Randy: Um and then from there it doesn’t matter that I’m naked
The relations between such phenomena as the subject’s identity and the place the subject identifies itself as being in, its situation, matter. Who is it that feels at home, at ease, relaxed, at odds, disorientated, lost, alienated, empowered, disempowered, excited, scared, threatened, amused, bored, curious, sexually motivated, turned on, turned off, intimidated, aroused, deflated, out of place, exposed, vulnerable, ashamed? Who is this figure who feels this? What does it mean to identify this figure as having a gender, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity? Where? When?
Who is the figure reporting all this, the figure who knows? Who is the interviewee?
Randy: part of coming from um all these different sort of backgrounds and stuff I.i.24:30
like that is that I can sometimes play around with it like when someone asks me where I come from I can say Indonesian or I can say da da da because who’s going to know and I kind of like that aspect and I
Russell: You’ve done that in saunas
Randy: I think so sometimes I just sort of go oh what the hell you know where will I be from today
names and things
Russell:I.i.00:00
Um the first question I want to ask you is when you were born was Randy the name you were given
Randy: Is Randy my given name Russell: Yeah when you were born
Randy: Yeah it’s um my actual full name is actually Friedrich Randy Joshua Marcs Russell: Right
Randy: Um but Randy is the name my parents always used if that makes sense Russell: Yeah
Randy: Like um I don’t really know what the reason was I think um I got the name Friedrich from
I.i.00:30
a colleague my parents used to work with who they had a lot of respect for so that’s how that came in and he was German and that’s the link to that name but um Randy was one that both my parents picked together that had meaning to them I suppose so that’s how that came about
Russell: And so even though Friedrich is the first name in your name Randy then is the name you’ve picked up on but partly because your parents kind of picked up on that Randy: Yeah yeah and I suppose er I mean they always call me
I.i.01:00
Randy and I just never found it peculiar that Friedrich was my first name and I was never called that for me it was just like oh they just call me Randy so that must be who I am Russell: Right
“Friedrich Randy Joshua Marcs” is a pseudonym developed specifically for this project. The “Randy” part was chosen by the interviewee, and the remaining three parts, “Friedrich” “Joshua” and “Marcs”, were invented by me. I think of the pseudonym, of this pseudonym in particular, as a serviceable translation, which is to say, a good one. The reflexive operations performed upon it in the course of the transcribed interview remain intact, more or less, in that they remain
essentially true to my experience of the interview—I’m referring to the
accumulative experience of staging the interview initially and then repeatedly listening to the recording—and are legible and intelligible, available for scrutiny, critique and further thought. Yes, his first name was German and, yes, it was subject to being misspelled, and so on. So let us align ourselves with[in] this fiction, this masquerade, just for now, as if these were the words that the interviewee known as “Randy” actually said. Let us suspend disbelief. Let us allow “Randy” to become Randy, for a while:
Randy: Yeah it’s um my actual full name is actually Friedrich Randy Joshua Marcs
“Randy” was not the only name Randy was given. Nor was it the first of the names he was given. Properly, “Randy” was not Randy’s first name. But his parents called him “Randy” so that was who he, Randy, became, who he was, “who I am”, who Randy “must be”. His name, “Randy”, interpellates and, in doing so, inaugurates (Butler, 1997: 33). It inaugurates Randy. It inaugurates “him”. It becomes what Randy thinks of, and speaks of, as his “real” name:
Randy: generally I’m pretty truthful um I actually find it hard you know when um even if I’m just in a bar or something but especially in a sauna I never make up a fake name for myself and I know guys do that but I’ve just found that
I.i.25:30
really absurd ah an absurd thing to do um and I’ve noticed like particularly the first couple of times when I went someone’s asked me what’s your name and I’d actually hesitate for a second and then just tell them my real name because I just thought I’d say oh should I say a false name um um um oh stuff that
Russell: Do you ever tell them that your name’s Friedrich Randy: No
Randy never gives a “fake” name and always gives his “real” name, the name that’s real for him: “Randy”, not “Friedrich”. Even though “Friedrich” is his first and proper name—his “actual” name as he, Randy, calls it—”Randy” is Randy’s “real” name.