Saturday, June 25, 2011
Santa Cruz Trip
I sit on the plane heading into San Francisco and look out at the snow-blessed mountains and think: am I tainted by now? Am I still as free from homophobia and prejudice as when I left here? The physical traces indicate problems. I shave my legs now, just shaved them last night, at 1:30 in the morning. My hair was short and cute & dykely when I lived here, now is it Cincinnati-fied?—it’s long and thick and held high and back in a ponytail. I have spent over a year depressed about that most heterosexual female obsession, weight loss. Ry has called herself fat many times this year, and Dylan proudly calls herself thin in response. This despite the most feminist household I can conjure. And all those sweet kind Waldorf moms, my real and good friends—I just wish there were also dykes there. I thirst for Santa Cruz and most lesbians I know in Cincinnati don't even know what they are missing.
Monday, June 20, 2011
The Month I Became Straight ...
Yesterday I turned to look at myself and realized I was almost completely utterly a straight woman. In her stereotypical form. I had two kids that I doted on. I was a stay-at-home mom. I had long hair and shaved my legs. Most of my friends, at least those I talked with daily, were straight, having somehow found decent, kind, loving and liberal husbands. My grad school experience had been so the opposite, an immersion in a pro-gay world, with my first ever openly gay professor, who was world-famous at that, world famous due to her brilliance. She invented the term “queer theory” for goddess’s sake. She was hot. Most of my friends were gay or actively pro-gay or more progressive politically than I was. But no more. We’d found a real home in the Waldorf community, an easy way to self-select for liberal allies. It was a wonderful relief to be less pro-biotic, less vegan, and less concerned about some progressive or new age cause than a certain percentage of the population there. It's nice not to be carving out your space every second.
And over the past two years I’d added to my repertoire the kickers, the internal signifiers of heterosexuality: I thought more about fashion than I ever had—though I'd never thought about it a lot. Mostly I thought more about how I dressed, instead of just putting on something comfortable and asexual. And I began to think too much about weight. I’d always been thin, or at least fine, I’d always been athletic and hadn’t thought much more about it. I was happy, satisfied, and didn’t know what all the fuss was about with other girls’ obsessions with weight loss. Then in the two years of trying to get pregnant, of obsession with trying to get pregnant, the books told me weight gain was a good sign. And with my tendency to eat to relieve stress, I gained weight even before I got pregnant with Dylan. Then at my pregnant height I was 208 pounds. And not worried about it. But after a certain number of pounds lost after she was born I couldn’t take any more off.
Who knew? I know that apparently the whole straight white female world knows this, but I didn’t know. My need for relief from stress through chocolate was high, especially when the kids were little. It was hard to work out, hard to find the time for myself. It sounds trite but that’s how it was.
The weird thing is that I felt thinking about weight was a straight girl issue—for me it really was. So that I was somehow giving in, or being traitorous, to care about weight. It was not my conception of dykedom to care about weight. Especially to care about calories. I of course had no money or no desire for Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers—that was beneath the athletic carefree me and not something a self-respecting dyke paid attention to. So when a few months ago I sneaked onto the online site Calorie Counter, and actually found it useful, I felt illicit, and guilty, and … straight. My athleticism and my dykedom have always and are still related for me. I am strong, athletic, like having muscles, dykely. It’s a way of loving myself, my body. I know there are plenty of Olympic athletes who are straight. But there is also Martina Navratilova, and Billy Jean King, two of the earliest celebrities to come out when I was young.
Here I was mired mostly happily in the home, with my 2.3 kids (almost) and my dog (well two) and instead of a white picket fence a dilapidated urban fence with too much glass on the sidewalk. Definitely culturally straight, and straight if you watched me coming into the playground or into the grocery store. I had a silver wedding band on instead of gold one, sure. I had the HRC sticker on my car but so many don’t know what that means. So my reluctance to act ‘straight’ by losing weight—such a girly girl thing—helped make me stuck feeling bad. But I realized I had caught myself on the horns of the dichotomy: If dykedom were defined in opposition to straight girlhood, then the binary oppositions lined up like this:
Gay Straight
_____________________
Casual Dressed up
Athlete wimpy non-muscular girl
No make up makeup
No fashion fashion
Rebellious conforming
Athlete sorority girl
Self-defined societally defined
Self-initiating defined by others (men or peer competition)
But also, to my detriment, like this:
Gay Straight
_______________________________
Fat thin
No kids mom
Works stay at home
Doesn’t care Obsesses about
about appearance appearance
Then I went bra shopping. I don’t know why my mom had failed to give me this experience. Perhaps it was mercy. I only know that bras were something I rarely bought, and rarely thought about, pre-kids. When pregnant my breasts blossomed, and afterwards I nursed for many years, so I knew something about nursing bras. During and after that my breasts stayed huge (for me). And while I realized an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with my bras I was too busy to pay attention. Then Susan had a wedding to go to, and her bootcamp friends decided to help her find a great outfit. All well and good, but then they went bra shopping, and I went along. I mean really went bra shopping, we had the name in hand of the best customer attendant at Nordstroms at the Kenwood Mall, and we went in a group, and I was completely out of my element. I’d gone once before, to a bra fitter at Macy’s when I was pregnant and huge…but that was a focused, desperate experiment and I’d gotten only wire-free bras.
