ALTERCASTING is the act of assigning an identity to someone else. That may seem at first glance like an intrusive act: shouldn't the assignment of identities be reserved for the people themselves? But we do it all the time. Those of us with the most fervent commitment to people's authority to define their own identity may work hard at not stereotyping people and trying to be open to multiple possibilities, but in the absence of being able to literally read other people's minds, we still do it. We formulate in our own minds a sense of who each other person is, in order to be able to interact with them, in order to be able to even think about them. At a minimum we tend to think of them as humans, and the moment we do that we altercast them in the role of human as we define and understand human. And we usually don't stop with only perceiving a person as an undifferentiated human. We notice things, clues to a person's identity, we make some educated guesses based on our own experience of people and society.
We care about other people's altercasting of us, it matters to us. If it did not, there would not exist any such thing as misgendering. If it did not, if we truly didn't care how others perceived us, we would also have to not care how others behaved towards us, how they treated us, because their interactive behaviors towards us are a direct outcome of how they perceive us.
This is why a person's identity is not composed entirely of who that person is to themselves, how they choose to identify. We may wish it to be that way or want it to be that way, particularly as a vehicle towards empowering them to self-define, but the real fact of the matter is that a person's identity is always the subject of dialogue between that person and all of the other people who perceive them and interact with them. A person's identity is always in a state of negotiation.
PRESENTING is the act of soliciting an ideal altercasted identity from other people, of getting them to altercast us with an assigned identity that pleases us, and often that will be at least a close approximation of our self-defined identity. Not always: the concept of being in the closet is about presenting so as to disguise one's identity instead of presenting so as to be seen and recognized. But as people who are out, as people who are political about our identity, we tend to devote a lot of energy into presenting our identity to the world, attempting to get people to altercast us the same way that we cast our own identities in our own minds.
It doesn't work if the people that we interact with do not have the necessary concepts to be able to think of us in the same way that we think of ourselves. If one happens to have a visible appearance that is culturally understood as a representation of one gender or sex (and in our culture's mainstream and in our culture's history, gender and sex have been one and the same), but also exhibits other signals (behaviors, et al) that are culturally understood as representative of the other, this is a presentation that could elicit an altercasting as gay, could evoke an altercasting as transgender or nonbinary or otherwise gender-atypical, but if the other people that one is interacting with have in their heads no interpretation of this combination except that it is wrong and pathological, it is instead going to inspire an altercasting as sick, twisted, wrong. And so we educate. We teach. We describe and defend and elaborate and we tell our experiences and outline how we think of ourselves, and we do all this in order to create in other people's head-space the possibility of seeing us more the way we wish to be seen.
Some of our PRESENTATION is a deliberate oversimplification; although our orientation or gender identity labels are not the entirety of our identity, any more than our age or our ethnicity is, the complex entirety of who we are is certainly not something that random strangers and casual acquaintances already have inside their heads to categorize us as. And so although we don't want to be reduced to a label or two in perpetuity and never known by anyone beyond a couple of general categories, most of us do position ourselves for easy recognition and categorization by the labels that let most people jump to some fairly decent first-tier approximations. Most cisgender heterosexual men present as men; most cisgender heterosexual women present as women; it is a cultural imperative that one should be clearly recognized and categorized by gender and treated accordingly. It is not that these individuals do not wish to ever be seen for the complex and unique people that they are, but that having folks react to them with these starting points is far more comfortable to them than for them to not do so. In fact, it is quite often a person's discovery that they themselves are uncomfortable with that altercasting that leads to a person's awareness of themselves as gender-atypical!
At any rate, we use a lot of shorthand when we present. We use the equivalent of a logo and a slogan on an everyday basis because we only occasionally get the opportunity to provide people with the equivalent of an article, let alone a novel.
