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ahunter3On Sept 3, I penned a short piece about repositioning my nonfiction memoir as a work of fiction:
http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/9662.html
In today's blog, I'm going to reminisce about a different repositioning, one that is part of my own backstory behind this book: from feminist issue to gender-identity issue.
The story starts in 1980, when I first had in my head a clear sense of wanting to confront the world and explain a thing or two about myself and gender and sexuality and all that.
Just as I currently need to "bundle" the book I've written, in order that authors' agents and publishers will perceive it as falling into a category they know about and having other similar titles they can mentally compare it to, in 1980 I recognized the need to "bundle" what I wanted to say so that it would fit in with a set of ideas that folks had some familiarity with. If you want to communicate with people, you don't want to be TOO original; people need a point of entry, a starting point they're already familiar with, and THEN, once you've established that, you can depart from there, contrasting what you're trying to say with material that your audience already comprehends.
Starting in 1980, most of my attempts to explain my material started off with feminist theory.
• Feminist theory in its most widely understood assertions says that it is not fair if the same behavior is viewed differently depending on the sex of the person; that was dead-on center to what I wanted to say about sexual behavior and associated personality, and it let me position what I was saying as a fairness issue, a POLITICAL issue, not some kind of needy emotional or mental state such as a mental pathology. That was important to me.
• Feminist theory by that point had accumulated a huge body of observations about sex role socialization that polarizes boys and girls, treating them differently in ways that CREATE differences even if they didn't already exist in that particular way, that REINFORCE them and emphasize and exaggerate them whether they did or didn't originally exist, and that also SHAPE how we interpret them so that even identical behaviors end up having different connotations to the observer. All this was also very much the territory of my ideas, so by referencing feminism I would not have to reinvent those wheels, explain all that from scratch.
• I saw myself as a male person whose personality and behavior was more akin to what was expected of female people, for which I'd gotten a lot of grief and flack over the years. My response, as a kid and as a young adult, to that grief and flack had been to stubbornly retain those characteristics and to disdain the model of masculine boyhood that I was being directed to as what I ought to be emulating instead. In choosing to position my concepts within the framework of feminism and feminist theory, I was choosing in part to DE-EMPHASIZE any personal claims to being inherently different from other boys and men, and instead placed the focus on these social forces and used my experience as a vantage point: "Behold, sex role socialization in action, trying to turn males into boys and men. Look at my experience, I'm one of the rare resisters and as such I have been the example to other males of the bad things that would happen to them, also, if they did not conform". I was trying to indict the social process.
• Right from the start, I was not only ambivalent about whether I was, in fact, different in general from other malefolk, but also aware of that ambivalence. The truth was, and still is, that I did not (and do not) know. I live in a world with other males who certainly appear to be alien and different from me, but I'm vividly aware of those social forces and processes and I can easily believe that those, all by themselves, can shape and mold male people into the configuration that I see around me, WITHOUT postulating any built-in differences between me and the majority of the rest of my sex. And indeed, sometimes I see it that way. But I also can readily believe that maybe the sexes are statistically different in ways that roughly and loosely correspond with the expectations, but that the sex role socialization forces take that situation and emphasize the polarization and shape and modify what they're going to end up meaning, both at the individual level and the broad social level. And sometimes I see it that way instead: that the factor that made ME, specifically, rebellious and stubbornly resistant to masculinization is that personality-wise I'm a statistical outlier so the expectations were a really really bad fit for me.
• My general attitude was "It doesn't matter". If I could wave a magic wand and make it so that sissy boys and butch girls were socially accepted and understood, if we could essentially have a widespread belief that there are male girls as well as male boys (just fewer of them), and female boys as well as female girls (likewise), the ugly nastiness of those social pressures would be ameliorated. And if that could happen, then that change would be wonderful whether I (and the hypothetical class of other boys like me) were intrinsically different from normative typical males or if there were no such fundamental difference.
• Similarly, and parallel to that, was the sexual orientation question. What I was seeing was a social expectation verging on coercive in its intensity that said that not ONLY were male people supposed to be a certain way in personality and behavior ("masculine") but that furthermore heterosexual eligibility was dependent on it. If, in other words, you insisted or persisted in being and behaving more like the expected female pattern, you would be THOUGHT to be gay, you would be TREATED as if you were gay, and you would not have any other real options since heterosexuality itself was so hardwired to a model of behavior in which masculine male people DID certain things (behaviors) to feminine female people that, in the absence of that personality and the behaviors associated with it, sex with female people simply wasn't gonna happen. I saw this as the ultimate and final weapon in the arsenal of sex role socialization forces. Of course, I saw it that way because I was attracted to female-bodied people.
