iskierka's blog

I didn’t expect anyone to take notice of my self-portait when Laura Swanson came to visit. A screenshot of a Tumblr customization page, it felt simple, despite the meaning I had given it, but when I spoke with others, they understood what I had meant. Tumblr, like many social media, stands at a peculiar intersection between personal thought and private identity, allowing users to specifically tailor their blogs to express the particular representation they choose at the time. Among women, it has a particular following; as stated by Niels van Doorn’s team: “The traditionally ‘feminine’ act of diary writing…is adopted by both men and women, challenging the traditional understanding of technology and the Internet as masculine territories.” Thus, it allows for a specific niche where users of any gender can express themselves in the manner that they choose. Through Tumblr, when one has the opportunity to match an identity to a real life face, it can express hidden facets of a personality one is unable to share in daily physical contact, allowing a kind of freedom for users using it to get away from their typical life.

I'm still trying to figure out where I stand on this book regarding what it means overall to our main topic. Persepolis, while first and foremost an autobiography, definitely included a gender-based narrative as Marjane grew older. For my part, I couldn't see the same in The Doll's House. Certainly there was a discussion of identity - how the boarders in Rose's home presented themselves to the world versus how they dreamed themselves, in particular. And of course there were the very gendered scenarios, like the story of Dream as told by the tribesmen in the beginning (leaving me wondering how the women's half of the story in their unique language would be told), or like Rose's would-be assault at the hotel. To compare Bornstein and Gaiman, the biggest similarity would be Desire, the genderless 'sister-brother' of Dream who appears in the last few pages. And from what little I know of Desire, this agenderism could be the basis of its own discussion. Why is Desire genderless - perhaps to prove that any gender could seek the same things for whatever motive? Actually, I wonder more if Desire is every gender at once. Dream called Desire 'sister-brother' instead of 'siblings', implied a dual truth in both terms. After Desire, the next most notable example would be Ken and Barbie and their stiffly-gendered dreams. In waking life, they appear almost as a single entity, sharing thoughts and finishing sentences, but in dreams, Ken becomes aggressive and violent (stereotypically male), and Barbie enters an extravagant fairy tale world.

As someone who's been in primarily female-oriented environments for most of my life, it feels strange how relatively recent feminism has been to me. So it was still something of a trial to define it in a group setting. As a group, we quickly established our opinions on Satrapi's Persepolis - its merits and its fault and where each lay - and the process had me questioning what constituted, not feminist values, but feminism as a whole. My personal opinion: a movement of its scale must be for a people, not for a person. A person may figurehead the movement, but they are still one experience among the whole. Therein lies my discomfort with calling autobiographies a feminist genre - they're meant to showcase one particular person, the writer. I do believe the contents can be feminist - they can display their activism, their beliefs, the people who influenced them. The reaction can be feminist - a reader can admire these same traits and use them as an example for how to steer their life. But as autobiographies are so narrow in that they focus only one on experience out of the whole, I do not see them as feminist. Maybe I haven't read enough of them, maybe I haven't read the right ones, but a life story is still the story of a single life. (I am eager to read the piece that changes my mind though.) 

I've gone through waves of extremes, being surrounded by only ciswomen or being the only girl in the area. When I went to a Catholic school intended for girls, I was still too young to understand the fluidity of gender, and thus thought I was weird because, heavens forbid, I hated wearing those silly plaid skirts. When high school broke, I was finally in a co-ed environment, and I had friends from across the spectrum of sexuality, but with three new cousins under my belt, I was the only girl out of five for my grandmother and mother to dote on, and I was hit by an avalanche of 'why can't you be more girly'. But as the years went on, and more and more of my friends came out, I came to realize more of what Kathy Ackerman meant when she opened her essay with the desire to be a pirate. It was unfair to limit oneself to ideas of should and could instead of what lead to inner happiness, instead of exploring ourselves to find what lies within. Pushing ourselves one way or another because someone else says so only leads to inner turmoil.