Part of the price tag of marginalization is that all of this--the act of presentation and the successful result, an appropriate altercasting by the other people we encounter--is much more complicated and difficult. I said above that most cisgender heterosexual men present as men. A cisgender gay man who does not wish to be altercast as a heterosexual male is likely to attempt to present as a specifically gay man. He has to encode more information in his shorthand, still conveying that he is a man but due to being an exception to the rule, a marginalized variant, he has to convey additional information to avoid being altercast as something he is not, see? And his success (an appropriate altercasting by other people as a gay man) depends on them having that possibility in their head, that when they think of people they are aware of that possibility and that they recognize the shorthand cues and clues that he uses. If this individual were a nonbinary pansexual demiboy, their situation is quantum leaps more difficult and the likelihood of provoking a successfully correct altercasting from other people is extremely attenuated. The signals and cues have to convey a lot more information (they're not merely an exception to the rule but an exception to the exception to the exception) and the likelihood of the typical person they interact with being aware of the possibility of their identity is vanishingly small, and on top of that the people interacting with them would need to recognize the shorthand, which is even less likely than having heard of it or read about it.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Skirt
I purchased and wore my first skirt not for transgender reasons but for feminist reasons. It's sexist to designate a garment as only for one sex when there's nothing about it's physical design that makes it accommodate one body structure and not the other. I liked skirts, they looked more comfortable than pants in the summer, and they looked fun to wear. And there was no reason I shouldn't wear a skirt if I wanted to, so I did. I wanted to flaunt my attitude towards sexist expectations.
There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.
Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.
I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.
Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.
None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.
These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *
There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.
If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).
Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.
Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.
First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.
Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.
I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.
I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.
I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.
Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.
I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.
Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.
None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.
These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *
There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.
If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).
Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.
Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.
First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.
Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.
I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.
I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.
I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Sunday, December 9, 2018
So Many Labels!
Person A (on a message board):
What exactly is your sexual orientation?
Person J (i.e., about nine replies down):
...apparently I need a Wikipedia page and a science degree to know for sure? No offense meant, but I had no idea of all these labels and what they mean.
Is this helpful? To have all the labels so people can put themselves in boxes? Or on a scale? I guess it is or people wouldn't do it. I know I'm completely naive so would anyone care to venture why? To identify with others?
I think that for the majority of people, all such labels are unnecessary. That's because the majority of people have a majority orientation, and there's absolutely 100% nothing wrong with failing to deviate from what's typical, there really isn't! :) And labels exist for the purpose of differentiating. It sometimes seems unfair to us weirdo deviant atypical folks that mainstream folks get to strut around simply thinking of themselves in an undifferentiated way as "just people, you know, normal people", but I can understand it and I don't think it's oppressive. I don't even think it's oppressive for most of you to go around treating everyone and expecting of everyone that they will be normal in all the ways you are normal, as long as you're willing to be nonjudgmental and adjust accordingly when folks explain "nope, I'm different".
So you want to know why so goddamn many labels and such complexity and never-ending proliferation of categories? That's also a reasonable question.
When you're a mainstream person, you get a pretty unified and consolidated experience about your sex / gender / orientation. Like everyone else who is part of human culture, you get a barrage of messages from other people, messages that are aimed at all people with your kind of body, messages that are pointed to all people with your kind of personality-and-behavior, messages that focus on all people who share your sexual appetite's object of desire, messages that speak to all folks who harbor your general sexual-romantic tastes and expectations, and so on.
What makes this ongoing experience unitary and consolidated is that, for mainstream folks, they don't contradict each other! The messages for folks with a body like yours, for example, say that such people will find people with this other specified bodytype to be sexy and attractive (and you do), that you will have a personality matching a certain description (and, hey, it happens to be mostly true for you), that the sexy attractive people that you're attracted to will tend to have a different set of personality and behavioral characteristics (hmm yeah, pretty much true for you), and that the actual WAY that sex and courtship and attraction and relationship-formation will tend to take place will be according to the following overdone movie script or TV sitcom set of scenarios (yep, watched them, and corny or oversimplified or not yeah they aren't foreign to you). So those messages reinforce each other. They don't prompt a bunch of questioning inside your confused little head.
Not so for some of us outliers, the exceptions to the rule. (And for some of us weirdos, the exceptions to whatever general rule you can make about the exceptions to the rule, and exceptions to whatever generalizations you can make about those folks as well).
Oh baby, things are a snarly mess on our side of the experience-continuum. The messages aimed at people with our type of body describe a personality that is not ours, or perhaps indicate that we'll be attracted to a body-type other than the ones we find attractive, or describe our likely sexual behavioral patterns in ways that completely don't mesh with how things are for us, and so on and so forth. And there are messages we hear specifically about the exceptions and those are generally not good messages either — in part because they tend to be the general consensus not of us about ourselves but of you normal folks and whatever conclusions y'all have reached about the deviant-from-normal folks you've run into or heard about or observed from the outside — and in part because they tend to be prescriptive messages that designate us as wrong, examples of how not to be. We hear those too, and bouncing back away from those as well as bouncing back away from the non-fitting normal messages means we do spend a lot of time contemplating all this shit. Or many of us do at any rate.
