Vice and heteronormativity
Mar. 18th, 2008 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI just caught a passing glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror. Barefoot. Jeans that are torn to shreds at the ends and don't fit particularly well. "Bleeding Heart" t-shirt from Threadless. Little female-symbol ear studs. No bra. I'm listening to Ani DiFranco and I'm reading an article - the article - by Carol Hanisch.
D'you know, boys and girls and non-aligned, I think I might be queer.
Um, yes. I've also, today, been trying to read something that isn't the bloody history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant - aaargh, I do not like this paper, I only did it as a prequisite for the Mind paper (which I adore, so there is that), I really should have done Plato's Republic instead - and am planning to move on with some swiftness to political theory. At the moment I have three topics that I know I want to read about: Rawls' theory of justice, luck egalitarianism, and feminism in general. As I never stop complaining about, there is no specific politics paper for feminism. There are two arguments for why this is the case. Firstly, it is argued, no other specific political position/ideology/philosophy/whatever-we're-calling-it-today has a paper of its own.
To which I say, except Marx and Marxism (paper 217). Oh, Marx, they say, he's extraordinarily influential, blah blah, so one humourless male German philosopher is clearly much more influential than, oh, half the world's population raising issues of political importance not only to themselves but to everyone. I happily concede that Marx is extraordinarily inflential. I do not concede that the oppression and the political exploits of my entire gender are less so. Oxford, you fail at convincing self-justification.
The other argument is this: feminism, they say, shouldn't have a paper of its own because it should be covered as part of all the existing topics. There is scope for feminist analysis everywhere, they say. Which is all very well and very noble, but where was my topic on gendered notions of aesthetics, mmm? Why didn't I get a topic on unexamined liberalism and the influence of gender in international relations? Does gender matter when we study the way we conceive our own consciousness? Why don't I know about that? And so on, and so on, etc. It's a very nice idea, and it entirely fails to work.
Going back to political theory, there, at least, I should not complain. My political theory tutor is very definitely made of awesome; he let me read pretty much whatever I wanted, and did, indeed, actively pursue feminist analysis in all topics. Which is why I'm spending some of today reading Elizabeth Anderson on Dworkin and the luck egalitarians. I seem to remember telling![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mi_guida about this: if you're on the - or indeed a - university network, it's on JSTOR, here: "What is the point of equality?" Fifty-plus pages of her taking Dworkin apart point by point. It's a joy.
(I also need to read a few more things on liberal feminism that, more than just being interesting and a good addition to my own corpus of feminist reading, are also things I can write about in an exam. This is proving particularly difficult. Have read chunks of Susan Moller Okin (urrrgh) and Catharine MacKinnon and am now faintly bored, as a lot of my reading for this topic was done for the compusory heterosexuality essay, which while great fun, isn't something that will ever come up in an Oxford Finals paper. Siiigh. The return to heteronormative liberal feminism, etc., I am bored.)
Speaking of compulsory heterosexuality, I was talking to Maria last night at quite some length - it was a conversation that started out very sensibly, with how are you and I hope you haven't been carried away by the storm, and quickly segued into rampant silliness involving hats and pie and square dancing and Embarrassing Crushes of Our Teenage Years, and it was nice, through the silliness, to be very, I don't know, out. This is something I notice a lot when talking to queer women, just in general conversation; there's this whole wonderful freedom to say, yes, women are sexually attractive, and to proceed under the assumption that whoever you're speaking to agrees with you on this point. Which is not significant now - obviously, when you start with a sample of women who are queer, this is a conclusion they are all likely to have come to - but it makes me wonder in passing how much I missed out on. Because this sort of conversation - the silly, cheerful, ooh, Katee Sackhoff is pretty sort of conversation - is the sort of conversation that girls seem to start having when they're about eleven, correct me if I'm wrong. I remember it becoming a feature when I started secondary school, at least; even in a girls' school (or perhaps more so, in a girls' school) people talked about boys.
(Can you hear the teenage syntax there? You can't even talk about this without regressing a little bit.)
