Plumbing
When I was a graduate student, I lived in a communal house with a bunch of other folks, each of us renting a room and sharing the common space such as kitchen and laundry and living room.
There was one resident I didn't get along with particularly well. He addressed me dismissively, with a smug contempt for my bookish ways. I think he considered me arrogant and pretentious. His nickname was 'Taxi' because he had once been a cab driver.
One fall, we started having problems with the washing machine. During the part of the routine where it would pump out the water from the wash or rinse cycle, the plumbing suddenly couldn't handle the water fast enough and it would back up and splash all over the floor. The drainage system was ancient and primitive: the drain pipes went into the ground and spread out in a fan with holes to let the water out into the soil, no sump, no generalized septic tank. (Water from toilets did get routed to a septic tank but everything else was expected to be slurped up by the sand).
I could visualize what we needed, in the abstract, and told the others in our household. "What we need", I told them, "is some kind of reservoir vessel with an opening in the top to let the water flow in from the pipe, wide enough and deep enough to hold all the water that was in the washing machine, with a drain at the bottom that goes on out to the regular drainage system. So when it backs up, it just fills the reservoir, which holds it until it can drain away at its own speed".
Taxi scoffed. "No. We buy a big sink from the hardware place and put it next to the washer and the drain connects to the bottom of the sink. Stick the hose from the washing machine over the lip of the sink and wire it to secure it".
Taxi was a person who thinks in the concrete and pragmatic; he may not have even seen that the sink he was suggesting was a match for the reservoir vessel I'd conjured up in the abstract. To my chagrin, I realized he'd not only proposed something that would solve the immediate problem of soapy water splooshing all over our floor and leaving us with a mess, but had also found a way of giving us an additional useful device in the process: items could be hand-washed in the sink. I had been visualizing something like one of those big plastic buckets like spackling compound comes in, with the existing hose coming in through an opening in the top and a hole being cut in the lower rim or the bottom and a second hose somehow cemented in place, and the entire contraption needing to be secured somehow in mid-air, and considering and rejecting a wide range of materials to pull all this together. Practical and pragmatic has never been my strong side, I'm afraid. His sink idea, I had to admit, was an unbeatable solution.
I found the whole situation very irritating.
One problem I have with pragmatism is that it often means perceiving the world in its current form as "the world you have to live in" and doesn't leave much space for visualizing the world as it should be. It doesn't have to have that effect -- there's a definite pragmatic and practical element in inventing things and creating strategies for change. But as a mindset, the type of thinking that is dismissive of abstract thought and concentrates on the importance of the here and now and the solid and the immediately available is a type of thinking that's prone to being dismissive of any notions about changes to the big picture.
Gender is an abstraction. Madison Bently, first person to use "gender" in the modern sense, defined it as "the social obverse of sex". An obverse is the front side of something, hence the outward-facing front of sex. It's the beliefs, understandings, roles, behaviors, personality traits, feelings, archetypes, nuances, priorities, values, charisma, and all the other stuff that humans attach to the bare fact of a person's biological plumbing. More to the point, calling it gender and distinguishing it from the plumbing itself is a recognition of the fact that the stuff we associate with having a penis or having a vagina isn't directly and inevitably a consequence of it. Some of our notions about how the folks who sport a clitoris and labia are inaccurate, wrong, biased, factually incorrect. And some of our other notions are only accurate as a generalization, so having that particular biological configuration doesn't mean having all the associated gender traits.
But for the overly pragmatic, parts is parts. You either got this type of plumbing or you got that type of plumbing. And yeah, beliefs are out there, they exist as things that are real, too, and you can be this way or that way but the world's gonna be this way or that way about it when you do, so that's part of the real world you should take into account. You wanna go against the current, sail against the wind, you should not expect to get very far very fast. That's the pragmatic truth.
Visionary idealism, the mental construction of the world as it really ought to be, depends on a clean slate with preconceived notions bracketed off as much as possible. When it comes time to consider tactics for actually changing to world to make these visions come to fruition, it is necessary to bring back in all the awarenesses that we bracketed off, to examine the real and to study it in detail. But while it's in the foreground of your thoughts, you'll have a difficult time imagining how it could be any different, or assessing within yourself what feels like the natural way for things to be in the absence of pressures pushing you and everything else into different forms.
I do talk with big words, and I write in long sentences and long paragraphs. Putting abstract thought into words is an art form and a challenge. These are not points that are easy to make to people in short choppy sentences and phrases. Our language is utilitarian, reflecting the inherent nature of concrete things, which are self-evidently what they appear to be. Tree. Rock. Knee. Eat. Sleep. Sex. The terms for abstractions tend to be longer words, words we use less often, and they tend to be more vague in their meaning, requiring the use of a bunch of them when one is painting a verbal picture. Ambivalently conflictual relationships. Internalized self-image. Projected and eroticized expectations of gender performance. Patriarchal hegemonic subject-object oppositional dynamics. Etc.
I don't do it to show off my vocabulary or impress people with how erudite I sound. I do it to communicate. To paint the right picture, so that it makes sense. (I'll admit to the ego factor: I do think I'm kind of good at it).
If you only want to converse in sentences that could fit on a bumper sticker, you leave yourself open to hostile reverse-snobby people who like to characterize us as delusional people who think our plumbing doesn't count and who want the world to go along with our delusions. In a limited space and with short attention span, they can claim they make sense and you don't.
