Passing (again)

I'm still thinking about passing, and it seems to me like we're taught to pass in many, many ways. Many of these have to do with performing gender (whether we're cis, trans, or genderqueer) and some don't.

A co-worker of mine just announced in a somewhat apologetic tone that she's PMSing, after spending several stressful hours dealing with a student who's aggressive, disrespectful, and has a massive sense of entitlement. Attributing her stress and irritation to hormones is an example of one way women are taught to pass in our culture: it's unwomanly to be angry or irritated, even when provoked to the extent that she has been. I can't imagine a male coworker attributing his emotional response to a situation like this to hormones. Why would he? The hormones didn't cause the response - the entitled asshole did.

A student who recently won a mathematics award on campus semi-apologetically explained to us that her father and grandfather are engineers - as if she needs to somehow justify and legitimate her talent. I can't imagine a male student acting so self-deprecating and apologetic after winning an award like this. Why would he? Everyone (including himself) would view it as natural that he won.

My partner frequently has to defend his commitment to our kids to people who act kind of puzzled over why a father would feel such a strong need to spend time with his kids and be truly involved in their lives. I would never have to defend my commitment to them or explain why I feel compelled to spend so much time with them. Because for me it's supposed to be "natural."

But I'm not sure if this one has to do with gender or not. In several recent conversations with friends, I've remembered/ mentioned my experiences as a kid who had a strange gift when it comes to math. I'm one of those people who perceives many things that are ostensibly not math-related in terms of mathematical expressions. Almost everything can be expressed as a mathematical function in my head. Colors have numbers to me. I can perform fairly complex mathematical functions very quickly in my head. I've always been this way, and it seems normal to me. But I rarely ever talk about it. My friends often ask me how much to leave for a tip, if some random number we come across is prime, for mnemonic devices for remembering phone numbers and SSN numbers, etc. But I don't usually describe to them what number a certain color is, or how you would explain a particular social dynamic as a mathematical function. I'm not embarrassed by this feature of my cognition, and I'm not super proud of it. It's just sort of normal.

But the reason I don't talk about it much goes back to second grade. When I was in second grade I told my teacher that colors had numbers. He looked at me without a spark of interest or understanding on his face and said "no they don't." I got the message. In fourth grade we had a color-by-number math activity in which you calculated the fraction problem in each sector of the picture and then colored it in according to the number-color combos listed in the key. I told my teacher that these were the wrong colors for the numbers. She asked me to explain what I meant. I answered that, for one thing, the number that went with green was too warm, and red should be a prime number. (It's really hard to explain this stuff). She looked at me with a perplexed look for a long minute and then turned to admonish a couple of other kids to return to their seats. I didn't pursue the conversation any further. I could see where it was going.

So I didn't talk about this way I had of perceiving things, but I did learn how to negotiate the world without weirding people out about it. I learned that, even though it's tedious and mind-numbing, you have to write out all the steps on a math problem that you already did in your head when you first saw it on the paper. When they ask you to do long division, they mean it. And if you don't show your work, you not only won't get credit for the assignment, but you'll probably be accused of cheating. How else could a skinny little blond kid who doesn't fit our cultural ideal for what a mathematically gifted person looks like correctly calculate 30 long division problems in about 5 minutes without showing any work? She must be cheating. So I think many kids like this learn to stay in their seats and pretend to be working until their classmates are done with the worksheet or test. They learn to laboriously write out each step of the problem, even though that requires them to keep cycling back over it in their minds to remember what all the steps actually were. And they learn how to be invisible. They learn how to pass.

The fact that we often require people with unusual abilities like this to pass makes me wonder how often it happens that outliers are simply trained to hide their abilities and blend in. Just as we want everyone in a neat little gender box that will be easy to deal with, we want everyone to fit into our other conceptual boxes. Otherwise life is messy and complicated, and you have to treat people as individuals with unique talents and needs. Much easier to just force them to pass...

Video of the Day

So, I have to 'fess up to this little quirk of mine: I collect the songs "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "The Rainbow Connection." It started with punk and ska covers, and moved on from there. At this point I have covers of these songs in every musical genre imaginable. I love that so many artists feel compelled to sing these songs at some point in their career. So, for your viewing pleasure, here's Me First and the Gimme Gimmes:



And no, this doesn't have anything to do with feminism. I'm aware of that, and it's OK with me.

