cursory weekend post!
Jan. 16th, 2011 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rax- Further Confusion is super rad, although oh my god my sleep schedule. But it has been wonderful to see many of my West Coast friends, especially the Seattle folks I missed last trip. And there is Race for the Galaxy! And there are tons of furries! It's pretty boss.
- One disappointment: They canceled the pokemon panel, and I am missing the IU pokemon event to be here (SO SAD ABOUT THIS), so I have not gotten to dork out about Pokemon much at all. Luckily, I ran into a smashingly androgynous Silver cosplayer --- no one else recognized the costume, and we dorked out at each other for a while, and they fed Rik when Rik was hungry, and it was great. I'm a teeny bit tempted to do a Dawn cosplay now (since I could basically make my hair work if I just parted it to hide the pink) but I don't know if people at furry conventions would get it, and I don't know if I care enough to actually go to an anime convention just to have an excuse to dress as a Pokemon character.
besides if I wanted to mack on people dressed as Silver I'd really need to do Kotone - I am actually getting reading done here! Not as much as I would at home but, hopefully, enough. This week's reading in one class is about non-academic feminism! It is reminding me why I prefer academic feminism. :( Although there are some really great things being said, this whole "second wave and third wave taking jabs at each other every chance they get" thing is just draining to read.
- Also, Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism, published in 2007, which claims to make a significant effort toward intersectionality, and even has a chapter all about men? Does not contain the word trans a single time [0], lukewarm at best towards queerness, and handles race with gloves. I need to read it a second time in a different mood to see if there are things I like about it; in the mood I approached it in, I was just like ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. But maybe I was looking for too much? Or at least letting my ugh get in the way of the things that are presumably good about the book such that we were assigned to buy and read it.
- Restaurants are for other people, but between a normal grocery store and a Vietnamese grocery store I am getting to eat more than trail mix, and that is good. Orange juice. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
[0] And yes, it's a pet issue, I know, but come on. I'd keep a running count of the number of times "genderqueer" showed up, but it would be too depressing. Trans is in the national consciousness, the way so many authors pretend it doesn't exist is just maddening. There really is no excuse. 2007.
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an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-17 05:51 pm (UTC)Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-18 02:03 am (UTC)in other news, i am taking g101 (kill. me. now.) and everything we have read so far seems to think it is okay to tokenize intersex people in order to make a point about ~gender~. Which (a) WTF, and (b) more WTF.
some gems from the main textbook (What is Gender: Sociological Approaches, by Mary Holmes, copyright two thousand fucking seven):
"Intersexuality puts the categories 'male' and 'female' into question and shows how for granted we take it that females will become feminine and males masculine, and all will perform the social tasks expected. Intersexual people show that bodies are important in forming gender identity and that having an ambiguous body makes forming a gender identity complex, but only because of entrenched common sense ideas that if you have a female body you must become feminine and if you have a male body you should become masculine. The assumption is that gender identity simply emerges from sex. For those whose bodies to not clearly fit either sex category, gender identity is a problem."
and
"Some men with penises feel like women trapped in men's bodies"
and SO MANY OTHER SHITTY THINGS.
I talked to the professor after class and was like, do you actually like this book, because I thought it was extremely problematic and she was basically like, "I guess you're right but oh well," which, what? Why are we reading this shit?
also dear god i don't expect non-binary genders to be recognized elsewhere but this is a fucking gender studies class so can we please do that please?
anyway i guess just, you are probably reading better things than i am right now.
also, how do you differentiate between academic and non-academic feminism?
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 02:48 am (UTC)We meet again.
See you on Thursday.
|:
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 02:58 am (UTC)and how do you know who i am?
OH GOD IRL PEOPLE ON THE INTERWEBZ.
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 03:41 am (UTC)I used my internet sleuthing skills:
1 Stryker class
2 Mention of QUILTBAG in your LJ (I'm not creepy)
3 Your name on your wordpress page (I swear I'm not creepy)
And from this I made a wild assumption THAT WAS 100% CORRECT!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-19 04:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-19 04:42 am (UTC)Well there goes that game.
What gave me away? Is it the blackness? It's usually the blackness.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-19 04:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-19 11:55 am (UTC)Tis my curse.
oX
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-19 06:05 pm (UTC)Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 02:58 am (UTC)Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 02:57 am (UTC)I am going to guess --- and please don't take anything I say (ever, except maybe about NetHack or Pokémon) as gospel truth --- that the instructor is forced to teach out of the book and is surly about it. But I dunno who is teaching you or what their deal is. If you want to gossip about it, I am happy to do so on Thursday. ;)
Academic vs. non-academic feminism is too big of a can of worms for me to get into, I have to do more homework...
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 06:07 pm (UTC)i'm pretty sure she chose the textbook but maybe not.
also, when/where are we hanging out thursday?
