Hi there

[Alvin]

Hi again Alvin and thanks (about my haircut)

I really like this forum, everyone's really friendly and interesting. Im still lurking in some of the threads.

I'm also really delayed in responding, haven’t been on as much in the last couple of days.

Hope everything's ok!

You sound really grounded about the experiences you've had in school. I understand what it feels like to be taunted and not feel like you fit in. I never felt like I really fit in much in middle or high school.

I think gender is a fascinating topic. So much of it is culturally grounded, but there is something innate to our sense of our own gender as well, and where does that line fall? I have thought a lot about that question through my life because I questioned my gender for a long time. From the time I was about 3 I was telling my parents I thought I was supposed to be born a boy. I never dressed in dresses except the days you have to... Easter, school picture day. But I feel more in tune now with my gender being more on some kind of middle line… I like my female body, but I don't want to dress it up in feminine clothes, I prefer a cleaner cut to my hair, etc. And that dynamic of having kind of a genderfuck style feels really comfortable and right for me.

I love that quote! Ha. And the reverse is also true - we start out before puberty being pretty gender neutral, it's only when society throws rules onto us that we start looking like girls/boys before puberty.

Ah nice one, a brainy successful guy too, Tim Cook.

You're right. Gender is indeed a very fascinating topic. Simon de Beauvoir famously said that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. We becomes either a man or a woman through a process of socialization. So while sex is a natural thing, gender is a socially constructed thing. I think we're all forced, more or less, to act in particular stereotypically feminine/masculine ways, including dress (as you said), ways of speaking, being deferential, so that we can have this binary opposition for us (men) to achieve a sense of dominance over women-- therefore a second sex.

According to Judith Butler, gender isn't something we have, but rather something we do. It's a strange thing to say, but she essentially thinks that "I do woman through a series of performative acts of femininity." -- how I talk, dress, think, and relate to other people. I agree with her that we're not aware of the fact that we're performing our gender. In other words, we are not consciously, voluntarily playing our roles, but we find ourselves playing our roles compelled or coerced by society. Maybe we have some control (at least some limited control) over our own gender performativity, and therefore even subvert our gender construction by acting in a way that are unexpected.

That's when I think Drag queen/king is really working their way to reconstruct or at least make us realize the idea of gender subversion. I have to say that, though I know quite a few about gender studies, I am by no means a recovered man. I am still recovering from the internal institutionalization of gender. As a gay man, I think I've always enjoyed a extended privilege in a heterocentric patriarchal society. Lesbians, on the other hand, suffer from not only heterocentricism but also patriarchy. Double pressure I would say, which makes me admire you as a out lesbian even more. You have this clear sense and confidence of who you are. You are not ashamed of your own gender identity. That's something like, as Halberstam called, "female masculinity". I agree with her that "masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects." Women have every right to celebrate their own masculinity. Hum... that reminds me of Ellen again.

Speaking of your profile, Edinburgh. That brings my mind to University of Edinburgh, and then England, and then Virginia Woolf...she's also a feminist I think, and a master of streams of consciousness...I am also having a stream of consciousness...so much going on in my mind but I couldn't figure out anything. Life is so queer.