All the local Rainbow grocery stores are plastered with posters for the Cops on Top fundraiser. On our way out, Mister Anti-Authoritarian said, “I wish the cops would stay on top of the rainbow.” And right then, I was reminded of Officer Andy.

The venerable institutions for which I slung pizza followed the usual restaurant policy of feeding policemen for free. (At that time — the early-mid 90s — I don’t believe there were any female cops in the city. If there were, they weren't in my areas.) Lots of cops were regulars, but the small queer contingent was even more regular at our establishment. Family feeds family, after all. Among them was Officer Andy, who was smart, sweet, and very, very hot. He looked like a 50's recruitment poster of the Ideal Policeman: tall, slim, black hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Not too tall, not too short. Not too fat, not too thin. Just right. Needless to say, our guys loved a man in uniform.

The trouble was, Andy himself wasn’t particularly fond of his uniform. So one day, he up and quit the force. After a brief period of reflection, he launched a second career as Officer Andy the Avon Lady and built a substantial clientele among the drag community in the city. In fairly short order, he was doing far better than he ever did as a cop. The last I saw him was years ago in the University bookstore, where he was buying a stack of textbooks for his much-younger boyfriend.

Posted at 10:28 PM | Permalink

I'd post a rant about Bush's statements against queer marriages, but Peggy said it better than I could. Go read.

Update: George wonders if the Constitution's current draft permits queer marriage. Plus: Does his penis go with him when he dies? Will he at least get a nice clutch purse to carry it in?

Posted at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This makes me so incredibly happy.

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Flowers for Al and Don is sending flowers to random queer couples waiting in line to be married in San Francisco. What a wonderful and worthy idea.

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Akma on either/or, both/and, both/but.

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Those of you who don't read Kiri really should. She's always got good stuff over there, but she's been on a roll lately with color and contemplations of self-image. I never do Big Link Love like this, but I had to have this piece on my own blog. Just for a little while.

Posted at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Twelve Frogs excerpted an article from Arts & Letters Daily that I somehow missed: Singular They: The Pronoun That Came In From the Cold. I'm still vastly interested in this topic, even though I haven't written anything about it in forever now. I used to think about it quite a bit, here and here and here. The last one is my favorite, because that's where stonefishspine pointed out to me that "ya'll" is the perfect singular they.

I'm a bit sad that my thesis won't be on a queer topic, but I've become so interested in the concept of an intellectual commons and how it might work, and I already have about 30 pages of work in that area. So it just seems like the thing to do. Still, it's important to keep talking about queerness and inclusiveness in speech. I hadn't seen anything on it lately, and I'm glad to see that the topic is still being bandied about out there.

Posted at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My comments have been graced by the Happy Tutor! He had quite a lot to say, but I was most interested in this, which comes from both comments and private email:

Sadly, I am afraid that Queer, Bi, Trans, and S/M and Bondage are marketing categories. As an exercise, cruise about the net and compile the cost of an ideal weekend, with appropriate venue and props for each sexual peccadillo.

The gay lifestyle, the lifestyle of the rich and famous, the lifestyle of the bookish, bondage as a lifestyle. What does this amount to other than a consumer identity? A way of life into which goods and services are sold as props and accessories? To think of it as a site of resistance seems 30 years out of date. Tell me about your lifestyle, and I will send you to the right department in our store. […]

Why not ask what it is that we all have in common that might enable us to unite under a common banner for common decency? That used to be called "Universalism," "Glassy Essence," "Human Right," "Nature," "Natural law." What say you?