In the end, I went three times before I got one underwire I liked, and spent two months studying the HerRoom site online before buying seven bras from them, all but one of which I returned, an athletic bra without wires. How much work being heterosexual is! I did very much like how my breasts looked supported, having never thought about it that much before, since before my breasts were much smaller or I was nursing. Now I was a double D! I felt that if each article of clothing was going to be two months worth of full time work, then I’d never really become well dressed. Susan’s straight friends, on the other hand, her bootcamp buds, spent all day helping her shop for a little black dress—Susan’s first dress in a very long time—three people shopping a bit for themselves but mainly for the fourth, and coming back successful, only to say: well now it’s time to get a bra, and then shoes, and then accessories. So much work, I found it ridiculous, even as I loved the finished look.
All of which is to say that binary oppositions are best challenged and messed with, as Derrida tells us. But that it was hard in such a straight, conservative location to give up even any signs of gayness. If I’d been in San Francisco or Santa Cruz, where multiple representations of lesbiandom, dykedom, femmedom, queerdom, and bisexuality blossomed, then playing with my self image would not have been so hard. Here I felt less free, less able to enjoy the pleasures of my own possible images, perhaps like some black people who choose not to dress down because they think that it will (and it often does) make whites perceive them more negatively. I often felt invisible, and certainly not affirmed in my gayness,much less my gay momdom. What I would have given to have just one other gay parent at our school. So I need to complicate my own relations with my self-image, and de-dichotomize, I suppose. Working on it.
And over the past two years I’d added to my repertoire the kickers, the internal signifiers of heterosexuality: I thought more about fashion than I ever had—though I'd never thought about it a lot. Mostly I thought more about how I dressed, instead of just putting on something comfortable and asexual. And I began to think too much about weight. I’d always been thin, or at least fine, I’d always been athletic and hadn’t thought much more about it. I was happy, satisfied, and didn’t know what all the fuss was about with other girls’ obsessions with weight loss. Then in the two years of trying to get pregnant, of obsession with trying to get pregnant, the books told me weight gain was a good sign. And with my tendency to eat to relieve stress, I gained weight even before I got pregnant with Dylan. Then at my pregnant height I was 208 pounds. And not worried about it. But after a certain number of pounds lost after she was born I couldn’t take any more off.
Who knew? I know that apparently the whole straight white female world knows this, but I didn’t know. My need for relief from stress through chocolate was high, especially when the kids were little. It was hard to work out, hard to find the time for myself. It sounds trite but that’s how it was.
The weird thing is that I felt thinking about weight was a straight girl issue—for me it really was. So that I was somehow giving in, or being traitorous, to care about weight. It was not my conception of dykedom to care about weight. Especially to care about calories. I of course had no money or no desire for Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers—that was beneath the athletic carefree me and not something a self-respecting dyke paid attention to. So when a few months ago I sneaked onto the online site Calorie Counter, and actually found it useful, I felt illicit, and guilty, and … straight. My athleticism and my dykedom have always and are still related for me. I am strong, athletic, like having muscles, dykely. It’s a way of loving myself, my body. I know there are plenty of Olympic athletes who are straight. But there is also Martina Navratilova, and Billy Jean King, two of the earliest celebrities to come out when I was young.
