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Having finished the book, and having thought about it some more ...

This story contains queer characters, but those queer sexualities are not center stage, although the queer sexualities are part of the story. What happened between Binh and Lattimore wouldn't have happened if both of them didn't have sex with men. Binh might not have ended up in France if he hadn't had sex in Bleriot. BUT his sexuality does not drive the plot, although it is integral to the plot. He suffers most for being Vietnamese; his sexual relationships with men merely provide the vehicles for his humiliation, humiliations which would not have occurred if he were not Vietnamese (perhaps he would suffer more for his sexual practices if he were white, and his sexuality mattered more in his social contexts). The fact that Toklas and Stein are in love with each other is a very basic premise of the plot, but Binh describes their relationship to each other as individuals, rather than as lesbians. Their romantic and sexual relationship is not glossed over, but it is not ...

I can't find the right phrase to describe it, but there's a type of queer novel (which I haven't read much of) which is all about coming out and being rejected and finding a community and an identity and whatnot. A narrative about being lesbian or gay or trans or whatever. The Book of Salt is not so one-note. A complex dish, in which the salty taste of gender merely offsets the many flavors of races and nationalities and languages and journeys and class and wealth and clothes and family and ...

Exquisite.

A relief for me. This is the kind of story I want to read more of, in which there are people like me, generally speaking (I'll settle for anything that isn't very heteronormative), but who have lives outside their genders, identities beyond their sexual partners and practices. To be honest, these days most of my recreational reading material is fanfic, because fanfic is very often queer, and very often written by queer women for queer women in a relatively queer and female community. Fanfic has its own tropes, of course, but they are very often queer tropes. I take what I can get. And I've been writing what I want to read, too, both in my fanfic and in my original fic. Someone's got to do it, normalize (for lack of a better word?) queerness so it's not all Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry and The Well of Loneliness. Stories about queer people, not about queerness.

But the question that concerns us, the class as a group, is whether The Book of Salt fits into a feminist canon. In my first, unconconclusive post, I proposed that gender and sexuality are central to feminism. In The Book of Salt, gender and sexuality are not central but they are important. I also say that gender and sexuality cannot be discussed without race and class and nationality and, and, and ... And so perhaps The Book of Salt represents an accomplishment which feminism is right now struggling with: this book achieves a kind of inclusiveness, in which any and every person is relevant because any and every person is gendered in addition to and, and, and ... And the gendering informs the rest, the rest informs the gendering. To be Binh, to be GertrudeStein, to be Lattimore, to be Bleriot, to be Alice B. Toklas: all queer, but such utterly different experiences because of that and, and, and ... (GertrudeStein: the sexuality of a self-described genius; Alice B. Toklas: the sexuality of a self-described genius's lover, caretaker, etc.)