Notes Towards Day 17: Towards New Forms (of Identity and Expression)

Music to get us in the mood:
Garth Brooks (via Owl): "We Shall Be Free"
and/or Lucinda Williams (via holsn39): "What If"
and/or The Distillers (via ebock): Seneca Falls...

Sins Invalid (via Karina--thanks!)

See also Eli Clare's Exile and Pride, on multi-issue politics
(replacing, for example, a flyer reading "you think prison is bad, try a nursing home," with
exposing "the interlocking power structures that both cause disability and lock up disabled people").
We do not need to set different identity groups against one another.

I. coursekeeping
finishing off the naming game
figuring out the car situation for Thursday
(also need! help! getting Kate to Villanova 12-1-ish....)

because we will not meet as a class on Thursday:
another event that day @ HC:
filmmaker and activist Tina Morton
1 - 2:30: Editing workshop (Roberts 11)
7 - 9: Public Screening (Chase Auditorium)
'The Dance of Aunt Ida Lee'

next Tuesday, November 10 we turn to the topic of masculinity:
We'll have a guest in class, post-doctoral fellow Howard Glasser
(cf. Ray Ricketts' ESems on Masculinity)

Required reading: Michael Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia"

Recommendations:

Men's Group: Movie Review

International Men's Day

Chris Ware's graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan (to be continued on Thurs, 11/12)

questions? all in order re: disability papers, etc?

II. from the forum:
cantaloupe's finding The Gender Workbook unnecessary

rae's thanking Kate Bornstein for her message that whoever you are is just fine

holsn39's comparing the effectiveness of Gender Outlaw w/ The Gender Workbook, which was less-effective-to-her: "being exposed to other people's perspectives makes me question my own, but having them directly question it doesn't seem to be as affective.  Kate Bornstein is making me think a little bit more about my gender.  I feel like the question that seems to be pushing me is 'do I want to be comfortable with a female identity?'...to think about how it might be dangerous to associate a gender to my body."
justouttheaslym's similar comparison: A lot of the articles and novels I have read have challenged gender, sex and disability in an informative tone. It's been like listening to a lecture...but what Kate does is force us not to rethink, but to think. To really think. I had this (insane) belief that I was the most gender neutral person in the world....But after reading, writing, enacting, quizzing (damn you Kate ;-)), I realized I have a lot more to do, a lot further to go, much more to think about.
III. for me, what is deepest is Kate Bornstein's challenge to the gender binary (=all binaries!):

From The Gender Workbook:
"maybe it's time we learn how to think in new ways, ways other than binary thought" (206).

From Hello, Cruel World:
Are you with us, or against us?...These questions are designed...to make you not want to be the complex person that you are. Either/or questions are...asked by bullies....You don't need to use your imagination, because the question itself dictates your only options.... we ought to be able to name ourselves, apart from the troublesome either/or language of the institutions that oppress us (33-36).

From Gender Outlaw:
"no question containing either/or deserves a serious answer" (46).

"The choice between two of something is not a choice at all, but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system which holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives" (101).

"Gender is not the issue....The issue is us versus them. Any us versus any them.
One day we may not need that" (222).

"How curious to have put all that energy into talking about gender.
I wonder what the world must have been like in those days for folks with only two choices" (246).

IV. Kate is also modeling a range of new forms of expressiveness to reflect our
increasing sense of the fluidity of our identities (as well as our thinking):

Gender Outlaw, for example, is written in "transgender style: based on collage; a more playful, less dictatorial style of self-expression; trying on accessories for next phase of my life" (3-4).

The book also reports on a shift in the form of theater, "so that the form itself emulated a queer life. Instead of a linear story line, there were many stories woven together, each beginning and ending @ different times, and instead of conflict and resolution, there was transformation" (150-151).

My Gender Workbook, which starts by declaring gender "a major restraint to self-expression" (1),
goes on to say that "the style of this book might be called theoryfuck. I'm hoping the mix of styles...highlights the constructed nature of the theory" (20).

holsn39 also shared an excerpt from the website of a Trans activist/theorist/artist
that seems quite relevant here, largely applicable to what it might mean--for anyone
who does not fit the into the "either-or model"--to write:

"Writing provides essential spaces for the future of declaring....a re-imagination of the current writing structures because our bodies do not exist there at all....imagination as activism....when a body does not adhere to the dominant culture’s dogma...they have no genealogy in the spectra of representation in the dominant culture...through this active imagination process that we create new positions and methods of declaration."

V. Rather than talking about, our actually now playing with some of these possibilities:

Advice from Lynda Barry: Don't worry about not having content before you write -- you write to
have an experience" (rather than, say, to record an experience). Writing can be a time when the "drawbridge opens up between the back of the brain and the front of it"; you can develop a "gradual belief in a spontaneous ordering form available in the back of your mind."

From Kate Bornstein's The Gender Workbook:
The Ten-Minute Gender Outlaw Exercise 
What is a Man? 
What is a Woman?
Why do we have to be one or the other?

The trick is that the answers have to be phrased in questions...
it keeps the questions open, which is where I think they belong....
The point is to get to a question you want to think about some more,
one that really tickles your brain--something you can ponder on
for the balance of the day. Once you get to that question, you stop" (32-33).

The First Gender Performance Workshop: On the Outside, Looking In
To familiarize students with their bodies, and some of the major limitations of the kinds of bodies we have. To free students from some of the fixed ideas they might have about their bodies by giving them another perspective on looking @ their bodies (225f.).

...imagine yourself an inhabitant of a planet far far far away from earth...your natural body is completely formless, shapeless, and weightless...you have the ability to change your body @ will...Think yourself into having two more appendages...Decide that you'd like to have a different color scheme to this body....(229, 232)

Talking about these experiences....
How might you write/draw/express differently your emergently different ideas?
How might writing/drawing/expressing differently enable different ideas to emerge?