Moms in Film: A Device in the Story

From an interview with Alfre Woodard at the A.V. Club:

AVC: You were going to say something about playing moms?

AW: It’s so boring. I’m not even going to talk about the pedestrian writers. I’m only going to talk about the really good writers and scripts. Americans have a hard time writing moms. I’ll get a script and everything's really great, everything’s well-drawn, but the mom is like this character, like stock footage, they go and get that out. They plug it in, this idea of "mother." You could lift moms out of any script, no matter what the culture, what the neighborhood, what the economic status, even if it’s a period mom, and you could switch them around, and they’d be the same person. I think it’s because most people don’t really have a human idea, a specific life that they attach to who their mother was. Their mother was there for them, so it either gets deified, or the opposite. That Mommie Dearest kind of thing. We love them or we don’t, or we rebel, but we can’t see who they are. That they are a person in life with taste, with sexuality, with opinions, who is pissy also, who has a right to not be the big tit for you every time you want something. And then we leave, and we go off to college or off into the world to work—you really appreciate your mom then. But there’s that big chunk when you don’t know your mom’s faults, desires, wishes, distastes.

It’s tough, because you’re always going to be playing moms. You really have to work to find the person, because they’re not really written a lot. You’re a device in a person’s life, a device in that story. In real life, most people I know are moms, but writing them, I could never reduce them to "mom." It’s like, she does this and this and this—oh yeah, and she’s got kids. They’re interesting, vital, crazy, fucked-up, wonderful, awful, really attractive, and also repulsive people doing wild things and mundane things. And we never see them on film or on television.

Profeminist Fatherhood

A friend linked me to this blog today, where I stumbled upon a really thoughtful and thought-provoking post on profeminist fatherhood. Some quotes:

3. How have your profeminist values changed over time? What is the impact of fatherhood on your profeminism?

Think about the implications: If a guy like me—who has every good intention and a history of profeminist activism, and who even served a stint as a stay-at-home dad—is failing at the task for forging a perfectly egalitarian family, then what does that tell us about the prospects of wider social change?

...

Here’s something I think progressive feminist folks need to understand in a deep way: Parents aren’t soldiers. We don’t take marching orders. And none of us is a general. You can’t tell your partner what she should want out of life, even, perhaps especially, when her decisions make you more powerful in the relationship. You can’t control the way the world thinks of you, and you don’t get to say what social and economic conditions you’ll face as a parent. This breeds feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, anger.

At the end of the day, your main task is to survive and support your family and raise happy children; how you respond to the things you can’t control reveals a great deal about your character, some of it good and some of it bad. You might discover (have you noticed my retreat to the safety of the second person?) a capacity for sacrifice and care that you never knew was there.

On the flip side, the dark one, you might also find yourself erupting with petty rage and misdirected resentment, eruptions that frighten you, your child, and your partner. In those scary moments, when our worst emotions take over and drive our ideals and aspirations over a cliff, it is easiest of all for both fathers and mothers to fall back on traditional patterns of dominance and submission.

What does that have to do with feminism? Everything, and nothing.

Pledging allegiance to feminist ideals doesn’t make you a good person or a good parent or a good partner, but it might remind you of the power you have—we always have power, if only over ourselves—and the need to restrain that power or share it with other people. It can also remind fathers of something that I think is crucial: There are alternatives; you do have choices, and your choices matter. You don’t have to be the man your father was; you don't have to be the idiots we see on TV; you can be a new kind of man, and you can help your sons become that kind of man.

10. Do you feel feminism has failed fathers and, if so, how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given fathers?

...I think a majority of feminists can foresee a positive role for fathers and, indeed, desperately want to see fatherhood redefined in a positive and progressive way. I don’t think feminism has offered a well-articulated vision of fatherhood, but that’s OK: It really falls to fathers to redefine fatherhood.

This is the great thing that feminism has given fathers: Its success has triggered culture-wide dialogs among men about what a good father should be and do. Feminists themselves are not always comfortable with these arguments, and certainly there has been much to criticize.

But, as an old Bolshevik once said, revolutions don’t happen in velvet boxes. They’re messy, contradictory, sometimes downright revolting—but usually also thrilling and necessary. Women have been rising for over a century, and only recently have men started to really change in response. From that perspective, it’s an exciting time.

