You make me feel like a natural... Daddy?

As Helena Iara has grown older, she needs more intellectual stimulus to make her happy: she wants movement, new things to see, and new sounds to hear.  One of the easiest ways to make her happy is to sing new songs, and I have had to search the depths of my musical memory to find music that she likes.  The most recent success have been songs from Motown: "My Girl" and "Natural Woman."

"My Girl" makes sense in a new context: Helena is, after all, my girl, and the lyrics of "I got sunshine on a cloudy day/ and when it's cold outside, I got the month of May" actually work much better for a father's love than for a boyfriend's... at least if we accept some kind of feminist critique of the use of girl as a term of affection for a grown woman.

Aretha Franklin's amazing "You make me feel like a natural woman" requires some lyrical adjustment, of course, with "Daddy" standing in for "woman."  But as she and I talked afterward, I told her how Judith Butler uses those lines as some of the most powerful arguments in her Gender Trouble, a book that revolutionized that way philosophers look at gender.  Butler shows that the male gaze is what makes a "natural woman," that "natural" is, in fact, constructed.  Which means that natural is actually cultural.

Helena got impatient at this point, so I didn't get to explain the rest of the argument, which is both difficult and brilliant, but changing the lyrics makes me think that "You make me feel like a natural Daddy" also fits well into Butler's basic argument.  Being a father seems to be one of the most essential, natural things there is, something that is pre-cultural.  But the truth of the matter is, one only becomes a father through the interaction with a child; fatherhood is not a biological fact, but something constructed through the loving gaze of the daughter.  Not, perhaps, a profound or new conclusion, but at least a justification for singing a great song to Helena.