daily gender

thoughts and questions

[dailygender-blog]

08

what is the difference/relation between visibility and legibility? 

when i declare myself ‘visible’, what do i demand from others, and what do i submit myself to? what do i lose?

if i declare myself visible to society, do i first have to formulate myself into something society can see? do i have to use words they understand? what do i lose when I describe myself in the terms of a society i don’t want to emulate?

[dailygender-blog]

07

the wrinkle in time movie struck a lot of very gendery notes for me. most of the characters were engaged in a contentious connection with femininity.  meg was recognized as a girl, but judged as as failure of girlhood. she did not fulfil standards of feminine beauty and lightness, but instead embraced seriousness and sturdiness. charles wallace had a feminine joy, openness, and lightness that (as a little boy) he is just on the verge of being expected not to give up forever. but you get sense that his HIGH femme life journey is just beginning. calvin succeeds in some important standards of girlhood - he is gentle, nurturing, and extremely beautiful. i read calvin as a girl who was presenting as a boy. i saw that throughout the film. i really loved that aspect of calvin. i wish calvin could have a movie about a fantastic journey of meaningful magic all about transness.

plus you have the magical characters who are all manifested at women and embody various forms of femininity, but since they’re not human and subject to human lives they don’t experience any struggle in negotiating that femininity.

[dailygender-blog]

06

there is a trope in masculine-feminine romance stories where the woman realizes or is told that the man truly ‘needs’ her, and this has the effect of making the woman feel gratified and she is bonded more closely to him. i previously understood this as being related to the idea of women feeling gratified by having sole access to a man’s vulnerability and ‘softer side’. but i have always found it difficult to understand why being ‘needed’ by a partner was so special and appealing. in trying to think about this a little more in depth, i tried to imagine the reverse - are men gratified in a similar way by being needed by women? i think they are, but in conventional masc-femme romance the woman needing the man she’s with is more of a given. she needs him not just for sex and companionship, but utilitarian needs like physical security, typically masculine physical and mechanical tasks, authority, and access to the money a successful man can make. but why men need women is less of a given. sex is certainly understood as ‘needed’ by men, but that is not about one woman specifically - traditional gender roles would have us believe when it comes to sex quality and variety is all that counts for a man. sex aside, men are supposed to be able to make their own way in the world.  so when a man not only ‘settles down’ with one woman, but also confesses to actually needing her, specifically, it imbues the woman with a level of importance/specialness that leads to the whole ‘i love him because he needs me’ trope. i still don’t really understand it. 

[dailygender-blog]

05

unless you are a person with nothing to lose, an attempt to radically change or destroy a system requires personal sacrifice. if you benefit at all from a system (patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism) you must be wiling to sacrifice the benefits you get from that system before you can seriously go about dismantling it or even critiquing it. perhaps you are a woman who loves men, or at least cherishes some things about men. in a world without patriarchy, the category of ‘man’ as we understand it will be different, possibly unrecognizable, possibly non-existent. there is no ‘tweaking’ or ‘the same, but better’ or ‘the same, but with better rules’. we must be ready to give up everything about a rotten system. we can have something new, but we need to be prepared to first lose everything and face the prospect of never having it back. even if you have something to lose, you must be willing to lose it. 

[dailygender-blog]

04

What is masculinity and what is femininity? Let’s say I describe ‘seriousness’ as a masculine quality. Someone will be quick to point out women are very serious. Describe any quality as masculine or feminine and a version of that exchange will play out. In trying to get root of what cultural standards of masculinity and femininity consist of, I’ve found it useful to ask these questions: What is it about a butch lesbian (either an imagined stereotype or a real life example) that is masculine? What qualities mark that person as masculine? What is it about very femme gay men that marks them as feminine? What actions do they take, what words do they say, what is it about their embodied presence that we recognize as feminine? When black women athletes are described as masculine, what qualities in them are being assessed? When Asian men are described as not masculine, what qualities are they be judged to be lacking? People can have a range of qualities that is not individually limited by gender expression or gender identity, but the broad cultural conceptsmasculinity and femininity have fairly tight restrictions that are most easily seen when they are perceived to be lacking or adopted by someone who is not supposed to have them.

[dailygender-blog]

03

Talking with straight people is an exercise in suspense because you just know they’re going to say something terrifying and then eventually they do.

[dailygender-blog]

02

in world without rape, men would not have the pleasure of killing men who raped their wives. audiences would not have the pleasure of seeing men kill rapists in movies. in so many stories about men, the act of killing a rapist seems to be viewed as a profound expression of masculine determination and love for the person they killed. there is something sick about the popularity of this narrative, which depends entirely on a woman being raped but is not actually about rape or women.

[dailygender-blog]

01

he most common form of romance that i see around me and in media has to do with a masculine person and feminine person being interested in each other. the masculine person tries to leave an impression on the feminine person, and the feminine person has to decide whether they’re into it and how fast things should proceed. then there is the ‘magic’ part of a happy romance: without explicitly communicating about what they want, both parties get what they want from the other person. this happens in stories all the time, and i believe it sometimes happens in the life of an individual. but what makes it seem special and magic is that events could have unfolded another way. there was an element of suspense and mystery before the moment where both parties got what they wanted. that made the moment where the desires are exposed and confirmed especially exciting. there had been risk of miscommunication and asynchronous desire up to that moment. so it’s a very dramatic moment and very gratifying when it ‘just works’. but that moment of magic romance only works when both parties ARE, by chance, on the same wavelength. If they’re not, that moment when desires are revealed may be awkward, it also may be the precursor to assault. masculine people tend to be socialized to press ahead with advances. feminine people tend to be socialized to cooperate with others. romance only works when the scenario is romantic from the point of view of both partners. if it is only romantic for one of the people involved, it’s a serious problem. but this risk is an inherent part of the way romance is performed and modeled.