I’ve recently read a couple books that both fall loosely under the rubric of coming-of-age / coming-out stories. Neither is a new release but they were recommended to me and sat waiting on my “to read” pile.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green and David Levithan (Penguin, 2010).
A lot of lesbian and gay lit offerings are effectively romances, and romances tend to emphasize the romantic relationship (hence the designation), and end happily ever after (HEA) or at least happily for now (HFN). Although Will Grayson, Will Grayson is in part about coming out and having that first sexual-romantic connection, it’s actually not a romance in the conventional sense. The emphasis is on friendship and loyalty among friends; the romantic relationships described in the book end up being in the background. This book portrays the tensions within an ongoing gay-straight friendship and the complexities in a formerly romantic-sexual relationship between the exes who still care for each other.
The “gimmick” of the book, if I may call it that, is that two boys of the exact same name take turns as the story’s narrator. One Will Grayson is gay but not out yet, and hasn’t had any meaningful sexual experiences as of the start of the book. The other Will Grayson is straight but similarly inexperienced (he’s rather introverted and has embraced a philosophy of never drawing attention to himself if he can avoid it). The authors handle the back-and-forth tradeoff between the two narrators by having one Will’s chapters all in lower case while the other uses normal start-of-sentence capitalization. It works.
The storyline and the two narrators revolve around central figure Tiny Cooper, “the world’s largest person who is really really gay”, also “the world’s gayest person who is really really large”. The exuberantly flamboyant Tiny is a theatrical creative. I coincidentally just now read a news article via a link within a Facebook group about how many gay men feel marginalized within the gay community over body image, especially the notion that to be successful in love and sex and socialization, a gay male needs to be neither skinny nor fat but perfectly sculpted instead. (It’s a complaint that mirrors those made by straight women about mainstream society). So it strikes me as healthy that we have here a heroic and popular extra-large gay person.
My Razzle Dazzle, Todd Peterson (iUniverse, 2015)
This is a period piece where the action takes place just a few short years before my own coming-of-age experience (and hence the events in my own book). Todd Peterson is just about the right age to have been my babysitter when I was a child. There are a lot of events and specific descriptions I can readily relate to as a consequence: the girls jumping rope on the playground and what it was like to play with them, the boys and the specific ways in which they were hostile to both girls and sissies, the “feel” of the school hallways and classrooms. Also, for that matter, the later career in software development, although I didn’t get into that as early in my own life as Todd Peterson did.
There are other elements of the story that are quite foreign to me though, in particular the phenomenon of roller derby, the experience of competitive skating on banked tracks and so on. Todd Peterson made the transit from enthusiastic fan to eventual team member of the Bombers, and his sense of accomplishment and belongingness among the skaters is as much a journey of identity and self-actualization as his coming out as a gay person. This is something that’s often not well-explained, that a marginalized identity on the basis of gender or sexual orientation tends to be a prominent factor in a person’s identity, but not to the exclusion of other things that may be developing concurrently in that same person’s life.
As with Will Grayson, My Razzle Dazzle alternates narration, this time between the current-era Todd Peterson who is reminiscing about his coming of age years, and the Todd Peterson he was as a child and young adult. The tradeoff this time is handled by having the historical reminiscent Todd Peterson written in the third person, while the modern Todd writes in the first person. And this works well too. The overall impression is that of Todd the author sitting in a comfortable armchair and discussing the events of the previous backstory chapter and their impact on his life overall. It gives him a way to theorize and make sense of those events and how they shaped him.
