Why I am not a man trapped in a woman's body:
1)I am not a man
2)My body is not a woman's body. It is a genderqueer body. It is lanky and sinuous and androgynous. It flails about and crashes into things. It often moves like puppy--awkwardly, with little balance but with excitement.
3)I am not trapped within it.
4)I am in the prolonged process of making it my own
5)I have the imagination and creativity to recognize my own contradictions without being afraid of them
6)I have lovers and friends who recognize these truths
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
Andy for Editor
I've finally become the quintessential Malrboro student. I bitch and moan about how much I have to do, and then I wake up and over commit myself all over again.
That being said... Vote for me
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Activist Rehersal
I haven't been posting because I don't feel like I don't have much to tell you most days.
Unless you want to hear about Jewish Anarchism, about a history of radical political counter-culture in America, about assimilation and whiteness making, about radicalization through construction of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the armed services.
Or trans activism. How when we aren't explicit about our motivations, we can undermine them through our organizing. How the trans movement is endebted to second wave feminism. About how empowerment, consciousness-raising, and community building are ways of resisting transphobia in it multifront battleground. About how we forget this.
Thus is the life of an academic I suppose. Here's a try...
I remember the moist air that clung to my jugular as I climbed the stairs to a mod at Hamshire College last semester. Sweat mingled with pizza fumes as I pushed my way through the patch-clad clusters of grunge hold-outs and trannarchists. The room settled for the concert. Young people sprawled haphazardly around the anarchist with a guitar. Piercing matted faces hung in the doorway. Women in flannel sat Indian style, flowing over into cuddle piles on the floor. I came as I had spent most of my days since I moved to Northampton-alone.
The fragrance was distantly reminiscent of a place I could not stand to be anymore but the contrast was real. I felt at home here more than I had in months. Brattleboro hung on their tongues shaped in words like ecology and sustainable agriculture, but they fell silent as he began to wail. Indictments. Patriarchy and corporations. Train-hopping through tunes that laid bare my frustrations. I felt too vulnerable to make eye-contact. I felt to cozy not to.
I invited Evan Greer to my college hoping for a sense of community that always falls short of my expectations. I hoped he could some how jump start my commitment to this place I'd turned my back upon. For all of his charm, he could not. I choreographed the privilege walk effortlessly. I sketched the outline of social justice with my eyes closed. I day dreamed through the mind map of climate change. I was a learned yet terrible activist. I was bored. The exercises felt passe', rote, self-congratulatory even. I feel like I'm stuck in an activist rehearsal, and I'm waiting for the stage call...
Unless you want to hear about Jewish Anarchism, about a history of radical political counter-culture in America, about assimilation and whiteness making, about radicalization through construction of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the armed services.
Or trans activism. How when we aren't explicit about our motivations, we can undermine them through our organizing. How the trans movement is endebted to second wave feminism. About how empowerment, consciousness-raising, and community building are ways of resisting transphobia in it multifront battleground. About how we forget this.
Thus is the life of an academic I suppose. Here's a try...
I remember the moist air that clung to my jugular as I climbed the stairs to a mod at Hamshire College last semester. Sweat mingled with pizza fumes as I pushed my way through the patch-clad clusters of grunge hold-outs and trannarchists. The room settled for the concert. Young people sprawled haphazardly around the anarchist with a guitar. Piercing matted faces hung in the doorway. Women in flannel sat Indian style, flowing over into cuddle piles on the floor. I came as I had spent most of my days since I moved to Northampton-alone.
The fragrance was distantly reminiscent of a place I could not stand to be anymore but the contrast was real. I felt at home here more than I had in months. Brattleboro hung on their tongues shaped in words like ecology and sustainable agriculture, but they fell silent as he began to wail. Indictments. Patriarchy and corporations. Train-hopping through tunes that laid bare my frustrations. I felt too vulnerable to make eye-contact. I felt to cozy not to.
