Refiner's Fire

This Lenten season, I have given up self-loathing.

I'm doing okay so far. Not great, though I never expected to stop hating myself altogether – you don't lose the habit of a lifetime just by deciding to give it up for Lent – but I've at least managed to steer clear of wallowing.

In the week or so running up to Ash Wednesday, it was very, very bad. Curl-up-under-my-desk-and-sob bad. Sit-in-the-back-seat-and-cry-silently-to-myself bad. When I get mired in it like that, it's very difficult to extricate myself, because it's self-perpetuating: I hate myself, and then I hate myself more for being so self-absorbed as to be thinking about how much I hate myself... It feeds itself.

So on Ash Wednesday I said to myself sternly: This ends now. For the next forty days, there will be no wallowing.

I've kept to that resolution pretty well, I think. Usually it present itself as a very stark choice between paths – THIS WAY TO THE QUAGMIRE OF SELF-LOATHING – and I just have to force myself to pick the sunny one. (No, inner voices, you're the worthless pieces of shit.) Unfortunately, I have not yet found a way to shut off the constant lower-level white noise of self-hatred that accompanies my every waking moment.

It feels as though that low-level stuff has stepped up its game in the past couple of months, but I don't think this is actually the case. I think what's happened is an increase in my self-awareness, to the point that I am now fully cognizant of (a) just how much self-loathing I've been carrying around in my brain-holder and (b) the possibility that maybe I should be trying to change that. (I also blame heightened self-awareness for the amplified gender identity struggle, which is not an entirely separate issue from the self-loathing one.)

This is not easy. Externally, my life is as close to perfect as it's ever been, and maybe it's because I feel I don't deserve such happiness that I torture myself so.

Fiction used to be enough. For at least a dozen years now, I've had one particular ongoing fictional world in which I spend at least a little time every single day. It sufficed as a channel, a coping mechanism, for my self-loathing (and, actually, some of my gender issues too). But lately that's not enough. I can't funnel it all into a world of my imagining anymore. I can't pretend my brain is made of tiny boxes. The walls are coming down, and I don't know what to do.

But, in my moments of optimism and faith, I can believe that what I am facing right now is the refiner's fire, and that I will be purified.

Losing Patience

I am seriously losing patience with white people who don't get it.

Pop quiz! What is your response to this?

A. OH BURN, TRUTH

B. I find it incredibly offensive that someone has just labeled my entire race as thieves. No one race is better than the other, I won't have someone stirring up racial hatred. If you define white as Western European and American, we are not responsible for all the evils in the world. Black people, Asian people, Indian people, Muslims, Jews, shamans, witch doctors, first nations, Maoris etc. have all committed atrocities and stolen from each other.

If you answered A, congratulations! You're not a completely terrible human being!

If you answered B (or some variant thereof), then just... GTFO.

When this happened on my Facebook, I pretty much disengaged completely. I wrote only, “OH NO, I'M REVERSE RACIST”, which is probably far too subtle a slice of mockery for the person in question (who probably thinks that “reverse racism” is a thing), and then I backed the fuck off. Another friend, who does a lot of anti-racist work, stepped up and wrote some very patient and kind posts to try to get the first person to check their privilege without hurting their fee-fees too much. I didn't say anything else, because I knew I wouldn't be able to stay civil.

The fact is, I'm having an extremely hard time giving a flying moon-fuck for white people who care more about their own hurt fee-fees than about combating racism.

Say it with me:

ANTI-RACISM. IS. NOT. ABOUT. WHITENESS.

It's really, really, really, really, really not about us.

I am white – matrilineally Jewish but fully WASP in appearance – and my one personal encounter on the receiving end of racism (not to mention my numerous encounters with sexism and heterosexism) assures me of what should be completely frickin' obvious to everyone: being on the receiving end of an -ism is much, much worse than having to check your goddamn privilege.

And I am profoundly not interested in explaining this to people who don't get it.

I've been learning about the history of the gay rights movement in the US, and one thing I've found very striking is that from the very beginning the movement was split into two wings. The one side advocated a softly-softly approach, and the other was a lot more militant. I think it's generally accepted in activism that both wings are necessary for maximum movement efficacy: if you don't have a softly-softly side, you'll alienate the mainstream, but without a militant wing you might not get anything done.

Myself, I don't have the temperament to be gentle with people whose consciousness hasn't yet been raised. But, by God, I admire those who do.

On Reading

I don't think I can overstate the influence Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” has had on me. It (along with chapter one of this book) launched the line of inquiry that led me to my current studies, which makes it basically responsible for both my current life and my foreseeable future.