I do note that My Razzle Dazzle is yet another “exhibit a” for my discussion of gender inversion and sexual orientation, or, more specifically, why people identifying as gender inverts as I do are likely to be males attracted to females or vice versa. Todd Peterson doesn’t make a distinction between being, or being perceived as, feminine or sissified, on the one hand, and being gay, attracted to other males, on the other. In an early chapter he describes playing double dutch with the girls, turning the rope and doing his own jumping in turn, and then being harassed for that by the other boys. There is, of course, no reason why playing jump rope with the girls means that one is attracted to other guys, or why having sexual fantasies about other boys would make a fellow feminine. But Peterson doesn’t say this or explore this distinction. And why would he? The people around him don’t make make such a distinction! Sissy means gay to them, so in accepting himself as a gay male, Todd Peterson looks back at sissy characteristics and interprets them as traits of a gay male child. Similarly, in a later chapter, he muses about the possibility of coming out to his family and one of his friends points out that he crosses his legs “like a girl” and from this and other such cues and expressions says “they may already know”. Because of this phenomenon, the people I suspect are most likely to identify as gender inverts will be sissy-femme males whose attraction is not towards other males (because those that are continue to identify as gay guys not as gay gender inverted guys), and similarly so for butch-masculine female folks (because the butch gals who are lesbians tend to conflate their butch attributes with their lesbianism rather than seeing it as a separate component of marginalized identity).
One notable exception to that is Jacob Tobia, whose Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story is definitely a gender-inversion testimonial, a description of being femme that is definitely not conflated with sexual orientation. I reviewed Sissy last year.
———————
My book is scheduled to come out March 16 from Sunstone Press, and is now available on Amazon for pre-orders (paperback only for the moment).
———————
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
Home Page
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Thursday, January 23, 2020
It's a Date!
There's been a delay -- my book will not, as previously indicated, come out in January -- but I do now have an official release date! GenderQueer: A Story from a Different Closet will be published by Sunstone Press on March 15, 2020.
So here's what the delay is about: if you pick up a nonfiction book, you're likely to see a block of text on the copyright and dedication page that tells you how the Library of Congress has categorized the book. Libraries and other institutions make use of this.
It's called a "CIP Block".
Here, for example, is the CIP Block for the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diamond, Jared M.
Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies / Jared Diamond.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-31755-8
1. Social evolution. 2. Civilization—History 3. Ethnology. 4. Human being—Effect of environment on. 5. Culture diffusion I. Title
HM206.D48 1997
303.4—dc21 96-37068
CIP
W W Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York N.Y.10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W.Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London, W1T3QT
Sunstone Press is a publisher that does release nonfiction books that are purchased by libraries and is therefore a participant in the Cataloging in Publication program. More info.
Since I hope for my book to be acquired by libraries and to become assigned reading for women's and gender studies programs at colleges, it seems very much in my best interests to have my book enrolled and given a CIP block.
Well, the Library of Congress apparently doesn't always move with great alacrity when a publisher sends in a manuscript. And that's what the wait has been about.
Between now and March 15, I should be getting a listing on Amazon for advance orders. I'll keep y'all informed.
———————
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
Home Page
So here's what the delay is about: if you pick up a nonfiction book, you're likely to see a block of text on the copyright and dedication page that tells you how the Library of Congress has categorized the book. Libraries and other institutions make use of this.
It's called a "CIP Block".
Here, for example, is the CIP Block for the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diamond, Jared M.
Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies / Jared Diamond.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-31755-8
1. Social evolution. 2. Civilization—History 3. Ethnology. 4. Human being—Effect of environment on. 5. Culture diffusion I. Title
HM206.D48 1997
303.4—dc21 96-37068
CIP
W W Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York N.Y.10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W.Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London, W1T3QT
Sunstone Press is a publisher that does release nonfiction books that are purchased by libraries and is therefore a participant in the Cataloging in Publication program. More info.
Since I hope for my book to be acquired by libraries and to become assigned reading for women's and gender studies programs at colleges, it seems very much in my best interests to have my book enrolled and given a CIP block.
Well, the Library of Congress apparently doesn't always move with great alacrity when a publisher sends in a manuscript. And that's what the wait has been about.
Between now and March 15, I should be getting a listing on Amazon for advance orders. I'll keep y'all informed.
