Sinister: where the boys go with boys and the girls with girls

[Kyla Schuller]

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


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