Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

that post demands a longer and more thoughtful response, but i want to hop in while i have a second and say YES I AGREE with so much of it, and that gender-specific responses (per your second anecdote) are often cloaked as 'convention' and 'tradition' b/c it is otherwise uncomfortable w/ a privilaged group to confront its own prejudice.

the whole "IDM (yeuch) is boy's only music" plays as a running trope amongst its detractors, too. but with the same reinforcement of stereotypes i guess?

Not to derail into WCC obsession land but... I get that about IDM coding "male" but - ~Aphex Twin~?!? Really?!?! Dude who appeared on the cover of the NME wearing a bikini and in fact a female body? Dude who addressed the tendering if electronic music with "girl songs" and "boy songs" and "girl/boy songs" - this guy? You're using him to construct an image of "masculinity" that excludes women at the end of a rape threat? Really?

HOW?

the rape threat is disgusting and inexcusable but Aphex Twin is also "difficult music", "collectable", "techie", "beardy" , all do have male associations ( without any tangible reason inherent to any of those attributes except the last ! but the stereotype *is* there)

He's also long haired and slightly effeminate in his beauty and he's a big sappy Celt who writes Satie inspired ballads for his Mum's birthday?

But this isn't "wah watmm sucks" it's about the construction of "male" identity through female-excluding spaces.

And not even in an honest way, like the "no boys thread" is an acknowledgement that yes, boys are sometimes interested in the things girls discuss on their own, but we'd rather be on our own kind. It's this highly gendered exclusion based on ~pretending women are not interested or biologically incapable~ of gender neutral spaces men wish to claim.

And it's often not even about male bonding or identity but about claiming things which bring power, money or acclaim so as to exclude women from all three

On our own / with our own kind. Sorry clumsy construction.

i guess some of Richard's more boneheadedly boyish fans can take the whole "Windowlicker" bikini thing as a playground joke and nothing more disturbing to their libidos.

yeah, i feel like the bikini thing played out as a gross-out joke rather than a feminising, in the discourse i read about it at the time at least. (and by discourse, let's be clear, i mean select magazine)

now to read WCC's post properly!

harbl, we should make that book club happen! (possibly w/o my mum, i am not bringing her to ilx)

Given the context of his other work, I don't read it as gross-out but whatevs, this is not AFX: C or D

It's about how men construct these rules of "X = feminine; Y = masculine" Very actively chase you out of Y, then claim "no women are in Y" as ~proof~ of Y's inherent "masculinity."

It's the same thing as Baron-Cohen (the neuroscientist one not the comedian) claiming that there is "male brain" and "female brain" and then writing a test for "female brain" on which actual women score an average of 40%.

My limited exposure to AFX part seven:

The video to Windowlicker. First part is the lonnng bit where two dudes in a car agressively (well, one of them is, the other is "whoa, be nicer!") hassling two girls to get into their car for specific reason.

Then, just as it's getting boring, Ricky smashes into the car removing it and the 2 MEN!, and seduces the two girls by sort of morphing them into himself and vice versa.

Now, is that a fairly feminine outcome, or am I over-reading?

WCC, I think your first example emphasises one of the funny things about closing things off by gender, which is the use of negative language about [hobby/trait/tendency] as a way of keeping other people out.

there's a lot of "this is a MALE thing that MEN do because we're boring and spoddy and get obsessive about stuff and our wives just don't understand" language used around quite geeky things - and because it sounds like a self-criticism it's considered 'okay', as a way of talking. but e.g. there's a lot of anger among geeky women about the way it's used as a barrier, "women just aren't interested in this" so you specifically as a woman can't be interested in this.

i think the second 'geeky' could have been instead 'women who are into sci-fi', i was kind of specifically thinking of some arguments around the founding of that website The Mary Sue

Most men seem to read it as competitive dickwaving - AFX as bigger pimp than the 2 wannabes / scrubs trying to pick up girls with no cash. But to me, the whole morphing thing and becoming one another was a genderfuck that outweighed the "man performing masculinity in front of bevy of naked girls and the rivals he has bested" because what he was performing was so NOT heteronormativity.