And of course, I didn't want to talk about boys, or at least not exclusively, so when I was having this very cheerful conversation yesterday evening, it was silly, yes, but it made me wonder, why have I not been having this sort of conversation for the last ten years of my life? And the answer is obvious and depressing: girls' schools, like everywhere else, are dens of vice and heteronormativity. And even beyond that, I think when I started meeting people who were emphatically not straight, both at school and later, they were emphatically not straight in a way that doesn't resonate with me. I'm not a lesbian, or at least not in my own understanding. I'm not really bisexual either, although I hang on to the term occasionally - because, as I heard a self-professed bisexual explain to me once, it sort of implies that "men are great, because of Y", and "women are great, because of X", and there are specific reasons for attraction to both (and it is both; there's very much a binary gender paradigm here), and that doesn't ring any bells for me. I'm queer. I like people. Mostly, I like women. (Er, mostly.) But that's entirely contingent, I think; perhaps if I'd lived in a different environment, met different people, I'd have been mostly attracted to men, because I can't in all honesty tell the difference between genders. In any case, a low-key notion of sexuality, I think. "Queer" is usually enough of a term for me; I've heard "omnisexual" and "pansexual" bandied about, which is all very well, but let's face it, they're remarkably silly words. One strikes me as kind of melodramatic, and the other sounds like sexual attraction limited to half-man-half-goat creatures with a taste for the flute. Neither of which I am especially keen to endorse. Hurrah for queer.
Um. Back to history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant, neither of which figure especially highly in the theory of identity politics, siiigh. Tell me what you think, people of the flist. What are your experiences of growing up queer? And is it different, as I think it must be, to come to queerness in adulthood? And what about straight people who don't understand heteronormativity either? Etc., etc. I'm interested to know.
D'you know, boys and girls and non-aligned, I think I might be queer.
Um, yes. I've also, today, been trying to read something that isn't the bloody history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant - aaargh, I do not like this paper, I only did it as a prequisite for the Mind paper (which I adore, so there is that), I really should have done Plato's Republic instead - and am planning to move on with some swiftness to political theory. At the moment I have three topics that I know I want to read about: Rawls' theory of justice, luck egalitarianism, and feminism in general. As I never stop complaining about, there is no specific politics paper for feminism. There are two arguments for why this is the case. Firstly, it is argued, no other specific political position/ideology/philosophy/whatever-we're-calling-it-today has a paper of its own.
To which I say, except Marx and Marxism (paper 217). Oh, Marx, they say, he's extraordinarily influential, blah blah, so one humourless male German philosopher is clearly much more influential than, oh, half the world's population raising issues of political importance not only to themselves but to everyone. I happily concede that Marx is extraordinarily inflential. I do not concede that the oppression and the political exploits of my entire gender are less so. Oxford, you fail at convincing self-justification.
The other argument is this: feminism, they say, shouldn't have a paper of its own because it should be covered as part of all the existing topics. There is scope for feminist analysis everywhere, they say. Which is all very well and very noble, but where was my topic on gendered notions of aesthetics, mmm? Why didn't I get a topic on unexamined liberalism and the influence of gender in international relations? Does gender matter when we study the way we conceive our own consciousness? Why don't I know about that? And so on, and so on, etc. It's a very nice idea, and it entirely fails to work.
Going back to political theory, there, at least, I should not complain. My political theory tutor is very definitely made of awesome; he let me read pretty much whatever I wanted, and did, indeed, actively pursue feminist analysis in all topics. Which is why I'm spending some of today reading Elizabeth Anderson on Dworkin and the luck egalitarians. I seem to remember telling
mi_guida about this: if you're on the - or indeed a - university network, it's on JSTOR, here: "What is the point of equality?" Fifty-plus pages of her taking Dworkin apart point by point. It's a joy.(I also need to read a few more things on liberal feminism that, more than just being interesting and a good addition to my own corpus of feminist reading, are also things I can write about in an exam. This is proving particularly difficult. Have read chunks of Susan Moller Okin (urrrgh) and Catharine MacKinnon and am now faintly bored, as a lot of my reading for this topic was done for the compusory heterosexuality essay, which while great fun, isn't something that will ever come up in an Oxford Finals paper. Siiigh. The return to heteronormative liberal feminism, etc., I am bored.)
Speaking of compulsory heterosexuality, I was talking to Maria last night at quite some length - it was a conversation that started out very sensibly, with how are you and I hope you haven't been carried away by the storm, and quickly segued into rampant silliness involving hats and pie and square dancing and Embarrassing Crushes of Our Teenage Years, and it was nice, through the silliness, to be very, I don't know, out. This is something I notice a lot when talking to queer women, just in general conversation; there's this whole wonderful freedom to say, yes, women are sexually attractive, and to proceed under the assumption that whoever you're speaking to agrees with you on this point. Which is not significant now - obviously, when you start with a sample of women who are queer, this is a conclusion they are all likely to have come to - but it makes me wonder in passing how much I missed out on. Because this sort of conversation - the silly, cheerful, ooh, Katee Sackhoff is pretty sort of conversation - is the sort of conversation that girls seem to start having when they're about eleven, correct me if I'm wrong. I remember it becoming a feature when I started secondary school, at least; even in a girls' school (or perhaps more so, in a girls' school) people talked about boys.