This leads me to another thing (returning to the topic of the second question) that has surprised me about fatherhood and feminism: In a perverse way, fatherhood has strengthened my commitment to feminism. By revealing the limits of my good intentions and scope of action, fatherhood has pushed me to seek new answers to feminist questions I thought I had answered in my early twenties, on both personal and political levels.

Fatherhood has also reminded me, in a visceral way, of the inequalities that persist between men and women, and, in particular, the burdens carried by mothers. Those burdens and inequalities shape and poison our most intimate relationships whether we want them to or not.

Here again, feminism is useful for fathers and mothers: It gives us perspective, or it should.

It’s easy to be overcome by day-to-day difficulties and despair of the possibility of changing the balance of power between men and women. But if we lift our eyes and look at the sweep of the past through feminism’s eyes, we can see that the balance of power has changed, on this and many other fronts. History doesn’t stop just because we personally feel stuck. If we look at the lives of the people who came before us, we see that our actions in the present do matter, both our individual choices and the act of speaking out in public.

Kinda refreshing!

Happy Equal Pay Day

Let's say you're a woman who makes exactly the median wage as compared to the median wage for men: $.79 to their dollar. That means that if you both work 5 days a week at 8 hours a day, at about 10:30 on Tuesday morning, you catch up to their pay for last week. Something to think about...

Systemic Exclusion: History Edition

I often think that we spend a lot of time talking about systemic oppression and exclusion, but the concept remains kind of vague and fuzzy for a lot of us. So in the interest of de-fuzzing the concept and giving specific, tangible examples to refer to when explaining this to friends or arguing with those in denial, here's the first of many posts on systemic exclusion and oppression.


One critique that postmodern feminists have concerning the knowledge/power framework in place is that it engages in metanarratives which serve to norm the dominant groups and other those groups which are marginalized. Traditionally, a (usually white male) historian will tell The Story Of History as if it's all-inclusive and represents all the important things that have happened. Note in this book title we're told that this is "The whole story of man." This may be very well-intentioned and simply done based on custom and convention without a critique of what it means to be the whole story of man, or which persons are taken to be the important or central figures. From what I hear, this book by H.G. Wells is quite well-written and very even-handed. But the fact remains that telling one story, from one perspective, and representing it as all-inclusive is inherently othering to many.

First, the sort of God's-eye-view that this approach suggests is not possible. We're all humans who are fully situated in one time period and cultural context. We each have our own place in the overlapping network of hierarchies, and that position will inevitably inform our view of the world. Second, the project of telling a metanarrative itself suggests that there's just one history to which some figures are central while others are marginal or ancillary. In fact, there are many, many interlocking histories centered around many, many people. And the identity of the one(s) who gets to decide which history is The History will inevitably effect that history and permeate the story told with the privilege, cultural attitudes, and values of the teller. Thus the privileged traditionally own knowledge and history.

So one way to start eroding this system of exclusion is to consistently critique the metanarratives, and instead encourage particular, situated narratives. You can tell the story of your history, in your cultural and historical context, from your perspective. And that story will inevitably center your experiences and the experiences of people who share in your identity. But when combined with the stories of those of other backgrounds, we get a much more complete and multi-faceted picture of events, nobody's voice is privileged, and the norming/othering effect is greatly reduced.

Torture and Capital Punishment

The recent release of torture memos has given new life to the debate on whether or not torture yields any useful information. The idea behind claiming that torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques," yields more and/or better info from the torturee seems to be that we could justify violating our laws, international treaties, and our national values in order to engage in torture as long as said torture was yielding information that makes us all safer. The ends justify the means sorta thing. As I was driving home last night and listening to a former interrogator being interviewed on NPR, it reminded me of an argument concerning the death penalty made by Jeffrey Reiman.

In the debate over capital punishment, there are two main arguments used to defend the death penalty: retribution and deterrence. Those who think capital punishment is justified by retribution point out that the criminal has done something very wrong and thus deserves to pay the price. Justice demands that the criminal give his life to pay for the taking of someone else's life. An eye for an eye and all that. Those in the deterrent camp point to the alleged fact that having the death penalty serves to deter people who might murder from actually doing it. So in this argument, capital punishment is a sort of stick hanging over the heads of the population that will come down on them as soon as they commit murder (or some other capital offense), and since everyone will know this, people will be less likely to murder.