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-20 12:52 am (UTC)"In our society, in addition to man and woman, the status can be transvestite (a person who dresses in opposite-gender clothes) and transsexual (a person who has had sex-change surgery). Transvestites and transsexuals carefully construct their gender status by dressing, speaking, walking, gesturing in the ways prescribed for women or men—whichever they want to be taken for—and so does any 'normal' person."
I can't even. Just. RAGE. Like how can you even pack that many offensive/fuckedup/blatantlywrong things into two sentences?
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-20 01:25 am (UTC)"Transvestites and transsexuals do not challenge the social construction of gender. Their goal is to be feminine women and masculine men."
I ... I can't even, who. the. fuck. do. you. think. you. are. INARTICULABLE RAGE, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT.
also, "the ease with which many transvestite women pass as men and transvestite men as women is corroborated by the common gender misidentification in Westernized societies of people in jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers"
like, just, WTF, is that a thing? i don't think so. also lololololol passing-sans-hormones as "easy."
okay i'm sorry i'll stop quoting at you. just, what.
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-20 01:45 am (UTC)"The readings you are assigning in this class propagate false and damaging stereotypes of trans* people. They tokenize intersex and trans* people in order to make (equally false and damaging) points about gender as an absolute social construct. To assign these readings to a group of students that is largely composed of freshmen-with-no-background-in-gender-studies is dangerous and irresponsible, especially since it appears as though class time will be devoted to summarizing rather than critically analyzing the readings. Holmes and Lorber in particular exploit the 'experiences' of trans* and intersex people at the expense of actual trans* and intersex people themselves, and they teach unwitting students that this is an acceptable or even good thing to do.
The materials being used for this class make me extremely uncomfortable because of these and other reasons (e.g., the texts also contain views towards non-Western gender identities and experiences that reek of thinly-veiled cultural imperialism). I can't speak for others in the class, but I feel that my identity and lived experiences as a trans* person are being dismissed and exploited, and it seems silly to assume that I am alone in that regard.
I strongly urge you to devote class time to rectifying this situation and discussing these issues, and to reconsider assigning such readings in the future.
Thanks, and see you tomorrow!
Simon
Uhhhhhhm maybe not.
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-20 02:40 am (UTC)i feel like this should qualify as hate speech, or something.
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-20 02:57 am (UTC)Also where/when are we meeting tomorrow?
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-20 02:47 am (UTC)Lorber has written some stuff I like but I find her stuff on trans... fucked.
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-20 06:17 pm (UTC)Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-18 05:15 pm (UTC)The thing I meant to say was that I think trans and trans issues are also personally relevant to cis people, because many of the forces which trans people run into around gender and sex and how those are thought of and how they are enforced also have considerable impact on cis people. It's just that for cis-people, they're often ego-syntonic (fit how we're* more-or-less comfortable thinking of ourselves anyway), and so either go unnoticed or are ascribed to some other source. And so it is very important for cis people to think about what formed our gendered and sexual identities, and this has a major intersection with feminism and feminist theories. So my point was that it doesn't make sense to think of it as a "pet" issue, because the ways in which transphobia has affected and hurt you have also, in a much less-noticeable way, affected the lives of everybody else, too.
It's not a new idea, I suppose; holding prejudice and privilege harms the people who hold them. Not as much as the people who are denied the privilege, and people who have privilege do benefit from it, but there is a cost, and the cost is important to think about.
* I'm going to say 'we' for cis because it's more true than not, but... stuff
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 03:07 am (UTC)One of the ways to talk through it that I really like is centering the discussion on cis anxiety; looking at an Other who doesn't work like them forces cis people to confront the construction of their own gender identities, and makes them uncomfortable.
The reason I call it a pet issue is not because it is a housecat to some other issue's roaring lion; it's because I look for it in everything I read, and focus on that more than I focus on other things. Valenti doesn't talk about disability worth a damn, either, but I didn't discuss that. Part of this is because I am trans; part of it is because I study trans. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something I should be aware of in the way I approach the world.
Re: an important clarification
Date: 2011-01-19 03:51 am (UTC)Oh good. I saw your reply and I was all "O NOES I did not mean to have feministcisprivilege!fail in my girlfriend's journal! That was not the plan!" But I like what my second comment said way better than the first, for clarity and meaning something, so I'm glad of you saying something that made me rethink and restate.
looking at an Other who doesn't work like them forces cis people to confront the construction of their own gender identities, and makes them uncomfortable.
In such extraordinarily useful ways. People put so much work into how they construct their genders-- it seems a shame to leave it all unconscious or unexamined.
The reason I call it a pet issue is ... because I look for it in everything I read, and focus on that more than I focus on other things... It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something I should be aware of in the way I approach the world.
That makes total sense. I have similar keywords, both in work and in general, and it's useful to keep in mind that other people are seeing something different.