I don't pretend to have anywhere near the amount of knowledge the Tutor does on the topics of marketing and consumerism. I haven't devoted the time or work to understanding it that he has, and my reading on these subjects is peripheral. But I do have some background in queer theory and queer life, and I'd like to respond from that angle. This will be a two-parter, for reasons of both space and time. Here we go:

The First Part: Queer-As-Marketing-Demographic
It's easy to see how someone might conclude that queerness is all about the accessories. And it can be - the same way that anything at all can, assuming one buys into the trappings. The individual is always free to determine his or her own level of consumerism. For instance, I suppose I could be called "bookish." But my books are paperbacks (some new, some secondhand), and my bookshelves are mostly scavenged from my parents' house. There are precious few hardbacks around here, and no leatherbound editions, no carved oak bookcases. I would rather put my money into my mind by purchasing more material to read. I could spend even less by using boards and cinderblocks and going to the library, but paperbacks and secondhand bookcases are where my level of comfort lies. Likewise, I've never felt the need to literally buy into queer culture. The only queer accessory I ever remember purchasing was a t-shirt with a tiny pride logo on it. I bought it because when I waitressed in it at the queer-owned restaurant where I worked, my tips went up. It was a purchase born purely of capitalist greed, or of blue-collar necessity. Whichever. I've always been of the opinion that I am fundamentally a person, regardless of gender or sexuality, and therefore I wear people-clothes and do people-things. I'm a bit anti-social, and like Groucho Marx, am suspicious of any group that would have me as a member. It's just the way I am.

At the other end of the spectrum are the folks I call hobby-queers. These are the people who find being queer fascinating, and who dedicate themselves to it. Most of them (although not all) seem to feel that they need a certain number of accessories in order to effectively "live the life." Those would be the ones who festoon their cars with rainbow paraphernalia and make annual reservations for Gay Days, where they tote their copies of Out and deluxe edition Queer as Folk DVDs in their official pink triangle bags. Ain't nothing wrong with that, but it never did appeal to me.

It's true that some forms of queerness require accessories by sheer definition. Being a transvestite can be accessory-heavy or not, depending on your level of commitment. If you're passing every day, then you only need one set of clothes. If you're a more occasional trannie, then you'll need two wardrobes. But the transvestite consumer still gets to decide how much money s/he is willing to invest in these wardrobes. The transsexual, though, is required to purchase the ultimate expensive accessory - a new set of nether regions does set one back a hefty (and non-negotiable) sum.

Last categories: B/D and S/M. Again, it depends on the consumer - some folks visit the hardware store, some visit the local Pleasure Chest. I got out of this one easy, since the practices don't really appeal to me, but I can't help but observe that people do tend to want to upgrade in their hobbies (and to want the right tool for the job.) For instance: do you feel that Blogger is adequate to your needs, or are you running MT on your very own domain?

Continue reading "queer as accessory?" »

Posted at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's another part of the queering pronouns project I've been intermittently working on. This bit deals with pronouns and face. For those of you who aren't Rhetoric Nerds, "face" is defined as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact.” It's a colloquial term as well as a Rhet Nerd one, though: think about the last time someone you knew "saved face" or "lost face" in a situation. It's that sort of deal.

Anyway, here 'tis:

The pronoun is such a small thing - that tiny piece of language that lets us move through the world, that bit of identity that assures our place within the accepted gender binary. “He” and “she” are a priori for most of us, tags given and accepted without a second thought. Most consider them only as a function of grammar: “any of a small set of words in a language that are used as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and whose referents are named or understood in the context.” (emphasis mine, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.) But what if your gender is constructed rather than given, the result of not only a second thought but of life-long deliberation? What if you cross that surgical line, and assume a gender identity that is no longer “understood in the context” by normative society? What if the affirmation of your identity, your face, hung on another’s use of pronouns? That bit of grammar becomes a constant indicator of the success or failure of your identity.

If one cannot be easily slotted into a normative gender convention, then face is lost. According to Goffman, “a person may be said to be in wrong face when information is brought forth in some way about his social worth which cannot be integrated, even with effort, into the line that is being sustained for him” (Jaworski and Coupland, 307). If the information “brought forth” indicates your gender to be one other than the one you desire to perform, and your audience comments on this information, then face is inevitably lost. Kate Bornstein, a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual activist, was born Albert Bornstein. She underwent a full transformation in her thirties and for a time identified exclusively as female, although she now describes herself as living “beyond gender.” At the time she wrote Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, she still identified as female and was very invested in living up to the female face that she had adopted. In that book, she relates a conversation with an acquaintance that involved pronoun use and loss of face:

“…someone I knew only peripherally came over to my house on an errand – he was with an ex-lover of mine. In casual conversation, he slipped on a pronoun and referred to me as ‘he’.