I'm still wrestling with it, because I am still trying to figure out the concept of authorial intent. Mostly, I think I'm with Barthes: externally established authorial intent is of no account; we have no access to the psychological state of the author as ey was writing; and we should want no such access beyond what we have in the text itself. Ricoeur makes this a little clearer, I think, by distinguishing in speech between the utterer's meaning (what the speaker intends to say) and the utterance meaning (what the sentence in fact says), and explaining that in written discourse we only have access to the latter. What I get from this is that if “what the text says” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But there's an additional layer of complication, which is: is there any such thing as “what the text says”? Texts don't have mouths. They don't say anything unless somebody reads – that is, interprets – them. So I'll refine that accusation: if “what somebody reads in your text” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But is that fair? It's the principle I generally operate on, but it's hard work. If, say, someone calls me out for problematic assumptions in something I wrote, my first instinct is to defend myself by 'splaining, “That's not what I meant!” But I stop. I remind myself that intent is not magic. I remind myself that externally established authorial intent does not matter. I wrote what I wrote, and if even one person reads something problematic there, the problem lies with what I wrote, not with eir reading of it.

But. But.

I also have a belief – a tenuous belief, a belief I am struggling with, a belief to whose demolition I am open, but a belief nonetheless – that anyone can read anything in(to) any text. And is it then fair to hold the author responsible for everything that could be read into eir text?

Anyone can read anything in(to) any text. Does that mean you can take “A Modest Proposal” at face value, ignoring its satirical intent? Does that mean you can reformat “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in”and declare it a short story, rather than a poem? Does that mean you can replace every instance of the word “nunnery” in Hamlet Act III Scene I with “ham sandwich”?

Well... I don't like that phrasing. I don't like telling people what they can and can't do with texts. Of course you can do any of those things. You have a find and replace function in your word processing software. And I take a First Amendment approach to reading texts – I believe you have the right to read any way you want to. I also believe that everyone in the entire world has the right to tell you that your “Get thee to a ham sandwich” reading of Hamlet is utterly ridiculous.

But you know what? You don't have to listen to the entire world. If you find more meaning in “Get thee to a ham sandwich” than in “Get thee to a nunnery”, you can do that to Hamlet. Really. It's called fanfiction.

At its best, fanfiction is a glorious corrective, an enactment of what-might-have-been. “Get thee to a ham sandwich” is a flippant example, but there are countless examples of people rewriting texts that spoke to them, and making them speak better. Star Trek fan who wishes TOS had more women in it? Gender-flip Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Twilight fan unhappy with its total queer erasure? Make a Jakeward slashvid. Rationalist Harry Potter fan? Rewrite the series with a rationalist Harry Stu.

Fanwork is awesome because it blurs or even erases the boundary between reading a text and writing it. There's no clearer demonstration of my belief that all readings are also writings.

However – if all readings are also writings, to what extent can an author be held accountable? Death of the author is a great concept, but in this world of internet discourse that's neither exactly speech or exactly writing, author accountability matters. And comments sections mean that, when it comes to blog posts and tweets and Facebook status updates, we can have access to the utterer's meaning as well as the utterance meaning.

This idea that what we're doing online is a whole new form of discourse still needs a lot of work, and I'm getting pretty excited about doing some of it.

On Writing

Historically, speech has been privileged over writing.

Plato said writing weakens the memory, ruining true reminiscence and true wisdom.

Socrates said writing is static, etiolated, defenseless.

Rousseau blamed writing for isolation, domination, and inequality.

Bergson said writing is dull, empty, dead.

They all thought spoken discourse was the site of real meaning. Speech is the genuine, immediate, meaningful expression of interiority – the true way of bridging the fundamental isolation of one human from another. Writing is exterior, passionless, hopelessly distanciated from both reader and writer.

(I'm cribbing all this from Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, btw, chapter 2: “Speaking and Writing”.)

We're living in an age where the distinction between speech and writing has been thoroughly blurred. (I dedicate all my Facebook chat logs to you, Derrida.) In fact, so much of our “spoken” discourse is now written or in some way recorded – on an almost daily basis I have conversations via text message and Facebook chat, and I don't even remember the last time I used my cell phone to call someone – that maybe it's a whole new category of discourse. People are discussing this, and I hope with a bit of time and effort on JSTOR and at the university library I can find a lot more stuff on the philosophy of internet-age discourse (recommendations are always welcome, friends!).

That said... writing is still my primary mode of discourse.

Writing isn't just the fact of putting words down on page/screen. It's a whole way of thinking. I write when my pen meets the paper and when my fingers strike the keyboard, but I also write when I construct passages of text in my head (whether they wind up actually written down or not).

In writing I can express myself without the impediments of physicality. In writing, no one expects me to decode all the mystifying subtleties of body language and facial expressions, and no one imputes to me implications I did not intend based on such subtleties that I was unknowingly expressing. In writing, no one will call me out for mumbling, or confuse me with an unexpected question, or look at me funny because I missed a social cue.

Writing is something I know. Writing is something I am comfortable with. Writing is something I feel I can control.

In writing I have time to pause, to reflect, to choose the right words. Writing slows me down, forces me to be self-critical – not, of course, that my written discourse is free of error and bullshit; but it's measurably more so than my spoken discourse. In effect, speaking merely voices my thoughts: writing shapes them.

Genderqueer, Or Internalized Misogyny?

[ETA: It's been brought to my attention that this post is founded on certain cissexist assumptions. It's true that I haven't engaged with my ingrained cissexism as much as I should, and I hope to work on that. Apologies for fucking up.]

