Entry tags:
butch, please
I was sitting down to compile a signal boost post for the week, which will probably be pretty big since I missed last week's. And I pulled out a link that I had a bit more to say about than I thought I did, so I figured it could have a post of its own.
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staranise had some discussion a few days ago about the history of "butch" and "femme" as terms, and whether or not they're lesbian-only words. Spoiler: her conclusion, which I'm 100% down with, is 'no'. I often bring up an anecdote, actually, about a slightly awkward joke my (gay, male, about twenty years older than me) boss once made off-the-cuff to an audience of mostly straight colleagues, back when I was new to the lab: "If you use the word butch... you're probably not." I, who am pretty butch, was a little confused and startled before I realized that the joke actually makes sense if you're habitually assuming that the people who use 'butch' are mostly gay men (which is, I think, his context; he coughed and backtracked a little bit when I stared at him in confusion).
We actually had a lot of those little "huh wha?" moments the year I was new to the lab. I think I was still adjusting to bringing up queer culture where there were straight people, which at the time I would have never bothered to do and which he (I think deliberately) makes a point of doing sometimes. And I think he was probably still adjusting some to me being there with my own context, which was (and is) very different from my boss' while still being recognizable. In retrospect, I'm a little sorry about having come into the lab with the trauma I did from Tumblr exclusionists; I think he was very excited to have a queer mentee, and I don't think he had any context for why I would sidestep conversations and tuck away my own perspective in (not-outwardly-visible) fright when he would toss topics of conversation out at me.
It turns out that when you're largely accessing queer community through the scars of gatekeeping and trauma, and you have been really seriously immersing yourself in the attacks mounted by exclusionists--at the time I was coming off of two years of doing that very heavily--you start developing a fear reaction to people who are "unassailably" part of the community and who don't do a lot of obvious and visible stepping to make sure you know you're welcome. Which, since I didn't actually tell him that I ID as ace and that colors my experiences really deeply until... oh, the summer after I joined the lab, after he spent two weeks with me in the field (so around each other 24/7) trying to figure out what the hell I was and why I wasn't responding like either a straight person or a queer person to the conversational gambits he'd toss out, obviously he didn't know to do. (And just as obviously my experience was totally outside his context, which makes total sense, and just--augh.)
I'm more open about it right now, but it's been gone on six and a half years, and I'm still trying to work out how to talk about my own experiences both to other folks in my field--will they criticize me for openly holding an identity that is so often ridiculed?--and within my department. It's easier with folks about my age, but it's not like older people are all in total agreement with exclusionists, either. And it's hard unlearning the signifiers I initially learned on the internet.
I hate how the context of exclusionists drives certain community experiences to hide and fear connection to other groups, while at the same time being totally unseen by wide swathes of the groups exclusionists are ostensibly protecting. I hate that my fear drove me to hide because I had associated the presence of "real" LGBTQ+ people with potential judgement and threat, especially when I think at the time I was probably the only other openly queer person in our department. (I think I may be that now--we had another cis male gay grad student who had been in the same undergraduate lab as I was join, but he has since left to pursue a career in data science. And I don't think either of us know anyone else.)
Anyway. That little story was such a perfect encapsulation of two people whose queer contexts and communities are different meeting with a little bit of a bump, and such a perfect "yeah, no: suck it" story for those exclusionists trying to insist that "butch" and "femme" are terms only for cis lesbians.
staranise had some discussion a few days ago about the history of "butch" and "femme" as terms, and whether or not they're lesbian-only words. Spoiler: her conclusion, which I'm 100% down with, is 'no'. I often bring up an anecdote, actually, about a slightly awkward joke my (gay, male, about twenty years older than me) boss once made off-the-cuff to an audience of mostly straight colleagues, back when I was new to the lab: "If you use the word butch... you're probably not." I, who am pretty butch, was a little confused and startled before I realized that the joke actually makes sense if you're habitually assuming that the people who use 'butch' are mostly gay men (which is, I think, his context; he coughed and backtracked a little bit when I stared at him in confusion).We actually had a lot of those little "huh wha?" moments the year I was new to the lab. I think I was still adjusting to bringing up queer culture where there were straight people, which at the time I would have never bothered to do and which he (I think deliberately) makes a point of doing sometimes. And I think he was probably still adjusting some to me being there with my own context, which was (and is) very different from my boss' while still being recognizable. In retrospect, I'm a little sorry about having come into the lab with the trauma I did from Tumblr exclusionists; I think he was very excited to have a queer mentee, and I don't think he had any context for why I would sidestep conversations and tuck away my own perspective in (not-outwardly-visible) fright when he would toss topics of conversation out at me.