(Can you hear the teenage syntax there? You can't even talk about this without regressing a little bit.)
And of course, I didn't want to talk about boys, or at least not exclusively, so when I was having this very cheerful conversation yesterday evening, it was silly, yes, but it made me wonder, why have I not been having this sort of conversation for the last ten years of my life? And the answer is obvious and depressing: girls' schools, like everywhere else, are dens of vice and heteronormativity. And even beyond that, I think when I started meeting people who were emphatically not straight, both at school and later, they were emphatically not straight in a way that doesn't resonate with me. I'm not a lesbian, or at least not in my own understanding. I'm not really bisexual either, although I hang on to the term occasionally - because, as I heard a self-professed bisexual explain to me once, it sort of implies that "men are great, because of Y", and "women are great, because of X", and there are specific reasons for attraction to both (and it is both; there's very much a binary gender paradigm here), and that doesn't ring any bells for me. I'm queer. I like people. Mostly, I like women. (Er, mostly.) But that's entirely contingent, I think; perhaps if I'd lived in a different environment, met different people, I'd have been mostly attracted to men, because I can't in all honesty tell the difference between genders. In any case, a low-key notion of sexuality, I think. "Queer" is usually enough of a term for me; I've heard "omnisexual" and "pansexual" bandied about, which is all very well, but let's face it, they're remarkably silly words. One strikes me as kind of melodramatic, and the other sounds like sexual attraction limited to half-man-half-goat creatures with a taste for the flute. Neither of which I am especially keen to endorse. Hurrah for queer.
Um. Back to history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant, neither of which figure especially highly in the theory of identity politics, siiigh. Tell me what you think, people of the flist. What are your experiences of growing up queer? And is it different, as I think it must be, to come to queerness in adulthood? And what about straight people who don't understand heteronormativity either? Etc., etc. I'm interested to know.
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no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:07 pm (UTC)The world is, I am increasingly realising, completely focussed, as it has been since the nobility realised that instead of decimating themsevles via private war it was much funnier just to oppress the rest of us on the white, male, top 10% of the world and whatever their values happen to be. That happens to be hetereonormativity right now; it might change, I suppose. Doubt it, in my lifetime, even though I will fight for it. The majority of the world don't really understand and just file anything like that under the sort of 'ignore with me pre-concieved expectations'. When I explain, freely, that yes I am sort of doing the Accepted Thing and getting hitched to a man but actually I rather prefer women they just look at me funny. Which aggravates me a bit, to be honest, but then I've had abuse from all sides of the spectrum about it so I don't know why I bother any more.
Oh dear. This is a very strange ramble. I'm going to shut up now and get on with Cross-Border Lords and other dull topics.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:10 pm (UTC)Katee Sackhoff makes straight girls a little gay and gay boys a little straight. Trufax.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:27 pm (UTC)It was quite nice reading Descartes and the first couple of meditations and Fable of the Bees is always good fun though.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:27 pm (UTC)I wish I wasn't feeling entirely too slow witted to adequately respond to this today, but the above statement resonated with me particularly because I've been studying concepts of gender and sexuality, and the tagging of these concepts a lot lately (no, I never do any reading for my own degree...) and what particularly frustrates/amuses (my reaction alternates here) me is the need to go around tagging every possible sexual preference and behaviour, every method of gender identifying.. or not. I've long been bemused by mankind's need to categorise absolutely everything, but it's even gotten to the stage where the LGBT society at my Uni are going to end up being an 8 letter acronym!
no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:29 pm (UTC)Nowadays I'm inclined to think it's not the rest of the world's business, whom you choose to sleep with, unless you make it so, but like you say, that doesn't stop the abuse.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:46 pm (UTC)For all I went to an all girls school, it wasn't that hetero-normative... I don't remember teachers expressing views one way or the other, except one of our PE teachers who was a lesbian and very enthusiastically told us all this. No one had a problem with it, and a few girls were out in sixth form, which only caused any problems in the boarding house - boys weren't allowed in the bedrooms, only the common rooms after school... but if the straight girls couldn't have their boyfriends in their rooms, should the lesbians within the school be allowed in each others rooms, oh dear - eventually they just decided to ignore the issue, and no one seemed to mind.