I invited Evan Greer to my college hoping for a sense of community that always falls short of my expectations. I hoped he could some how jump start my commitment to this place I'd turned my back upon. For all of his charm, he could not. I choreographed the privilege walk effortlessly. I sketched the outline of social justice with my eyes closed. I day dreamed through the mind map of climate change. I was a learned yet terrible activist. I was bored. The exercises felt passe', rote, self-congratulatory even. I feel like I'm stuck in an activist rehearsal, and I'm waiting for the stage call...
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Class Issues and the Transgender Community
I've been at the task of making generalizations about the trans people I've met over the last 6 months of researching and being fairly active in trans communities in the area, and the one set of issues that comes to the surface most blantantly is class issues.
If the standard of living of normative society could be measured on a 1-10 scale, I think the whole spectrum of transfolk could fit within 1-6 and probably would cluster around 2-4. What does it mean that I was part of an organizing body whose six core members were mostly underemployed or unemployed despite having marketable skills (the group included a lawyer, a marketing executive, a web developer)? These are the leaders. They and others like them are the people in our community who have the most education and stability who are most willing and able to start families. These are our success stories. And among the people I admire most in our community, none of them have health insurance. Many of them are married to bio-women who make more money than they do (we all know that bio-women make 75% of what bio-men do). Many are part-time employees. Few own the houses they live in. Most do a little bit of a lot of things to barely make ends meet.
It's not just that the trans community are poor, but that we are one of the only downwardly mobile communities I can think of (if you ave others then please leave a comment). This means that on average trans people have less wealth than their parents. Whereas most people maintain the same level of wealth as their parents or even gain wealth (because they have access to cultural capital that helps them accrue wealth) to pass onto future generations. What does it mean that our children are less likely to go to college than we were, less likely to own a house, less likely to have access to any number of opportunities purely by virtue of their parent's gender identity/expression?
Most frustrating of all is that I don't know where I'm going to end up even within this community. I know that my life (materially and in other respects) will probably look a lot more like the trans activists I interview than like my mother's life. However, I don't know if I'll end up transitioning. I don't know if I'll ever get that male privilege. I doubt that I'll ever get straight privilege or even gender-normative-woman privilege. I guess the more I think about the future, then more I feel oppressed.
If the standard of living of normative society could be measured on a 1-10 scale, I think the whole spectrum of transfolk could fit within 1-6 and probably would cluster around 2-4. What does it mean that I was part of an organizing body whose six core members were mostly underemployed or unemployed despite having marketable skills (the group included a lawyer, a marketing executive, a web developer)? These are the leaders. They and others like them are the people in our community who have the most education and stability who are most willing and able to start families. These are our success stories. And among the people I admire most in our community, none of them have health insurance. Many of them are married to bio-women who make more money than they do (we all know that bio-women make 75% of what bio-men do). Many are part-time employees. Few own the houses they live in. Most do a little bit of a lot of things to barely make ends meet.
It's not just that the trans community are poor, but that we are one of the only downwardly mobile communities I can think of (if you ave others then please leave a comment). This means that on average trans people have less wealth than their parents. Whereas most people maintain the same level of wealth as their parents or even gain wealth (because they have access to cultural capital that helps them accrue wealth) to pass onto future generations. What does it mean that our children are less likely to go to college than we were, less likely to own a house, less likely to have access to any number of opportunities purely by virtue of their parent's gender identity/expression?
Most frustrating of all is that I don't know where I'm going to end up even within this community. I know that my life (materially and in other respects) will probably look a lot more like the trans activists I interview than like my mother's life. However, I don't know if I'll end up transitioning. I don't know if I'll ever get that male privilege. I doubt that I'll ever get straight privilege or even gender-normative-woman privilege. I guess the more I think about the future, then more I feel oppressed.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Folksonomy Musings (article and poem)
In a moment of insomnia, I've decided to post the only real pearl of wisdom I gained from the technology portion of the Allied Media Conference, and it can be summed up in the equation: Folksonomy= folk + tagging = more democratic pathways of information.
