Just Kristin

I have been putting off post­ing for a few days now, suf­fer­ing as usual from “first-mark-in-a-blank-notebook” syn­drome. I ratio­nal­ized that, since my design is not com­pletely fin­ished, I can­not pos­si­bly begin adding con­tent. Even when con­tent pre­sented itself, when the blog muse, Teknosyn­graphea (thank you, Rick), struck me with her rss-feed of inspi­ra­tion, I put off writ­ing for one rea­son or another, promis­ing myself that I would make a list and get down to it soon…soon. Then tonight, here I sat, pulling a 4 to mid­night shift, wait­ing for some­one to IM me out of my ennui when I was made to remem­ber the old adage, “Make your wishes care­fully for they may be granted.” The fol­low­ing Y! mes­sage came from my daugh­ter:

Daugh­ter: check ths out:
Daugh­ter: Het­ero­sex­ism sucks. Queer mar­ket­ing strate­gies suck. The gen­der binary sys­tem sucks. Queer assim­i­la­tion sucks. Will and Grace sucks. Big­oted preach­ers from the mid-west suck. Gay Fuel sucks. This is why I’m not gay like happy but queer like fuck you.
NoLonger­Bored­Mother: how much of it do you under­stand? how much do you agree with? where is it from?
Daugh­ter: i’d say 1/2 or so… a bit more i think
Daugh­ter: i agree with most of it
Daugh­ter: it’s from [IM chat buddy]

Inter­est­ing. Not at all what I was expect­ing after an ini­tial con­ver­sa­tion opener about the sukiyaki she had eaten for din­ner at her father’s house this evening. Any­way, before I could con­tinue this con­ver­sa­tion with her, she had to go take a bath or some­such, so I thought that this first post on my res­ur­rected blog would be a fine place to fin­ish what I was going to tell her. Any com­ments that those who stum­ble in on this site would like to offer to a just-past-decade-old wise woman and her sometimes-stymied mother are wel­come.

Het­ero­sex­ism sucks.

Het­ero­sex­ism is, accord­ing to a Prince­ton online dic­tio­nary, “dis­crim­i­na­tion in favor of het­ero­sex­ual and against homo­sex­ual peo­ple.” Yes, this sucks. If I were you, I would ques­tion any norm before accept­ing it as truth. Put sim­ply, kiddo, a norm is the ver­sion of a thing that doesn’t get a label. “Mar­riage” is the norm, and it means — to our soci­ety — het­ero­sex­ual mar­riage. “Amer­i­can” is the norm, and it means — to our soci­ety — white amer­i­cans of Anglo ori­gin. Peo­ple who do not fit this societally-defined nor­ma­tive ver­sion have to clar­ify with a label: “gay mar­riage, inter­ra­cial mar­riage, Asian Amer­i­can, African Amer­i­can, Arab Amer­i­can, and so on, as though they are not “real” mar­riages and Amer­i­cans, but rather token or hon­orary ones. Another unfair norm is white­ness — Out­side of the fact that no per­son is com­pletely white or black in color, why is white the norm? When a per­son is half “white” and half any­thing else (“black”, “Asian”, etc.), why are they con­sid­ered the lat­ter? Why not “white”? Why not “grey”? Or best of all, why not noth­ing, no label at all? Even the inter­net has an unfair norm, again relat­ing to the U.S. Notice that .com, .net and .org are all mainly intended for U.S. sites, while other coun­tries have dif­fer­ent suf­fixes includ­ing a coun­try code, like co.uk or co.jp. Why all this cre­ation of “nor­ma­tives?” That is a long dis­cus­sion, and if you want to have it, I’d love it if you’d come up with some of your own the­o­ries first — share and share alike.

Queer mar­ket­ing strate­gies suck.

This could mean one or both of two things:

1. - The mar­ket­ing (com­mer­cials in mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers, or on tele­vi­sion and the radio) used to sell things to the GLBT (Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender) com­mu­nity are based on a het­ero­sex­ist view of the GLBT com­mu­nity or help to per­pet­u­ate a very wrong stereo­type of the com­mu­nity, and are there­fore flawed, or
2. - The very fact that spe­cial mar­ket­ing strate­gies are used for the GLBT com­mu­nity (Do they need spe­cial mar­ket­ing? Are they dif­fer­ent than non-GLBT peo­ple?) is wrong.

