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

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.

I understand that, Lex, I just wish that there were a way gay men could resist the stereotype without agreeing with perpetuating the construct that being ~like a woman~ is inherently awful. Say it's incorrect, but no need to say it's demeaning?

gay men tend to have butch/femme and top/bottom dichotomies but no real useful way to describe the in-between stuff, which is why i hate both of those dichotomies

well the thing is it's usually in situations where you can't really spell it out in those exact terms, it's something you have to convey through your own behaviour rather than a calm & sober debate about identity/gender.

which might be something to talk about, actually, b/c how these gender issues affect us in a practical way is often not in a situation like this thread, where it's entirely appropriate to be discussing these things in these terms - most of one's quotidian life isn't like this, and it's navigating those situations where the actual problems come from

or something. don't feel i expressed that quite clearly

gay men tend to have butch/femme and top/bottom dichotomies but no real useful way to describe the in-between stuff, which is why i hate both of those dichotomies

― Prince Rebus (donna rouge), Tuesday, February 14, 2012 5:50 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otmfm

(though i don't want to hijack the feminism thread with gay male talk, ha. btw i have always found it funny how many str8 ilxors lurk on the gay thread!)

late replying to this but couple of xps to NV...

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?
this interests me greatly because on the one hand you have 'male' logic, reason etc explicitly positioned against 'female' sentimentality, hysteria etc.

Yet with sexuality you see the opposite popular perceptions - men are passionate, sexual, unafraid etc vs women who are "not as sexual", "don't think about sex as much as men", "are more aroused by the mental than the physical" etc.*

why is that?

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?
irl yes obviously but the public perception really hasn't moved on much; you see this literally every time a rape case hits the news.

*all actual things men have said to me.

Yet with sexuality you see the opposite popular perceptions - men are passionate, sexual, unafraid etc vs women who are "not as sexual", "don't think about sex as much as men", "are more aroused by the mental than the physical" etc.*

i recognize what you're describing but i think associations with female sexuality are way more incoherent than that. women are also viewed as sexually voracious in a way that threatens men, especially women of color in our cultural context.

i am not actually sure the way female sexuality is understood is all the far out of the virgin-whore box, but like i said, i can be reactionary about this stuff.

women are also viewed as sexually voracious in a way that threatens men, especially women of color in our cultural context.

this is news to me. examples?

i guess i'm just talking about the whore pole of the virgin-whore dynamic. "Hottentot Venus" type-stuff.

men are passionate, sexual, unafraid

More reckless, maybe.

xxp definitely true horseshoe.

when i say about it having moved on, I was definitely not referring to the wider societal perception!

i guess i'm just talking about the whore pole of the virgin-whore dynamic. "Hottentot Venus" type-stuff.

right, this seems to comfortably encompass, say, Nicki Minaj or Li'l Kim or whoever. otoh I can't recall too many asian dragon-lady representations lately... and latina women are like a whole other basket of nuances when it comes to the virgin-whore axis.

xp