I liked Rachel grapenut's post about the girls in her art class acting all crazy and girly girl-like. Her frustration of the way girls get tracked into certain social expectations and behaviors at such an early age reminds me of my own feelings. It is also interesting to think about ways that girls perform the role of girlness, often understanding this to be different from the way they see themselves. It is significant that rachel's kids talk in high pitched voices and use lots of airheady slang when they're playing with dolls- and that they don't behave this way normally. Somehow, it seems they have a conscious or unconscious understanding that being a girl is a role, it is an identity to be performed, and it is also different from how they themselves carry out their lives. For really, the concepts of female and male do not work. Biological facts such as roughly one in two thousand infants born in the US undergo immediate genital surgery (sometimes unknown to the parents) to make them fit our conception of male and female bodies show us that the idea of gender is even more socially constructed than it may first appear. There simply is no way of being female or being male - they are abstract concepts that we have nonetheless ordered our society around. So really, all gender identities are performed. They are not essentialist facts: there is simply no way to define a woman. Legal systems have tried -- there are some amazing old European laws -- including Denmark's (i think it's denmark) that women with penises longer than 3 inches cannot marry men - that betray a discomfort with the lack of certainty about gender and sexual biology. It's similar too to the idea of gayness. For what is being gay, really? Is it sexual relations with someone of the same sex? This leads to several problems: what exactly are sexual relations, what exactly is the same sex, and that plenty of people who identify as straight nevertheless fool around with same sex lovers from time to time. As for me, am I gay now? I've dated women for years, but now I find myself dating a boy. Am I still a dyke? How do I perform my dykeness while walking hand in hand with a hetero boy? And what about the fact that the girls iv'e dated are in many ways more traditionally masculine than this boy? What about the girl I've dated who wants to undergo gender reassignment surgery to be a boy? How then would we be gay? There are plenty of boys who are lesbians - transgender and transsexual dykes are largely accepted in urban Gen X queer communities. So then, what is gay? Is it performing a divergent sexuality? A breaking down of traditional sexual and gender barriers? Yet it often doesn't feel divergent at all. Many queers, myself included, are guilty of thinking of queerness as somehow cooler than heterosexuality. There are many reasons for this, most especially that the need to affirm ourselves in spite of numerous pressures and disgust from family, peers, society at large - why even comments like "being gay is ok for OTHER people but I would never want to do that" can feel really uncomfortable - create a need to unequivocally equate gayness with goodness. Which accomplishes some extremely necessary work toward self-respect and pride, but also, sometimes gets silly. On Friday night I was at a benefit and got to meet Dorothy Allison, one of my favorite writers. As I approached her she turned and grabbed me at the waist, saying, "oh hi there baby." My heart fell. How could someone I respect so much treat me as a sex object? We had a picture taken - she saying we should press our faces real close, cheek to cheek. We talked a bit, she had her hands on both my hips - I took my Polaroid and was off. So this is transgressive sexuality? Am I supposed to feel differently about this situation because she is a girl and not a boy , and somehow it's cool and crazy and new for women to treat each other this way? Is this really performing a divergent sexuality? Or a very tried one with different players fulfilling its roles? Because really, it doesn't feel that much different than Thursday night, when a car of guys stopped to yell and cat call at me as I crossed the dark parking lot, alone. The trick I think is understanding and accepting that we are always performing various identities and not to find this really nihilistic and depressing. Also, it's not that I'm saying we should stop playing and just "be ourselves" - for it is exactly my point that this is completely impossible to determine. Nothing is static, nothing is given. It's depressing, but also potentially freeing. One of the reasons I so liked eXtreme elvis was the way he consciously plays with identity performance. We're the audience, he's the performer - so really, it makes no difference if he's calmly singing a ballad or shoving a used tampon up his ass while pumping his legs into the air like a tempermental baby having its diaper changed. He performs the role of crazy performance artist, we perform the role of audience, expecting, paying, to be shocked. And he takes it a step further -he sung about fear and went so far as to explicitly bid people not to fear performance artists. He flaunted and exposed his role - he named it for us, he gave us instructions - I perform the role of crazy, you perform the role of audience. It doesn't matter that I'm raising the stakes, it doesn't matter that I'm rubbing my huge filthy naked body all over you - this is my role, that is yours --- that's what it's always about, like it or not. There's no reason to be afraid - you knew this anyway, I'm just here to illustrate it graphically. DILDOS!!! kyla __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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