But this is not an AFX thread, are y'all just ignoring everything else I said in that massive post?

Ha x-post w C v much not ignoring.

Sci-Fi is a HUGE one & prob would have been a better example but I haven't been part of any scifi communities in years bcuz electronic music is my scifi. Also the biggest scifi geeks I know are ALL women.

OK, maybe a nother angle:

Stereotypical behaviour: The Man goes off to do his 'hobbieh' while the wife shrugs and goes off shopping with the girls. But on entering the hobbispace, oh noe another girl! Must not make move on her! must not flirt! I know I'll insult her and she will never look like making a move!

I find male-only groups/spaces somewhat alien and would be depressed to think of any of my activities as masculine-coded.

I find sci-fi spaces somewhat alien, but hey.

So women must be excluded from masculine space because their pesky temptress ways mean that men cannot control their sexuality? Oh come off it, that one is Older Than Dirt and it's one of the founding principles of Rape Culture. #NotBuyingIt

i really don't think it's about feeling constrained by yr desire to flirt w/o insulting. but there is certainly a way in which people who conceive of these spaces as 'masculine' do feel constrained if not threatened by a female presence.

and maybe that's a feeling that needs to be patiently worked out if there's ever to be a solution.

i'm sure men only spaces exist in part because some men feel threatened by female sexuality, and that needn't be expressed purely as "away vile temptress"? that inability to relate to women other than in terms of their desirability/undesirability underpins rape culture but it's problematic in plenty of other ways too - libido destroying reason is another classic "the boys can't help it" identity ish and at the same time as it serves to exclude women from swathes of discourse it perma-cripples swathes of men in a permanent adolescence. (which is still a privileged state within the kyriarchy yes)

question tho, isn't there a more general division happening here between, for want of a better phrase, the libido-led and the intellect-led? a division that also cuts across normative gender lines?

Must be (excluded)? No of course not. it all comes down to basic ignorance, of course.

Men are allowed to speak their desire without losing authority but godhelpyou if you as a woman bring sexuality into the ring (your own or anyone else's) because you can be one or the other, never both but that's another kettle of fish.

I understand the desire to take a vacation from sexual temptation but male only spaces have usually been more annoying than relaxing in my experience.

xp

it's a kettle this thread can explore tho?

and yeah huge awful double standards still in play but female sexuality is a little way out of the angels vs whores box by now surely?

I'm not ignoring, I just can't speak w/ much experience about the second scenario – I have such unremittingly terrible taste in music, and such a preference for mid-century melodic drivel that my tastes transgress boundaries far beyond the gender-inflected ones, and kind of fail in a way that preculdes any serious consideration. IOW, you are potentially right, but I wouldn't know, and I don't have an analogue in my own life for comparison.

As to the first example... I think the reactive gendering of activities you cite – the attachment of a gender/sexuality sum to an innately neutral activity – is a very real thing and has as much to do with fear of sissiness or faggotry on behalf of the men themselves, as with an outward directed pressure toward women. This doesn't make the labels less offensive – it reduces the participation of women to an epsilon - but is in significant fashion a construct for power-holding men to elevate their own preferences. Anecdotally, I enjoy growing small potted herb plants and flowers. I was well into my 20s before I acknowledged that (a) I liked this activity and (b) I had avoided participating because I felt it wasn't proper/appropriate/sissyish (c) it had been a favorite childhood hobby to garden with my grandmother that I had stopped as a teenager. What I mean to illustrate is that in the experience of my life, this type of indoor gardening was a feminized activity* in a strictly non-valuative way, but nevertheless one that I felt I could not access for fear of transgressing a strictly described gender stereotype.