This, too, is a long dis­cus­sion, but if you engage me, it will prob­a­bly include talk of my dis­like for labelling, my dis­gust with cor­po­ra­tions and all their adver­tis­ing, etc.…but you knew that. :)

The gen­der binary sys­tem sucks.

The num­ber one def­i­n­i­tion in Webster’s dic­tio­nary of “binary” as an adjec­tive is “1 : com­pounded or con­sist­ing of or marked by two things or parts.” The writer is there­fore say­ing that the belief that there are only two gen­ders is not cor­rect. Most peo­ple believe that there are only males and females, and that any­thing other than het­ero­sex­ual pair­ings are “abnor­mal” at best. Oth­ers (includ­ing myself) believe that not only are there more than two sexes, since inter­sex (her­maph­ro­ditic) indi­vid­u­als exist, but that gen­der is also far from binary and comes in many fla­vors. For exam­ple, to what gen­der does a per­son born with a male body but a female mind and who loves women belong?

Queer assim­i­la­tion sucks.

I believe that, in this state­ment, the writer is express­ing anger at a soci­ety that only accepts queer peo­ple who do not show their “queer­ness,” and/or at the queer peo­ple who try to blend in to nor­mal soci­ety. I under­stand his anger at these things. Queer assim­i­la­tion is society’s attempt to prove that het­ero­sex­ism is the norm, and when queer peo­ple hide their queer­ness to try to make their lives eas­ier, it shows these peo­ple that they are right.

Will and Grace sucks.

Will and Grace is seen by some as hav­ing two negatively-portrayed gay char­ac­ters: Will, who is a gay man “assim­i­lated” into straight soci­ety, and Jack, a gay man who has all the char­ac­ter­is­tics that straight peo­ple think gay men have — he is a stereo­type of a gay man in the same way that black­face per­form­ers por­trayed stereo­typ­i­cal blacks. Enforc­ing these stereo­types is bad because it makes them seem truer and last longer in the minds of peo­ple who don’t think very much.

Big­oted preach­ers from the mid-west suck.

I am sure that there is more than one big­oted preacher in the mid-west, so I can­not say to which one the writer is refer­ring, but there are quite a few seg­ments of Chris­tian­ity that are less than friendly (to say the least) to mem­bers of the GLBT com­mu­nity. Expe­ri­enc­ing hatred for belong­ing to any group, espe­cially when mem­ber­ship was not cho­sen but bio­log­i­cally deter­mined, is a hor­ri­ble thing. This type of hatred needs to be fought through debate and edu­ca­tion. It is impor­tant to remem­ber, though, that it is equally as bad to hate an entire group of peo­ple (Chris­tians, Chris­t­ian preach­ers, or any group for that mat­ter) for the wrongs that only a sam­ple of their com­mu­nity has committed.

Gay Fuel sucks.

Gay Fuel is sup­pos­edly an energy drink mar­keted to gays to improve their sex­ual energy. This is anger­ing to the writer most likely because it is an exam­ple of queer mar­ket­ing sleaze — the mar­keters are say­ing that any energy a gay man has will be used on sex, a stereo­type of hetero-origin.

This is why I’m not gay like happy but queer like fuck you.

The writer has, like your mom, decided to take the label “queer” rather than “gay” (or “les­bian”, “bisex­ual”, etc.) because “gay” is accept­able to het­ero­sex­ist soci­ety, while “queer” is a word used by het­ero­sex­ist soci­ety as a deroga­tory term for “homo­sex­ual”. By using “queer” to label our­selves, we take the power of the insult away. For exam­ple, if some­one always called you “Jap-girl”, you could decide to intro­duce your­self as “Jappy” or have a blog called “Jap-Girl”, and then when some­one called you “Jap”, it would have no strength as a ver­bal weapon or a put-down.…get it?

Any­way, this is all I can muster at this time of night. I hope it helps. You prob­a­bly knew most of it already, sweetie, but I had to get my two-dollars-worth in…you know your mom. I may add stuff later. We’ll see.