It turns out that when you're largely accessing queer community through the scars of gatekeeping and trauma, and you have been really seriously immersing yourself in the attacks mounted by exclusionists--at the time I was coming off of two years of doing that very heavily--you start developing a fear reaction to people who are "unassailably" part of the community and who don't do a lot of obvious and visible stepping to make sure you know you're welcome. Which, since I didn't actually tell him that I ID as ace and that colors my experiences really deeply until... oh, the summer after I joined the lab, after he spent two weeks with me in the field (so around each other 24/7) trying to figure out what the hell I was and why I wasn't responding like either a straight person or a queer person to the conversational gambits he'd toss out, obviously he didn't know to do. (And just as obviously my experience was totally outside his context, which makes total sense, and just--augh.)
I'm more open about it right now, but it's been gone on six and a half years, and I'm still trying to work out how to talk about my own experiences both to other folks in my field--will they criticize me for openly holding an identity that is so often ridiculed?--and within my department. It's easier with folks about my age, but it's not like older people are all in total agreement with exclusionists, either. And it's hard unlearning the signifiers I initially learned on the internet.
I hate how the context of exclusionists drives certain community experiences to hide and fear connection to other groups, while at the same time being totally unseen by wide swathes of the groups exclusionists are ostensibly protecting. I hate that my fear drove me to hide because I had associated the presence of "real" LGBTQ+ people with potential judgement and threat, especially when I think at the time I was probably the only other openly queer person in our department. (I think I may be that now--we had another cis male gay grad student who had been in the same undergraduate lab as I was join, but he has since left to pursue a career in data science. And I don't think either of us know anyone else.)
Anyway. That little story was such a perfect encapsulation of two people whose queer contexts and communities are different meeting with a little bit of a bump, and such a perfect "yeah, no: suck it" story for those exclusionists trying to insist that "butch" and "femme" are terms only for cis lesbians.
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I'm having an issue right now with other spanish-speaking online ace activists because they tend to spend a lot of time fending off both haters and ace elitists on their outreach projects, and as a result, tend to be constantly on the defensive when in social media. And i always forget that, and thus sometimes make some casual critique without making sure to first thank them and let them know i think their work is valuable and this is not a personal attack-
It sucks, for everyone involved, is what i'm trying to say. I want to be able to connect with other ace and queer activists and organizers, but this whole context of online antagonism is just so uuuugggggghhhhhh.
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(I am uncomfortably reminded of jumping down poor
Like, it just muddies the water and makes it so much harder for people to connect with one another, as you say, because not only are people reacting to the possible predators churning up the silt of the river... they're also reacting to the silt itself and the moving things that might be fishers but might equally just be other fish.
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:(
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Like, they DO NOT ACTUALLY GET to tell someone how they dress, or what they ask their friends to call them, or who to sleep them, or what relationships they form, or what rights they can lobby for. Nor should they GET to.
That's the kind of thing I'm afraid to say on Tumblr, because so many people view themselves as having a moral responsibility to police other
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The problem is part of the "gave up on them" was giving up on the idea that I might be something other than a straight cis woman and diving straight back into the "lying to yourself" part of the closet because clearly I wasn't queer; they said so.
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I always think of the time I brought a six-month-old pointer puppy to a dog park--I would have been maybe thirteen or fourteen--and she decided she knew how to play because of all the time she'd spent bossing around our older Jack Russell Terrier around. So she took off at full speed at this middle-aged Rottweiler who was sniffing another dog, barking like a fool, and I was all heart-in-mouth because I was fully expecting this to trigger a big dog fight.
The Rottie braced himself, chest-slammed her, and knocked her off balance and sent her spinning off into the dirt, and then went back to whatever he was doing without batting an eye. It's one of the moments I think of as one of the most socially ept, kind things I've seen a dog do, ever--I would not have blamed him for starting an *actual* fight over it, because fifty pounds of baying pointer puppy yelling and racing at you would certainly have been enough to make me startled and think I needed to fight for my life. But he wasn't threatened, and he had the presence of mind to treat her like a baby even though she was acting like a threat--but not a baby so small that he put up with her crappy behavior.
I worry that the kids these days aren't getting enough of the early socialization, and that there aren't maybe enough adults who have the lack of trauma to identify what they're doing, identify that they're idiots, and summon the emotional wherewithal to send them spinning off into the dirt on their asses so they get shocked into learning better. I have no idea how to do that any better than I actually do, though.
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I'm super interested in your experience of overlapping scientific and queer mentorship—er, or the possiblity of it. Do you think forming a queer mentorship/friendship with your PI (er, boss, don't know your lab structure!)— I mean, is that even how you would characterize it? Is he a scientific mentor and queer friend, or scientific AND queer mentor? How did those interpersonal identities (queer and scientist) affect each other?
I am asking, I think, because in my lab life people were either one or the other—people above me scientifically were either new queers or not at all (or reaaalllly not my type of gay, and bad scientific mentors to boot), and people scientifically on par or newer than me were...queer in similar ways, but not merging their queer/scientific identities.
