As most of you know by now, I'm an English Lit/Kinesiology double major. A lot of you also probably know that I consider myself a heArtist, an activist from the heart, with a decent working knowledge of gender/queer/racial theory and praxis.
I often find I introduce myself with: "and I prefer he/him/his or they/them/theirs pronouns."
I question the use of race and ethnicity in any kind of survey format.
I cringe when someone uses "sex" and "gender" interchangeably.
Rather than calling myself a feminist, I say that I work on feminist projects because I think that with many of the postmodern influences within contemporary, third-wave feminism it's very hard to "be a feminist."
In short, I'm a bit of a queer who questions institutionalized systems, even those bureaucracies that I work for.
Being a Kinesiology major then has proven somewhat ironic at times as I constantly feel as if I have to question authority and what I'm learning. Kinesiology as a generally health-related field is biased against me in many ways. I'm generalizing, but it in part instills the kind of institutional behaviors and thought processes that I spend most of the rest of my time fighting to educate people about.
Let me give an example: most of my kinese-peers are fairly athletic, or at least active. We're constantly studying the human body, how it works, how to make using it more efficient, how to fix it when something goes wrong. So it wouldn't be uncommon to hear someone make a comment about a person needing to find the right diet/exercise program to lose weight and be happy. While it is true that changes to behavior can lead to changes in mood, the assumption that they have to happen in order to be happy is fat-shaming. But in many ways it's built into our field of study because from a clinical perspective to be obese is something that needs to be fixed.
I'm always working to be very careful to frame my arguments in ways that are sensitive to people of different body types and even catch myself before I outright agree with any claim that would denigrate another person's body. But the bias is there. It infuriates me when people don't take care of their bodies, when they are lazy and inactive and only eat junk and then complain about feeling like shit.
I constantly have to remind myself though that there are institutional pressures that affect these kinds of things in so many ways. Race, class, geographic location, education, all these areas I experience as privilege allow me the time to eat pretty damn well and make the free time to work out, part of privilege is access.
Talking with a friend before class the other today I had to explain what asexuality is and how it's different from most people's colloquial conception of it, and while he was open to the concept it was so foreign to him that he barely had words to respond to me. Part of privilege is being so normal the sometimes if you're outside of that normal there aren't even words for you.
This is the field I'm going into right now.
And I recognize that I will face similar conversations and thoughts in any field I go into. The fact that the discourse of the field itself is often part of the problem drives me crazy though, just a little, because it often marginalizes or erases any recognition of the kinds of privileges and oppressions concurrently at work in favor of the stripped-down facts.
How do I do this without removing the humanity?
I talk about liminality like I'm dancing in the middle ground,
but doorways mediate borders, close walls on loud disputes,
and shift like seaweed on the sand.
Sometimes doors get slammed, and sometimes walls get taken down.
Sometimes the tide pushes too far in one direction and the land falls away.
Liminality is being home without a home,
floating in the aether of ideas.
You are everywhere and nowhere -- caught in the eternal between.
It's maddening and saddening and somehow, sometimes
the most triumphant feeling in the world.
Society teaches fear of betweens
because betweens mean opportunities for change.
That's what teaching is, choosing the path we take to change,
because knowledge is supposed to be power and those with power can choose,
but sometimes knowledge isn't enough.
When other powers are at work
it feels inexorable as if the only lights in the world are outshined by the sun.
So you burn brighter. So you burn out.
And it seems like nothing changes.
Everything changes eventually.
That's the power and the knowledge and the hope of being between.
Everything. Changes. Eventually.
You just can never stop working for it.
You are not alone.
You are never alone.
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