I really like your metaphor. I'm pretty uncomfortable with trying to police anybody else's sexual identity, though, so I think it's generally best just to take them at their word. If this JoAnn Loulan person says she's a lesbian, who I am to argue with her? I can actually see why, if she's 99.9 percent attracted to women, she would keep the lesbian identification, even while she's fucking the .01 percent of the male population that appeals to her. Especially if she was deeply involved in the lesbian community, and being lesbian is a big part of her self-image. To use your metaphor, if she's been a model resident of Lesbia all these years, it seems unfair for the bureaucrats to revoke her citizenship now.
It's difficult especially for women of Loulan's generation, whose lesbian identity was about so much more than being emotionally, sexually and romantically attracted to women. Being a lesbian was about making a commitment to women as a people and to lesbians as volunteer members of a purely feminist culture. Lesbian feminism was about rejecting the compromises implied by alliances with men (and non-lesbians). If Loulan has spent all these years being true to herself and to her politics, finding herself wanting to commit herself in marriage to a man does call her life's work into question, in part because lesbian feminism was about choosing women, especially other lesbians, and rejecting the privileges of heterosexual partnership. Now, I don't really get to make a call on any of this, being a lifelong fence-sitter myself, but if Loulan's commatriots are looking askance at her decision, I can see their point.
Oh, and I'm not saying that in marrying a man, Loulan is being untrue to herself. It is in fact because she has to be true to herself that she married the person she loved. But it does complicate things that it happened to be a man, and that complexity should perhaps be addressed in her work, if it hasn't been already. It does seem like a copout to say "I'm a lesbian who married a man." Her generation's brand of lesbianism was about seizing the right not to marry a man, even if that man was a "beard," and demanding the right to live as lesbians without men. If things are different now, maybe it should be talked about by the women who created lesbian feminist culture in the first place. I'd be interested in a deep analysis of that nature.
Oh, I certainly understand *why* people are upset, I just tend to think the way forward is through maximum acceptance of people's various self-chosen identities and affiliations. My mind jumps easily to situations like the controversy surrounding transwomen at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, where the right and wrong of it is clear at least to me. Imposing labels on people causes a lot of hurt: I think generally they should get to pick their own, even if it's not the ones we would have picked in their shoes.
I even just had a little conversation inside my head where I reductio ad absurdum'd myself: Are you sure, Shannon? What if somebody declared themselves a hedgehog, would you consider yourself bound to accept their self-definition? And then I thought Well what about the furs and the otherkin? If somebody tells me they're a centaur trapped in a human body, who am I to gainsay it?
So, yeah, I'm on the side of self-definition, and maximum acceptance of those self-definitions.
Full disclosure: I have some personal feelings on this subject because I've witnessed a very similar situation in which it was a family member who got hurt. My aunt Mary was a confirmed dyke, pretty big in the Philadelphia leather scene, until her longtime partner Karen transitioned into a man named Garen. Mary supported her partner through this.
From my aunt's point of view, nothing had changed. She was still love with the same person she always had been. She was still the same person she always had been: a leather dyke.
From her community's point of view, my aunt was now a heterosexual and a traitor to The Cause. She was ostracized and shunned. She lost all the social standing that she'd won over the years. She lost almost all her friends. They ended up moving.
It was very, very hurtful to her, and of course I'm on her side: I think her friends were narrowminded and bigoted. So, witnessing that situation really influences my thinking on all this.
I know, but, things were different to my parent's generation. I think the gay community was so under attack from every side that they really developed an us-or-them mentality. Aunt Mary became Them, and was punished for it.
Yeah, your aunt Mary's "friends" sound like assholes. I might agree in a roundabout way that she is now heterosexual (or at least bisexual), but it in no way follows that she is a "traitor to the Cause" (whichever Cause that is, I'm still waiting for the attachment with my powerpoint of the homosexual agenda).
Maybe it's because I'm one of them hippie bisexuals, but I can't imagine dropping a friend because that person's partner's genitalia changed (or his/her genitalia changed, for that matter). For heaven's sakes, haven't we had enough problems with that sort of shit?
Anyway, I hope your aunt Mary found nicer friends.
I might agree in a roundabout way that she is now heterosexual
Well if you ever meet her, don't say that to her face. As one of the older generation who fought a lot of devastating battles, she's absolutely not willing to give up her hard-earned queer identity.
Anyway, I hope your aunt Mary found nicer friends.
She and Garen live in Fayetteville now, so at least they've got family.
I hope I do meet her someday; she sounds like a very cool person. And socially I do believe that in order to discuss someone's sexual identity with them you need an invitation from that person, in writing.
And for what it's worth, I think that a queer identity is a given for anyone who is trans or in a relationship with a transperson. Same with a bi person. I only balk at the word "lesbian", which seems to specifically say that the person in question is not benefiting from straight privilege.
(it occurs to me that for transpeople, the amount of privilege they and their partners have is directly connected to how they present and how they look; it's not difficult to imagine a trans couple who get hardly any bennies in that department. But they'll still get some and that shouldn't be ignored.)
