I remember in 1st grade one day having a conversation about tomboys in my class, the teacher, her name now long forgotten (Ms. Quinn or something similar?), nowhere in sight. It was recess, perhaps, or lunch.
I wasn't familiar with the term, so someone explained it to me.
"A tomboy is a girl who acts like a boy."
I remember thinking about this for a moment before declaring that I must be some kind of tomgirl then because I was a boy who often acted like a girl and preferred doing "girl" things out on the playground.
Everyone laughed at me. But I didn't quite know why.
It's been a few plus years since this incident. I've grown up, learned a few things and for the most part lost touch with pretty much anybody I knew back in that period of elementary school.
I wonder sometimes how much of me is still that goofy 7-year-old running around with all the girls, proudly making up words to fit me because nothing else quite works and then I look at myself and my life and I realize I never stopped doing this.
My English professor loves to quote the Marilyn Chin poem The Barbarians are Coming:
"If you call me a horse, I must be a horse.
If you call me a bison, I am equally as guilty."
Adam was a namer. Adam was of the earth, of the ground. His legacy in humanity is our naming because to name something is to describe it. To quantify it, to reduce it down to its constituent adams (atoms?) and know it from the inside out.
But names are shadows.
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
A name is a part. To name me separates me, divides me into a Self and Others. But I have many names, many symbols that cannot be said.
I'm queer. I'm here.
But that's only a picture of a piece of the puzzle.
"I am that I am."
But before I make a statement worthy of boasting godhood, let me say I exist in relation. We say identity is a social construct. Race, gender, sexuality, etc. are byproducts of the perceptions created and maintained by everything around us, reinforced by ourselves, our surroundings, everything.
To illustrate with a gem from a conversation last night:
Imagine two "bros" walking down the street together. You're driving by and you see them, what are they doing? They're acting like stereotypical bros of course. But why? What if by some chance these two young men love each other but are unable to because of how they have been culturally inculcated as bros.
Which isn't to say they were raised this way, though that is a factor. But what's more important in this instance is the fact that they might not be able to act the way they may want to because of where they are, because of who they're with, because you're watching, because of what they're wearing, because of who's not there, because of how old they are, because they're male. It's a whole complicated mess of influences.
What then are we to do about this?
To exist outside this system of identity politics doesn't work unless the entirety of your culture actively works to exist as such. But unless you're ignorant to how the system works, it's an oppressive, hierarchical abuse that limits you from being who you truly are or want to be.
Armed with knowledge though, we can work from within to corrupt the system. To make an overly simplified analogy (because for a lot of the identities I talked about above, it's not a choice), if you suddenly decide to you hate clothes and think they're oppressive, you don't simply stop wearing them. It's not socially appropriate to do so. Instead what you do is you change the culture that surrounds you. You frequent nudist-friendly areas and teach the people around you that it's okay to not wear clothes. You start wearing short cuts and fewer layers. And yes, maybe you participate in "subversive" activities that bring attention to the oppression but you also take advantage of the system.
No comments:
Post a Comment