with Alice's visions, suddenly our path is mapped. Hope remains in continuing to play with these blind spots and allowing our visions to mark their mutability and limits because it is at these points of contingency that we contact the unknown. We begin to reach backward and forward against yet never totally leave our dark ages behind.

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Kids From Yesterday, Today: Shakespeare & New Moon

"You only live forever in the lights you make

When we were young we used to say

That you only hear the music when your heart begins to break

Now we are the kids from yesterday, today"

Danger Days, MCR

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Working in trans, queer, and disability theory in the field of medieval literature, I have found myself compulsively seeking what Eve Sedgwick calls "reparative readings" of rejected persons, narratives, cultures, and even time periods. I have come to firmly believe that a smart reader makes a book smarter. While Twilight has been a public success, it remains an abject or guilty pleasure for many serious academics. In many respects, however, the things that attract readers to Twilight queerly reflect much of the allure of medieval literature; including shared relations to time, conflicts and magical realisms. Pulling Twilight and Medieval-Early Modern Literature together becomes not only a queer project of appropriating from the mainline but a medieval project of messing with the archive. Enjoy!

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As I continue to read forward through the Twilight Saga, I keep getting pulled backward towards childhood and beyond, to ages that I don't remember and cannot reach without the aid of another; in this case, Shakespeare. Engaging with the English playwrights sonnet sequence in the context of queer embodiments, Aranye Fradenburg has invited me, through her contribution to Shakesqueer, "Momma's Boys," into a meditation on Power, Instability and Absence, which Resonates with my reading of the second book in the Twilight Saga, New Moon.

If in the Teen and 'Tween (or Middle) Ages we are stuck between reaching to exercise our own agency and being supervised or dominated by a parental figure, then Childhood or Early/Pre-M(e) Ages may be defined by an anxiety over the loss or impending loss of the Parent/Dom/Love-Object. In New Moon, Bella receives what many of her readers may have wished for her in the first book, an escape from her Vampire-stalker, Edward. The sudden loss is however shattering to her pysche and alters her liveliness. Likewise, as Fradenburg notes, Shakespeare's sonnets are steeped in the anxiety for a lost care-giver and lover, which has in turn, become imprinted on the childish poet.

The description and marketing of Twilight has struck an ironic chord between the youth market and their "mothers." While I will abstain from defining the gender parameters of the book's readership so starkly, I will agree that the book functions within a logic of (managing/engaging) childishness. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight's author, admits to writing the book "with one kid on my knee and another at my feet." Shakespeare too freely directs his sonnets here to a "youth" and there to a "dark lady" which is simultaneously casts as both lover and mother. What comes from the loss of our vampire, our domme, our lady at a tender age?

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"Many of my students" writes Fradenburg on Shakespeare's Sonnets, "find Will childish and narcissistic (he wines endlessly, he should get over it, he's a loser). We are often not comfortable when we see the infantile in the grown-up. But I argue that is exactly the view the Sonnet's permit" (F 321). Certainly Shakespeare appears very locked, compelled, out of (self) control in the Sonnets. Yet, is this so surprising? If many of them are about Love and Time/Aging, then are we not exactly situated among things which appear by definition to challenge our self-governance? Eros and Thanatos, well before Freud, are marked as checking the Will with powers outside of himself/itself.

Those that give us Life and those that give us Death, are not so easy to distinguish. Feeling with the childish Will, Fradenburg admits on one side (such as in Sonnet 110), "How could we not fall in love with those who give us life -- as we seek in turn to vivify those we love?" (325); and on the other (such as in Sonnet 35).  "Attachment happens whether or not children are well treated. Abused kids often defend their parents and fear being taken from them. Attachment may ensure survival, but... it is not designed to make us happy" (324). As those familiar with Sub/Dom or Age play, a Sub/Little may most love their Dom/Big when they are disciplining them.

Such a binding together of the self and the other, wherein the absence of one may mean the dissolution of the other, can have tragic consequences, as the Sonnets demonstrate. Shakespeare's Sonnet 143, which Fradenburg uses to introduce her essay, concludes with a desire for the absent mother to return so as to silence the desire/life of the infant: "Turn back to me, / and play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind: / So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will / if thou turn back, and my loud crying still" (Sonnet 143). There is a desire for the absent thing which can grow into a desire for absence itself. The depart inspire an uncontrollable feeling of being "parted" oneself, and that the remains of your life are no longer sustainable. In this case, the attainment of the beloved or else destruction (or both) seem to become two overwhelming trajectories. One cannot help but hear in this resonance, the plot and words of Romeo and Juliet, which begins Meyer's second book.

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"These violent delights have violent ends / and in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / which, as they kiss, consume," are the lines from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that open New Moon (II. VI). The book itself becomes structured along the lines of the play of these foolish children that cannot seem to wait, with the exile of the beloved (Edward/Romeo), opening up an opportunity for the alternative suitor (Jacob/Paris) to come in and offer up a more sustainable lifestyle, but which in the eyes of the lover (Bella/Juliet) is such an overwhelming loss that she contemplates and even feigns suicide (via jumping off a cliff/drugging), which is mistranslated to the absent lover by an unreliable source (Balthasar/Roselie), compelling the lover to attempt to take his life (via suicide by cop/poisoning). 

