In Summary...

As I read over my blogs for this class, the one theme that consistently strikes me is that of community identities: how to create them, how to name them, and who to include. Perhaps this is an obvious theme to choose, but seeing as how the gay community has struggled to find a community since the possibility of a community even came up (or out), it seems like an important and meaningful one to chose.
To me, the hardest thing to overcome when talking about community identities within the gay community, is having to overcome the idea of being outsider. Any queer identity is based on the fundamental notion of being different, of not being mainstream, of being something else, and something other. Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall says in her essay “Bitches in Solitude” that

“Identities focused around not being something else as opposed to being something are the result of feeling attacked on all sides; they’re an attempt to consolidate ground that feels threatened.”

She goes on to talk about how, at least in the lesbian community, this consolidation has turned into an ever restricting ‘who’s a real lesbian?’ game, in which a community with strict rules and binding manifestos tries to limit their numbers in order to keep some semblance of similarity, or connection while simultaneously trying to transgress boundaries and fight for equality. Alisa Solomon, in “Dykotomies: Scents and Sensibility” talks about 1989 lesbian newsletter which published a long list of things the lesbian community needs to do be all-inclusive, yet many lesbians found this long list of rules to be completely ridiculous, completely suffocating, and ultimately against the point: the overwhelming number of ‘inclusivity’ rules actually turning away more women than including women.
However, this question of community identities is in no way limited to the lesbian community. One of my first blogs, “To Box or Not To Box” talks about the difficulty currently in the transgender community, which further demonstrates this difficulty. I still have not found answers to the questions that I pose in that blog, and I still don’t understand quite how transgender warriors who wish to conform to one gender or the other, who often desire to fit into traditional gender stereotypes can fight alongside the gender-fuck crowd who’s ready to topple over the oppressive dichotomy that gender presents. As Kate Borenstein points out in her book, Gender Outlaw, both of these groups ultimately point out the “silliness” of the gender system, and in one way or another seek to dismantle it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that its any easier to come up with one unifying name, or one unifying community.
Furthermore, the creation of a gender-fuck/queer identity has led to confusion over lesbian butch identities, as I bring up in my blog, titled “My Butch Identity”. While these two groups have much in common, perhaps especially in terms of appearance, their ideologies are different, making it nearly impossible to try to group them under one umbrella term. Esther Newton’s point, and my own feelings, about wanting to be a woman, and wanting to be butch, simply do not fit in with the idea of erasing gender altogether, although its possible and likely that for many women, these two ideas could be relatively synonymous.
Another couple of blog posts, “How Far We’ve Come” and “It’s an Individual Thing” respond to a debate that concerns the entire ‘queer’ community: assimilationist vs. radical. Although, as I mention in these blogs, I think, in many ways, this debate has turned into a celebrate vs. respect debate, its yet another way that the gay community is split apart, another way in which we find ourselves too big to fit under one name.
I am not trying to answer these big questions. I am not even trying to talk about these individual issues, but more trying to approach the ever-elusive community identity. Of course, the truth is that the gay community is every bit as diverse as any other community, including ‘the’ white community’ or ‘the’ heterosexual community, but I suppose that yet another privilege that comes packaged with being in the majority is that you don’t have to find a community label that fits everyone. There is a natural assumption that, of course, the heterosexual community is too diverse to try to include under one label, and certainly, no one would try to make the statement that ‘all heterosexual believe in…’ though people do that with the gay community, and other minority communities daily. Philosophically, of course, it makes sense to me, yet it still seems like an ultimately futile, and counter-productive search. Talking about our differences, figuring out ways to be inclusive without being exclusive, welcoming and joining other people’s communities, and banding together to work on a variety of issues seem like more productive paths to take. But then, again, I’m an idealist…