Reiman enters the debate on capital punishment well after these two positions have been established and fleshed out, and he takes a different tack than trying to disprove either position. Instead, he begins by granting both claims. He says, OK let's grant that the death penalty is just because of retribution, and if it does in fact prevent people from murdering each other, it is useful as a deterrent. These two ideas do seem to be intuitively appealing. But there still may be other reasons not to support the death penalty. For one thing, just because somebody deserves something, doesn't mean we have to give it to them. After all, if we were totally consistent retributionists, we'd still be gouging people's eyes out and chopping off their hands. But most of us cringe at that sort of thing in a civilized culture. And second, there's no real evidence that capital punishment is any more effective at deterring violent crime than long sentences. In fact, in many countries and states where there is no death penalty, the homicide rate is significantly lower than in those that do. So neither retribution nor the deterrent effect seem to be compelling reasons that we have to have the death penalty.

Are there reasons why we wouldn't want to practice capital punishment? According to Reiman, YES. For one thing, by abstaining from the death penalty we reject cruel treatment of people (just as when we abstain from gouging out eyes and chopping off hands), and reaffirm the value of human life. Not just unborn human life, but human life in general. (That last bit was my little snark - don't attribute that to Reiman, please.) In addition, we can avoid the social injustice that seems to be inherent in the uneven sentencing rates by simply abolishing the death penalty. Obviously the social injustice inherent in unequal conviction rates will still have to be dealt with. But at least we won't still be executing a hugely disproportionate rate of minority and economically disadvantaged convicts. And that would reflect our commitment to bringing about social justice.

But where Reiman's argument really ties into the torture issue is here. Being a civilized nation entails that we turn away from cruel and horrible ways of treating people. We like to believe that we've evolved past the enjoyment of public hangings, drawing-and-quartering criminals, and displaying the heads of beheaded criminals on public fenceposts. But to evolve past this, we need to also move past the necessity to have executioners among us. What does it do to an individual to be the one whose job it is to kill people? Can someone who has this job comfortably live among others in a civilized nation? And what must our self-conception be if we're OK with the fact that our criminal justice system necessitates the existence of executioners?

So this thought led me to think about all those operatives whose job it was day in and day out to chain people to ceilings, almost drown them, slap them repeatedly as they're chained and helpless, lock them in little boxes, etc. When this is all over and they come home, what effect will this experience have had on them? Will they still have a sense of empathy and compassion for their fellow humans? How will they tend to handle conflict and stress? Maybe we want to abstain from torture not just because of what it says about us, but because of what it does to us. And it's hard to imagine the kind of information torture would yield that could justify giving up our values, our respect for human life and dignity, and our ability to live with each other in a civilized way. When you look at it this way, torture is far too costly to ever be worth its potential benefits.

The Social Construction of Gender

I've been involved in a number of conversations lately about the social construction of gender, and it occurs to me that what it means for gender to be a social construct, along with the implications of a social construction theory of gender, is not clear to a lot of people. So here's an explanation that may clarify things a bit.

A social construction is something that doesn't exist independently in the "natural" world, but is instead an invention of society. Cultural practices and norms give rise to the existence of social constructs and govern the practices, customs, and rules concerning the way we use/view/understand them. In other words, we all act as if they exist, and because of our intersubjective agreement, they do.

The classic example of a social construct is money. Various cultures utilize paper, gold, silver, or other items as a medium for trade. To do this, we invest the object with value that we all acknowledge (we act as if it has value), and this informs our practices when it comes to money. But money is not a thing that occurs independently of human activity in the natural world. Thus it is a social construction. It's very real - calling it a social construct does not amount to calling it imaginary or non-existent. But its existence is dependent on our culture and our practices. This means that its definition, use, meaning, value, etc. is entirely contingent on culture.