I know, it sounds so theoretical that you're probably either wanting to click away in annoyance or preparing to commence mental masturbation, but if you make it to the end, then there is a geeky yet kinda cute (if I do say so myself) conclusion.
It seems that even the "experts" find Web 2.0 to be a nebulous concept, but from what I gather, it refers to a new way of creating, accessing, and thinking about information that has come about via the internet, but what makes it 2.0 is how we're using it. When the process of creating content becomes communal like in open source, when the process of distribution becomes social like in youtube, when the process of cataloging becomes collective and democratic like in tagging (the blue highlighted words at the end of each blog entry that are actually searchable key terms), that's when we're operating in Web 2.0 space.
[skip this if you want to avoid theory] Let's take a second to deconstruct Folksonomy (folk + taxonomy) or "the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content" according to wikipedia. With tagging, we assign arbitrary associations that, rather than being based upon external, standardized cues, add meaning from our own experiences, allow us to highlight which aspects of a give piece of information are important to us, and allow us to connect with other people who categorize in similar ways to what we do.
Tagging is like identity. It is created based on reference points that shift according to whom is interpreting what and in which context. Content can inhabit multiple varied, intersecting and/or overlapping categories at any one time. There is a portion of it that has to do with the actual content but most of its meaning comes from how the user relate to it- how they call it, who they send it to, what they associate with it. Where as old-school internet searches operated by a tree-like structure, with one category embedded underneath another one (ie. to find soccer scores you would look under entertainment then sports then soccer then statistics), tagging only privileges one way of categorizing information above others in so far as it is more commonly cited and understood.
But is that enough to call it folk? Some of the distinguishers of things that fall under the category of folk in my mind are... it's something easy to teach yourself, something can be done almost anywhere by anyone, something that requires relatively little investment of time, and training, and/or money upfront. Let's remember who does and does not have the access to the internet and under what circumstances (things that make sense to check out on my laptop which I have 24 hour access to are different than what I would check out if I were on a public library computer for 20 min blocks). Let's remember who has the confidence and spare time to teach themselves (I only learned how to use some of these programs when I flew half way across the country to go to a conference). Lets remember that we only occasionally do it in the same room and almost never do it in the streets...
Other neat things to think about:
Zipcode tagging = what’s going on around you? Who could you meet? Possibility of real world connection.
Pivot browsing (browsing by using tags) = conversational flow
[You've made it past the techy part!] Why is this important? Because it means that we are learning new ways to relate to content, we are becoming actively engaged in the media we are consuming at each step of the process. Of course there is the issue that all of the infrastructure we use (like blogspot) is corporately consolidate and sustained mostly through data mining. Even though there are promising alternatives to corporate monoliths (such as Storiesforchange.net instead of youtube), they have only a fraction of the traffic, and in a cyber world where there is too much everywhere all the time, distribution is an important consideration. It's democratic in the way that political parties and lobbying are, which is to say it's easy to bully.
In the end, web 2.0 is not anyones salvation. It is a tool that is less limiting, less consolidated, less inaccessible than television was, but its not local, its not class-blind, and it doesn't belong to us. We should let our imaginations be freed by it in-so-far as it creates new ways of relating to and with each other via technology but we should be cautious that we don't let it technology circumscribe our notions of what community and social networking actually mean.
Tags for my life 06.30.08
Lost, wandering, VA beach, Northampton, Marlboro College, in between, liminal, intersticial, borderlands, genderqueer, queer, white Puerto Rican, abstentia, unemployed, Buddhist, groundless ground, vulnerability, stronger, Afraid, Recovering, compassion, asexual, romantic, intimacy, connection, wrestling, kink, play, boi, post-modern, writing, teaching, Meg Mott, creating, media, documentaries, reflexive, Truth, dysfunctional family, baggage, lies, silence, confusion
I know, it sounds so theoretical that you're probably either wanting to click away in annoyance or preparing to commence mental masturbation, but if you make it to the end, then there is a geeky yet kinda cute (if I do say so myself) conclusion.
