Identity: Joining, or Formulating?
Here's a snippet from That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class --
Queenie’s perspective seemed to be mostly formed around belonging to an already-existing category that people knew about, while mine on the other hand was all wrapped up in theory, describing myself as belonging to a hypothetical group that I then had to describe.
If I was understanding correctly, all the gay males that Queenie had grown up knowing about painted their nails, wore dresses and skirts and high heels, did their hair, carried handbags and purses, and referred to each other with female pronouns. Or at least except for the ones trying to keep it hidden. That was how you did gay. It wasn’t a thing separate from doing femme.
My first book, GenderQueer, was a story of gradually arriving at a gender identity that wasn't already out there available for me to join, because "genderqueer" wasn't a term or a concept in our society yet.
Guy in Women's Studies on the other hand, mostly is a description of my primary attempt to join, to link up to a community, a culture, a movement. To be a part of. To participate.
Not only was it an era before "genderqueer" was trending, it was also an era before the rise of academic departments and majors called "gender studies" or "women's and gender studies" or "women, gender, and sexuality studies". Instead, what existed were departments of women's studies. That was the main place that gender and biased gender expectations were being discussed, or at least the main place where I, a male, could enroll and attend.
So that's where I went.
I think both modalities have their limitations as well as their strengths. When you seek to join an existing identity, you are to some extent fitting yourself into a pre-existing box. So in the case of gender, here we have people rejecting the notion that they should fit themselves into the gender box that is designated for a person of their physical morphology... but who then look around for a different existing box to move themselves into. I'm serious: I'm in a dozen or more Facebook groups devoted to being gender-variant in assorted ways, and in all of those groups there is a constant trickle of young people coming in to post, "I came out as nonbinary and ace aro when I was 16 but lately I've been wondering if I'm actually demiboy and grey ace or even demisexual? The thing is, I don't know if I can really say I'm a demiboy though since sometimes I like to wear skirts in the summer, and I don't want to be a fake, what do you think?"
So yes, people really are measuring themselves against these identities and then worrying in a way that's at least a little bit like the original friction of measuring one's self against the original imposed binary gender identity that society tried to impose. I mean, yeah, on the one hand, there isn't enormous social pressure to pick that particular box, the way there is with the original pink-and-blue box pair. But on the other hand, these aren't young people who are saying "Well, a good portion of the descriptions of 'demiboy' and 'grey asexual' apply to me, but there are also ways in which I don't fit the assumptions, so whatever, something like that". They're fretting about it. Needing to find an identity, an existing label that fits them like tailored clothing.
To formulate one's own identity definition, of course, rescues one from that sense of perhaps picking the wrong box. But the limits on this side of the divide are all about going it alone, not having any kind of social pre-existing understanding of the kind of person you're claiming to be and having, instead, to explain it all to people. Many of whom may not find it all that interesting to listen to such a complex and detailed self-description. And while the people trying to pick the correct existing box often seem to walk around with an internal doubt, a sort of impostor's syndrome, those of us who have gone around inventing our own labels and identities and spent time trying to live our lives espressing and explaining ourselves in those terms get a lot of external doubt, the dismissive and sometimes hostile attitude of other people that we're fakes, that our identities can't be real because if they were real, why hadn't they heard of such identities before?
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Queenie’s perspective seemed to be mostly formed around belonging to an already-existing category that people knew about, while mine on the other hand was all wrapped up in theory, describing myself as belonging to a hypothetical group that I then had to describe.
If I was understanding correctly, all the gay males that Queenie had grown up knowing about painted their nails, wore dresses and skirts and high heels, did their hair, carried handbags and purses, and referred to each other with female pronouns. Or at least except for the ones trying to keep it hidden. That was how you did gay. It wasn’t a thing separate from doing femme.
My first book, GenderQueer, was a story of gradually arriving at a gender identity that wasn't already out there available for me to join, because "genderqueer" wasn't a term or a concept in our society yet.
Guy in Women's Studies on the other hand, mostly is a description of my primary attempt to join, to link up to a community, a culture, a movement. To be a part of. To participate.
Not only was it an era before "genderqueer" was trending, it was also an era before the rise of academic departments and majors called "gender studies" or "women's and gender studies" or "women, gender, and sexuality studies". Instead, what existed were departments of women's studies. That was the main place that gender and biased gender expectations were being discussed, or at least the main place where I, a male, could enroll and attend.
So that's where I went.
I think both modalities have their limitations as well as their strengths. When you seek to join an existing identity, you are to some extent fitting yourself into a pre-existing box. So in the case of gender, here we have people rejecting the notion that they should fit themselves into the gender box that is designated for a person of their physical morphology... but who then look around for a different existing box to move themselves into. I'm serious: I'm in a dozen or more Facebook groups devoted to being gender-variant in assorted ways, and in all of those groups there is a constant trickle of young people coming in to post, "I came out as nonbinary and ace aro when I was 16 but lately I've been wondering if I'm actually demiboy and grey ace or even demisexual? The thing is, I don't know if I can really say I'm a demiboy though since sometimes I like to wear skirts in the summer, and I don't want to be a fake, what do you think?"
So yes, people really are measuring themselves against these identities and then worrying in a way that's at least a little bit like the original friction of measuring one's self against the original imposed binary gender identity that society tried to impose. I mean, yeah, on the one hand, there isn't enormous social pressure to pick that particular box, the way there is with the original pink-and-blue box pair. But on the other hand, these aren't young people who are saying "Well, a good portion of the descriptions of 'demiboy' and 'grey asexual' apply to me, but there are also ways in which I don't fit the assumptions, so whatever, something like that". They're fretting about it. Needing to find an identity, an existing label that fits them like tailored clothing.
To formulate one's own identity definition, of course, rescues one from that sense of perhaps picking the wrong box. But the limits on this side of the divide are all about going it alone, not having any kind of social pre-existing understanding of the kind of person you're claiming to be and having, instead, to explain it all to people. Many of whom may not find it all that interesting to listen to such a complex and detailed self-description. And while the people trying to pick the correct existing box often seem to walk around with an internal doubt, a sort of impostor's syndrome, those of us who have gone around inventing our own labels and identities and spent time trying to live our lives espressing and explaining ourselves in those terms get a lot of external doubt, the dismissive and sometimes hostile attitude of other people that we're fakes, that our identities can't be real because if they were real, why hadn't they heard of such identities before?
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts