I was a year old today when I found out that Angela Carter was a sex worker. She was a hostess in Japan before the term was invented. I love Angela Carter. I have met very few people who have read her rebellious work in detail. I know poets who love their novels but need to learn about their fantastic collection of poems, The Unicorn. The Unicorn spoke so strongly to me as a young adult that I made fun of the canonical medieval poetry I was forced to endure as a college freshman. Carter writes prolifically and in prose and is known for her magical realism. Her work has been adapted for television and film many times, and a fellow drag performance artist recently recommended The Passion of New Love Eve to me, for which I was very grateful. The Passion of New Love Eve is a dystopian science fiction story about transgender reproduction and the announcement of a new messiah in the desert. The book was first published in 1977, and despite being an avid fan, I was unaware of its existence until now, in late capitalist 2024. I read Dr. Hoffman’s Infernal Desire Machine about a year ago, and that was the last title of hers I read. It reminded me of the surreal classic Locus Solus. I found myself joking in the bathtub that they can’t betray us because the only good white cis academic feminist is dead. Angela Carter’s feminist critique in Sadine Woman holds a torch for what 70s feminism could and should have been. The discussion of “flesh” in that essay stayed with me, and I finished writing this essay in a basement studio apartment in Camden. I still remember how it felt in my body, and it made me cry.
I found myself joking in the bathtub that they can’t betray us because the only good white cis academic feminist is dead.
I mention Angela’s death because I also note that there is a street in Brixton, London, dedicated to her. It sits on the district’s edge, embedded in a public housing estate of small apartment blocks. Angela Carter Close hides at the back of these apartment blocks, where each tenant’s rubbish is collected. So, the city council decided to honor her. Was it intended as humor? It is tough to tell whether she is being insulted or not. In 1969, she employed the earnings of her Somerset Maugham Award to flee her husband and move to Tokyo for two years, where, as she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982), “she understood and was radicalized about what it meant to be a lady.” According to the introduction to Carter’s posthumously disseminated grouping of writings, Bounce a Shank, she formed working there as a hostess. She discerned that her “breasts no elongate belonged to me.” – Wikipedia. Carter’s 1977 novel, The Passion of Love, is about the protagonist, Love Eve, who has recently had a sex change against her will at the hands of a cult leader and is in a sort of Stockholm syndrome/love affair. Love Eve is terrified of getting pregnant. Love Eve knows she will soon be pregnant and only wants to be left alone. Behind her lovemaking modification, she is so fearful of obtaining pregnant that she holds suicidal beliefs. “She was much more independent than traditional feminists of her time,” says historian Maria Warner Carter. “The Passion of New Love Eve” reminds me of more contemporary works, such as the early writings of Chuck Palahniuk. Both authors are not afraid to write from the perspectives of trans women and sex workers, and they weave thoroughly entertaining and equally queer stories. We are present as whole human beings in their stories.
She started performing as a hostess and supposed that “my breasts no lengthy belonged to me.”
Sex employees play a vital function in the novel. Love Eve is seduced by a “nude dancer,” who tricks her into following her home through the dystopian wilderness of a New York City ravaged by late capitalism. There is also a group of women with whom Love Eve is temporarily involved, who “sell” their “ass” for the benefit of their mutual husbands, engaging in secret affairs in the hope that they will not listen. “Fallen Women” are at the helm of revolution in history. Lilith, a senior resistance fighter, speaks of the nipple-painted dance: When the seducer shows his true colors, the seduced is on guard. As you may recall, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, with whom Adam fathered the entire race of Jinn. All my wounds will heal magically. Rape will only refresh my virginity. I am timeless; I will climb over rocks.” Carter published in New Society magazine in 1977: “Isn’t capitalism, after all, the brothel in which we all put our beds?” Despite the text’s generation, the deck is developed. This fearless tale contains many metaphors that were not metaphors at the time, maybe even love. The later chapter, the Children’s Crusade, feels like it could have been the starting point for Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem. The apocalyptic scene takes place in a building that the British call a “pleasure dome,” but the Americans call it a “mall.” For such a slim novella, it’s an exhilaratingly dense story of queer love and resistance, and I highly recommend this wild apocalyptic journey through the fictional collapse of American imperialism.