While this is on one hand, perhaps, a reductive allegorical reading of New Moon, it is openly invited by the book. The play is referenced throughout the book, with Bella reading it in school and at home, as she fawns over Edward; and Bella goes as far as to call Jacob her "Paris," a point which Meyer underlines by making that the chapter title.

Beyond the obvious, however, and bringing in Fradenburg's reading of Shakespeare as childish, we might find resonance between the Sub/Child author of the Sonnets and Bella. This consuming desire for the Powerful Dom/Parent, whether present or absent, is consistently marked by tradition as "inappropriate," writes Fradenburg, "for someone thirty years older [or in Bella's case, Edward is nearly 100 years older], thirty years younger [or 100 years younger]. The kind of love that makes a fool, a pervert, a stalker out of you" (F 317). The love certainly seems to make a stalker out of Edward (who even watches her while she sleeps), and consistently makes a fool out of Bella (so much it can be hard to read).

One of the central things which propel and participate in Bella's madness/foolishness/childishness during Edward's absence and removal of domination, is that he has become so inscribed in her psyche/being that she hears a phantom of his voice speaking to her. "Sonnets are about the way others live in our minds" writes Fradenburg, and perhaps Edward's infamous Lullaby for Bella, which he sings for her and which she replays, functions in a similar way after he is gone; "if you are alive in my mind -- or, rather, if that is where I have to talk to you, you are probably not around. But this is not just about controlling the locomotions of the other by incorporating them; it is about the way representation allows us to maintain and create links with people we cannot be with" (F 325). Indeed, it is the desire for hearing Edwards phantasmal voice that propels Bella to instigate them by foolish, dangerous acts, such as the jump from the cliff which results in Edward attempting suicide.

Of course, in Bella's case, unlike Juliet's, she is able to get to her beloved in time to prevent him from destroying himself. As a result, Edward returns (or turns back) like the "dark lady" in Shakespeare's sonnets and "silences" her crying by giving her both Love and Death simultaneously: he turns her into a vampire. The exchange comes along with a promise of marriage, so that for this child, she exists in a state of UnLife: caught between perpetual desire and destruction, Submission and Domination, childishness (Edward will ever be 17 years old and Bella 18) and age (they will live forever). In a sense, she comes to occupy (through the powers of supernatural vampirism) what Juliet and Shakespeare cannot: a paradox of sustaining and culminating opposites and being a kid from yesterday, today.

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Undeath in the Tween Years: Chaucer & Twilight

"They're gonna clean up your looks 

with all the lies in the books...

They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me

They could care less as long as someone'll bleed

So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose.

Maybe they will leave you alone, but not me"

Teenagers, MCR

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Working in trans, queer, and disability theory in the field of medieval literature, I have found myself compulsively seeking what Eve Sedgwick calls "reparative readings" of rejected persons, narratives, cultures, and even time periods. I have come to firmly believe that a smart reader makes a book smarter. While Twilight has been a public success, it remains an abject or guilty pleasure for many serious academics. In many respects, however, the things that attract readers to Twilight queerly reflect much of the allure of medieval literature; including shared relations to time, conflicts and magical realisms. Pulling Twilight and Medieval-Early Modern Literature together becomes not only a queer project of appropriating from the mainline but a medieval project of messing with the archive. Enjoy!

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Tween & Middle Ages

The teen years are not so far behind me that habits that grew up in that time of my life have totally transformed into their young adult version. Conversely, the experience of being a teen is not so enveloping of my day to day experience that I cannot see forests for the trees.

That said, spending my spring break dipping into the popular fiction of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (conveniently passed the time in which reading it would be significant and I will be able to be more charitable in my reading of the book) and the Prioress's Tale has brought up memories of a perspective that has lost a degree of intensity (although by no means relevancy) in my current circumstances: the experience of occupying a vulnerable position of power.

Living alongside Bella Swan as she began to be courted and dominated by Edward Cullen proved to be far less objectionable than I had anticipated. Asking myself why I am not more offended by the blatant chauvinism and stalker-like behavior of Edward, I came up with the answer, “well, isn’t that how any dom(inant), of any gender, would behave towards their sub(missive)?” Coming from a queer theoretical and subcultural perspective, the particularity of the Bella/Edward story resonated with the S(ub)/D(om) world I knew.

Indeed I'm not the first person to make the connection between the Twilight romance and Sub/Dom culuture, as evidenced by E.L. James, citing it as the inspiration for her book series 50 Shades of Grey.

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Resonance

Indeed, calling it a “resonance” rather than a representation, I feel does more justice to the literature as well as to the readership. Rather than pining down the book’s meaning or making it stand in for all male/female, all heterosexual, all human/non-human, all dom & sub, all x & y relationships allows the book to live and retreat into its own particularity which resists being instilled as an allegory or meta-story. It loses deific power as the universal love-story at the same time as it loses its demonic power as the universal story of patriarchal dominance. 

