Slipperiness & Gender Identity: Stone Butch Blues

Rich conversation, both face to face yesterday and here below.  Yes, indeed, Stone Butch Blues is a painful/powerful/useful reminder that "humans can be brutal."   And yes, I too can "identify with Jess." My guess is that most people can, if they allow themselves to.  For some people, the underlying issues are focused on sex/gender identity (cf Gender identity and the brain).  For others, there are different underlying foci, perhaps as many different ones as there are kinds of people.  Not everyone has to face the sort of physical abuse Jess describes, but my guess is that most people (all people?), at one time or another and to one degree or another, experience some level of psychic discomfort,  "feel invisible" and hence "disconnect from myself publicly" (cf What am I? To whom am I?).  

Such "double" (W.E.B Dubois) or "dual consciousness" (Fritz Fanon) isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Indeed, one can make a case that slippery brainedness of this sort is a necessary and valuable component not only of deconstructing and reconstructing individual identities but of deconstructing and reconstructing cultures as well (cf cultural and individual identities).   That said, Stone Butch Blues is an important reminder that there is a continuum from psychic discomfort to psychic abuse to physical abuse.  And a challenge to all of us to think more actively and explicitly about deconstructing and reconstructing cultures, not only with regard to their handling of matters of sex/identity but more generally.

It was this aspect of our conversation that most intrigued me, and most pushed my own thinking along.  I was intrigued by the distinction made between "filters," "categories," and "reified" forms of the latter as it developed from Anneliese's starting point in "face-blindness." 

The brain does indeed and necessarily "filter" in the sense of using some input information while discarding other information.  This filtering begins at the unconscious level and almost certainly does result in differing subjective experiences and hence different constructed understandings of the world/self in different people.  At the conscious level, the filtering in turn, again probably desireably and necessarily, leads to "categories," the grouping together of things that are made more similar both by the underlying filtering and because recognizing similarities (and differences) is useful for particular purposes.

Its at the transition between filtering and categories, between unconscious and conscious brain processing, where I suspect cultural factors begin to become quite significant.  It makes sense for the brain to look for commonalities between its own subjective constructions of the world and those of other brains in order to facilitate cooperative interaction on mutually significant tasks.  Categories, or what we might call "shared subjectivities" are valuable for this.  We can more easily work together by having shared ways of making sense of things.

Its not, I'm coming to think, filtering or categorizing or culture in and of themselves that create the the kinds of problems exemplified in Stone Butch Blues or the milder forms of it associated with dual consciousness generally.  What creates those problem is the "reification" step, a transformation from shared subjectivities of benefit for particular purposes to the assertion that constructed categories based in unconscious filtering and useful in particular contexts are "real," ie fixed, eternal, and collectively expressive of all acceptable possibilities.   What made trouble for Jesse (and makes trouble for all of us) is not shared subjectivities useful in particular contexts for particular purposes (man/woman, homosexual/heterosexual, butch/fem in the case at hand) but rather the notion that these categories are adequately expressive of all aspects of one's personal subjectivity and exhaust the acceptable range of possibilities.  Its when one comes to believe that shared subjectivities have greater validity than individual subjectivities that dual consciousness becomes a problem rather than an asset, and when one, I suspect, starts to feel "invisible" and needing to "disconnect from myself publicly."

Is there a way out of this problem?  I'd like to think there is but it is one that I think will require significant changes both in cultures and in individuals.  Rather than taking culture as a given, we need to recognize that culture is itself a product of "shared subjectivities" and so can be influenced by individual subjectivities.  And we need, all of us, individually and collectively,  to be more critical of culture, actively deconstructing and reshaping it.  Along these lines, we need to pay particular attention to those features of cultures that discourage rather than enhance the ongoing development of distinctive individual subjectivities and act to change those features

"we have learned to deal, if still somewhat reluctantly, with diversity as a starting point but ... we still, both in classroom contexts and more generally, act as if what we want to achieve is commonality, bringing people from their diverse starting points to some shared degree of accomplishment/normalcy, lessening diversity and difference.  Maybe instead, in both classrooms and cultural systems generally, we should wholeheartedly embrace difference as the substrate for bringing new things into existence, and so not only welcome it at the outset but encourage its continuing development?" ... Culture, brain, science, education

More generally, we need to reconceive cultures in ways that empower individuals based on their distinctive individual subjectivities rather than using "norms" and "standards" to  disable them. 

"Instead of looking at each other in terms of deficiencies, we could look at each other in terms of strengths and construct our sense of what we're trying to do based on that.  We are trying to do whatever the particular collection of people who make up our culture is able to do well.  And we constantly adjust what we're trying to do to assure that everybody in our culture plays a meaningful role in what we're trying to do.  We create and recreate our culture to make everybody a meaningful contributor to it." ... Cultures of ability

Cultures, of course, won't be changed overnight, and so there will be a continuing need to help individuals struggling with oppressive social categories.  Here it seems several guiding principles can be helpful

• shared subjectivities ("social categories") have no greater claim to validity than individual subjectivities
• individual subjectivities are necessarily always richer than shared subjectivities
• shared subjectivities should be understood not as things among which individuals need to choose but as one particular set of options out of a much larger array
• shared subjectivities can be used by individuals to conceive alternative possibilities that in turn can become candidate shared subjectivities

Maybe in fact that's not a bad set of principles for all of us, whether we are at any given time wrestling with oppressive social categories or not, consciously or unconsciously?  Shared subjectivities can be useful, but they can also be constraining.  They can give one a sense of security and comfort, but sometimes the wish for a sense of security and comfort can put one in oppressive situations, or itself become oppressive.  Perhaps the trick here is to recognize that shared subjectivities are actually no more certain than individual subjectivities, and that shared subjectivities don't replace individual subjectivities but are best thought of as adjuncts to them.  And to accept that a certain level of insecurity, and associated psychic discomfort, is part of the price we pay for being agents capable of reshaping both our selves and the cultures of which we are a part.  Perhaps a clearer sense of that in individuals would make a contribution to the cultural changes needed to make humans less brutal to one another?