———————
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
Home Page
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Oppression
You may not like hearing this, but if you value equality and consensual relationships, and would personally prefer interacting with other people as mutual and free agents rather than exploiting or coercing them by having power over them if you had that choice, that means you *would not benefit* by having power over them.
That’s what benefit means – to have it better than would be the case otherwise. So if having power over others does not appeal to you as preferable to egalitarian relationships, you’re saying power over others would not improve your life, would not make it better. It would not benefit you.
And if that’s the case you can’t righteously assume that anyone in power necessarily benefits from that situation. You can’t assert that they would not also prefer equal and fair consensual social relationships if they could choose, not unless you can show that at the individual level they had the opportunity to make such choices and chose to oppress, chose to occupy positions of power.
I’d like to point out also that if you believe it to be true that power intrinsically is of benefit to those who do have power over others, that it is inherently desirable, then you’re saying that you would oppress if given the opportunity, since that, once again is what “to benefit” means – that it would be in your personal best interests, that it would bring you happiness, joy, satisfaction, pleasure, and so forth to have power over others. If there is a valid reason why you would not, that implies that it would actually be to your benefit to not do so. Whether it be conscience or a sense of justice and fairness, or a pleasure from interacting as equals and being trusted and being able to trust, or a wish to be in God’s good graces, or whatever, these reasons count as benefits when making such a choice.
Power is real. Inequality is real. Oppression is quite real, and struggles against it are noble and good and courageous and should be admired and lauded. What is not real is the notion that because you're rising up against oppression, you get to identify some culprits, evil people who can be blamed, perpetrators who can properly be thought of as unfairly getting away with oppressing. Power isn’t what we’ve been led to think it is. It defines the powerful as well as the disempowered. It isn’t a substance that one can possess and wield however one chooses. Most power is specifically the power to obtain this or attain that precise thing. Very seldom does a position of power give a person the power to dismantle the structures of authority that establish that power. Many people in social power were born to it, and far more were given a vastly unequal start within a system where people compete for it. Most of the social structures that specifically oppress categories of people – racism, patriarchy, colonialism, class stratification, etc – are solidly in place and individuals defined in a position without their participatory consent, the male white English-speaking wealthy western-nation able-bodied lucky privileged folks as much as the others.
Don't get me wrong -- many people in positions of structured power over others delight in it, revel in it, get a major part of their sense of worth from being able to feel like they're better than someone else. I'm very much exposed to that phenomenon, having endured bullying from fifth grade boys, assaults from fraternity boys in wealthy Long Island suburbs, and abuse of authority at the hands of police officers and psychiatric ward staff. Certainly they believed that having power over other people was a desirable commodity! But in all such cases it seemed like they were compensating for feelings of gross inadequacy. We're familiar with the trope of poor marginalized whites in the south making up for their sense of inferiority by abusing blacks so they can be better than someone, at least.
But that doesn’t make them right. And to go forth with the attitude that oppressors have it better in life than the rest of us do? It's the mindset of a child who thinks the misbehaving children are having a better time in life until and unless the teacher catches them at it and takes their pleasure away from them. It is not the mindset that creates a revolution. It's the mindset that creates a rotation. A rotation of the people in power. It's an old old story, people rising up against their oppressors so they can take the oppressor's comfy seats and make the former oppressors groven, put them up against the wall, show them what it feels like ...and guess what? After a very short time it's not just the former oppressors who seem to deserve the bottoms of our uprising's jackboots. And it's "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
And dammit, you're better than that.
———————
And yes, my book is supposed to come out this month from Sunstone Press, but I *still* have no concrete news to report yet. Stay tuned!
———————
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
Home Page
That’s what benefit means – to have it better than would be the case otherwise. So if having power over others does not appeal to you as preferable to egalitarian relationships, you’re saying power over others would not improve your life, would not make it better. It would not benefit you.