Instead, via resonance “something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode” (the I.C., the Coming Insurrection 12).

The Invisible Committee’s (the I.C.) concept of resonance as a revolutionary mode, functions well as a mode of literary scholarship, because it allows us to bracket the question of direct causal or representative story-telling; i.e. Bella does not submit to Edward because she is a woman and he is a man, or because she is a sub and he is a dom, because she is a human and he is a vampire, because she is a X-ist and he is a Y-ist --- rather, Bella’s submission exists in its own world and may resonate with the experience of a human, submissive woman elsewhere but was not written as a result, as a cause, or any other direct reaction to her experience. 

“[Resonance] is not like a plague or a forest fire --- a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density” (I.C. 12-13).

Bella (in Twilight), Sub/Dom Culture, the Coming Insurrection, and myself, all resonate together through this reading (as the very form of this reading), in part because we are all concerned about power. Each of us exist as submissive bodies that yearn for dominance or else to become dominant, but experience our position in relation to power as ever under threat, as unstable, inconstant, and contingent.

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Teen Vampires

The experience of the Sub, the Teenager, and the Human strike a common chord: here we are regarded as powerful, but always with the permission of something else, there we are outright dominated, and ever in both and between there is a sense that our power might be taken away.

The Dominants, Parents, the Vampire, may give us room to stand with them as equals but the moment that we move counter to their wishes for us, they might insist on their privilege over us to bring us back in line. We have power insofar as other powers abstain from exercising their power and desire over us. The Scholar, like the Doms, the 'Rents, the Vamps, desires the submissive body to be independent but fears that it might run too far away or get into danger, thus putting them beyond our power to feed off their life-blood and affection.

Edward’s hold on Bella, keeping her close and yet resistant to either devour her or make her into a thing equal to and like him (a vampire), evidences this tension. Bella calls Edward out on this treatment: i.e. giving her piggy-back rides (279), watching her while she sleeps (293), dancing with her feet standing on his, telling him that this behavior makes her "feel like I'm five years old" (488). Indeed, it is an extension of Bella’s contingent power with her father, and to the reader, which gives her a life of her own only insofar as they do not insist on pinning her down.

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Undead Choirboys

Such resonance moves between texts, harmonizing with the song of the Prioress’s boy in Geoffrey Chaucer's the Canterbury Tales. There, he is given a voice through song, but given only the form, not yet trusted with the meaning of the words (he could not understand Latin, "For he so yong and tendre was of age"). There, he walks through the Jewish quarter of the city to school, on the contingency that they allow him to pass (for a time) unhindered.

The Jewish population too exists in this city in a "Iewerye" (a ghetto), on the contingency that they are not expelled, pay additional taxes, function as the bankers for the city, and generally submit to the dominant Christian overlords (from which the child descends and with which his song resonates). At a moment when the boy passes through the Jewish Quarter, singing his song of the Mother Mary (the Ave Marie and Alma Redemptoris)  a few members of the Jewish population are convinced by an oppositional Satanic spirit to reject the sonic dominance of the child; silencing him with death. In this moment of rupture, the silencing violence against the Jewish people of the ghetto reaches a breaking point, resulting in an another act of violence that spurs on the murders being put to death and even heavier domination of the "Iewerye." Power breeds resistance which can be co-opted (by the city and the narrator) to justify further oppression. Even death is no escape.

Miraculously, the child is brought back to a kind of contingent unlife by the intervention of a parental (Mother Mary) figure, who with the help of an enchanted grain ("[which] she leyde... up-on [his] tonge"), his song continues despite his death. This child’s particularity continues to resonate and exercise power, as a sonic agent of the dominant religion and Mother Mary in particular, with the physically powerful Jewish men/adults, with parents, with other children, with the unliving, with vampires, with teen-agers, with Bella/Edward, and with us.

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Un/de(te)r-mined/ Lives

The power of the Prioress’s Tale and the boy’s song is contingent on the reader, but its vulnerable efficacy has persisted in a partially alive/autonomous state as well as in a partially dead, passé, pinned-down tradition of medieval literature. The Text and the boy are both undead vampires in a sense, sucking life-blood from the reader, just as we are drawn to it and bite into it for nourishment. This unlife has thus allowed the boy’s singing dead body to continue on for centuries until it can sit (literally and literar-ily) on the shelf next to Bella and Edward. 

The resonance of vulnerable power-positions and power-plays continues to connect them with my lived experience.

While the particularity of the Prioress’s song-boy and Stephenie Meyer’s teen-vampires are in a sense removed from my current circumstances, I continue to harmonize with their song of feeling uncertain about one’s position in a community, the feeling that one’s autonomy and life are contingent on dominant forces not exercising their power over me, shutting down my song and closing my book. And yet, this resonance reminds me also of all I will never know of the unlife of teens, boys, and vampires. What comes next for such Un/de(te)r-minded Lives?

To quote Twilight: Eclipse, "who the hell knows? This isn't the time to make hard and fast decisions, this is the time to make mistakes... to change your mind and change it again, because nothing is permanent." In other words, Things Transform, and that involves the demands for support in undeterred undetermined lives.

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