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