* Feminized in the sense that I could not participate, and I was masculine, and the container gardeners in my circle were female. The singular experience trumped the larger cultural one that says 'gardening is an obv. gender-neutral activity,' and was directed only inward – I didn't, to the best of my recollection, make any assumption or attach meaning to any male gardeners I encountered.

that post is like an hour old, sorry

remy, what does "reduces... to an epsilon" mean? i've never come across it before and google's not being super helpful.

epsilon is a maths analogy! it's something very very small

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Epsilon.html

just a mathy way of saying 'makes women a trivial sum'

maths analogies! awesome, i am using that one forever.

Wow, this thread. Holy hell. By the way, if you start your argument on the premise that a very very common turn of phrase is actually something to be taken painstakingly literally, you've already lost.

I can't deal with the multitude of points and ideas that have been on this thread since last I checked in, so I'm just gonna...

i don't know much about the trans experience or trans norms at all. i was raised by two cisgender lesbians & a hetero pair of parents, and i feel like i have some sense of what friends mean when they describe themselves as queer, but i haven't known or read of much of the trans experience. does anyone have suggestions on that?

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 6:50 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My friend has written a good personal column about it, if you're interested? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/transgender-journey

Also, I saw someone ask for a clarification of 'cisgender' upthread, but not sure if anyone answered? I know wiki's not the best resource, but this sort of covers it. Basically, it's in contrast to 'trans' but without the highly offensive use of terms like 'normal' that people often use without thinking (I'm sure I have done in the past).

cis gay men seem to get especially het up about the word 'cis' ime - like i've seen a few bloggers claim they don't like the word because it sounds like "sissy" and is thus feminizing/demeaning (and yet they're content to fling the word 'tranny' around as if that word isn't extremely problematic either)

i like cis because it's both a good shorthand that dispels the idea of all trans ppl as being 'other' and bcz it's etymologically consistent

huh I've never seen this cisgender term before, interesting.

Any dude, gay or otherwise, who gets het up about "feminising" being inherently "demeaning" can GTFO AFAIC.

I mean I get the negative reductive stereotypes of gay men as effete can be pretty offensive and RONG but that derives its power from an intensely misogynist worldview that sees femininity as naturally tainted as much as reductive ideas about homosexuality.

sure - otoh it isn't really that surprising that some gay men overcompensate in the masculine gender roles dept. defense mechanism etc

"het up" <-- also problematic :)

i like cis as useful & necessary shorthand but i'm also aware of how jargony it can come across to people who haven't heard it before - the influence of academia and academic language on queer/feminist theory is not something i would dismiss but i think it's also helpful (and necessary!) to move away from it if we actually want to effect this change we talk about.

SO MANY gay men i've known have casually flung around "tranny" (and terms like "slut", "slag" too for that matter) and i fucking hate it.

lol mark

SO MANY gay men i've known have casually flung around "tranny" (and terms like "slut", "slag" too for that matter)

lol yeah if anything that's where I've picked it up from. long-running club night called the "Trannyshack" in SF etc

i thought "het up" was derived from "heated up"?

have any transsexual communities attempted to reclaim "tranny" incidentally? i have no idea

well I can tell you from experience that most of the attendees at Trannyshack are uh, cisgendered, I guess

Het up is past tense of heated up, it's punny! Duh!

ooh look there's a website

maybe SFW, I dunno

those angry hets! ;)

re: 'tranny': the impression i have is that, much like 'fag', some ppl are fine with it, others aren't. either way, not cis ppl's place to make that call (and i personally don't feel comfortable using it in just about any context)

Any dude, gay or otherwise, who gets het up about "feminising" being inherently "demeaning" can GTFO AFAIC.

i agree but there's also a thing that i recognise where you feel like someone's treating you like a stereotype of a particularly flaming/feminine gay man and i tend to respond by having to put my foot down and make it clear that's not on

Sorry I forgot, I'm meant to still be participating in the Great Feminist Humour Boycott of 1973 - we will boycott humour until equality is achieved... oh wait.