Fearless Friday - Of Pronouns and Performance
Pronouns
I only just came across an interesting piece in the September 30 New York Times about how more and more young people are feeling free to choose their own pronoun referents. (It's equally interesting that the Fashion and Style section is where this article was posted, but I'll save those thoughts for another day.) It's a sign of more flexible times when not only can people choose their pronoun, but institutions such as Google, not to mention the British Home Office, which adds yet another piece of proof to my growing sense that at the institutional level Merrye Olde Englande is at least several steps ahead of the supposedly open-to-all U.S. when it comes to matters of gender and sexuality.
On the other hand, I was disappointed to see The New York Times, of all publications, continue to conflate gender and sexuality: "Teenagers are by nature prone to rebellion against adult conventions, and as the gender nonconformity movement gains momentum among young people, 'it is about rejecting the boxes adults try to put kids in by assuming their sexual identity labels their personal identity,' said Dr. Ritch C. Savin-Williams, director of the Cornell University Sex and Gender Lab. 'These teens are fighting the idea that your equipment defines what it means for you to be a boy or girl. They are saying: ’ ” True, the responsibility for the quotation lies with the director of the Sex and Gender Lab, but the Times printed it, provided the lead in, and generally continues to speak of gender and sexuality as if they were interchangeable throughout the article.
Aside from that sign of how far we still have to go in understanding the difference between who we want to go to bed with and who we want to go to bed as, as Jenny Boylan so aptly put it, this article got me thinking about the relationship between gender roles and pronouns. As someone who grew up in the era of ERA, when women were working to break down artificial barriers that defined women's work (lower paying support staff) and men's work (managerial and leadership roles), I have long looked at the boy-girl dichotomy as a generally arbitrary social and cultural creation. Rather than changing my pronouns, I'd rather ditch the gender stereotypes and make everything we attribute to one gender or the other open to everyone.
On the other hand, we now live in a world that defines almost everything except job descriptions by gender, so I say "Hurrah!" for all the young people who are choosing their own pronouns, and welcome the day when more institutions make gender terminology the same matter of self-choice as some hospitals are making racial and ethnic origins (Brigham and Women's in Boston, for example).
Performance:
The Vermont Folklife Center is hosting an exhibit: "Backstage at the Rainbow Cattle Company: The Drag Queens of Dummerston, Vermont." I have yet to visit, but the VFC has also posted audio clips from interviews with the drag queens on Tumblr. This one from Candi Schtick clarified something for me that I had suspected, but not been sure of. While both drag and cross-dressing are about performing, in the sense that any gender role is a performance, drag is about performance in an on-stage, glitz and glamour way way, about assuming a persona that, as Candi says, is a different aspect of yourself. Cross-dressing, on the other hand, is about being your whole, true self in the everyday world.
Another huge difference between drag queens and transgender is that--with one exception--drag queens, at least those in Dummerston, don't want to be women. Drag queen is about being something more, as Candi says in her October 12 clip: "Everybody has the ability to be a drag queen, in some form or another. They just don't push themselves to get there."
It's because drag queens have gotten out there that the general public assumes that a guy wearing a dress must be a drag queen, and therefore is probably gay.
This is one of those places where it's up to writers to make it clear that there's not One Story of being a guy in a dress. "One Story" is a reference to Chimananda Adichie's TED talk:
There are all kinds of stories of being the guy in the dress or the guy who wants to wear the dress (or the woman who wants to wear the three-piece suit and wingtips). Works like Ellen Wittlinger's Parrotfish or Julie Anne Peters' Luna, both of whom deal with young people who change gender completely, much as Jennifer Finney Boylan and Chaz Bono have done visibly in the real world. What's not as visible in the real world, as well as in fiction, are people like Eddie Izzard, people who don't feel fully one gender or the other. They have stories, too, but have not become as visible yet. It's time to make them visible, so that real young people won't feel left out, because they don't fit the One Story.
I only just came across an interesting piece in the September 30 New York Times about how more and more young people are feeling free to choose their own pronoun referents. (It's equally interesting that the Fashion and Style section is where this article was posted, but I'll save those thoughts for another day.) It's a sign of more flexible times when not only can people choose their pronoun, but institutions such as Google, not to mention the British Home Office, which adds yet another piece of proof to my growing sense that at the institutional level Merrye Olde Englande is at least several steps ahead of the supposedly open-to-all U.S. when it comes to matters of gender and sexuality.
On the other hand, I was disappointed to see The New York Times, of all publications, continue to conflate gender and sexuality: "Teenagers are by nature prone to rebellion against adult conventions, and as the gender nonconformity movement gains momentum among young people, 'it is about rejecting the boxes adults try to put kids in by assuming their sexual identity labels their personal identity,' said Dr. Ritch C. Savin-Williams, director of the Cornell University Sex and Gender Lab. 'These teens are fighting the idea that your equipment defines what it means for you to be a boy or girl. They are saying: ’ ” True, the responsibility for the quotation lies with the director of the Sex and Gender Lab, but the Times printed it, provided the lead in, and generally continues to speak of gender and sexuality as if they were interchangeable throughout the article.
Aside from that sign of how far we still have to go in understanding the difference between who we want to go to bed with and who we want to go to bed as, as Jenny Boylan so aptly put it, this article got me thinking about the relationship between gender roles and pronouns. As someone who grew up in the era of ERA, when women were working to break down artificial barriers that defined women's work (lower paying support staff) and men's work (managerial and leadership roles), I have long looked at the boy-girl dichotomy as a generally arbitrary social and cultural creation. Rather than changing my pronouns, I'd rather ditch the gender stereotypes and make everything we attribute to one gender or the other open to everyone.
On the other hand, we now live in a world that defines almost everything except job descriptions by gender, so I say "Hurrah!" for all the young people who are choosing their own pronouns, and welcome the day when more institutions make gender terminology the same matter of self-choice as some hospitals are making racial and ethnic origins (Brigham and Women's in Boston, for example).
Performance:
The Vermont Folklife Center is hosting an exhibit: "Backstage at the Rainbow Cattle Company: The Drag Queens of Dummerston, Vermont." I have yet to visit, but the VFC has also posted audio clips from interviews with the drag queens on Tumblr. This one from Candi Schtick clarified something for me that I had suspected, but not been sure of. While both drag and cross-dressing are about performing, in the sense that any gender role is a performance, drag is about performance in an on-stage, glitz and glamour way way, about assuming a persona that, as Candi says, is a different aspect of yourself. Cross-dressing, on the other hand, is about being your whole, true self in the everyday world.
Another huge difference between drag queens and transgender is that--with one exception--drag queens, at least those in Dummerston, don't want to be women. Drag queen is about being something more, as Candi says in her October 12 clip: "Everybody has the ability to be a drag queen, in some form or another. They just don't push themselves to get there."
It's because drag queens have gotten out there that the general public assumes that a guy wearing a dress must be a drag queen, and therefore is probably gay.
This is one of those places where it's up to writers to make it clear that there's not One Story of being a guy in a dress. "One Story" is a reference to Chimananda Adichie's TED talk:
There are all kinds of stories of being the guy in the dress or the guy who wants to wear the dress (or the woman who wants to wear the three-piece suit and wingtips). Works like Ellen Wittlinger's Parrotfish or Julie Anne Peters' Luna, both of whom deal with young people who change gender completely, much as Jennifer Finney Boylan and Chaz Bono have done visibly in the real world. What's not as visible in the real world, as well as in fiction, are people like Eddie Izzard, people who don't feel fully one gender or the other. They have stories, too, but have not become as visible yet. It's time to make them visible, so that real young people won't feel left out, because they don't fit the One Story.