Queer Response Paper NUMBA 4

I cannot say enough how perfect I thought the first line for Matthew Gutmann’s piece “Trafficking in Men: The Anthropology of Masculinity” is to make his point. In case you have not read it or to refresh your memory: “Anthropology has always involved men talking to men about men. Until recently, however, very few within the discipline of the “study of man” had truly examined men as men.” (385) One of the most interesting profound realities that has been brought to my attention in my studies of culture, sexuality, etc., is the phenomenon of ignorance in probably each and every inquiry. Regardless of what you’re studying, there is most likely something you are taking for granted. When you are trying to build a body of knowledge about something, there has to be a foundation upon which it’s built. This foundation is all too often accepted as truth if not absolutely dogmatic. The stability of this foundation, however, should always be taken into consideration. Nancy Tuana talks about it in terms of an Epistemology of Ignorance. An example is how we’ve define sexual deviance based on heterosexism for decades. Questions about the nature of heterosexuality: where does it come from? what does it mean? why? were simply overlooked. If heterosexuality was the natural foundation upon which we built our other knowledge, then why define it?

This article begins by pointing out that the foundation of anthropological discourse has, for years, had Man, and in many respects masculinity, as the natural foundation for the study of humanity. It is only recently that anthropological inquiry has begun to examine men as “engendered and engendering subjects.” (385) What is the nature of masculinity? Are men born or are they made? If a man is not masculine, is he automatically feminine? If he’s not absolutely masculine, is he automatically regarded as effeminate? The rest of Gutmann’s article lists observed behaviors, beliefs and concepts that have been encountered with these questions in mind in more recent anthropological studies. Overall it left me all the more convinced of cultural diversity, but did have some interesting consistencies. I don’t think this article is nearly exhaustive enough to absolutely take those consistencies to heart. I can only imagine what a work would look like that was exhaustive… if that’s even imaginable.

J.M. Carrier’s article “Homosexual Behavior in Cross-Cultural Perspective” has some more detailed examples of cultural diversity in attitude toward variations of cross-gendered identities and homosexual behavior. The part that catches my attention the most is in the Mexican culture. Mexican culture is known for having some of the most rigid, strict expectations of masculinity: hypermasculinity, machismo or macho-men. Boys and men that fall below these extremely high expectations are automatically labeled effeminate, regarded as homosexual, and targeted for homosexual activity (it is interesting to not that the “macho men” who seek out the “effeminate” men are not regarded as homosexual, as long as they play the dominant penetrator role in the sex act). This was an idea that struck me when we were reading about transsexuals and transgendered individuals. Could it be that, because of society’s high expectations for men, some just don’t feel capable of or simply don’t want to have to fulfill the role, and choose instead to identify as a woman? Could this be a psychological aspect of (at least some) transexuality? In Mexican culture there seems to be literal social force in addition to the obvious psychological aspects that lend to this assignment of (sexual?) identities. (238-239)

Why is it so common to correlate social “gender” roles with sexuality? Carrier pointed out what seems like should be obvious: “The link between cross-gender behavior and homosexual behavior is the belief that there should be concordance between gender role and sexual object choice.” (236) But not all societies and cultures throughout time as space necessarily make this connection. Some simply take on the social expectations of the opposite gender and we have no evidence of what their sex life, if they had one at all, was like. All, very interesting to think about…

Nothing without authoritative blessing!

I always hated the idea of a man asking a woman's hand in marriage.. .and still do. It symbolizes that passing on of property from one man to another. One reason I walked alone down the isle.

But what ever happened to getting your family's blessing? Sure, part of it also corresponded to that idea of property... but the other part of it signified a family's approval of the match. Whether it be because if would improve the family's name, politically, brought money into the family, simply was a good match of characters for the new couple to be partners capable of building a great life together, etc.

I think that last part is important. It seems that if you're going to make a decision like that, it would be extremely helpful to get your friends' and family's so-called blessing. Not necessarily for a dogmatic answer on whether or not the relationship will or won't work and what actions you should take... But i think that sharing our perspectives is incredibly helpful.

How many stories have you heard of the marriage that lasted about a day and a half because the couple was head over heals for each other (NRE), got married on impulse, and realized it was a huge mistake? (or some variant of that story) Would the outside perspectives of the individuals closest to the bride and groom not be useful in this situation?

Or someone who is impulsive because they're so lonely, they jump into all sorts of relationships, or one very long-term one... it's easy to be blinded by loneliness. Easy to be blind when you're starving for partnership. But when you're blind, how can you see whether the relationship you're jumping into is the solution to your problems? You're close friends and family members may not have the absolute answers to every situation, but we should never take what they have to say for granted.

Hell, think of where'd I'd be if I'd listened to everyone that found out when I was engaged... "I guess everyone has to have their first."

