judeswork - Tumblr blog

judeswork · 3 years ago

Text

I wish I was a straight man's wet dream.

I once wrote that I felt completely in the middle, gender non-conforming. Happy to be masculine and feminine at once. Moving forward I’m less sure of this. At the time I listened to Adult Mom’s song ‘survival’ not knowing if my mum loved me anymore.

I was changing, I was not what she bargained for.

I was born Sophie. I changed it when I was 8. Sofy, then Sofi.

That was my name for 10 years.

I am the only girl out of all my cousins. I have a brother.

Was I socialized male?

I believed that the gender binary was an opt-in social contract that held no relevance for me as a sexual deviant. Instagram infographics told me:

‘Judith Butler says that gender is a construct, it's not real, there's no merit! You can be anything you say you are!’

The logic was that the binary relies on balance, Male 4 Female. Without an attraction to men there is no concept of womanhood, how could I be in the binary, or have that system even apply to me if I didn’t care for men? Can the opposite also be true? Do men rely on the attraction to women to maintain their manhood?

Only in the emasculation of being a bottom. The power dynamics of sex dictate that the man has the power and it is emasculating to not be in control, to be fucked instead of fucking. Taking a queue from Low Theory examining ‘Desperate Housewives’ we see this demonstrated in a suburban heterosexual setting. The Van De Kamps are a completely perfect American family disintegrating in front of the audience. Husband Rex's need to be sexually dominated destroys the marriage which the nuclear family is founded on. In a traditional western view of marriage the power position of the Husband relies on their sexual dominance over their wife. By desiring sexual domination Rex emasculates himself, situating him in the ‘Female’ power role.

Consider the position of the gay man in media, the Gay Best-Friend. Feminine portrayals show they hold less power (subtext; they are the bottoms, they occupy the same sexual power position as women therefore they are legible). The similarity in gendered attraction continues the standards for beauty as dictated by men and transposes them into a new audience. The acceptance of queerness in popular culture comes with a set of rules, queerness in the public eye is only tolerated insofar as it doesn’t challenge the desires of the masculine man.

In public consciousness a story is always sold, capitalism is always at play and failure is inevitable. As the ultimate failures of male-centric capitalism, lesbians fall through the cracks. The position of the patriarchy in popular culture informs and enforces the story that in order to be visible you must be desirable. In order to please men visually and financially a market forms, aimed at fixing the undesirable characteristics of women. Feminine beauty is the most marketable as it contains more historical routes of exploitation for profit. In the process of inclusivity lesbian identity has become a homogenous group where femme lesbians are presented as the subversive, revolutionary face of the community. A neoliberal narrative is sold to the audience, as a lesbian you can (and should) still be desirable for men.

Choice feminism is the marketing tool for the patriarchy, the politic governed by capitalism that declares that to make a choice is to be free. The dog whistle for girl-boss feminists to justify selling their skinny tea to vulnerable audiences. This is a feminist act because you’ve made the choice of personal empowerment through exploitation and financial gain. This politic tells us that exploiting the system by feeding into it brings greater personal wealth (and therefore liberation). Instead of liberation, the system is reinforced and pushed further. The standards created by men, which early feminists rebelled against become ingrained in the female subconscious and perpetuated by women. Lesbians are pushed to the bottom of the cultural consciousness, to the public they seem to only reside in porn, femmes created for straight men as the ultimate fantasy.

Butch lesbians are almost completely absent from popular culture. The neo-liberal empowerment model has created a machine which pushes female visibility to an extreme, feminine and sexualised. The beautiful skinny Zendaya and Hunter Schafer of Euphoria vs the uncomfortable predatory butch of Lea Delaria in Orange is the new Black. Women with masculine tendencies live in the space of invisibility and discomfort to their straight seeming counterparts. Butch is seen as too uncomfortable and predatory to view, but female masculinity offers a break from capitalism and neoliberal rhetoric, a slight breathing room for deviants.

How can I rationalise the pressures of womanhood with my innate feeling of gender dissonance.

The space where butch should be transposes from popular culture into my life. The space where those like me should be is suspiciously empty. The more I move on this path the more I understand why. My existence is still too abrasive to stand, the subversion of masculinity into a new grotesque form, too much for any room or discussion.

No words for my place exist in any discussion which uses the words male and female.

The politics of the binary reject the presence of someone like me and no words exist which can truly quantify the position I hold in the world. I’ve reached the same position through a new path. I sit in the unprofitable space that never should have existed. Claiming masculinity without manhood, femininity without womanhood. Considering my place and my abrasion against all discussion, how can I rationalize gender without the pressure to become an end of the binary? To escape the discomfort of illegibility by becoming a man, or his fantasy.

I told my mum on the phone that I’m Jude.

She still loves me. Now I carve space, one year before deciding my medical future.

References

Bragg, Jordana. 2021. Fail like you mean it! – how to escape the spectacle of “queer” in visual art, theory and writing. Melbourne, Australia: Monash University.

Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of identity. 1st ed. N.p.: Routledge.

Cherry, Marc, executive producer. 2004. Desperate Housewives. Touchstone Television. Disney+.

Ferguson, Michaele L. 2010. “Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics.” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (March): 247-253. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25698532.

Finlay, Toby. 2017. “Non-Binary Performativity: A Trans-PositiveAccount of Judith Butler’s Queer Theory.” Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts 4 (October).

Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. N.p.: Duke University Press.

Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. N.p.: Duke University Press.

Halberstam, Jack. 2020. “Wild Things: An Aesthetics of Bewilderment,” Author Talk. Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia5CmrzTqw4&list=PLcdzFoyXiUIuxvIodC-1vYQXcVFzqBpiT&index=2&ab_channel=RIBOCA.

Levinson, Sam, executive producer. 2019. Euphoria. Featuring Zendaya M. Coleman and Hunter Schafer. HBO. Neon.

Moreno-Domínguez, Silvia, Tania Raposo, and Paz Elipe. 2019. “Body Image and Sexual Dissatisfaction: Differences Among Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Lesbian Women.” Frontiers in Psychology, (March). 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00903.

Power, Cassidy R. 2021. Fragments, fixations and footnotes. Diaspora of the queer self. Auckland, New Zealand: University of Auckland.

Power, Cassidy R. n.d. You're so handsome, why does it feel so good? Thesis.

Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Paul B. Preciado Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. N.p.: The Feminist Press.

Tannenbaum, Neri K., Jenji Kohan, Liz Friedman, Sara Hess, Tara Herrmann, Lisa Vinnecour, and Mark A. Burley, executive producers. 2013. Orange is the New Black. Featuring Lea DeLaria. Lionsgate Television. Netflix.

#writing #References below the keep reading

0 notes