Well, guess what? We don't reach a single unified and consolidated "minority opinion" consensus! Instead, first you get a sort of first-tier "voice of the exceptions" and after that's been out there and ingested a bit you get the next tier of dissenting exceptions who AREN'T that way and THEY put out a second set of descriptions of experience and identity and after that's hit the airwaves / magazine covers etc you get another tier and another tier.
It's like one of those statistical graphs where you've got a long tail fading off from the concentrated blob that represents the main trend.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
What exactly is your sexual orientation?
Person J (i.e., about nine replies down):
...apparently I need a Wikipedia page and a science degree to know for sure? No offense meant, but I had no idea of all these labels and what they mean.
Is this helpful? To have all the labels so people can put themselves in boxes? Or on a scale? I guess it is or people wouldn't do it. I know I'm completely naive so would anyone care to venture why? To identify with others?
I think that for the majority of people, all such labels are unnecessary. That's because the majority of people have a majority orientation, and there's absolutely 100% nothing wrong with failing to deviate from what's typical, there really isn't! :) And labels exist for the purpose of differentiating. It sometimes seems unfair to us weirdo deviant atypical folks that mainstream folks get to strut around simply thinking of themselves in an undifferentiated way as "just people, you know, normal people", but I can understand it and I don't think it's oppressive. I don't even think it's oppressive for most of you to go around treating everyone and expecting of everyone that they will be normal in all the ways you are normal, as long as you're willing to be nonjudgmental and adjust accordingly when folks explain "nope, I'm different".
So you want to know why so goddamn many labels and such complexity and never-ending proliferation of categories? That's also a reasonable question.
When you're a mainstream person, you get a pretty unified and consolidated experience about your sex / gender / orientation. Like everyone else who is part of human culture, you get a barrage of messages from other people, messages that are aimed at all people with your kind of body, messages that are pointed to all people with your kind of personality-and-behavior, messages that focus on all people who share your sexual appetite's object of desire, messages that speak to all folks who harbor your general sexual-romantic tastes and expectations, and so on.
What makes this ongoing experience unitary and consolidated is that, for mainstream folks, they don't contradict each other! The messages for folks with a body like yours, for example, say that such people will find people with this other specified bodytype to be sexy and attractive (and you do), that you will have a personality matching a certain description (and, hey, it happens to be mostly true for you), that the sexy attractive people that you're attracted to will tend to have a different set of personality and behavioral characteristics (hmm yeah, pretty much true for you), and that the actual WAY that sex and courtship and attraction and relationship-formation will tend to take place will be according to the following overdone movie script or TV sitcom set of scenarios (yep, watched them, and corny or oversimplified or not yeah they aren't foreign to you). So those messages reinforce each other. They don't prompt a bunch of questioning inside your confused little head.
Not so for some of us outliers, the exceptions to the rule. (And for some of us weirdos, the exceptions to whatever general rule you can make about the exceptions to the rule, and exceptions to whatever generalizations you can make about those folks as well).
Oh baby, things are a snarly mess on our side of the experience-continuum. The messages aimed at people with our type of body describe a personality that is not ours, or perhaps indicate that we'll be attracted to a body-type other than the ones we find attractive, or describe our likely sexual behavioral patterns in ways that completely don't mesh with how things are for us, and so on and so forth. And there are messages we hear specifically about the exceptions and those are generally not good messages either — in part because they tend to be the general consensus not of us about ourselves but of you normal folks and whatever conclusions y'all have reached about the deviant-from-normal folks you've run into or heard about or observed from the outside — and in part because they tend to be prescriptive messages that designate us as wrong, examples of how not to be. We hear those too, and bouncing back away from those as well as bouncing back away from the non-fitting normal messages means we do spend a lot of time contemplating all this shit. Or many of us do at any rate.
Well, guess what? We don't reach a single unified and consolidated "minority opinion" consensus! Instead, first you get a sort of first-tier "voice of the exceptions" and after that's been out there and ingested a bit you get the next tier of dissenting exceptions who AREN'T that way and THEY put out a second set of descriptions of experience and identity and after that's hit the airwaves / magazine covers etc you get another tier and another tier.