-----
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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There was one resident I didn't get along with particularly well. He addressed me dismissively, with a smug contempt for my bookish ways. I think he considered me arrogant and pretentious. His nickname was 'Taxi' because he had once been a cab driver.
One fall, we started having problems with the washing machine. During the part of the routine where it would pump out the water from the wash or rinse cycle, the plumbing suddenly couldn't handle the water fast enough and it would back up and splash all over the floor. The drainage system was ancient and primitive: the drain pipes went into the ground and spread out in a fan with holes to let the water out into the soil, no sump, no generalized septic tank. (Water from toilets did get routed to a septic tank but everything else was expected to be slurped up by the sand).
I could visualize what we needed, in the abstract, and told the others in our household. "What we need", I told them, "is some kind of reservoir vessel with an opening in the top to let the water flow in from the pipe, wide enough and deep enough to hold all the water that was in the washing machine, with a drain at the bottom that goes on out to the regular drainage system. So when it backs up, it just fills the reservoir, which holds it until it can drain away at its own speed".
Taxi scoffed. "No. We buy a big sink from the hardware place and put it next to the washer and the drain connects to the bottom of the sink. Stick the hose from the washing machine over the lip of the sink and wire it to secure it".
Taxi was a person who thinks in the concrete and pragmatic; he may not have even seen that the sink he was suggesting was a match for the reservoir vessel I'd conjured up in the abstract. To my chagrin, I realized he'd not only proposed something that would solve the immediate problem of soapy water splooshing all over our floor and leaving us with a mess, but had also found a way of giving us an additional useful device in the process: items could be hand-washed in the sink. I had been visualizing something like one of those big plastic buckets like spackling compound comes in, with the existing hose coming in through an opening in the top and a hole being cut in the lower rim or the bottom and a second hose somehow cemented in place, and the entire contraption needing to be secured somehow in mid-air, and considering and rejecting a wide range of materials to pull all this together. Practical and pragmatic has never been my strong side, I'm afraid. His sink idea, I had to admit, was an unbeatable solution.
I found the whole situation very irritating.
One problem I have with pragmatism is that it often means perceiving the world in its current form as "the world you have to live in" and doesn't leave much space for visualizing the world as it should be. It doesn't have to have that effect -- there's a definite pragmatic and practical element in inventing things and creating strategies for change. But as a mindset, the type of thinking that is dismissive of abstract thought and concentrates on the importance of the here and now and the solid and the immediately available is a type of thinking that's prone to being dismissive of any notions about changes to the big picture.
Gender is an abstraction. Madison Bently, first person to use "gender" in the modern sense, defined it as "the social obverse of sex". An obverse is the front side of something, hence the outward-facing front of sex. It's the beliefs, understandings, roles, behaviors, personality traits, feelings, archetypes, nuances, priorities, values, charisma, and all the other stuff that humans attach to the bare fact of a person's biological plumbing. More to the point, calling it gender and distinguishing it from the plumbing itself is a recognition of the fact that the stuff we associate with having a penis or having a vagina isn't directly and inevitably a consequence of it. Some of our notions about how the folks who sport a clitoris and labia are inaccurate, wrong, biased, factually incorrect. And some of our other notions are only accurate as a generalization, so having that particular biological configuration doesn't mean having all the associated gender traits.
But for the overly pragmatic, parts is parts. You either got this type of plumbing or you got that type of plumbing. And yeah, beliefs are out there, they exist as things that are real, too, and you can be this way or that way but the world's gonna be this way or that way about it when you do, so that's part of the real world you should take into account. You wanna go against the current, sail against the wind, you should not expect to get very far very fast. That's the pragmatic truth.
Visionary idealism, the mental construction of the world as it really ought to be, depends on a clean slate with preconceived notions bracketed off as much as possible. When it comes time to consider tactics for actually changing to world to make these visions come to fruition, it is necessary to bring back in all the awarenesses that we bracketed off, to examine the real and to study it in detail. But while it's in the foreground of your thoughts, you'll have a difficult time imagining how it could be any different, or assessing within yourself what feels like the natural way for things to be in the absence of pressures pushing you and everything else into different forms.
I do talk with big words, and I write in long sentences and long paragraphs. Putting abstract thought into words is an art form and a challenge. These are not points that are easy to make to people in short choppy sentences and phrases. Our language is utilitarian, reflecting the inherent nature of concrete things, which are self-evidently what they appear to be. Tree. Rock. Knee. Eat. Sleep. Sex. The terms for abstractions tend to be longer words, words we use less often, and they tend to be more vague in their meaning, requiring the use of a bunch of them when one is painting a verbal picture. Ambivalently conflictual relationships. Internalized self-image. Projected and eroticized expectations of gender performance. Patriarchal hegemonic subject-object oppositional dynamics. Etc.
I don't do it to show off my vocabulary or impress people with how erudite I sound. I do it to communicate. To paint the right picture, so that it makes sense. (I'll admit to the ego factor: I do think I'm kind of good at it).
If you only want to converse in sentences that could fit on a bumper sticker, you leave yourself open to hostile reverse-snobby people who like to characterize us as delusional people who think our plumbing doesn't count and who want the world to go along with our delusions. In a limited space and with short attention span, they can claim they make sense and you don't.
-----
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