“Let me tell you what happened, the way it looked from inside my head. The world slowed down, like it does in the movies when someone is getting shot and the filmmaker wants you to feel every bullet enter your body. The words echoed in my ears over and over and over. Attached to that simple pronoun was the word failure, quickly followed by the word freak. All the joy sucked out of my life in that instant, and every moment I’d ever fucked up crashed down on my head. Here was someone who’d never known me as a man, referring to me as a man. Instead of saying or doing anything, I shut down and was polite to him for the rest of the time he was in my house.

“Now, here’s the telling point: all three of us were aware of that slip, and none of us said anything. … We all knew he’d slipped on a pronoun, and none of us said anything – not a giggle, not an ‘oops,’ not one comment. Each of us was far too embarrassed to say anything ‘til the next day.”

Gender Outlaw, 126

As briefly discussed earlier, face relies on audience, and audience is linked to community. An utterance that can be chalked up to ignorance in one community becomes a terrible faux pas in another. If a speaker is from a known sympathetic community, then I would argue that all participants typically feel more comfortable and less concerned about face. This necessarily makes the sudden, unexpected loss of face even more traumatic. In this case, the participant who slipped on his pronouns was a trained sex worker who specialized in working with gender minorities. As a member of a sympathetic community he was assumed to know better, and did, but slipped anyway.
Goffman notes that participants are invested not only in maintenance of their own face but also the face of others in the conversation (Jaworski and Coupland, 308). This is evident in Bornstein’s assertion that “Each of us was far too embarrassed… .” The speaker would have been embarrassed to have caused another participant to be in wrong face, and he would also have felt that he himself had lost face as a community member by making this pronoun choice.

The loss of face to both the speaker and Bornstein was so severe that none of the participants felt able to attempt immediate verbal face-work. Their only social salvation was poise. Goffman defines poise as “the capacity to suppress and conceal any tendency to become shamefaced during encounters with others.” In Bornstein’s recounting of the event, it certainly seems that this was the social skill that she fell back on: “Instead of doing or saying anything, I shut down and was polite to him for the rest of the time he was in my house” (Bornstein, 126). In this way, she was able to save face.

Posted at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

These are just a few excerpts from Small Pieces Loosely Joined that I wanted to preserve here for my research purposes.

BODIES AND THE WEB:
“Our idea of knowledge, however, has consistently moved away from the truths of the body. Knowledge, our tradition of thought tells us, is universal, dispassionate, eternal and objective – exactly what bodies are not. The truths of the body are even taken to be the enemies of knowledge. This basic stance comes with the Greek origins of knowledge: we need the discipline of knowledge because bodily perception can be misleading. Knowing has ever since struck us as a pursuit for ascetics, virgin professors, and nerds uncomfortable in their own skins. Knowing, we’ve come to believe, is the type of things that a machine – a computer, or a robot – might do. And it is no accident that the voices of authority that try to shut us up – whether a bad government, a bad teacher, or a bad boss – do so by implicitly claiming to be ‘realistic,’ a code word for the claim that the authority sees the world more ‘objectively’ and without the ‘distortions’ of perspective and interest.
“It would be ironic, then, if the Web, a world our bodies cannot enter, were to return knowledge to the truths of the body: tied to an individual, oriented by a particular viewpoint, rooted in passion (139).”

COMP AND THE WEB:
“Nevertheless, the Web’s character comes from text, and that’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future. Words build the place in which the other forms of media are embedded. Words are the stuff of the Web.
“Words impart their nature to the Web. Although words are pineal, they aren’t mainly physical and ‘merely’ meaningful. Quite the contrary. They can be words only because they are units of meaning … Words have always built worlds, just as they build the Web (164).”. More on page 165 that is too long to type.