But not only do we take this much needed advice for granted, even dismiss it without due deliberation all too often, but most people are too hesitant to share it. There are definitely distasteful ways to shove your opinions in other people's faces, but there are very helpful, constructive ways to share your perspective with the people you love. Maybe it's best to wait to be asked for it...

I was just thinking about how nice it would be sometimes to be able to step out of my own consciousness into a more objective view of my situations and take a look around. This made me think of getting your parent's blessing for marriage.... which made me think of getting the people closest to you's blessing when you might be making decisions while oppressive objects are obstructing your view.

Just a ramble.

Homework time.

Queer Response Paper NUMBA 3

First of all, why have I never heard the term “gender journey” before? It is a term Ariadne Kane uses in the very short article entitled “Introduction: Looking for Understanding” from the International Journal of Transgenderism. This term alone has some interesting implications. Sure, there are many many many people that have issues identifying with the male/female gender (and sex) dichotomy. So what is a gender journey? Is it an introspective inquiry attempting to define one’s gender, whether it is defined as either male, female, a combination, or something else entirely? This concept could be interesting for a lot of people, especially in the sociological and psychological studies of sex and gender. But when it comes to just that pure struggle that everyone goes through to try to understand who they are, their very essence, isn’t it a bit restricting to endeavor on a “gender” journey? After all, isn’t it labels that pertain to gender the restrictions one would be trying to avoid or transcend when taking that inward journey of learning/knowing/loving thyself? My handy love-of-my-life Oxford English Dictionary defines gender as a few things: The first is a very long explanation basically referring to the nouns and pronouns that correspond or relate in any way with a person or object’s sex or sexlessness. 2) “The state of being male, female, or neuter; sex; the members of one or other sex.” And 3) “Sex as expressed by social or cultural distinctions.” The word apparently comes from the “Old French gendre (mod. genre) which comes from Proto-Romance from Latin genus, gener-; see GENUS.” The history and definition of the word “gender” entail strict classification and labeling. Don’t get me wrong, I am completely aware that classifications, labels, and generalizations are not only a natural human inclination, but are, for many reasons, absolutely necessary. My only qualm with this whole idea of a “gender journey” is that when it comes to knowing thyself, how much of each dynamic and diverse individual existence is being overlooked or misunderstood when trying to be understood based on these systems of classification? (Whether they involve the possibility of only male and female, or those two plus 300 others.) What does “gender” really mean when it comes to introspection? Based on the way the human mind works, how capable are we of understanding anything outside of systems of classifications and/or generalizations? If we can understand anything without them, it seems it would be our own individual selves. Just some thoughts…

Interesting that I went off for so long on those two words when I thought that Kane’s piece, while interesting, was easily the least important of the three we read for this Monday. In Susan Kessler and Wendy McKenna’s piece, “Who Put the ‘Trans’ in Transgender,” they take their readers on a very brief journey through the history of the terms “transsexual” and “transgender,” introducing different possibilities for why “trans-” is used instead of some other prefix, which actually ties into one of my favorite points of the next and last reading for this Monday: Judith Shapiro’s “Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex.” “Trans” can mean three things: change, across, and beyond or through. Up until this point, when I think of all the variations of being transgender or transsexual, I relate it to the movement to transcend sex and gender (as you may have guess from my first rather long paragraph), but that’s not generally accurate at all. I found it incredibly interesting that in fact, most transgendered (both with and without reconstructive surgery) people adhere to the male/female binary gender norms more strictly than the average bio-male or female. Most are not trying, nor would they want to try, to redefine any social or cultural definition of the binary gender system, but are merely trying to redefine which category they fall under.

This is one of those points that seems like it should have been totally obvious based on the very nature of changing from male to female, female to male, or some variation thereof. I just never saw it before. And that’s not to say that the goals and lifestyle of a transsexual individual is any more or less normal, logical, sane, etc than I or anyone originally thought. All it shows is to what extent transsexualism is absolutely taken for granted as many things it is not, and widely widely widely misunderstood.

I'm a Petite Cute Li'l TIMEBOMB OF FURY AND PASSION

I would like to invoke the words of Kidneythieves for this one:

Arsenal
Naive little pieces of
What they tried to teach her
Quiet and protected
Slightly anorexic
(She Waits)
She's a time bomb, with her vibe on
She's gonna use it and surprise them
She's a time bomb, with her vibe on
They'll never know where she got her weapon.
They really don't believe her
She keeps it all a secret
Found the Golden Muses
Doesn't need to prove it
(She Waits)
She's a time bomb, with her vibe on
She's gonna use it and surprise them
She's a time bomb, with her vibe on
They'll never know where she got her weapon.
Naive little pieces
She thought that they could see her
But soon the Desert Pigs will know
She's holding in an arsenal.
(She Waits)
She's a time bomb, with her vibe on
She's gonna use it and surprise them
She's a time bomb, with her vibe on
They'll never know where she got her weapon.
She Waits.