Transpeople are an interesting and complex case, because I think what's being punished is gender variance/ambiguity. Not all trans people look ambiguously gendered, and not all ambiguously gendered-presenting people are trans. A butch lesbian, a butch straight woman, etc all probably get a lot more shit from society than would a trans person who presents unambiguously male/female.
As far as having crap flung at you, I do agree that variantly-presenting transpeople get an enormous amount flung at them. I don't think that such discrimination is institutionalized or has a generational impact in the same way that discrimination against black people is. It all sucks in different ways.
Well, the process of transitioning also sparks a lot of discrimination (people getting fired, etc), and the trans people who have been murdered seem to mostly have presented unambiguously--when the murderers discovered they were trans, they decided to punish them for the "deception". Trans people also have the fewest legal protections.
It all sucks in different ways.
Yeah, heartily agreed. I didn't mean to get into some kind of privilege scorecard-keeping, as I think that is silly.
Mm, thank you for the historical perspective. It's kind of odd and interesting because if you have read any of Loulan's work you might remember that a great contribution that she brought was the idea of "willingness" being the first stage of sexual response, before arousal. It brings a level of voluntariness to the rather mechanistic arousal > plateau > orgasm model. Of course, I wonder that she does not think that who you're willing to take off your pants with should define your sexuality...
"feel like makin' love?" "check"minniethemoochaJanuary 6 2008, 22:37:21 UTC
The notion of "willingness" being the first stage of sexual response weirds me out, because it sort of bypasses the idea that the person first of all turns you on, which is sort of involuntary, right? There's also this odd undertone of "brave little soldier" to it, in my perception at least... It is interesting to me, though, in that when I was in college and much, much more traumatized and freaked out by sex in general, that I had a definition in my mind of the difference between "willingness" and "desire", and that I hadn't really experienced the latter up until a certain moment. Which is too bad.
Generally I agree about letting people self-define, and I certainly wouldn't deny her entrance to say a festival on the grounds of my annoyance. But I do reserve the right to roll my eyes heartily at her insistence that she really belongs in Lesbia, although she is not living there right now.
The power of this sexual-identity metaphor for me is that it includes some of where you've been and a whole lot of where you are right now. It's backwards-looking -- your country of origin -- but focuses on the fact that your current fate is tied to the country where you live right now. JoAnn Loulan's fate right now is bound to the residents of Straightville, whether she likes it or not.
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I even just had a little conversation inside my head where I reductio ad absurdum'd myself: Are you sure, Shannon? What if somebody declared themselves a hedgehog, would you consider yourself bound to accept their self-definition? And then I thought Well what about the furs and the otherkin? If somebody tells me they're a centaur trapped in a human body, who am I to gainsay it?
So, yeah, I'm on the side of self-definition, and maximum acceptance of those self-definitions.
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From my aunt's point of view, nothing had changed. She was still love with the same person she always had been. She was still the same person she always had been: a leather dyke.
From her community's point of view, my aunt was now a heterosexual and a traitor to The Cause. She was ostracized and shunned. She lost all the social standing that she'd won over the years. She lost almost all her friends. They ended up moving.
It was very, very hurtful to her, and of course I'm on her side: I think her friends were narrowminded and bigoted. So, witnessing that situation really influences my thinking on all this.
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Maybe it's because I'm one of them hippie bisexuals, but I can't imagine dropping a friend because that person's partner's genitalia changed (or his/her genitalia changed, for that matter). For heaven's sakes, haven't we had enough problems with that sort of shit?
Anyway, I hope your aunt Mary found nicer friends.
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Well if you ever meet her, don't say that to her face. As one of the older generation who fought a lot of devastating battles, she's absolutely not willing to give up her hard-earned queer identity.
Anyway, I hope your aunt Mary found nicer friends.
She and Garen live in Fayetteville now, so at least they've got family.
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And for what it's worth, I think that a queer identity is a given for anyone who is trans or in a relationship with a transperson. Same with a bi person. I only balk at the word "lesbian", which seems to specifically say that the person in question is not benefiting from straight privilege.
(it occurs to me that for transpeople, the amount of privilege they and their partners have is directly connected to how they present and how they look; it's not difficult to imagine a trans couple who get hardly any bennies in that department. But they'll still get some and that shouldn't be ignored.)
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As far as having crap flung at you, I do agree that variantly-presenting transpeople get an enormous amount flung at them. I don't think that such discrimination is institutionalized or has a generational impact in the same way that discrimination against black people is. It all sucks in different ways.
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It all sucks in different ways.
Yeah, heartily agreed. I didn't mean to get into some kind of privilege scorecard-keeping, as I think that is silly.
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The power of this sexual-identity metaphor for me is that it includes some of where you've been and a whole lot of where you are right now. It's backwards-looking -- your country of origin -- but focuses on the fact that your current fate is tied to the country where you live right now. JoAnn Loulan's fate right now is bound to the residents of Straightville, whether she likes it or not.
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