It seems that even the "experts" find Web 2.0 to be a nebulous concept, but from what I gather, it refers to a new way of creating, accessing, and thinking about information that has come about via the internet, but what makes it 2.0 is how we're using it. When the process of creating content becomes communal like in open source, when the process of distribution becomes social like in youtube, when the process of cataloging becomes collective and democratic like in tagging (the blue highlighted words at the end of each blog entry that are actually searchable key terms), that's when we're operating in Web 2.0 space.
[skip this if you want to avoid theory] Let's take a second to deconstruct Folksonomy (folk + taxonomy) or "the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content" according to wikipedia. With tagging, we assign arbitrary associations that, rather than being based upon external, standardized cues, add meaning from our own experiences, allow us to highlight which aspects of a give piece of information are important to us, and allow us to connect with other people who categorize in similar ways to what we do.
Tagging is like identity. It is created based on reference points that shift according to whom is interpreting what and in which context. Content can inhabit multiple varied, intersecting and/or overlapping categories at any one time. There is a portion of it that has to do with the actual content but most of its meaning comes from how the user relate to it- how they call it, who they send it to, what they associate with it. Where as old-school internet searches operated by a tree-like structure, with one category embedded underneath another one (ie. to find soccer scores you would look under entertainment then sports then soccer then statistics), tagging only privileges one way of categorizing information above others in so far as it is more commonly cited and understood.
But is that enough to call it folk? Some of the distinguishers of things that fall under the category of folk in my mind are... it's something easy to teach yourself, something can be done almost anywhere by anyone, something that requires relatively little investment of time, and training, and/or money upfront. Let's remember who does and does not have the access to the internet and under what circumstances (things that make sense to check out on my laptop which I have 24 hour access to are different than what I would check out if I were on a public library computer for 20 min blocks). Let's remember who has the confidence and spare time to teach themselves (I only learned how to use some of these programs when I flew half way across the country to go to a conference). Lets remember that we only occasionally do it in the same room and almost never do it in the streets...
Other neat things to think about:
Zipcode tagging = what’s going on around you? Who could you meet? Possibility of real world connection.
Pivot browsing (browsing by using tags) = conversational flow
[You've made it past the techy part!] Why is this important? Because it means that we are learning new ways to relate to content, we are becoming actively engaged in the media we are consuming at each step of the process. Of course there is the issue that all of the infrastructure we use (like blogspot) is corporately consolidate and sustained mostly through data mining. Even though there are promising alternatives to corporate monoliths (such as Storiesforchange.net instead of youtube), they have only a fraction of the traffic, and in a cyber world where there is too much everywhere all the time, distribution is an important consideration. It's democratic in the way that political parties and lobbying are, which is to say it's easy to bully.
In the end, web 2.0 is not anyones salvation. It is a tool that is less limiting, less consolidated, less inaccessible than television was, but its not local, its not class-blind, and it doesn't belong to us. We should let our imaginations be freed by it in-so-far as it creates new ways of relating to and with each other via technology but we should be cautious that we don't let it technology circumscribe our notions of what community and social networking actually mean.
Tags for my life 06.30.08
Lost, wandering, VA beach, Northampton, Marlboro College, in between, liminal, intersticial, borderlands, genderqueer, queer, white Puerto Rican, abstentia, unemployed, Buddhist, groundless ground, vulnerability, stronger, Afraid, Recovering, compassion, asexual, romantic, intimacy, connection, wrestling, kink, play, boi, post-modern, writing, teaching, Meg Mott, creating, media, documentaries, reflexive, Truth, dysfunctional family, baggage, lies, silence, confusion
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