MISC.
“On the Web, there’s only passion, words, and the presence of others, in grand, shifting, ineffably messy relationships. … The virtual world of the Web exposes more clearly the truth of our everyday lives (171).”

Posted at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have gotten so tired of happening upon articles about "Queering Whatever." These used to be sort of pertinent - I remember "Queering Democracy," for instance. I'm as much for queer visibility as anyone, but I have two problems with this: 1) I think people are pretty much just people, regardless of orientation, race or creed, and 2) "queering" has become a buzzword, one of the memes that Baldur's been carrying on about. I swear to God, I fully expect to see articles on "Queering Bronchitis" or "Queering Ring Tones" next. Somewhere out there must be a piece on "Queering the Web," but I hope never to lay eyes on it. One of the things I've always valued about the web is its possibilities for genderlessness.

So of course I was discussing future joint presentation topics with a professor, and we got to talking about androgyny in the context of web classes. I've been contemplating that, and wondering how much bodies play into the web at all, while reading Weinberger. These passages suddenly became pertinent:

"We are showing one another how the world looks from our perspective - a truth of the body. We are doing so because we care about the world and our place in it - a truth of the body. We are doing so with the urgency of passion - a truth of the body.

"We never escaped these obvious truths of the body. How could we? We may ignore them at times because that lets us achieve the goals of science or even because it lets us lord it over others, but science and petty oppression are still realized through embodied people in a world of intelligent bodies. In a truly ironic way, the bodiless Web reminds us of the bodily truths we have always lived" (142).

"The Web is a written world. ... The knowledge worth listening to - that is worth developing together - comes from bodies, for only bodies (as far as we can tell) are capable of passionate attention, and only embodied creatures, their brains and sinews swaddled in fat and covered with skin, can write the truth in a way worth reading. The bodiless Web is fat with embodied knowledge that could only come from the particular people - smart, wise, opinionated, funny, provocative, outrageous, interestingly wrong - to whom we're listening" (145).

Obviously, some of these particular people -these bodies - are queer. That would make the web, my beloved bastion of androgyny, queer. So maybe this does have a bearing on things after all. Must contemplate.

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Posted at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Scott linked an old post of his in my comments the other day, and everyone who hasn't already read it should go look at his rant on Southerness. I thought it was hilarious, but what really interested me was a comment stonefishspine left there:

The beauty of y'all is its gender neutrality. Most of my northern friends use the phrase "you guys." The South has long realized that women also exist (though, granted, we Southerners have not always been at the forefront of suffrage and feminism).

I have always found it interesting that most Southern expressions of that type are inclusive. Besides y'all, a number of areas use you-uns (you ones) -- again, gender neutral. I'm not certain of the reason, linguistically, this occurs in the South, but I've always found it fascinating.

Posted at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I got a slap on the hand today from a professor I teach with because he didn't like my use of s/he as a pronoun. Should one be inclusive or should one strive to remove clunkiness? He thinks the latter. I think both. S/he is far more streamlined than the awful he/she, his/her bit. It didn't seem worth it at the time to get into a discussion about nonbinary pronouns - zie and vir, for instance. Those are the pronouns that would either denote all-inclusive-genderlessness or a third gender, depending on who you talk to.

I've been trying to forget about pronouns lately, since I spent a lot of last semester thinking about them in Queer Theory and Language Theory, and ended up with a paper that was (mostly) about queering pronouns. Despite that spate of overkill, the more I contemplate the topic the more interesting it is to me. Not to most normal people, though, as evidenced by the following exchange:

"Hey, what are you working on these days?"
"Well, there's this paper on queering pronouns..."
"Pronouns? Why? What can you say about that? Hey, look at that bird."

Anyway, here's a bit of what I'm thinking about:

The future of gender pronouns is hazy, and has been in question since the early feminist movement first began to question the use of “he” as a universal pronoun indicative of mankind as a whole. Since then, we've seen the advent of “his/her” and “s/he” as alternatives. But these are still hegemonic references to the traditional gender binary; what alternatives are available for transpeople?

Continue reading "He/She/Zie" »

Posted at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (2)