As our culture changes, so do our constructs. Some constructs come into being and then fall into disuse and thus go out of existence. Others remain but change from one culture and historical period to another. Gender is one such construct. The traits and behaviors that are thought to be "masculine" and "feminine" differ dramatically from one culture and time period to another. Appropriate ways of behaving, the labor that's assigned to gender groups, beliefs about natural abilities and propensities, etc. change significantly. And this variation and adaptation to conditions and social pressures reinforces the idea that gender is a social construction rather than some sort of essence that arises from biology. Because if gender was determined by physical sex, then it wouldn't vary in this way, but would remain constant, just as other biologically determined attributes remain constant. Instead, gender varies with cultural change.

Generally speaking, gender is assigned at birth according to physical sex. Medical professionals look at the baby's genitals and announce that the baby is a boy or a girl (unless the child is intersex, in which case much work is done to force the child into one camp or the other). And then the work begins to socialize the child and teach them the script that goes with the gender they've been assigned. And most of us get to be pretty darn good at acting out the appropriate script. We learn which emotions we're supposed to display, which activities we're supposed to enjoy and excel at, and which ones we're supposed to avoid or suck at, how to talk to each other, how to manage our body language, which kind of work and hobbies we're supposed to pursue, etc. And for many of us it's not a great fit, but we manage, or we learn how to make those features of ourselves that don't fit the script less conspicuous (i.e., we pass). But for some of us, it feels wrong enough that we can't just fit in or pass. For transgender and genderqueer individuals, performing the other script, or a different script altogether, is the only way to make life livable. (For transsexuals, the issue encompasses more than gender, so they will have other issues, except insofar as they often also learn to perform "the other" gender script.)

So this description raises a number of questions. Why are there only two scripts, when bodies seem to come in more than two shapes? Why do we need these scripts at all? Why are we so committed to the idea that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between the two scripts we have and the two kinds of bodies we insist on believing people are born into? These are all good questions, and all things that feminists should be pushing on and tugging at the loose strings. A few brief answers:

We need the scripts and the clearly delineated categorical distinctions, because you can't build hierarchy without difference. Hierarchy depends on difference, so you choose some physical differences, like genitalia and skin color, and invest them with significance. Once you have groups which are thought to be essentially different, you can build up and justify your hierarchy on the basis of them. Making them essential, or biologically grounded, gives them immutability and God-ordainedness.

So then we need to maintain the one-to-one correspondence in order to maintain the stability and essential nature of the distinctions. We can't allow people to go around determining their own identity and position in the hierarchy will-nilly, or everything will fall apart. And we especially must maintain the gender-sex link because of heteronormativity. After all, one function of gender is to indicate to the world what kind of bidness you've got going on under your clothes. As an outward marker of physical sex, gender allows us to identify which individuals are potential mates for us, and avoid the oh-so-horrifying experience of being attracted to someone with (gasp!) the wrong set of genitalia.

So what follows from the view of gender as a social construction? First, it reveals that gender is not immutable or set in stone. Harmful aspects of our construction of gender can and should be discarded. But beyond that, if gender exists to support hierarchy, then gender, as it is viewed and practiced in our culture, is not only uncomfortable for many people, but a tool of oppression. So at the very least, driving a wedge between sex and gender, and putting pressure on the notion that everyone has to fit into some kind of neat binary or follow some kind of carefully delineated script, benefits everyone and serves to weaken patriarchal structures. And allowing every individual to navigate their own identity formation and locate their own spot on the gender continuum would lead to a lot less disonnance and uncomfortable performances, not to mention physical danger and stigma for those who don't adhere to the script to which they were assigned.

However, one thing that the social construction view of gender does not get you is a condemnation of trans people for "reifying gender." First, this view (espoused by some very vocal radical feminists, to the horror and dismay of other radical feminists) is based on a profound misunderstanding of social constructionism and reification. Second, the view is inconsistent in that it condemns one group (trans folk) for performing gender, but ignores the fact that all of us are performing gender all the time. If trans people reify gender by adhering to a script, then so do cis people. And even if this view was coherent, it shows a profound lack of compassion and understanding of the individuals. We are all of us born into a system that is already gendered, and our social survival depends on our learning how to perform the script. This is not an individual decision that's ours to make. So this is an instance where we ought to hate the game, but not the player.

And one thing's for sure: we all benefit by discourses and practices which drive a wedge between sex and gender. The loosening of these strict categories and binaries can result in a view of sex and gender which is far more fluid and flexible, allowing more breathing room for everyone.

Happy Earth Day

Punk and Body Image

This post might seem really random and out-of-nowhere at first, but bear with me.