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More generally, I've been on both ends of the mentor/mentee divide with this respect now--I had a queer enby undergraduate I was supervising, although I think we were both a little frustrated by the lack of work I had for them while they were working with me. And--it's complicated! With respect to my student, for example, I was walking this weird thing where I was aware of their pronouns and nb status while I don't actually think anyone else in the lab was, because I'd found out from them following me over Twitter; we didn't talk about it except when I was drafting a letter of recommendation and wanted to know what pronouns they wanted me to use in the lab and otherwise.
Oh, hell. It's such a soup of emotion and feelings and weird overtones of family while not being family, you feel me? I mean, I'm in my seventh year of my PhD now, and also there's that delighted "wait, you have a gay PI?!" reaction from fellow queer students, and it's sometimes confusing for me to navigate all the tangled stuff that snarls together between queer mentorship and scientific mentorship and my own family of origin issues for me. I am about two hundred percent sure that it's confusing the other way, too.
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(I sometimes TA classes and my tiny children have a whole bunch of Obvious Feelings about me being obviously disabled and Visibly Queer. And -- you know the trick where you talk to kids when you're driving or cycling or walking or whatever so they don't have to make eye contact so vulnerability is easier? IT TURNS OUT that your MSc child who's in lab for a project is suddenly willing to ask a lot of questions if you casually mention having taken time out of degrees to be Crazy In while letting them watch you handle HF. Which the vast majority of your attention is on, so eye contact is Definitely Not Happening...)
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Oh man do I know that feel. I am not obviously disabled, but I have had students come up to me and very carefully hand me accommodations like "don't expect eye contact from me mmkay" and "my anti-anxiety meds are making my hands shake uncontrollably oh NOOOOO" and, well, I also do usually proctor our extra-time exams.
So if I casually go "yeah that's fine, got it" without blinking--you know how people get about accommodations, like they're either a huge hassle or they fall over backwards to be accommodating and make a big thing (less common)? I feel like there's a similar thing to coming out, whereas just... treating it like the normal thing that it is makes people perk up and think "one of us?" I don't recall talking much about it with my students, but the disability office gave me a teaching award after I started TAing this lab, so I think I must be doing something right. (It's a little clock with a very soothing tick. I am endlessly proud of it.)
My tiny children have so many Obvious Feelings just generally, and the queer ones and the ones with brain shit who have the context to peg me back I think... yeah. It's okay, though, because I have so many feelings right back for them, even though I have no idea how to go about showing it.
Yes! I agree.
So it's a real disconnect for me between tumblr and doing city or regional LGBTQ+ work, where you'll run into all sorts of LGBTQ+ people who flunk tumblr purity tests.
Re: Yes! I agree.
The exclusionist gatekeeping just... it doesn't square with the lived realities of any of the people I've sat down and gotten to know, and it always speaks to a really incredibly narrow idea of what this broader community is and has been and will be again. It's so weird. Especially in the incredibly narrow sense it has of what people are like! People are so messy and complicated and unsure!
I tell you what, I think the earliest sense I had of that kind of "people are more complicated than this" was watching folks on the old AVEN forums handle people who are questioning, and seeing the kinds of questions people came in with. And watching how more experienced people handled those questions, but also just... being so amazed by what you can find out about people if they trust you enough to tell you.
Re: Yes! I agree.
(Also while I'm ranting, "allies" means allies and yes the center I volunteer for cultivates those relationships.)
Re: Yes! I agree.
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I'm the type who is often assumed to be a lesbian; I'm not, but I don't always bother to correct that assumption. I don't care that much. It's not a bad thing to be called.
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I'm particularly glad they were good about it because at least two folks who were there while I was have since picked up national advocacy positions--one who seems to have been taken under Laverne Cox' wing, another who was featured on the new Queer Eye a while back--and so I'm this weird mixture of really proud and really glad that those are the people whose voices are getting amplified.
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(And there's other factors that make a local queer group just not half as necessary to me.)
Ooooh, was this - oh, what was his name - Sky? Skyler? - the trans guy? How cool that you (peripherally, at least) know people doing that kind of advocacy!
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It was! He's a few years older than me and I think had graduated a year before the year I was there as a senior, but was still hanging around the org at the time because... well, that's where your social circle is, you know? I had known there was a trans character in S2, but had no idea that he'd been to college with me until the episode rolled around and I spotted his face. Reading the interviews and the general reactions to the episode, especially the people worrying that his agency was overridden to present a more appealing picture to straight/cis people, was kind of hilarious to me--mostly because I could visibly see the wheels turning as he was settling into I Am A Representative mode, and I know he has no compunctions about playing a particular role as an educator and representative generally.
It was enough of a headfuck that I kind of can't settle back into Queer Eye as brain candy, though--too close! real people now! which is a shame. I really liked what I'd seen of it previously, and maybe I'll be able to pick it up eventually.
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Aww, that *is* a shame! I hope you can find that distance again eventually.
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(Also he really is that into snapback hats. I am incredibly not surprised by his wall of hats. I didn't even know him that well--I was closer to the nonbinary+ace+genderqueer contingent than the pack of trans guys, and most of them were underclassmen--but that was very very obvious back then.)
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