And if that’s the case you can’t righteously assume that anyone in power necessarily benefits from that situation. You can’t assert that they would not also prefer equal and fair consensual social relationships if they could choose, not unless you can show that at the individual level they had the opportunity to make such choices and chose to oppress, chose to occupy positions of power.
I’d like to point out also that if you believe it to be true that power intrinsically is of benefit to those who do have power over others, that it is inherently desirable, then you’re saying that you would oppress if given the opportunity, since that, once again is what “to benefit” means – that it would be in your personal best interests, that it would bring you happiness, joy, satisfaction, pleasure, and so forth to have power over others. If there is a valid reason why you would not, that implies that it would actually be to your benefit to not do so. Whether it be conscience or a sense of justice and fairness, or a pleasure from interacting as equals and being trusted and being able to trust, or a wish to be in God’s good graces, or whatever, these reasons count as benefits when making such a choice.
Power is real. Inequality is real. Oppression is quite real, and struggles against it are noble and good and courageous and should be admired and lauded. What is not real is the notion that because you're rising up against oppression, you get to identify some culprits, evil people who can be blamed, perpetrators who can properly be thought of as unfairly getting away with oppressing. Power isn’t what we’ve been led to think it is. It defines the powerful as well as the disempowered. It isn’t a substance that one can possess and wield however one chooses. Most power is specifically the power to obtain this or attain that precise thing. Very seldom does a position of power give a person the power to dismantle the structures of authority that establish that power. Many people in social power were born to it, and far more were given a vastly unequal start within a system where people compete for it. Most of the social structures that specifically oppress categories of people – racism, patriarchy, colonialism, class stratification, etc – are solidly in place and individuals defined in a position without their participatory consent, the male white English-speaking wealthy western-nation able-bodied lucky privileged folks as much as the others.
Don't get me wrong -- many people in positions of structured power over others delight in it, revel in it, get a major part of their sense of worth from being able to feel like they're better than someone else. I'm very much exposed to that phenomenon, having endured bullying from fifth grade boys, assaults from fraternity boys in wealthy Long Island suburbs, and abuse of authority at the hands of police officers and psychiatric ward staff. Certainly they believed that having power over other people was a desirable commodity! But in all such cases it seemed like they were compensating for feelings of gross inadequacy. We're familiar with the trope of poor marginalized whites in the south making up for their sense of inferiority by abusing blacks so they can be better than someone, at least.
But that doesn’t make them right. And to go forth with the attitude that oppressors have it better in life than the rest of us do? It's the mindset of a child who thinks the misbehaving children are having a better time in life until and unless the teacher catches them at it and takes their pleasure away from them. It is not the mindset that creates a revolution. It's the mindset that creates a rotation. A rotation of the people in power. It's an old old story, people rising up against their oppressors so they can take the oppressor's comfy seats and make the former oppressors groven, put them up against the wall, show them what it feels like ...and guess what? After a very short time it's not just the former oppressors who seem to deserve the bottoms of our uprising's jackboots. And it's "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
And dammit, you're better than that.
———————
And yes, my book is supposed to come out this month from Sunstone Press, but I *still* have no concrete news to report yet. Stay tuned!
———————
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
Home Page
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Polarized Echo Chambers
My facebook feed served me up a feminist group's post that mocked transitioners for allegedly having an attitude of "Hey, did you know that if you think being a girl would be a fun little upgrade, you can transition and be a girl? Lots of people start transitioning not because they think they 'need' to, but because they think it would improve their life and be more enjoyable".
The original post was followed by a long string of caustic comments about how these transitioners will never know what it was actually like to grow up as girls or are attempting to identify out of being oppressors, or think that a change of costume is all that gender identity is about. And several making fun of the use of "girl" instead of women.
I tried to engage with them with the following post, which wasn't moderated or piled onto, but was completely ignored. Not a single 'like'. No comment pro or con.
It's a shame, because I'd really like to have a dialog with them. (I hope you can see that from the tone and content of my post. It's not like I went in there yelling at them and calling them 'TERFs'!). But I guess they just prefer to preach to the choir.