It's like one of those statistical graphs where you've got a long tail fading off from the concentrated blob that represents the main trend.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
REVIEW: DePression Pink by Alice Klugherz
Pink-garbed people under pink lights. It's a female experience. Depression and anger. (And guilt). Klugherz and her entourage of dancers and performers express women's frustration with this emotional content and the ways in which women who express it are then blamed for their own condition.
Then the terrain changes. The troup speaks of being trained to comply, specifically being trained as females to accommodate. And bad things happen, a combination of ratcheting up the ickiness of the things you're expected to comply with and sudden exposure to things you weren't expecting or ready for, but for which a lifetime training in being amenable and cooperative didn't prepare you to cope with or avoid.
And then you get the message that either you're being ridiculous to complain about it or that it didn't happen at all.
Through personal vignettes and opportune echoes of phrases we've all heard on the news-channels, we're reminded again of Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the primordial clash of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There are viscerally personal stories told, stories of violations and betrayals. Mothers, boyfriends, doctors, teachers, acquaintances and strangers, and how they've contributed, either by committing gross invasions or by participating in the denial and erasure. The whole of the piece is far greater than the mere sum of its parts because it's a cumulative experience.
Diane Roo Carroll, Anna Zekan and Irene Morawski join Alice Klugherz in the leadoff performance, using dance to highlight the emotional substance of what Klugherz narrates about being depressed and angry.
The voice of Marlene Nichols introduces the #metoo element with Klugherz and Cynthia Xavier using movement and posture to illustrate her story. Lenny Langley weilds a mean utility-light and Anna Zekan walks us a transfixed deer caught in it as the women explain the general phenomenon of being caught and paralyzed by the situation, setting the stage for the narratives that follow.
Susan O'Doherty, Shari Rosenblatt, Irene Siegal, and Klugherz herself relate their specific stories of encountering these sexual intrusions; they peel themselves to the raw reactive cores, exposing their uncertainties and the self-doubts and self-recriminations as well as the fury at what's been dealt to them.
Themes emerge: we see how people cope by so often treating the occurrence as a dream or bottling it up as a vague half-remembered thing; there is little opportunity to name things, to speak them out loud, when they are so seldom spoken of and when there is no one to whom one can speak them; and the social pressure is to push down on one's feelings, to deny and erase; and there is once again the "weather thing", learning to regard these behaviors of men as if they were as natural and as inevitable as rainstorms. Marlene Nichols rhetorically asks, "What kind of New Yorker would I be if somebody copping a feel on the subway left me devastated, you know?"
And finally, of course, internalizing it, Blaming one's self for what happened, and experiencing it as unanchored random despondency and misery and fury.
DePression Pink is not set in chronological order. It starts with the depression and anger and then sifts through what precedes it, what causes it. And yet that's the cognitive order, sure enough. It's the order in which a person coming to grips with all this is most likely to process, recognizing the incapacitating emotional states and recovering the awareness and memories of the violations later.
Towards the end of the piece, the performers offer a sentiment I have to dissent with: "If they wanted something mutual", they declare, after indicting the perpetrators of these intrusions, "they would have it". Those of you who follow my blog will already recognize that I have said all along that there are problems for the male person who does indeed want something mutual. It isn't set up that way. This is not, however, any discredit of the message rendered by DePression Pink; if anything it is a concurring statement about how things are structured. It's the same phenomenon, this polarization. One audience member commented on the combination of the sensual/sexual women in some of the dance pieces, dancing in celebration and freedom, and these awful stories, and the significance of juxtaposing them, that they are both part of women's reality. This dynamic, in which sex is pursued in a predatory way by males, in which female people are treated as prey... this is woven into our cultural understanding of what the genders mean, of what it means to be a woman or a man. If there are women who do not readily see any corresponding validity to a male complaint that we're situated to behave in a sexually invasive way or else be relegated to the sexual sidelines, they might more quickly recognize it in the social condemnation of women who are so brazen as to pursue their own sexual interests instead of waiting passively to comply with some male's initiative. They might recognize it in the litany of names that get applied to women who act with sexual autonomy.
Alice Klugherz says, near the end of the piece, "I am going to cross out what I've written, and write it again and again, until it says what I want to say". She seems to have honed her voice to a very effective edge in DePression Pink.