• Gay and lesbian people, in 1980, were definitely positioning their discussion of sexual preference in terms of built-in differences. That they were oppressed AS gay and lesbian people, that it needed to be OK with the world that some folks were indeed gay and lesbian and that that wasn't pathological or undesirable or inferior. I recognized early on that I needed to NOT be saying that the only reason anyone was in fact gay or lesbian was that that was how sex role socialization disposed of the personality-and-behavior nonconforming misfits like me who didn't get sex-role socialized properly. First off, I needed to NOT be saying that for pragmatic reasons: I was trying to liberate myself and people like me from sex role socialization forces, not attack other people and tell them they were doing things all wrong, and gay and lesbian people very obviously weren't perceiving their sexual orientation as "something society did to us". Secondly, and more importantly once it sank in good, was that I sure as hell didn't KNOW that to be the case. All I knew from first-hand experience was that social forces felt to me like they were trying to cast ME as gay for failing to fit the masculine mold; I realized that gay and lesbian people were saying they were ATTRACTED to the same sex, not that they'd been driven in that direction, and quite commonly said that they'd known it even as children, had always been that way. I had no business, therefore, proceeding as if I knew their situation better than they did. AGAIN, my attitude quickly reconciled as "it doesn't matter". If there are indeed built-in differences in sexual orientation between hetero and gay folk, it absolutely cannot hurt any of us if the world ceases to assume you are hetero if your personality and behavior fits the expected norms for your sex and that you are gay/lesbian if you have a disproportionate amount of those expected in the other sex instead.
• For myself, with regards to my OWN sexual orientation as built-in or otherwise, I again tended to look at it two different ways and shifted between the two depending on how I thought about the gender difference: when I tended to think of myself as not intrinsically different from other males, I also thought of my sexual orientation as not being different intrinsically: nope, "heterosexuality" is a socially constructed and socially maintained set of rules, all part & parcel of the sex role socialization phenomenon; lift that out of the way and yeah, I'm attracted to female-bodied people, as are most males, and were it not for the social forces and etc I'd have no issues or problems here. But at the other times, when I'd find myself thinking of myself as truly different from other males in general, I'd also think of my sexual orientation as a different thing: heterosexuality is where MASCULINE males are sexually involved with FEMININE females, and I'm in the inverse situation and should perhaps be seeking out females who are as much a misfit as I am, not merely because they'd have more sympathy for the complexities of my situation but because our inverse behavioral patterns would link up in a reversal-of-expectations pattern. Straightbackwards instead of straightforwards. Not hetersexual, something else, something as different as my gender identity. But once again, as far as positioning of what I was trying to say to people, I chose to de-emphasize the latter. If I could wave that magic wand and make a world where folks didn't associate sexual orientation with conformity versus nonconformity to expected sexrole-specific personality and behavior in general, people like me would find partners. So it didn't matter.
Next Up: More Repositioning Part II, the shift to Gender and Queer Theory
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
http://ahunter3.livejournal.com/9662.html
In today's blog, I'm going to reminisce about a different repositioning, one that is part of my own backstory behind this book: from feminist issue to gender-identity issue.
The story starts in 1980, when I first had in my head a clear sense of wanting to confront the world and explain a thing or two about myself and gender and sexuality and all that.
Just as I currently need to "bundle" the book I've written, in order that authors' agents and publishers will perceive it as falling into a category they know about and having other similar titles they can mentally compare it to, in 1980 I recognized the need to "bundle" what I wanted to say so that it would fit in with a set of ideas that folks had some familiarity with. If you want to communicate with people, you don't want to be TOO original; people need a point of entry, a starting point they're already familiar with, and THEN, once you've established that, you can depart from there, contrasting what you're trying to say with material that your audience already comprehends.
Starting in 1980, most of my attempts to explain my material started off with feminist theory.
• Feminist theory in its most widely understood assertions says that it is not fair if the same behavior is viewed differently depending on the sex of the person; that was dead-on center to what I wanted to say about sexual behavior and associated personality, and it let me position what I was saying as a fairness issue, a POLITICAL issue, not some kind of needy emotional or mental state such as a mental pathology. That was important to me.
• Feminist theory by that point had accumulated a huge body of observations about sex role socialization that polarizes boys and girls, treating them differently in ways that CREATE differences even if they didn't already exist in that particular way, that REINFORCE them and emphasize and exaggerate them whether they did or didn't originally exist, and that also SHAPE how we interpret them so that even identical behaviors end up having different connotations to the observer. All this was also very much the territory of my ideas, so by referencing feminism I would not have to reinvent those wheels, explain all that from scratch.
• I saw myself as a male person whose personality and behavior was more akin to what was expected of female people, for which I'd gotten a lot of grief and flack over the years. My response, as a kid and as a young adult, to that grief and flack had been to stubbornly retain those characteristics and to disdain the model of masculine boyhood that I was being directed to as what I ought to be emulating instead. In choosing to position my concepts within the framework of feminism and feminist theory, I was choosing in part to DE-EMPHASIZE any personal claims to being inherently different from other boys and men, and instead placed the focus on these social forces and used my experience as a vantage point: "Behold, sex role socialization in action, trying to turn males into boys and men. Look at my experience, I'm one of the rare resisters and as such I have been the example to other males of the bad things that would happen to them, also, if they did not conform". I was trying to indict the social process.