This is something that has boggled me for years, but that I am just beginning to become conscious of. Whenever someone refers to me as "cute" or "skinny" or makes a comment about how I "shouldn't pick up that dog! He weighs like X pounds!" I get a little confused. Not offended, necessarily, just confused. Am I really that little? I don't feel that little... I sure as hell don't feel as fragile, weak, frail, or infirm.

Then I'll catch myself in the mirror.. not every time I look in the mirror... but at just the right moment and angle I'll catch a glimpse of this tiny little girl in the mirror. She has long thin arms and legs, a tiny little waist, cute but insubstantial little butt and boobs. She looks just like me but that can't possibly be me.

Call in vanity, but I have always felt like I could move mountains (um.. so to speak). Dream it up and I am capable. Physically, intellectually, whatever. Of course we all have both our off days and our reality checks. I, after all, can NOT lift a million pound half dog/half hippo. I can't after all sit down and read Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy overnight with ANY understanding (I'd be willing to be that there aren't more than maybe 2 or 3 people in human HISTORY that could read Nietzsche overnight and have a full understanding). I can't take one term in French as suddenly speak if fluently.

But I CAN lift like a 70 pound dog (not saying I necessarily should...). I CAN decipher Nietzsche and many other philosophers and other theorists if given the time. I CAN and AM continuing to learn French and look forward to refreshing my Spanish, continuing with the little tiny bit of modern Greek that I started with, and looking into many other languages.

But it's obvious that at least a part of what people see in me is this small and fragile girl. I glimpse her in the mirror once in a while and am even overtaken by her on the occasional days that I feel lost, confused, and absolutely stuck.

So Who Is She?

Hm.... who says I have to have all the answers now? I've at least identified this part of me and why I get this slightly off and uncomfortable feeling whenever people refer to my apparent fragility.

To be continued.......

Queer Response Paper NUMBA 2

(Thissuns a li'l bit more rantlike and interesting if you haven't read my class readings)

In the excerpt we read from her book A Desired Past, Leila Rupp made many interesting points. I think she really hit the nail on the head (er.. one of the times she hit the nail on the head) when she commented that “history… is not the one ‘true story.’ Rather, it is a story as best we can tell it, given the evidence, our own assumptions and values, and the perspective we take from our own place in a particular society at a specific point in time. (14)” While the investigation into the history of sexuality is absolutely invaluable and interesting and necessary, I think it is all too common for people to take the very narrow dogmatic stance of finding “historical facts” and using them to write “true history.” But in reality this isn’t possible. (I would argue that this is true of just about ANY inquiry.) Any possible evidence that can be perceived and assigned relevance is doing just that: being taken into consideration by someone’s (or even a group of people’s) individualized perception and is having it’s historical relevance assigned to it based on that person’s ideas, disposition, what he/she is looking for, experiences, etc etc etc. That’s because no matter what journal entry, court case, or other physical evidence we come across, it is historical, meaning no longer in context. Though we can grasp some part of the essence of the context through this evidence, it is not possible to absolutely understand the context of the events, human emotions, dispositions, cultures, behaviors that took place throughout human history. (Even if the individual doing the historical inquiry was, in fact, there, they are still limited to their own perspective.)
That said, this inquiry is still absolutely invaluable because of the effect it has on our current context. By studying other cultures, times, any “other” possibilities of human existence, we open our minds to alternate possibilities for our own existence. Even if our perception of the actual manifestation of these possibilities in other time and space isn’t entirely accurate, we are still opening our mind to them and creating a better understanding of who/what/when/where/how/why humans do and/or can exist as well as who/what/when/where/how/why we understand ourselves as such. This learning process and movement toward understanding is important because without it, humanity would be static, unmoving, and unchanging. One absolute constant in human history is change and evolution. Remaining absolutely stagnant goes against human nature. Human history from just about any perspective will tell you that.
Skipping many other very interesting statements made by Rupp, I am very intrigued by Foucault’s way of looking at things. At this point, I have read very little of his work and may not be interpreting it correctly, but what I have gotten from it is interesting never the less. Instead of looking at human sexual history with a critical eye and using repression for a foundation, why not take it all into consideration more objectively? I think Ayn Rand put it rather well when she was asked whether man’s altering of nature is natural: “Well, what do you think man is? Outside of nature? A supernatural being?” Though my views are significantly different from hers and she was reaching a very specific point with a very specific question in this quote, I think she brings up a very interesting point: In the vast diversity of human behavior and experience, who’s to say what’s natural? Are hetero-monogamous relationships “natural” for humans? Is bestiality? Sodomy? Inter-generational/racial sex? Rape? Orgies? Polyamory? Masturbation? Etc Etc Etc…. The mere fact that mankind took their behavior in these directions at any point in time proves that, to some extent, they are all part of human nature. In the same way that the fear that creates the ideas that some of these behaviors AREN’T natural is part of human nature. With that in mind, the studying of human sexuality, including the repression itself, should be regarded with an objective mind, taking into consideration that all different sides of the story offer evidence and information about human nature, which is incredibly diverse and complex. It seems to me that this attempt at an objective eye is the goal of queer studies. But again, just how capable are we of being absolutely objective? All we can do is try. Then, if and when we catch ourselves applying any form of bias to our studies and attempts to attain understanding, perhaps we can correct ourselves, moving toward a more thorough and maybe even more accurate understanding of whatever it is that we are studying.

