(no subject)
I spent Saturday evening surrounded by people telling me how much they like me. I can heartily recommend this as a way to spend a Saturday. It's taken me a while to genuinely internalise the fact that this is not simple politeness, I'm actually genuinely wanted there. So I'm totally overwhelmed by the derby love.
Ranty conversations with the Butchfemmetrans crowd and notes for later thought.
I started by thinking that sexuality and gender identity were completely separate. Then I decided that gender identity informs sexuality be defining one's attraction to a given person as heterosexual or homosexual. Lately I've been thinking that modes or affection, that is to say the ways in which we demonstrate affection, are strongly gendered. So body language that says you're attracted to someone also declares what gender you are and, in many cases, what gender the person you're attracted to is. I do wonder if sexuality is, to a certain extent, determined by the modes of affection that you feel comfortable demonstrating in as much that you want your partner to be receptive to your affection.
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Being socially privileged and experiencing discrimination due to a lack of that social privilege are viewpoints that can be mutually exclusive to the extent of being totally outside of the experience of each other. Harassment due to gender, race, sexuality and so on can literally be invisible to someone who neither experiences it nor perpetuates it because it's not something that they ever see. If our language lacks terms to describe that situation well then the person experiencing it moulds language to that situation as best they can but because the recipient of that description already has set ideas about what that language means, they receive a distorted impression of what is being said to them. There's a lot of dialogue that takes a great deal of repetition and negotiation before consensus is reached on what is actually being said and a broader understanding of the concepts involved is achieved.
Ranty conversations with the Butchfemmetrans crowd and notes for later thought.
I started by thinking that sexuality and gender identity were completely separate. Then I decided that gender identity informs sexuality be defining one's attraction to a given person as heterosexual or homosexual. Lately I've been thinking that modes or affection, that is to say the ways in which we demonstrate affection, are strongly gendered. So body language that says you're attracted to someone also declares what gender you are and, in many cases, what gender the person you're attracted to is. I do wonder if sexuality is, to a certain extent, determined by the modes of affection that you feel comfortable demonstrating in as much that you want your partner to be receptive to your affection.
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Being socially privileged and experiencing discrimination due to a lack of that social privilege are viewpoints that can be mutually exclusive to the extent of being totally outside of the experience of each other. Harassment due to gender, race, sexuality and so on can literally be invisible to someone who neither experiences it nor perpetuates it because it's not something that they ever see. If our language lacks terms to describe that situation well then the person experiencing it moulds language to that situation as best they can but because the recipient of that description already has set ideas about what that language means, they receive a distorted impression of what is being said to them. There's a lot of dialogue that takes a great deal of repetition and negotiation before consensus is reached on what is actually being said and a broader understanding of the concepts involved is achieved.