Here I was mired mostly happily in the home, with my 2.3 kids (almost) and my dog (well two) and instead of a white picket fence a dilapidated urban fence with too much glass on the sidewalk. Definitely culturally straight, and straight if you watched me coming into the playground or into the grocery store. I had a silver wedding band on instead of gold one, sure. I had the HRC sticker on my car but so many don’t know what that means. So my reluctance to act ‘straight’ by losing weight—such a girly girl thing—helped make me stuck feeling bad. But I realized I had caught myself on the horns of the dichotomy: If dykedom were defined in opposition to straight girlhood, then the binary oppositions lined up like this:
Gay Straight
_____________________
Casual Dressed up
Athlete wimpy non-muscular girl
No make up makeup
No fashion fashion
Rebellious conforming
Athlete sorority girl
Self-defined societally defined
Self-initiating defined by others (men or peer competition)
But also, to my detriment, like this:
Gay Straight
_______________________________
Fat thin
No kids mom
Works stay at home
Doesn’t care Obsesses about
about appearance appearance
Then I went bra shopping. I don’t know why my mom had failed to give me this experience. Perhaps it was mercy. I only know that bras were something I rarely bought, and rarely thought about, pre-kids. When pregnant my breasts blossomed, and afterwards I nursed for many years, so I knew something about nursing bras. During and after that my breasts stayed huge (for me). And while I realized an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with my bras I was too busy to pay attention. Then Susan had a wedding to go to, and her bootcamp friends decided to help her find a great outfit. All well and good, but then they went bra shopping, and I went along. I mean really went bra shopping, we had the name in hand of the best customer attendant at Nordstroms at the Kenwood Mall, and we went in a group, and I was completely out of my element. I’d gone once before, to a bra fitter at Macy’s when I was pregnant and huge…but that was a focused, desperate experiment and I’d gotten only wire-free bras.
In the end, I went three times before I got one underwire I liked, and spent two months studying the HerRoom site online before buying seven bras from them, all but one of which I returned, an athletic bra without wires. How much work being heterosexual is! I did very much like how my breasts looked supported, having never thought about it that much before, since before my breasts were much smaller or I was nursing. Now I was a double D! I felt that if each article of clothing was going to be two months worth of full time work, then I’d never really become well dressed. Susan’s straight friends, on the other hand, her bootcamp buds, spent all day helping her shop for a little black dress—Susan’s first dress in a very long time—three people shopping a bit for themselves but mainly for the fourth, and coming back successful, only to say: well now it’s time to get a bra, and then shoes, and then accessories. So much work, I found it ridiculous, even as I loved the finished look.
All of which is to say that binary oppositions are best challenged and messed with, as Derrida tells us. But that it was hard in such a straight, conservative location to give up even any signs of gayness. If I’d been in San Francisco or Santa Cruz, where multiple representations of lesbiandom, dykedom, femmedom, queerdom, and bisexuality blossomed, then playing with my self image would not have been so hard. Here I felt less free, less able to enjoy the pleasures of my own possible images, perhaps like some black people who choose not to dress down because they think that it will (and it often does) make whites perceive them more negatively. I often felt invisible, and certainly not affirmed in my gayness,much less my gay momdom. What I would have given to have just one other gay parent at our school. So I need to complicate my own relations with my self-image, and de-dichotomize, I suppose. Working on it.
Monday, June 13, 2011
On My Kids Configuring My Heterosexual(ish) Privilege
I’ve felt this over the years, at various levels of intensity, but it must be said: Kids make me more legitimate in this culture’s eyes. This Cincinnati conservative world. I can feel myself tense as I say the word “partner,” though I do say it, over and over again, refusing to closet myself. I don’t know how anyone does it, frankly—I mean, I do know why and can feel why they do it, at least in part—but there’s so much of my life that is bound up with Susan’s life. How would I refuse to talk about so much of it to my work colleagues? How do I refuse to say “my partner” to the secretary at the doctor’s office, even though I could care less about her and her relationship to gay rights? How can I not say to the nurse “my partner was sick for a while, and then Rylie, and now I think Dylan might have the sinus infection too?” I am gearing myself up to say “wife” now that Rylie said it referring to Susan on my behalf. I want to say that for the kids, also for legitimacy reasons. But it’s more likely to elicit a reaction of confusion, I fear, and possible homophobia. Also in front of the kids.
If I say “partner” with kids in tow, or if I say “my partner” while discussing my kids, I can feel the pull of legitimacy they bring to any occasion. Kids puts us on the heterosexual, normative map. It’s true. And that is a reassuring feeling, whether I want it to be or not. Judith Halberstam talks about and celebrates queers living out a prolonged adolescence in her work, mainly because of the lack of children. I therefore must become less queer, and more adult, for having had the kids, in the cultural view. I don’t mind the “more adult” part, having never been into all the bars and dancing that is supposedly part of a prolonged adolescence. And I am fifty years old, dammit, surely an adult. But the less queer? I don’t like the binary opposition that makes me less queer. And yet, and yet, what I want to talk about today is the relief it sometimes brings me. I walked into the garage of the hospital today, after we watched Susan give her talk at her Point of Care Scholar graduation, and they’d given our car a ticket because they thought an employee—Susan—had parked in visitor parking. I had to talk to three people about it—it was a $75 ticket—and it solved nothing in the end. However, I had kids in tow as I said the words “my partner works here” or I mentioned my kids somehow as I talked on the phone. The little snail trail of legitimacy…two little girls. No nothing wrong with them. They dress very femininely, they are obedient or seem well mannered for the most part, are acceptably cute. They are like carrying an American flag around everywhere, for a Muslim: I belong, I may seem as if a part of me doesn’t, but I do belong. And it works. The family configuration registers on people’s faces.