Queer Theory Response Paper NUMBA 1

This one is responding primarily to 3 class readings:
Martha Umphrey's "The Trouble With Harry Thaw"
Jonathan Ned Katz's "Homosexuality and Heterosexuality: Questioning the Terms"
Didier Eribon's "The Shock of the Insult"

In our first reading by Martha Umphrey, I really like how she sets up the reader to make the same mistakes she made when encountering the story of Harry Thaw. She sets us up to expect some version of homosexuality as we know it, only for us to find ourselves (whether from the very beginning, or later, when she describes the difficulties she encountered) unable to define his situation with typical modern terms for sexuality. The whole time I was reading it, I was thinking “Well duh! Just because he had sexual encounters with boys doesn’t mean he’s a flamboyant homosexual, bisexual, insane… whatever. It simply means that he was a human being that at one point in time found his sexual desire directed at younger boys. This is not THAT unusual of phenomena.” She does this so that we better understand where she went wrong and why the homo/hetero binary system comes up short. She then introduces her readers to the term “queer” in a very clear and defined way (or, by definition, unclearly defined), describing the value and uses of the concept. This was very useful to me because I’ve only ever known the term as either “unusual,” or referring to an individual that anyone would identify as GLBTIQ.
Umphrey did leave me a little confused about the nature of “doing queered history” and this concept of recuperating queer historical figures. When it is clear that today’s terminology can’t just be extracted from the context of its origination and placed in any historical setting, how can we even locate, let along recuperate, any historical figures that fit our cause?
The second piece, by Jonathan Ned Katz, I had read for my sophomore inquiry sexualities class. I definitely think I got more out of it this time though! He talks in detail about the contextual limitations of sexual terminology. His last paragraph is especially liberating: Encouraging researchers to consider history and other cultures more objectively and with less influence of modern sexual hypotheses. Imagine what we’d see with such an unbiased eye! But then there’s only so much we, as human beings, can do to see more objectively.
The last reading, by Didier Eribon, I found to be more disappointing than not. It really could have been interesting had it been more focused on how we’re psychologically affected by being labeled/identified by other people in different ways. Instead, Eribon chose to discuss being “insulted” via labeling and name-calling. Maybe it’s just me, but being insulted seems to be a choice. We are only victimized (especially by mere words) if we allow ourselves to be victimized. The author makes it sounds like every negative remark that is (or even seems) to be thrown in our direction has devastating consequences on the formation of our very being. While I definitely think that no individual is immune to both the positive and the negative influence of other people, Eribon’s language sounds like a pathetic plea for pity. In this article, the damage caused by being called a name could be equated with the damage caused by being raped! Eribon needs help, any sort of help that would teach him about self-esteem and self-responsibility. Maybe I’m just being cold-hearted.

Bloggy Statement of Purpose

This is actually a statement of purpose that applies to everything and anything I write:

I Can Only Speak for Myself: Generalities are useful for some things, but seem to be rendered useless when attempting to achieve a thorough understanding of oneself. So, in writing, I speak only for myself, and in so doing, may perhaps happen to offer material that reader's may identify with in such a way that they are left better enabled to understand themselves and the world around them. Increasing and developing this "understanding" is the key to discovering, developing, and living the life that is optimal for each individual and, potentially, the life that benefits the world around us the most as well (symbiotically).

THAT said, I am starting this blog for several reasons.

One, through my Deelicious Dee I have gotten a glimpse of an interesting and intellectual online community of people that share their thoughts, ideas, just how their day went, what it all means, and respond and progress with each other. I would LOVE to be a part of that. Also, as anyone who knows me is aware of, I'm a busy philosophy student that is constantly writing and exploring new ideas. Any sort of feedback in any quantity is ALWAYS useful.

Because I am so busy, however, blogs outside of my school work will probably be somewhat rare. However, this term in my Intro to Queer Theory, we are writing a response paper each week to the class readings. These papers are very much in what I call "rant" format, perfect for a blog. Although most of my readers won't have read the articles I'm referring to, I think they have some interesting content independent from the readings. I will at least post these and perhaps other things that I would love to hear other people's thoughts on and/or that I think other people would find interesting.

So.... enjoy!

love,bug