Week 9: Writing and Imagining Gender Outlaw-ry

Kate Bornstein is pretty amazing. I enjoyed the performance a lot, as a performance at least. However, I found that her exaggerated theatricality actually took away from her message most of the time for me. Someone said something interesting in class the other day about how it was actually quite fitting that she was performing/exaggerating because gender is a performance. I think that this is actually a great point. Gender is a performance, and Kate especially has had to experience and perform many different kinds of roles. I guess I probably would have benefitted from going to the conversation on Thursday morning, because then I would have been able to see the side of her which I think was missing from the performance. I guess with someone so interesting I want to see the real  them, not a rehearsed and polished version.

Regardless, I think she's a very talented performer/actress and that her writings, which she read aloud, are beautiful. I was especially touched by the small part of her play which she performed. However, the thing that I most appreciated about Kate and her performance was her honesty. She wasn't standing up there and saying that she used to be confused but now she was perfectly well-adjusted. She came to us as a work in progress. She came to us admitting very difficult things, and told us flat out that she was an anorexic, alcoholic, ex-phone sex operator, and a whole slew of things people try to keep hush-hush. I guess that's why Kate is so revolutionary. She doesn't keep her mouth shut on issues people was to let fade away into the dark. That takes guts. It also makes change happen. Go Kate!

The exercise from Bornstein's Workbook, that we did in class, really intrigued me, because unlike most of the peopl in that class I didn't feel more relax and comfortable with my body but rather frustrated, as we went through the motion of the exercise, I found that my body was getting heavier. Now it might have been because I was sitting on a chair instead of laying on the floor, but when we got to the part where we had to imagine what part of our body we would use, I found the only thing that popped into my head was my brain. But I felt inadequate and disabled when I couldn't think and couldn't function because my mind was not doing anything. I began to feel frustrated, upset, and angry at the fact that the one thing I though would function without it having to change would be the mind, but I was wrong. 

After the exercise I started to think about the probable implications the exercise could have and I finally came up with the solution. I think the reason for my frustration had to deal with who I am in reality. I think that I would like to think that I control my mind but how am I sure. I think the exercise helped me see my mind is still constricted and defined by what we already think we know.

The thing that stayed with me the most after Kate's performance was the piece that she did about her 8^th grade English teacher and the meaning of pronouns. I was struck by the obviousness of the things was pointing out, even though they were precisely the things about which one rarely thinks explicitly. “He” is used universally as the default “neutral” gender – a privilege which “she” has never and will never experience. If he is the default, it’s no wonder that “she” is the break from the expected, the disruption of the norm, the aberrant. Of course, at least “she” is a known radical, one that is still name-able. What happens is the disruption from the norm lacks a name, is neither the expected norm nor the one known radical (something outside of the he-she binary)? If that unnamed radical is so elusive it can’t even be named, then naturally it makes sense for people in our [fill-in-the-blank]-normative society to assume that it cannot possibly exist. It’s not that it’s a deviation from the norm – that’s already been taken care of: spotted, identified, and tagged as a “she” – it’s that its neither the norm nor the deviation from the norm. It’s neither IT nor NOT-IT. Boggles your mind, doesn’t it?

In class Cantaloupe asked something along the lines of "why can't we just do what we feel like and not worry about deconstructing categories?"    I think that is what all of this deconstruction is about; trying to figure out how much of what we want to do is the product of social constructs.  Marcel Duchamp said "You cannot defy convention by being anti-convention. The only way you can defy convention is by ignoring it." So the question is now: can we ignore conventions if we don't fully understand them.  The ovbious answer seems to be yes, of course you can ignore something you don't know about.  But the conventions we don't know about nevertheless shape who we are in major and minor ways.  We are socialized to want to do certain things, to behave in certain ways, to think in certain ways and to feel certain things because of our sex.   Our pleasures and desires are shaped so much by social constructions.  I don't know if it is ever possible to deconstruct these fully for ourselves.  I think for the future what we can do is change the way socialization occurs so that possibilities are framed by gender neutrality.

For me, it seems that the only way to do what I feel is through self examination.  I am trying to think about why I want the things I want to figure out whether I really want them even though I dont know if there is really a me...  All of this is so complicated and I don't think there are really any answers...I guess we just have to keep questioning, keep imagining ourselves on that shapeshifting planet.

Here is a funny little animation that makes me think about gender outlaw-ry and about bodies that don't fit in......... WARNING It might one of the (many) things that I think is funny and others think is totally inappropriate/really, really weird... (sorry)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOmyebFVV8