I am willing to recognize we have differences, but not that there is a line drawn between us so that I cannot participate in your struggles and you cannot comprehend mine.
Yes, there are things someone can only understand if they've been there--but they can understand there is something they cannot understand. They can trace the perimeter of it, read the parameters, find out what they need to do.
I defy the disjunction between an ally and a community member. An ally participates in the struggles of the group, feels hurt when it is hurt, feels joy when it triumphs, carries prejudiced rubbed off by association, relinquishes the privilege of the dominant group to not think about the issue, the inequality, the inequity. Yes, there are gradations of participation, gradations of harm, but there are those within the recognized community itself.
***
Just now I realized I could be a straight cisgendered woman without losing any of myself, any of my freedom to live the lifestyle I want, any of my identity. Such fears used to drive, have driven my second-guessing of the labels I applied to myself--and my latching on to the labels in the first place. I did that with mental illness as well as sexuality and gender, identifying with illness so hard because I was afraid that without the label, my experiences would be invalidated, my inabilities and quirks defined as willful delinquency.
In the high school environment, I felt my sexuality invalidated at every turn. High school and the media invalidate most everyone's sexuality: you're too slutty, you're not sexy, you're a laugh-worthy virgin, you're immoral, you're too young or inexperienced, you're infatuated, you're deficient, you're female, you're male, you look gay, you're uncool...
I heard the biphobic messages. I heard the homophobic messages. I heard the messages about beauty and social status and how confused “girls” are. My father went into denial the moment I came out to him as bisexual at 15. He moved on from there to venom. Others assumed I'd move on, “choose one,” most likely men because, you know, men are just more attractive.
Oftentimes, any sign that I might be more attracted to men, I suppressed with panic--what if I was really the pathetic, sex-starved, confused, femininely weak girl they thought I was? Just making up the bisexuality because I hadn't had the real thing yet. Worse yet, deserving of the dismissal and derision I felt I was treated with.
After high school, I encountered an actual queer community. I protested and attended queer events. I was proud, but again I was afraid--of losing the beliefs and values of the queer community, of being forced by rogue sexual fluidity back into the heterosexual world. I didn't separate heterosexuals from heteronormativity.
Now I have. Two things helped with that: my numerous enriching experiences with straight allies who can be just as queer as the rest of us (if they want to), and my accumulation of broken gender norms. My body hair and my bare face and my variable clothing and my ideas are all mine. My feminism is not contingent upon my queerness. My social liberalism is not contingent on my innate difference. My participation in the struggle of the transgendered and genderqueer people is not contingent on my being one of them.
I am not coming out as a straight woman. I am definitely not straight--but I am guilty of minor attempts to “hide the evidence” of my attraction to and relationships with men, which is crazy and unjust to them. I'll be well-rid of that bias.
As for woman? Still wide-open on that front. I have no innate desire to abandon my identity as a genderqueer, androgyne, slightly-bigendered mostly-agendered person, agenderist, etc, but sometimes I worry that my identity as such is unnecessary and causes more trouble than it's worth--that the identity and the narrative I have in my head about it create the problems the narrative claims they are in response to. That I wouldn't feel weird when people called me “she” or referred to me as female if I hadn't latched onto this label three years ago--in this model of the scenario, mostly in response to the alienation I felt from the misogyny and social isolation I grew up with and partly in an over-enthusiastic show of solidarity. As I attempt to resolve this self-doubt, I might move toward a female identity--but on the other hand, I really don't want to.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Anecdote that crushes you with the human spirit #1
Today I overheard a story. I don't know where it was set--an American homeless shelter or a poor country abroad--or what exactly the event was, but it went something like this:
Volunteers had set up several stations to teach kids about something. Science, maybe.
One five-year-old boy studies each of them intently, one arm bent to carry his backpack, his three-year-old brother's hand and backpack grasped in the other. He's in charge of the little brother, and he wants to learn the material to make sure the little one understands it as well, and he has to memorize it to teach to the sister who was too sick to come.
Five years old.
The story-teller, a volunteer from the event, said that this was why, this was why...
And of course ze's right.
Volunteers had set up several stations to teach kids about something. Science, maybe.
One five-year-old boy studies each of them intently, one arm bent to carry his backpack, his three-year-old brother's hand and backpack grasped in the other. He's in charge of the little brother, and he wants to learn the material to make sure the little one understands it as well, and he has to memorize it to teach to the sister who was too sick to come.
Five years old.
The story-teller, a volunteer from the event, said that this was why, this was why...
And of course ze's right.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Urban Nature Writing?
I wasn't looking to get inspired by my homework tonight, considering the queue of remaining assignments, but I did.
On the first day of Intro to Environmental Studies, the professors asked the students to tell the class about their favorite place. I didn't raise my hand: The favorite places were all in the "wilderness" somewhere, and at the time I was severely and pleasantly lost in my webfic addiction. My favorite place is Salt Lake City. This is where I became myself, crawled out of the darkness that was my life in high school, stuck in a box-shaped room in the suburbs with nothing but my computer screen and my hallucinations for guidance.
Oh, and a melodramatic teenage depression.
But no matter that my love for this place arose from my coming of age (and increased through familiarity, of course)--it's still a deep, raw affection, sometimes even a need, a sense of home--"home is where the heart is," but my loved ones live far from where I feel most at home. Home is where the self grows strongest.
My class readings for the day have validated my attachment to an urban setting: two readings discussed urban ecology, urged that we consider cities as ecosystems, not malign them as inferior antitheses of nature; the other reading discussed nature writers.
Nature writers, Trimble claims, listen to their subject, acknowledge it as the authority instead of identifying themselves as experts.
What would it be like to observe Salt Lake in this way?
