IS THAT YOUR REAL MASK?: Ampersand posts on a subject that forms the major theme of the short story I’m blogging: gender or sexual identity. He links to a post that separates out six categories of identity.
This post reminded me, actually, of Mommentary’s post about the literary characters with whom we’ve fallen in love. I found it genuinely hard to distinguish between characters I’d fallen for and characters with whom I’d identified. (I’m a narcissist, I guess…!) Grantaire is more an identification-character, Sula much more a want-character, but really, it’s a bit of a tangle. And virtually all of the literary characters with whom I identified strongly, especially as a child, were male. (In the well-written, feminist Alanna books, I identified with Alexander of Tirragen even though he’s an obvious villain–I have a hard time liking the good guys!)
Anyway, I thought I was in an interesting position to fill out the Jasper survey: bisexual, strongly pro-gender, conservative Catholic chick. Let’s see what happens….
core identity: Wait, you mean people have core identities? I’ll go with “wry Catholic alienated male-identified chick.”
biological sex: I’m one of the ones that can get preggo, and I’ve known that all my life. (IOW even if you are a woman who can’t become pregnant, you have known all your life that people like you are the people who give birth, not the people with the option to walk away. That has shaped your life. Some comedienne–Carol something??? Hofstadter???–had a great line, “I don’t have any children–at least as far as I know.” That’s funny coming from a chick but just plain true coming from any dude who’s ever slept with a lady.)
sexual/romantic attractions: people I think are better than me; also, beautiful losers. You can imagine this makes for a wide range of possibilities.
sexual/romantic attractiveness: depends on whether I have long hair or not.
gender expression: babycakes, I express my gender in ways you couldn’t imagine.
social perception: With long hair = your basic chickadee, probably someone you can ask favors of (directions, spare change, etc). With short hair, dressed punky = Punky Brewster, nonthreatening, weirdo. With short hair, dressed butchy = “Are you… you know… that way?” Yeah, I can look superdykey if I want to. Threatening to middle-school boys, but then, who isn’t?
As you can probably guess, reviewing this list only reinforces my basic belief that American society focuses way too much on who you think you are–your quote-unquote authentic self–and way too little on what you should be doing with your life. Way too little on whether “who you are” is actually best defined not with reference to your own feelings and inclinations, but rather with reference to what and Whom you love. Or, as in my case, Whom you want to love and try to love.