Gender Confidence

Our class discussion on Monday was pretty interesting, or at least I thought it was. Gender has always been a fascinating subject to me (I have been called tomboy since I could remember being called anything, and while it is a relatively nice term, it can definitely create some confusion for the little ones…), and one that I have sometimes struggled with, both in terms of my own gender identity and in terms of the gender of my ‘attractee’. Ultimately, like Juni, I would like to say that gender doesn’t matter, that I’m attracted to personalities, to minds, to senses of humor and compassion. But, really, given a man and a woman with the exact same personality, mind, sense of humor and compassion, I would choose the woman. Every time. I feel more comfortable with women: I like their softer voices, their softer bodies. I’m scared of penises. Each and everyone of those characteristics that Matt Kaily mentions in his book, all the parlor tricks, the jack of all trades, the 21-gun salutes, all of that just terrifies me. But like Matt Kaily (or, rather, unlike Matt Kaily) I feel I will always be attracted to ‘femaleness’, to whatever is that ‘essence’ of women.
While the big T throws a bit of kink into that ‘essence of women’ line, I think it does so in a positive way. Its good for women (and men) to think about what they really think a woman is, to consider the traits and characteristics, apart from a vulva and breasts. Having looked at a woman standing in front of me, with a real, functioning penis between her legs, has changed my view of a woman, but it has not destroyed it. While I don’t think that I am capable of putting to words exactly what I believe a woman is (perhaps, there are no necessary or sufficient characteristics), I think I’m just going to have to trust my heart on this one. So far it’s worked out well.

How Not to Stay White

We talked in class yesterday about homosexuality in the black community, and the ways in which these stereotypes haven’t changed. In class, we mostly focused on the ways in which the black community is homophobic, but I had a hard time separating that homophobia from the white community's racism. During our conversation I was reminded of Allan Bérubé’s article, “How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays” which takes a very pointed and interesting look at the white, gay male community. In his article, Bérubé talks about San Francisco gay bars that triple card people of color (and not white people) in order to make sure that the bar doesn’t “get taken over” by black, Latino, or Asian men. He talked about how the Campaign for Military Service actively denied letting a black gay man testify for fear that other gay men wouldn’t be able to relate to his experiences. He talked about how comparing gay rights leaders, such as David Mixner, to black civil rights leaders by saying such phrases as “our own Martin Luther King” is problematic because it excludes all the gay people of color who already have Martin Luther King, and don’t need their “own”.
To me, it seems like until the gay community can become ‘unwhite’ and actively look at its own racism, then being gay and a person of color will also be a contradiction, and will always bring up accusation of ‘race traitor’. I have a hard time talking about the ways in which people of color, or specifically, the black culture is homophobic without talking about the specific reasons they have to be, and the specific ways that we white queers perpetuate and create an environment of racism and homophobia.
In his article Bérubé suggests that we, the white gay community, actively talk about being white, that we talk about why we’re at a predominantly white bar, or on an all white panel. He believes that intentionally examining our own whiteness and asking some hard questions about our beliefs, and not just letting our white privilege allow us to not see or talk about race will help create a gay community that is more open and more representative of the actually gay population. I think Bérubé is right. I think we need to start talking about our whiteness, our own racism, our own acts of seclusion. One place to start is by looking at our own classroom.

My Butch Identity

Last week, I really appreciated Esther Newton’s discourse on the butch identity. Although an online Butch-Femme Test calls me androgyne, I still identify as butch, or at least soft butch, and I thought Newton has some really interesting answers to butch questions. I’ve had a hard time thinking about my gender in the past and locating it in a preset category, and I think that Newton’s response to my transgender question really helped me to figure that out. Like Newton, I grew up mostly as one of the boys. I admired my older brother to the point of wearing his clothes, copying his hobbies, and hanging out with his friends (being 6 years old, they weren’t always too willing, though). Today, I wear my own clothes, have my own hobbies, and hang out with my own friends, but my ‘tom-boy’ butch identity mostly remains. I don’t think I’m a hard butch, I mean, I still wear tight jeans on occasion, jackets from the women’s section of REI, and earrings, but I definitely like baggy clothes and power tools. And I like my lesbian identity, and I like being a woman, and I, like Newton, would hate to be a straight man (sorry, straight men).

What Newton mentioned that I hadn’t really thought about before is the idea that the gender queer movement is really eliminating the butch identity. Today, anyone dresses ‘like a man’ or throws off prevalent female stereotypes is supposed to identify as transgender, or at least gender queer, but, as Newton was saying, part of the butch identity, as least for many people, is actually wanting to be a woman, but a butch one.
Of course, like most things, there doesn’t really seem to be a ‘one size fits all label’ that can actually work. Many butches might identify as transgender, etc, etc, but I agree with Newton that the woman-identified butch—at least as an identity—is disappearing, and I think, in many ways, its leaving more and more girls and women confused.