The cars come first to my mind. They are the loudest, and the most visibly numerous agents in the city. The buildings and roads, more invisible to a human observer, perhaps deserve first mention. The changes in the contours of the earth wrought by construction, like the compacted terrace my house sits on, overlooking 13th East, which corresponds, I've heard, to a fault line.
The animal life. The rodents scurrying in scraps of woods around Emigration Creek on Westminster campus, or in the native plants and imported rocks of a xeriscaped yard. One crawled into my house a week or so ago; I saw it in several places over the course of the day, haven't seen it since. I hope for its sake it didn't fall prey to my roommate's neurotoxin trap, and part of me resents my failure to replace the poison with humane traps. Maybe I will talk to my roommate about that.
Spiders are more common indoor companions, and on the campus, box elder bugs. There must be an astonishing array of smaller life forms that I don't notice.
Invasive and nonnative species fascinate me. They thrive in the urban landscape--does that give them the right to colonize it? A fellow student in class thinks so, that the disturbances of modern human society will lead to a new equilibrium, another step in the course of evolution.
Of course the loss in the meantime may be devastating, the cost too high. I don't know the science to inform this normative question.
The weather, of course, is a major part of our ecosystem. In the past week we went from shining snow cover for several days to warmth and rain scattered with hail today. This effects the transportation patterns of the human and vehicle populations of the city: I was among the few bikers in the hail, although many have adapted to the snow--and even the inversion. I passed a fellow cyclist who wore a breath mask. I think I may adopt this innovation.
The internet itself is an interesting device: I can use it to find the experiences of other cities, geographically arbitrarily far away, with the innovation I'm considering. They can ship me the product if I find out other people consider it useful.
The light--including the light pollution--is among the most striking features of this city. City light on clouds at night. Stars drowned out. Dusky light caught between snow and cloud cover, the in-between world surreally bright and edged in orange-blue.
In Sustainability & Consciousness last semester, we talked about "going out into the woods alone"--and how unbearably lonely the first few days could be. Yet I ghost through the city, often going many days without a meaningful or prolonged conversation. It wears on me, especially when (as today) I've had contact with another person, the contrast showing up the loneliness. Solitude is not a requisite condition for nature writing or observation: some of the famous nature writers traveled with geologists or biologists to give their journeys direction and information. But solitude is a common condition. I wonder if I can turn mine into observation as well.
On the first day of Intro to Environmental Studies, the professors asked the students to tell the class about their favorite place. I didn't raise my hand: The favorite places were all in the "wilderness" somewhere, and at the time I was severely and pleasantly lost in my webfic addiction. My favorite place is Salt Lake City. This is where I became myself, crawled out of the darkness that was my life in high school, stuck in a box-shaped room in the suburbs with nothing but my computer screen and my hallucinations for guidance.
Oh, and a melodramatic teenage depression.
But no matter that my love for this place arose from my coming of age (and increased through familiarity, of course)--it's still a deep, raw affection, sometimes even a need, a sense of home--"home is where the heart is," but my loved ones live far from where I feel most at home. Home is where the self grows strongest.
My class readings for the day have validated my attachment to an urban setting: two readings discussed urban ecology, urged that we consider cities as ecosystems, not malign them as inferior antitheses of nature; the other reading discussed nature writers.
Nature writers, Trimble claims, listen to their subject, acknowledge it as the authority instead of identifying themselves as experts.
What would it be like to observe Salt Lake in this way?
The cars come first to my mind. They are the loudest, and the most visibly numerous agents in the city. The buildings and roads, more invisible to a human observer, perhaps deserve first mention. The changes in the contours of the earth wrought by construction, like the compacted terrace my house sits on, overlooking 13th East, which corresponds, I've heard, to a fault line.
The animal life. The rodents scurrying in scraps of woods around Emigration Creek on Westminster campus, or in the native plants and imported rocks of a xeriscaped yard. One crawled into my house a week or so ago; I saw it in several places over the course of the day, haven't seen it since. I hope for its sake it didn't fall prey to my roommate's neurotoxin trap, and part of me resents my failure to replace the poison with humane traps. Maybe I will talk to my roommate about that.
Spiders are more common indoor companions, and on the campus, box elder bugs. There must be an astonishing array of smaller life forms that I don't notice.
Invasive and nonnative species fascinate me. They thrive in the urban landscape--does that give them the right to colonize it? A fellow student in class thinks so, that the disturbances of modern human society will lead to a new equilibrium, another step in the course of evolution.
Of course the loss in the meantime may be devastating, the cost too high. I don't know the science to inform this normative question.
The weather, of course, is a major part of our ecosystem. In the past week we went from shining snow cover for several days to warmth and rain scattered with hail today. This effects the transportation patterns of the human and vehicle populations of the city: I was among the few bikers in the hail, although many have adapted to the snow--and even the inversion. I passed a fellow cyclist who wore a breath mask. I think I may adopt this innovation.
The internet itself is an interesting device: I can use it to find the experiences of other cities, geographically arbitrarily far away, with the innovation I'm considering. They can ship me the product if I find out other people consider it useful.
The light--including the light pollution--is among the most striking features of this city. City light on clouds at night. Stars drowned out. Dusky light caught between snow and cloud cover, the in-between world surreally bright and edged in orange-blue.
In Sustainability & Consciousness last semester, we talked about "going out into the woods alone"--and how unbearably lonely the first few days could be. Yet I ghost through the city, often going many days without a meaningful or prolonged conversation. It wears on me, especially when (as today) I've had contact with another person, the contrast showing up the loneliness. Solitude is not a requisite condition for nature writing or observation: some of the famous nature writers traveled with geologists or biologists to give their journeys direction and information. But solitude is a common condition. I wonder if I can turn mine into observation as well.
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