• Right from the start, I was not only ambivalent about whether I was, in fact, different in general from other malefolk, but also aware of that ambivalence. The truth was, and still is, that I did not (and do not) know. I live in a world with other males who certainly appear to be alien and different from me, but I'm vividly aware of those social forces and processes and I can easily believe that those, all by themselves, can shape and mold male people into the configuration that I see around me, WITHOUT postulating any built-in differences between me and the majority of the rest of my sex. And indeed, sometimes I see it that way. But I also can readily believe that maybe the sexes are statistically different in ways that roughly and loosely correspond with the expectations, but that the sex role socialization forces take that situation and emphasize the polarization and shape and modify what they're going to end up meaning, both at the individual level and the broad social level. And sometimes I see it that way instead: that the factor that made ME, specifically, rebellious and stubbornly resistant to masculinization is that personality-wise I'm a statistical outlier so the expectations were a really really bad fit for me.
• My general attitude was "It doesn't matter". If I could wave a magic wand and make it so that sissy boys and butch girls were socially accepted and understood, if we could essentially have a widespread belief that there are male girls as well as male boys (just fewer of them), and female boys as well as female girls (likewise), the ugly nastiness of those social pressures would be ameliorated. And if that could happen, then that change would be wonderful whether I (and the hypothetical class of other boys like me) were intrinsically different from normative typical males or if there were no such fundamental difference.
• Similarly, and parallel to that, was the sexual orientation question. What I was seeing was a social expectation verging on coercive in its intensity that said that not ONLY were male people supposed to be a certain way in personality and behavior ("masculine") but that furthermore heterosexual eligibility was dependent on it. If, in other words, you insisted or persisted in being and behaving more like the expected female pattern, you would be THOUGHT to be gay, you would be TREATED as if you were gay, and you would not have any other real options since heterosexuality itself was so hardwired to a model of behavior in which masculine male people DID certain things (behaviors) to feminine female people that, in the absence of that personality and the behaviors associated with it, sex with female people simply wasn't gonna happen. I saw this as the ultimate and final weapon in the arsenal of sex role socialization forces. Of course, I saw it that way because I was attracted to female-bodied people.
• Gay and lesbian people, in 1980, were definitely positioning their discussion of sexual preference in terms of built-in differences. That they were oppressed AS gay and lesbian people, that it needed to be OK with the world that some folks were indeed gay and lesbian and that that wasn't pathological or undesirable or inferior. I recognized early on that I needed to NOT be saying that the only reason anyone was in fact gay or lesbian was that that was how sex role socialization disposed of the personality-and-behavior nonconforming misfits like me who didn't get sex-role socialized properly. First off, I needed to NOT be saying that for pragmatic reasons: I was trying to liberate myself and people like me from sex role socialization forces, not attack other people and tell them they were doing things all wrong, and gay and lesbian people very obviously weren't perceiving their sexual orientation as "something society did to us". Secondly, and more importantly once it sank in good, was that I sure as hell didn't KNOW that to be the case. All I knew from first-hand experience was that social forces felt to me like they were trying to cast ME as gay for failing to fit the masculine mold; I realized that gay and lesbian people were saying they were ATTRACTED to the same sex, not that they'd been driven in that direction, and quite commonly said that they'd known it even as children, had always been that way. I had no business, therefore, proceeding as if I knew their situation better than they did. AGAIN, my attitude quickly reconciled as "it doesn't matter". If there are indeed built-in differences in sexual orientation between hetero and gay folk, it absolutely cannot hurt any of us if the world ceases to assume you are hetero if your personality and behavior fits the expected norms for your sex and that you are gay/lesbian if you have a disproportionate amount of those expected in the other sex instead.
• For myself, with regards to my OWN sexual orientation as built-in or otherwise, I again tended to look at it two different ways and shifted between the two depending on how I thought about the gender difference: when I tended to think of myself as not intrinsically different from other males, I also thought of my sexual orientation as not being different intrinsically: nope, "heterosexuality" is a socially constructed and socially maintained set of rules, all part & parcel of the sex role socialization phenomenon; lift that out of the way and yeah, I'm attracted to female-bodied people, as are most males, and were it not for the social forces and etc I'd have no issues or problems here. But at the other times, when I'd find myself thinking of myself as truly different from other males in general, I'd also think of my sexual orientation as a different thing: heterosexuality is where MASCULINE males are sexually involved with FEMININE females, and I'm in the inverse situation and should perhaps be seeking out females who are as much a misfit as I am, not merely because they'd have more sympathy for the complexities of my situation but because our inverse behavioral patterns would link up in a reversal-of-expectations pattern. Straightbackwards instead of straightforwards. Not hetersexual, something else, something as different as my gender identity. But once again, as far as positioning of what I was trying to say to people, I chose to de-emphasize the latter. If I could wave that magic wand and make a world where folks didn't associate sexual orientation with conformity versus nonconformity to expected sexrole-specific personality and behavior in general, people like me would find partners. So it didn't matter.
Next Up: More Repositioning Part II, the shift to Gender and Queer Theory
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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Date: 2014-09-20 05:46 pm (UTC)K.