--------- posted ---------
I'm certainly familiar with the notion that the male adults are often called "men" while the female adults are still being spoken of as "girls". But I'd call into question the logic by which the designation-terms used for males becomes the standard. I'm not a fundamentally different person than I was at eight, and the "adultist" notions within our culture teach us to turn our backs on who we originally were and embrace an adult identity that is often more constrained -- don't you think so? For me, the person I was at eight looked around the 2nd grade classroom and decided the people I admired and whose approval mattered to me were the girls. I valued what they valued. And *feminism* told me I wasn't "doing it wrong", that it was the double standard which was wrong, and if I valued "girl things" and "girl ways" that was entirely OK.
Feminism also has said that although there's nothing wrong with biological maleness, biological maleness is also NO EXCUSE for exhibiting the behaviors and embodying the values we characterize as 'masculine'. That the identity "MAN" is a political problem, that the personal is political, that the PERSONALITY is political, with its behavioral nuances and values and priorities and so on. Well, if there is to be a global feminist success, it kind of *has to involve male people pushing away from that "man" identity*, now doesn't it?
I'm sorry if the ways in which some of us approach that are insulting or cooptive of your identities, but we're thrashing about trying to find a language and a set of concepts that let us be self-affirming. We're not a unified lot of males (nor do all us identify ourselves AS males -- although I do, it's the bod I was born with and it's not the problem). I'm so sad to see the polarization and lack of dialog. You feminists are my role models, heroes, and inspiration.
———————
And yes, my book is supposed to come out this month from Sunstone Press, but I have no concrete news to report yet. Stay tuned!
———————
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
Home Page
The original post was followed by a long string of caustic comments about how these transitioners will never know what it was actually like to grow up as girls or are attempting to identify out of being oppressors, or think that a change of costume is all that gender identity is about. And several making fun of the use of "girl" instead of women.
I tried to engage with them with the following post, which wasn't moderated or piled onto, but was completely ignored. Not a single 'like'. No comment pro or con.
It's a shame, because I'd really like to have a dialog with them. (I hope you can see that from the tone and content of my post. It's not like I went in there yelling at them and calling them 'TERFs'!). But I guess they just prefer to preach to the choir.
--------- posted ---------
I'm certainly familiar with the notion that the male adults are often called "men" while the female adults are still being spoken of as "girls". But I'd call into question the logic by which the designation-terms used for males becomes the standard. I'm not a fundamentally different person than I was at eight, and the "adultist" notions within our culture teach us to turn our backs on who we originally were and embrace an adult identity that is often more constrained -- don't you think so? For me, the person I was at eight looked around the 2nd grade classroom and decided the people I admired and whose approval mattered to me were the girls. I valued what they valued. And *feminism* told me I wasn't "doing it wrong", that it was the double standard which was wrong, and if I valued "girl things" and "girl ways" that was entirely OK.
Feminism also has said that although there's nothing wrong with biological maleness, biological maleness is also NO EXCUSE for exhibiting the behaviors and embodying the values we characterize as 'masculine'. That the identity "MAN" is a political problem, that the personal is political, that the PERSONALITY is political, with its behavioral nuances and values and priorities and so on. Well, if there is to be a global feminist success, it kind of *has to involve male people pushing away from that "man" identity*, now doesn't it?
I'm sorry if the ways in which some of us approach that are insulting or cooptive of your identities, but we're thrashing about trying to find a language and a set of concepts that let us be self-affirming. We're not a unified lot of males (nor do all us identify ourselves AS males -- although I do, it's the bod I was born with and it's not the problem). I'm so sad to see the polarization and lack of dialog. You feminists are my role models, heroes, and inspiration.
———————
And yes, my book is supposed to come out this month from Sunstone Press, but I have no concrete news to report yet. Stay tuned!
———————
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
Home Page
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)