Margin of Error

Today, I sat sipping my free-trade coffee, eating my local-vegan eggless-salad sandwich, reading up on Queer/Gender theory.  I'm not really the epitome of stereotypes that my prior statement would have you believe!  I believe it is important to be involved in activism and charity.  I contribute regularly to Greenpeace, Doctors Without Borders, and a bunch of other things.

Here is the problem I have with boxes.  If nobody had ever told you that you're in one, how do you learn to think outside of it?  With regard to gender, I believe that it is essentially a socially constructed box that we use to oppress other people.  It's not that simple, though.  There are innumerable more systems of inequality that exist, simply because our society rewards some arbitrary characteristic, and oppresses all things not it.  But I'll get to all that some other day.

I'm reading Riki Wilchins's Gender Theory/Queer Theory at the moment, and my Intro to Women's Studies textbook at the same time, and they both present this same idea: if we used to define "Man," but not "Woman," other than to not that whatever is not "Man" must be this other thing we'll call "Woman."  Wilchins brings a really important point up near the end of the book.  She adds that feminism not only strengthened and supported the idea of the "Woman," but in empowering us, we also reinforced the archaic notion of the binary norm system that we've all come to agree is ridiculous.  It seems like an endless rat race in semantics to me, as a novice Queer/Gender theorist.  (Actually I'm three upgrades away from novice, so be gentle with critiques, please.)  We all agree that to be marginalized is terrible, (unless you're the one doing the marginalizing, then...) but how are we supposed to fix it?  Why do we have to be boxes to be checked?  Why are we in different sections of the department store?  Why are we continually stroking this monster in society (and when will it eat us alive?!)?

But if we're so much more complex, why don't we have other categories listed in the Missed Connections section of Craig's List?  Shouldn't there be more to it?  What about intersexed persons?  Where do they find the lost spark from a public transportation encounter? 

I might as well "out" myself here. In case you hadn't figured it out yet, yes, it's true, I read the Craig's List Missed Encounters.  I can't help it, and refuse to make excuses for it.  I like to fantasize in my mind that some of those random lost opportunities will someday result in love.  Or at least a phone number exchange.  I'm an idealist, I suppose.  It's just my nature.

But back to the evils of Patriarchy, Capitalism, and discrimination:  yeah, they all pretty much suck, but they are all so interwoven into each other, it turns out, they form a giant floor rug under which we all get swept sometimes.  

Not quite as eloquent as usual,
Shayna

New Old City

Dedicated to a different generation.

So for a class we've been discussing (and by that I mean I played hookie and had to get with the prof to catch up) Samuel Delaney's Time's Square Red, Time's Square Blue.  Before I go into all the things that this fantastic book brought up, I have to preface it with a few things.

First off, I need to remind you of my self-diagnosed and untreated ADHD.  When I am reading, I am always listening to music, as well, so there is not a real integrity of pure literary work.  It's kind of like that concept of sociology that you cannot take an aspect of an individual completely out of its context. (i.e. I am a woman and ambidextrous, but I don't represent all women, nor all ambidextrous people; the combined total of all the things I am make me who and what I am, and you can't separate each thing out...)

Okay, second, this book is a little graphic (but fabulous) when it comes to the sexual description.  It is, however very nonchalant about the whole thing.  Delaney writes about public sex in the theaters of Time's Square in the 1980's as an aspect of social and contemporary culture.

The book is broken into two main "essays," Delaney's own personal accounts with people he's met in the theaters, and their interaction, and the second half, sections where he analyzes the atmosphere and culture as it relates to his own philosophy/views.  In the second half, he repeatedly draws upon what Jane Jacobs says in Death and Life Of Great American Cities. Jacobs explains the value to all aspects of the population of larger cities, including what she refers to as "winos" and junkies. She does, however exclude the public sex scene from this rhetoric.

But is there really value in a bunch of grimy old movie theaters that feature porno films?  Delaney says yes, and I'm inclined to agree emphatically.  I believe in any process that creates a sense of unity and forms anastamoses in society, where otherwise the divide between class, race, gender, and everything else we humans use to persecute one another.  If gangs weren't violent, I'd probably be for that, too, only it would look much more like a Rotary Club meeting.

At any rate, when I was sharing my (admittedly naive and idealistic) interpretation of the book with the professor, two things popped into my head. First, I was immediately curious if Delaney had published anything on the subject in the last decade or so that might be comparable to this generation's transition to more internet-based resources like Craigslist and Adultfriendfinder, etc.  (He has not.) I am also wondering if there is any sort of comparable "underground" place for women to have the random public sexual encounters.  (I'm pretty sure there is not, and if there is, I've certainly not yet found it...)

At any rate, I'll come back to this topic later, I can almost promise it!