I went on a flight of fancy this afternoon and made my very own Niche Pride Flag (inspired by a euphoric conversation with a friend last weekend). Rather than just keep it to myself, I figured, hey, what else is Tumblr for?
Note that this is intended to represent me and me only; it’s an exercise in self-awareness and (re-)affirming my values. I guess I have a weird and nuanced relationship with the politics around pride flags and flags in general.
Here’s the breakdown:
Seven horizontal stripes for the seven letters of my given name (it’s a powerful name, and seven is historically an auspicious/significant number).
burgundy: passion, in both the sense of emotional passion (for things, ideas, people, etc) and spiritual passion (transformative suffering - good things in my life have often come out of very dark periods); recognition and acceptance of the fact that suffering is a part of life (a nod to certain alternative interpretations of the Garden of Eden story, and to the First Noble Truth in Buddhism).
mulberry: also known as murrey in heraldry. I developed a fondness for this colour during my last big period of self-assertion (when I was also heavily involved with the SCA); it felt like all the best qualities of blood-red and royal purple rolled into one. I use it here to represent what the Shambhala Buddhist community (from whom I’ve learned a lot) calls warriorship - a kind of dignified bravery - in my case encompassing a dedication to justice, ideally fuelled by the compassionate love known to Christians as agape (analogous to the Buddhist metta).
rose pink: queer femininity. My relationship to femininity is complicated and (like anything) context-dependent; what both defines it and makes it vague is that I perform it specifically for myself and for other women-aligned people (i.e., the usual definition of “femme” in lesbian communities), as well as to transgress the limitations of my assigned gender. I don’t know how much of it is essential to me, but I like it when other people recognize it in me.
white: non-binariness, analogous to the white stripe in the trans and genderqueer flags. However, my sense of my own gender is virtually a blank slate; I reject all essentialist notions of gender (and sex), and feel quite strongly that gender can only be understood in terms of performativity (at least on a personal level) and/or as a class system (on a societal level). Thus, my own gender quest is ultimately a lifelong exploration of throwing gendered attributes against a metaphysical wall and seeing if they stick; it’s a kind of openness, nothingness, don’t-know-ness that I have to be comfortable with.
(I realize this flag design is literally “centering whiteness”, as a friend of mine observed about the trans and genderqueer flags, but, as a white person, this is also a reminder to myself to be accountable for my own privilege and ethnocentrism.)
medium blue: boyishness; salvaging and sublimating whatever attributes of my assigned gender I find helpful or even important. Note that I construct “boyishness” as a very different thing than manliness or manhood, which I’ve never been able to identify with.
indigo/dark blue: spirituality, esp. mysticism. Should be self-evident if you read my posts, but I’m really into the idea of liberatory encounters with a divine presence that may-or-may-not be within us if not also outside of us, and calls us to work toward a vision of universal love and justice.
In case you haven’t noticed, I find God and gender to be very similar as they can’t be said to exist in a nuts-and-bolts sense of phenomenal reality, but this doesn’t preclude them being real or meaningful (after all, they affect us and the world around us).
forest green: renewal and resiliency. During my last big phase of self-assertion, I bought a dark green wool overcoat (think Captain Jack Harkness) at an army surplus store and wore it everywhere. I’m doing the same with a dark green corduroy jacket that’s belonged to a succession of important people in my life. Green is a colour of new growth, but here it’s focused and determined. Throw whatever you want at me, I’ll just reinvent myself and move ahead.