Unit Six Post: “Labels” Summary
For my special topic in unit six, I chose Wyatt Fleckenstein’s poem “Labels,” which I found on YouTube under the recommended videos section. This represents sexuality, because the whole poem is Fleckenstein’s experience of being queer, namely in terms of dealing with family ignorance (Fleckenstein’s mother’s love despite difference). It also represents unit six, because, as I mentioned in my last post for unit six, slam poetry is a type of pop culture. Fleckenstein doesn’t specifically make pop culture references, but understanding this poem as pop culture allows me to analyze it within the terms set up in Gender Stories.
According to Gender Stories, one of the ways to rewrite the binary (out of the three: retell, revise, and rewrite), is through synthesis. In terms of gender, that means a “strategy [that] allows one body to carry markers and meanings of both genders simultaneously without privileging either” (Foss, Domenico, Foss 128). While Fleckenstein does represent ambiguous gender roles (“she bought me men’s dress shirts for my job interviews.”), I would argue that this poem also synthesizes sexuality. When describing sexuality, Fleckenstein uses the term queer, which like gender can be, is “fluid, ambiguous, and multiple within the same person” (Foss, Domenico, Foss 128). As Fleckenstein says, “She (the mom) is trying to learn what queer means. I tell her for me, it’s mostly about the people I’m attracted to, but it’s a complicated identity; I say, don’t assume it’s the same for everyone.” This is also similar to how Gender Stories discusses asexuality, though they explain that asexuality opts out of the binary altogether because asexuality includes no desire to have sex and the binary is inherently sexual.
According to Pflag.org, queer is an umbrella term for someone “who feels somehow outside of the societal norms in regards to gender or sexuality. Relating to Fleckenstein’s poem, it is also a “fluid label as opposed to a solid label, one that only requires us to acknowledge that we’re different without specifying how or in what context” (“A Definition of Queer”). I would argue that this lack of labels--a big point to Fleckenstein’s poem--is a way to rewrite the binary. That’s because, for all the oppositions/sides to it, the binary relies on labels and categories. To refuse exact labels is a way to refuse the binary itself. According to Gender Stories, “openness and flexibility are the only rules for constructing and performing this kind of [sexuality]” (Foss, Domenico, Foss 132). Much like familial interactions, Fleckenstein’s sexuality is portrayed as open and flexible.