The other night I dreamed I was at a church that had three bathrooms marked Men, Women, and Genderqueer. Entering the last, I found a glorious wonderland that was everything I could possibly want from a bathroom: talking Japanese supertoilet, hot tub, surround-sound entertainment system, etc.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that I trust my dreams. Dreams are your brain sorting through its junk drawer: most of it is pure junk, and occasionally something important turns up. I trust my reactions to my dreams. I've had sexual dreams about male friends which didn't disturb me at all, because I instinctively classified them as junk (hell, if everyone keeps calling him your boyfriend, your subconscious is eventually going to try it on for size, even if the notion is quite revolting). And it was a thoroughly PG-13 teenage dream about a female friend which unleashed the initial torrent of panicked self-reflection that is the first tender step on toward the closet door.

I wish I had access to the diary entry of the time so you could see it in its full, verbatim hilarity. “I'm not gay,” I wrote desperately (or something to that effect), “though it would make sense of a lot of things I like (hot girl-on-girl makeouts on Sugar Rush; scantily clad women in horror movies)...”

(I know! Bless, right?)

It took me a couple more years of self-torture – writing things like, “I'm not gay. I'm just homosexual”, which presumably made sense to me at the time – before I gave up trying to resist The Gay. (“Suck it, haters,” I at last wrote triumphantly: “I am a lesbian.”) My reluctance to accept The Genderqueer reminds me a lot of my reluctance to accept The Gay. I'm probably scrabbling for any available reason to deny something I pretty much know is true.

And yet, and yet...

I can't stop obsessively second-guessing myself. Just as I used to fear that my homosexuality was nothing more than intense fear and disgust at the penis, I now worry that my inclination toward genderfuckery is nothing more than internalized misogyny.

Like, when I reject the societal performance of femininity (shaving, makeup, skirts, long hair), is it because I consider the feminine-coded to be lesser?

If I accept the proposition that no true generalization can be made about women without resorting to tautology – if I accept that you don't have to be, have, or do anything to “qualify” as a woman, apart from identifying as a woman – why then am I not comfortably identifying as a woman?

When I'm enraged by someone in a store calling me “Missy” (THIS LITERALLY HAPPENED LAST WEEK, IN BERKELEY, IN 2012), am I enraged because it's fucking patronizing as shit, or because it genders me as female?

Does my general feeling that being gendered female is wrong mean that it's wrong for me, or that deep down I buy into the patriarchal equation female = wrong?

I feel increasingly disconnected from the pronoun she/her. When somebody refers to me as she/her, it feels as though they're talking about someone else. I like it when I get read as male or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. I would love to ask people to use ey/em, but they probably wouldn't: even in out oh-so-progressive, wonderfully accepting and queer-friendly community, most people are terrible at respecting the pronouns of our openly genderqueer friends. And even if I could convince my friends to make the switch, how can I stop strangers from gendering me female?

We're so indoctrinated to categorize everyone into this M/F binary that people immersed in a supposedly queer-embracing environment won't even refer to someone as “they” after being explicitly asked to. And yet I pull on one thread and the whole gender thing comes apart in my hands. The existence of trans men and women is proof that it's possible to scrutinize and deconstruct your gender identity and reach a conclusion other than “Gender is bullshit”; but more and more that seems like the inevitable endpoint of my own inquiry.

Celebrating Your Favorite Sea Beastie

Happy Narwhalentine's Day, y'all!

NARWHALS!

The Second Annual GCG Pop Culture Awards

Are canceled, because fuck you, entertainment industry. You're a bunch of craven, pusillanimous money-grubbers, recycling the same old garbage, reinforcing the same hegemonic narratives. You're a bunch of soulless suits who stifle genuine artistic expression in service of the bottom line. You suppress important voices and interesting stories so that you can maintain your profit-driven empire and, in so doing, perpetuate the kyriarchal status quo. You churn out meaningless sequel after crappy reboot, all empty fodder for the entertainment-industrial complex. Any flicker of art or soul or resistance is crushed under the jackboot of the massive money-machine that is big studios.

In your relentless pursuit of ultra-capitalism, moreover, you have proved yourself myopic and cowardly in the extreme. Once again you've utterly failed (ironically enough) to adapt to the demands of the consumer and the changing modes of production and distribution. Your opposition to the unstoppable forward march of technology reveals you to be a tantrum-throwing child, a bully, and an utter fool.

Inevitably, things are changing, and you're too busy screaming and throwing your toys at us consumers to take advantage of it. The real artists – the people with something to say, who are motivated by the Muses and not solely by Mammon – are adapting. They're taking their art and message straight to the people. They're utilizing the almighty power of the internet to raise funds and awareness for their projects, and to distribute their creations directly to the fans.

Unlike you, they're harnessing this awesome new power. Unlike you, they accept the change and work with it. You, entertainment industry, are King Canute, frantically flinging your last shreds of integrity into the sea in the vain hope that it might hold back the tide. You're shitting yourself in terror, and I for one welcome the day – surely imminent now – when the sea of change finally drowns you.

(And the best movie of 2011 was Attack the Block, and the best TV show of 2011 was Community, both of which have of course been totally sidelined by the aesthetically and morally bankrupt gatekeepers of the industry.)