This weekend some friends of ours had a benefit to raise money to cover their dog's vet bill after a little wrestling-with-a-train-and-losing episode. So they did the keg with live music (punk) and $5 at the door thing, and the party went really well. The police were not called, the neighbors did not complain, nobody passed out or puked on anyone else, and Crash (the most appropriately named dog in the world) is on the mend. But this party got me thinking. There was a day (pre-baby, of course) when I rarely missed a punk or rockabilly show. And yet, I don't have any interest in listening to pre-recorded punk or rockabilly. You won't find many punk tracks in my iPod or on my computer, and I have very few punk bands in my Pandora radio station. So why do I like live punk so much?

For one thing, of course I like the subversiveness of punk culture, although it irritates me to see it appropriated and commercialized at times. Second, I love the energy of the music. For some reason this doesn't translate for me when it comes to recorded material, but nothing compares to the energy of a live punk band. And third, the people at punk shows are endlessly interesting to me. You get such a good mix of misplaced people, angry kids, ironic gestures, and posing. You also get those few who are just exploring the identity and seeing if this might be their niche.

But what I really love is how punk (mixed with a little alcohol or pot) puts people in this place where their body issues kind of fall away. When you watch how people dance to other genres, it seems like there's always this element of self-awareness and self-censoring. People are acutely aware of how they appear, how hot they look, how trendy their "moves" are, etc. But at a good punk show, nobody cares anymore. People cut loose and dance any ol' how, and it always strikes me as this really freeing thing. So maybe it's just me, or maybe it was the tequila, or maybe it's the fact that I'm just now finally emerging from the year-long just-had-a-baby-and-rarely-go-out-and-party-with-friends stage, but to me it's one more thing to like about punk. Because everyone could use a little break from body issues, even if it's just for a few hours.

Feminism 101: Definitions Edition

Gender: The constellation of socially constructed behaviors, roles, characteristics, appropriate activities, propensities, etc. that correspond to "masculine" and "feminine."

Sex: The (somewhat artificial) binary of physical and biological characteristics thought to distinguish male from female.

Gender Identity: The psychological aspect of gender - the way one identifies oneself, which may or may not match the gender and/or sex assignment at birth.

Cisgender: A person is cisgendered if their gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth based on their physical sex.

Transgender: A person is transgendered if their gender identity does not match the gender they were assigned at birth based on their physical sex.

Cissexual: A person is cissexual if their gender identity matches their sex assignment at birth.

Transsexual: A person is transsexual if their gender identity does not match their sex assignment at birth.

Genderqueer: A person is genderqueer if they reject the gender binary by blending aspects of both genders or forming a third gender identity or simply trying to live without being defined in terms of gender.

Intersex: A person is intersex if they don't fit neatly into either the "male" or "female" categories. This may be due to ambiguous genitalia or a mix of typically male and female reproductive and/or sexual anatomy. Traditionally, intersex individuals have been surgically altered to fit into the gender categorization that's assigned to them. However, intersex is slowly being recognized as a normal condition that has been problematized by the rigid sex binary required by our cultural attitudes and gender binary.
*Note: "hermaphrodite" is generally a pejorative term used to describe intersex

Social Construction: Any contingent phenomenon that is created by a society. Social constructs exist only because the members of a society implicitly agree to behave as if they do. Generally speaking, there are conventions around social constructs that guide our behavior regarding them. The most common example used to illustrate this is money. Paper and gold money would be worthless if it weren’t for our practices and conventions, but because we all agree to invest money with value, it is valuable. Saying that money is a social construct doesn't imply that it doesn't exist or that it's not real. It's very real and exists as a social construction; it's just not a "natural fact" about the world independent of human activity.

Silencing Mechanisms

1. Bursting into tears during a rational discussion and claiming that your opponent's valid point that was neither a personal attack nor overly-confrontational is really hurting your feelings. This is manipulative and generally a way to avoid either responding to their point or conceding that their claim was compelling. (I realize this one may be a bit controversial...)
2. Accusing your antagonist of being politically correct as a way to avoid acknowledging the ignorance or hate or privilege behind your words that your antagonist has just pointed out.
3. Attributing the claims of another participant in the discussion to emotion or hormones in order to avoid addressing them.