DePression Pink was performed November 29 and 30, and Dec 1, at University Settlement in the Lower East Side of New York. Video footage of the performance is pending and when it becomes available I will edit this blog post to include it.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Then the terrain changes. The troup speaks of being trained to comply, specifically being trained as females to accommodate. And bad things happen, a combination of ratcheting up the ickiness of the things you're expected to comply with and sudden exposure to things you weren't expecting or ready for, but for which a lifetime training in being amenable and cooperative didn't prepare you to cope with or avoid.
And then you get the message that either you're being ridiculous to complain about it or that it didn't happen at all.
Through personal vignettes and opportune echoes of phrases we've all heard on the news-channels, we're reminded again of Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the primordial clash of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There are viscerally personal stories told, stories of violations and betrayals. Mothers, boyfriends, doctors, teachers, acquaintances and strangers, and how they've contributed, either by committing gross invasions or by participating in the denial and erasure. The whole of the piece is far greater than the mere sum of its parts because it's a cumulative experience.
Diane Roo Carroll, Anna Zekan and Irene Morawski join Alice Klugherz in the leadoff performance, using dance to highlight the emotional substance of what Klugherz narrates about being depressed and angry.
The voice of Marlene Nichols introduces the #metoo element with Klugherz and Cynthia Xavier using movement and posture to illustrate her story. Lenny Langley weilds a mean utility-light and Anna Zekan walks us a transfixed deer caught in it as the women explain the general phenomenon of being caught and paralyzed by the situation, setting the stage for the narratives that follow.
Susan O'Doherty, Shari Rosenblatt, Irene Siegal, and Klugherz herself relate their specific stories of encountering these sexual intrusions; they peel themselves to the raw reactive cores, exposing their uncertainties and the self-doubts and self-recriminations as well as the fury at what's been dealt to them.
Themes emerge: we see how people cope by so often treating the occurrence as a dream or bottling it up as a vague half-remembered thing; there is little opportunity to name things, to speak them out loud, when they are so seldom spoken of and when there is no one to whom one can speak them; and the social pressure is to push down on one's feelings, to deny and erase; and there is once again the "weather thing", learning to regard these behaviors of men as if they were as natural and as inevitable as rainstorms. Marlene Nichols rhetorically asks, "What kind of New Yorker would I be if somebody copping a feel on the subway left me devastated, you know?"
And finally, of course, internalizing it, Blaming one's self for what happened, and experiencing it as unanchored random despondency and misery and fury.
DePression Pink is not set in chronological order. It starts with the depression and anger and then sifts through what precedes it, what causes it. And yet that's the cognitive order, sure enough. It's the order in which a person coming to grips with all this is most likely to process, recognizing the incapacitating emotional states and recovering the awareness and memories of the violations later.
Towards the end of the piece, the performers offer a sentiment I have to dissent with: "If they wanted something mutual", they declare, after indicting the perpetrators of these intrusions, "they would have it". Those of you who follow my blog will already recognize that I have said all along that there are problems for the male person who does indeed want something mutual. It isn't set up that way. This is not, however, any discredit of the message rendered by DePression Pink; if anything it is a concurring statement about how things are structured. It's the same phenomenon, this polarization. One audience member commented on the combination of the sensual/sexual women in some of the dance pieces, dancing in celebration and freedom, and these awful stories, and the significance of juxtaposing them, that they are both part of women's reality. This dynamic, in which sex is pursued in a predatory way by males, in which female people are treated as prey... this is woven into our cultural understanding of what the genders mean, of what it means to be a woman or a man. If there are women who do not readily see any corresponding validity to a male complaint that we're situated to behave in a sexually invasive way or else be relegated to the sexual sidelines, they might more quickly recognize it in the social condemnation of women who are so brazen as to pursue their own sexual interests instead of waiting passively to comply with some male's initiative. They might recognize it in the litany of names that get applied to women who act with sexual autonomy.
Alice Klugherz says, near the end of the piece, "I am going to cross out what I've written, and write it again and again, until it says what I want to say". She seems to have honed her voice to a very effective edge in DePression Pink.
DePression Pink was performed November 29 and 30, and Dec 1, at University Settlement in the Lower East Side of New York. Video footage of the performance is pending and when it becomes available I will edit this blog post to include it.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)