That increasing legitimacy makes me feel like Cherrie Moraga does when she says she will use her white skin privilege, again and again, if it helps get her and her lover out of bad situations. On the other hand I also have long hair now, and I shave my legs. It used to be I had a more dykely hairdo. But there’s the guilt as well, for passing. And fury, at how rigid people’s expectations are.
The thing is, I feel this I notice this every day I am out in the world with the kids, or even am on the phone making an appointment for one of them. That is an empowering—no not empowering—but legitimizing, a soothing of the ego, a reassurance that I won’t have to fight one more time—it’s shitty, really isn’t it? Think how often the kids legitimize me without me even being aware of it. It separates me from all those ‘adolescent’ gay folk, those rebellious fuck-you queers. And it feels good. Even as I hate the whole dichotomy, and part of me hates being mistaken for straight, especially by people I suspect and hope are gay. Lee Edelman, queer theorist extraordinaire, argues to the extreme, in essence: around the dichotomy, the binary opposition, of gay vs. straight: Well if straight means having kids and gay is its opposite, then gays should be anti-child, be pro-death, to strengthen the dichotomy and alter the valuation of it, to value our side of it. Which is of course absurd, and offensive, but at least it’s powerful, and it’s a direct attack on this invisible—and false—legitimacy I gain just by having children.
More to say…
If I say “partner” with kids in tow, or if I say “my partner” while discussing my kids, I can feel the pull of legitimacy they bring to any occasion. Kids puts us on the heterosexual, normative map. It’s true. And that is a reassuring feeling, whether I want it to be or not. Judith Halberstam talks about and celebrates queers living out a prolonged adolescence in her work, mainly because of the lack of children. I therefore must become less queer, and more adult, for having had the kids, in the cultural view. I don’t mind the “more adult” part, having never been into all the bars and dancing that is supposedly part of a prolonged adolescence. And I am fifty years old, dammit, surely an adult. But the less queer? I don’t like the binary opposition that makes me less queer. And yet, and yet, what I want to talk about today is the relief it sometimes brings me. I walked into the garage of the hospital today, after we watched Susan give her talk at her Point of Care Scholar graduation, and they’d given our car a ticket because they thought an employee—Susan—had parked in visitor parking. I had to talk to three people about it—it was a $75 ticket—and it solved nothing in the end. However, I had kids in tow as I said the words “my partner works here” or I mentioned my kids somehow as I talked on the phone. The little snail trail of legitimacy…two little girls. No nothing wrong with them. They dress very femininely, they are obedient or seem well mannered for the most part, are acceptably cute. They are like carrying an American flag around everywhere, for a Muslim: I belong, I may seem as if a part of me doesn’t, but I do belong. And it works. The family configuration registers on people’s faces.
That increasing legitimacy makes me feel like Cherrie Moraga does when she says she will use her white skin privilege, again and again, if it helps get her and her lover out of bad situations. On the other hand I also have long hair now, and I shave my legs. It used to be I had a more dykely hairdo. But there’s the guilt as well, for passing. And fury, at how rigid people’s expectations are.
The thing is, I feel this I notice this every day I am out in the world with the kids, or even am on the phone making an appointment for one of them. That is an empowering—no not empowering—but legitimizing, a soothing of the ego, a reassurance that I won’t have to fight one more time—it’s shitty, really isn’t it? Think how often the kids legitimize me without me even being aware of it. It separates me from all those ‘adolescent’ gay folk, those rebellious fuck-you queers. And it feels good. Even as I hate the whole dichotomy, and part of me hates being mistaken for straight, especially by people I suspect and hope are gay. Lee Edelman, queer theorist extraordinaire, argues to the extreme, in essence: around the dichotomy, the binary opposition, of gay vs. straight: Well if straight means having kids and gay is its opposite, then gays should be anti-child, be pro-death, to strengthen the dichotomy and alter the valuation of it, to value our side of it. Which is of course absurd, and offensive, but at least it’s powerful, and it’s a direct attack on this invisible—and false—legitimacy I gain just by having children.
More to say…
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