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• 1 media/ElizabethBishopPostcardsCase 12.jpg 2023-09-21T21:42:49+00:00 Queering the Postcard 2 plain 2023-12-13T16:10:14+00:00 Langdon Hammer argues that Bishop’s letters “were a vehicle for gay sociability in an era when there were strong constraints on speech about sex and sexual identity” (106). Bishop's postcards played an important role in the creation of queer community, notably through her subversive captions for stock images; her use of postcard images to convey unspoken queer meaning; her commentary on gender and the gaze; and her practice of writing collaborative postcards with her female partners to other queer couples. 
  
  Bishop's habit of recaptioning picture postcards took a notably campy turn in her postcards to queer friends, as in her Greek postcard to James Merrill showing a wreath of flowers encircling a man and woman's clasped hands. Bishop wrote: “I’m either congratulating you on yr. engagement, or asking you to marry me... I think.” In her captions Bishop often poked fun at stock images of heterosexual couples, marriage, and nuclear families. In her short poem “Exchanging Hats,” Bishop suggested that conventions of gender are malleable. Similarly, on a Blarney Castle postcard, she wrote above a short-haired figure in a skirt, “man?”, and posed, as already discussed, with Louise Crane as a pair of male boxers on a photocard. These postcards put Bishop in dialogue with queer artist Claude Cahun, who photographed herself as a boxer (1927), and Marcel Duchamp, who changed the Mona Lisa’s gender by drawing a beard and mustache on a postcard image: all presented conventions of masculinity and femininity as ready-made clichés that could be performatively remade. 
  
  Bishop also used postcard images to convey unspoken queer meaning, as in the postcard of James Collinson’s 1857 painting “The Empty Purse” that she sent to Lota with no message other than twice underlining the title. According to the Tate Gallery, “The title of this picture and the showiness of the woman looking brazenly at the viewer suggest that she works as a prostitute” (tate.org). Bishop's choice of this postcard clearly sent a non-verbal message to Lota, perhaps that she missed their erotic life together. Bishop’s queer gaze often emerged in her engagement with postcards’ female subjects, as in her comment on the image of four women walking down Copacabana Beach that “this is an unusually realistic picture of the beach here” followed by the observation that “Both Lota and I have had flu [...] and if Brazilians didn’t kiss quite so much maybe these things wouldn't spread so fast!” In 1971 Bishop sent Alice Methfessel an image of a rainbow behind Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, writing, “I have really always felt that I have exaggerated & that one rainbow is enough for anyone, one rainbow & one A.M.” Bishop alludes to an early poem, “The Fish,” and its penultimate line “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” (P 44) while also preparing the ground for her very last poem, “Sonnet,” in which a rainbow-bird flies “wherever / it feels like, gay!” (P 214). Rainbows were a significant image in Bishop's poetry and also for the queer community (Burt). In 1978 the first rainbow flag designed by Gilbert Baker was flown in a pride parade. Bishop was flying her own postcard version nearly a decade earlier.