It's struck me since being at Oxford that my views on sexuality during secondary school were much like my views on religion - everyone could fancy who they wanted (and believe what they wanted) and what was the fuss? They're all just people... why distinguish on grounds of gender?
Being hideously bookish and not really getting the hang of the concept of fancying anyone until quite late on (except for a couple of absolutely classic and cringeworthy schoolgirl crushes), I never noticed that maybe my views weren't the same as everyone else's until I came to Oxford and realised that actually, maybe people didn't actually fancy people and not pay much attention to gender.
I'm about to start rambling in circles I think, so I will leave that there at least until I clear my thoughts a bit...
no subject
on 2008-03-18 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:00 pm (UTC)Coathangers! *snerk*
no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:17 pm (UTC)And thank you, that's interesting to learn, and sounds very different from my all girls' experience, which was sadly not very encouragin in this regard. I hear you on people paying attention to gender; I mean, intellectually I know it happens, but I can't get my head round quite how.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:21 pm (UTC)I think you're slightly underestimating the abilities of the earthbound heterosexual to deal with the concept of gender spectrums. I really hope you've never felt uncomfortable discussing anything while I've been around anyway.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:30 pm (UTC)Oddly, I think I actually pay more attention to gender now than I used to... when I first emerged from books and not being at school with boys (so some point in Upper Sixth), I was very aware that boys were not girls and vice versa... but was aware that in terms of finding them attractive or fancying them I didn't really see any difference, even if there were (and still are) more men that I ended up being attracted to. Being in Oxford and realising that actually no, this is not how the whole world works, has I think made me more aware of gender again, partly so I don't just assume and step on peoples toes. I wish I didn't have to worry about it though. I think that makes sense?
no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:45 pm (UTC)The fact of it is that even if said het girls are the nicest and most understanding in the world, there's still little automatic space in their company to share squee over pretty women and queer-oriented chat without having to back up and explain things from scratch every so often, and it's nice to have that space. Which is something you don't have to think about, good for you. But I get the feeling you didn't really read the context for the bit you quoted, or you wouldn't have felt attacked by it.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:53 pm (UTC)I was just curious as to how far people who have grown up in that scenario still feel mildly uncomfortable around those they always feared wouldn't understand when they were younger.
I fully sympathise with feeling innately more comfortable with some than others from experiences growing up; I still tend to be more distrustful of guys than girls after going to an all boys school.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 03:55 pm (UTC)dens of vice perrhaps...
on 2008-03-18 04:04 pm (UTC)And, yes, you're write omnisexual, pansexual (and I think I ran across postmodern sexual once - what the fuck is that all about, you fancy people ambiguously while refering to others?) are silly silly words. Ominsexual is my favourite - in the silly, not in the 'I would actually use this' sense. I keep imagining self on a hilltop with a beard and a big hammer crying into the storm: "I am OMNISEXUAL!!!"
no subject
on 2008-03-18 04:16 pm (UTC)Personally...I don't fear homophobia like I did in school (I mean, I know I may potentially encounter it even in my current state of partial-het-privilege, but I'm now in a position to take it on the chin), so it's not exactly about feeling uncomfortable/anticipating bad treatment anymore, or even being conditioned by my teenage experiences (okay, not entirely true, I do automatically clam up around girls who remind me of the ones who made life difficult at school...about most things, but queerness/gender especially).
It's more that I, to some extent, talk about different things with different people out of a judgement on what topics are of most common interest? Common experience is by no means everything, but it helps - if I want to talk about how to reconcile identifying as unambiguously female with a rejection of gender roles, or angst about whether x thing I did today was conditioned by hegemonic cultural values, or, you know, moan about periods, the people I have primary recourse to will be those who've thought about the issues and have some experience of dealing with them, who are mostly queer and/or feminist women. (and, by the same token, if I want to squee at someone about how totally mindblowing x maths/astronomy fact is, I'm probably not going to talk to someone who doesn't Get why that is exciting, because even if I utterly value their company it would be a bit like squeeing at a brick wall) Sure, other people can be empathic and informed, but the probablility of having to back up and explain why this stuff is important to me is less when hanging out with other queer girls than, say, the PPE cohort here. Not all queer girls, and not exclusively, sure, but there's still that space where for once you don't have to feel differentiated by your queerness but proceed from some basis of common understanding on specific issues.
no subject
on 2008-03-18 04:17 pm (UTC)I was very lucky to fall in with a bunch of queers and drama-types in sixth form, because they were Queer Like Me and then I started to morph into the fabulous person you see before you (ok, you don't, but you know what i mean) today.