burning man & gender cues
I've actually been intending to make a Burning Man-reaction post for a while now. As a bonus, you'll get a little more meandering about gender.
Now that it's well after the burn, there are two aspects of it that stick in my head. The first: the most fun thing I can do there is just hanging out in Center Camp, teaching people to contact juggle, learning new tricks, learning from the staff/poi people, and just enjoying the atmosphere there. Contact juggling is a great ice breaker. People start watching, and then I can ask them if they want to learn. (Hi mzrowan!)In other contexts at Burning Man, it just feels difficult to start interesting conversations. Once I started talking to someone about contact juggling, it was much easier to go off on whatever other topics people were interested in. There are also other beautiful things happening, like two people just coming up with new idea after new idea for a fire staff duet, and how everyone around was contributing--I've heard ideas compared to sparks before, but that situation was one of the few times it really felt like an accurate metaphor for what was going on.
Hmm, I need to practice contact juggling more. I keep saying I should start a night, though now that it's not summer location becomes a harder question. I'm told that there's some kind of silk thing at Spontaneous Celebrations on Wednesdays that would take kindly to a wandering juggler?
The other thing that sticks in my mind about Burning Man relates to gender. The way people present there, there are fewer societal limits on gendered expression, at least fashion-wise. People of all genders go around wearing petticoats, or shiny shirts, or no shirt, or whatever they want. Sounds like a utopia for a gender-strange person like me, no?
It just drove home that it is not that simple. When people present how they want regardless of gender, they look more at other people's bodies when deciding how to behave towards them. I noticed that, even when dressed fairly femme, I would get some people treating me more as a male than I generally do in Camberville with my day-to-day presentation. (though this could partially be due to a different culture in the bay area from the one I mostly interact with in Camberville) (though some people, it seems, still got it--it strikes me that these circumstances are where the subtler of gender cues from normal society might actually be useful--people are less likely to do them as deliberate transgressions of default society. More on kinds of gender cues in a bit.)
I used to think I was searching for a society where there were fewer rules about how one presented oneself based on one's gender. So what do I want? Perhaps I want a society where people make fewer assumptions about others' genders. At least, based on body. There's this tension, though--I do think that people should be allowed to present however they want, regardless of their gender, but that decreases the utility of presentation as a communication tool. Perhaps I don't know exactly what I want from society in this case.
On gender cues (I am using outward-appearance examples, though the same discussion probably applies to behavioral): It seems to me there are two main kinds of them. There are "primary" ones, that are sufficient to put a person in a binary category of how they are at least read as *trying* to present (though they can still be read as failing, of course). Examples: most skirts, most makeup, beards. Breasts are perhaps another example, though they are less controllable than the others, so they tend to be read more as a gender signifier by people who are more used to assuming everyone is cis. For great genderfuck, sport more than one of these, conflicting, at a time. The other kind are the subtler ones. They're things that reinforce a gender presentation, but don't immediately lock one into one of the binary genders alone. These are things like baseball caps, hair length, hair style (ex. high vs. low ponytails), the cut of most clothing, nail polish.
With my own current presentation, I tend to go for the subtler cues, in the femme direction, in the hopes that these will set off the body traits that I can't (or would require hormones to, which I'm not sure whether I want) change. I tend to avoid both kinds of masculine cues however much I can, but my body does make that difficult sometimes. Every once in a while, I'll go for some of the "primary" feminine cues, though I am still somewhat scared of doing that at work.
I'm still figuring out what works for me, though. I'll keep getting closer. Who knows, someday I may find a destination.
On the health front: recovering from surgery has been going well, though I am trying not to push myself too hard.
Now that it's well after the burn, there are two aspects of it that stick in my head. The first: the most fun thing I can do there is just hanging out in Center Camp, teaching people to contact juggle, learning new tricks, learning from the staff/poi people, and just enjoying the atmosphere there. Contact juggling is a great ice breaker. People start watching, and then I can ask them if they want to learn. (Hi mzrowan!)In other contexts at Burning Man, it just feels difficult to start interesting conversations. Once I started talking to someone about contact juggling, it was much easier to go off on whatever other topics people were interested in. There are also other beautiful things happening, like two people just coming up with new idea after new idea for a fire staff duet, and how everyone around was contributing--I've heard ideas compared to sparks before, but that situation was one of the few times it really felt like an accurate metaphor for what was going on.
Hmm, I need to practice contact juggling more. I keep saying I should start a night, though now that it's not summer location becomes a harder question. I'm told that there's some kind of silk thing at Spontaneous Celebrations on Wednesdays that would take kindly to a wandering juggler?
The other thing that sticks in my mind about Burning Man relates to gender. The way people present there, there are fewer societal limits on gendered expression, at least fashion-wise. People of all genders go around wearing petticoats, or shiny shirts, or no shirt, or whatever they want. Sounds like a utopia for a gender-strange person like me, no?
It just drove home that it is not that simple. When people present how they want regardless of gender, they look more at other people's bodies when deciding how to behave towards them. I noticed that, even when dressed fairly femme, I would get some people treating me more as a male than I generally do in Camberville with my day-to-day presentation. (though this could partially be due to a different culture in the bay area from the one I mostly interact with in Camberville) (though some people, it seems, still got it--it strikes me that these circumstances are where the subtler of gender cues from normal society might actually be useful--people are less likely to do them as deliberate transgressions of default society. More on kinds of gender cues in a bit.)
I used to think I was searching for a society where there were fewer rules about how one presented oneself based on one's gender. So what do I want? Perhaps I want a society where people make fewer assumptions about others' genders. At least, based on body. There's this tension, though--I do think that people should be allowed to present however they want, regardless of their gender, but that decreases the utility of presentation as a communication tool. Perhaps I don't know exactly what I want from society in this case.
On gender cues (I am using outward-appearance examples, though the same discussion probably applies to behavioral): It seems to me there are two main kinds of them. There are "primary" ones, that are sufficient to put a person in a binary category of how they are at least read as *trying* to present (though they can still be read as failing, of course). Examples: most skirts, most makeup, beards. Breasts are perhaps another example, though they are less controllable than the others, so they tend to be read more as a gender signifier by people who are more used to assuming everyone is cis. For great genderfuck, sport more than one of these, conflicting, at a time. The other kind are the subtler ones. They're things that reinforce a gender presentation, but don't immediately lock one into one of the binary genders alone. These are things like baseball caps, hair length, hair style (ex. high vs. low ponytails), the cut of most clothing, nail polish.
With my own current presentation, I tend to go for the subtler cues, in the femme direction, in the hopes that these will set off the body traits that I can't (or would require hormones to, which I'm not sure whether I want) change. I tend to avoid both kinds of masculine cues however much I can, but my body does make that difficult sometimes. Every once in a while, I'll go for some of the "primary" feminine cues, though I am still somewhat scared of doing that at work.
I'm still figuring out what works for me, though. I'll keep getting closer. Who knows, someday I may find a destination.
On the health front: recovering from surgery has been going well, though I am trying not to push myself too hard.