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Since the beginning of a new year seems as good a time as any to look back at the past 365 days and forward at the next 365, I thought I’d pop up and say some things.
2011 was a very peculiar year, full of growing pains. My graduate program has been more or less dismantled, which I have been reluctant to go into much here. I finished the spring semester excited for the summer and the following year of learning, but by mid-summer I knew that at least in the fall I would not be in classes and as of a few weeks ago, I am done with that school for good. One year of an MA under my belt and I am bitter. I was supposed to be done with my masters by this summer and instead I’ll have no degree and very few transferrable credits, and I haven’t applied to other programs yet because I loved that one so much and have no idea where I will find another one like it. So in the meantime, I’m working, trying to figure out where I’m going, what the fuck I’m doing, what matters to me. So the year began with direction, purpose, energy, excitement, momentum. And ended, here, with a grinding halt and a giant question mark.
2011 was the year of moving to Oakland, which ML and I decided to do before I found out that grad school was up in the air but which I ended up being very glad of, given that rent at our new place is $700/month less combined. And we have a house! With a yard! And wild blackberries and lemon trees, and I have a hammock and spent many fall afternoons reading in the hammock drinking lemonade. We also have a roommate (a friend of ours from before) who is pretty much my favorite person ever and I actually really like living with a roommate again. And we have a cat, Gilda, who owns all of us, and who knows to sit to get a treat. ML is trying to train her to take to a leash. So far, she’s having none of it.
2011 has been a year of a lot of personal and emotional upheaval, which has been both painful and broadening. I’m trying, probably unsuccessfully, to tow a line between taking risks and making a giant mess, and I think I’ve crossed that line in unfortunate ways at times this year. Maybe, eventually, I will go into some of these things here.
In 2011 I deepened friendships that are so meaningful to me in so many ways, and I watched one friendship between close friends crumble and am still grieving that, especially as I feel in some ways in the middle and don’t know how to support them and also give myself space to be angry at both of them and sad. In 2011 I grew apart from my parents but closer to my siblings and especially my sister who, despite being mystifyingly different from me also, still, can finish my sentences. We now live in the same state!
I came out to my grandparents this year, in the middle of everything else, and sobbed for three straight hours when my grandpa hung up on me. Not that that response was a surprise, but that there was so much of all of this other stuff stagnant inside me and unable to surface emotionally, and that when I started crying about grandpa hanging up on me it turned into crying about everything all at once and altogether. Then I brought ML to Thanksgiving with them, and with my mother and and my aunt and uncle and (gay, but not yet out) cousin and my sister and her boyfriend. And three days later my grandpa called me and told me, awkwardly and hesitantly, that ML sparkles and that he will consider her in our family. And I was like, wow, that was it? Like eight years of agonizing over this and he tells me she sparkles? I should’ve done it a lot sooner.
2011 was a year of deepening politicization and although this hasn’t been a space where I’ve really talked much about politics, current affairs, and theory much, I’m wondering whether that will change this coming year as all of those things are more present for me than they’ve been before as things I’m constantly wanting to think about, talk about, process. It was also a year in which that politicization has changed me personally, changed my sense of self and my sense of possibility in the world, and that feels exciting and that regardless of my grad program no longer existing, that energy is still simmering and I am running with it still.
Things look a lot different from this end of 2011 than from the front end. Maybe I won’t even bother trying to look forward; maybe I’ll just take this next year little by little.
There’s something on my mind recently that I’ve been struggling to put to words. When I was out last weekend with ML, we had a good conversation about it and I intended to write about it right away but then I sat and stared at a blank document for a while, the words bottlenecked in the tips of my fingers and I couldn’t type. Maybe this time will be different.
[Trigger warning: this post discusses violent rape.]
There’s a serial rapist in a neighborhood in San Francisco where many of my friends live and where I go to frequently, and he’s struck multiple times. The attacks have been violent and in public in early morning hours. And I’ve been really turned off by the way it has been discoursed in communities I’m tangential to and in general by the patterns I have witnessed over and over in the past, repeated here, as responses to extreme violence against women.
I found out about it because of an email blast by the local rape crisis center to all of its volunteers; the email gave the details of the attacks, I guess just as an advisement to the volunteers about potential hotline callers. It also said that the police are on the case but that they’re asking that it not be brought to media in order that they can find the rapist more easily; media attention might alert him that they’re looking and he could relocate. Before too long this email had spread throughout the various networks I’m a part of and I got it sent to me in various truncated forms several additional times, always along with some sort of cautionary note by the sender about being careful, not walking alone, taking appropriate measures, and finally “be safe.” People are hyperaware and there has been a palpable climate of anxiety.
There are multiple layers of all of this that I struggle with. There’s the obvious fact that the sensationalizing of the street attack and the stranger rape is highly problematic, especially given the ubiquity of rape, sexual assault, and violence perpetrated by non-strangers. For me, though, that’s a more difficult argument to grapple with given that for me it is not a myth, it is not sensational. Still, I can’t write about the problematics of what’s going on in SF right now without bringing that up, the hyper-paranoia and perhaps exaggerated response to this sort of rape, especially in contrast to the silence around all other (and way more common) forms of sexual violence. Related to and beyond that, though, I’m angered by the way this kind of information is just sent into the world to live its own sensationalized life and that it seems like the only real possible reaction to it is fear, and the result is a kind of social control of women operated through this fear. One of my friends called the rape crisis center to ask if they were planning or knew of any organized community or collaborative response and she said they just sounded annoyed and dismissed her. This isn’t to say that it’s their job to put something like that together, but that given the way they disseminated the information and offered no container for coping with the gutteral punch of the email other than to suggest that individuals who have feelings about it call the crisis hotline, a dismissive response to my friend’s inquiry just seems inconsiderate and even irresponsible to me.
I’m also struggling with the faith in the police that that initial message conveyed, and particularly with the lack of questioning the police’s methods which, in this case, was essentially “don’t tell the media because we need to find the guy and if he knows he’s being hunted he’ll move” and to me reads as “we need him to strike again so we can catch him” or, “it’s more important that our strategy for catching him not be interrupted than for the community to be able to feel safe.” When I was subletting in North Berkeley in summer of 2008, there was also a serial rapist who was breaking into the homes of young women who were living alone and violently raping them. I was, in fact, living alone and in the immediate vicinity of his previous attacks when the police knocked on my door, handed me a flyer with “information” and how to contact a tip line, and then left me alone in my ground floor apartment with windows that didn’t lock, shrugging and saying “sorry, can’t help you there” when I asked them, panicked, “well what should I do??” What we should do, apparently, is fear for our lives and our bodies, because what else does this method of disseminating information call for? And, why did the crisis center that historically only will cooperate with police to the extent that it is forced to so blindly follow in the police’s footsteps in this case?
Then there’s the fact that eventually a local newspaper did release a blurry black and white still from a security camera of the suspect, and that the only thing about him that is discernible from this photo is that he is black and that he was wearing a dark hoodie. What is the purpose of this circulating when there is no chance that anyone will actually be able to identify him based on that photo and instead it just sends the message: “be afraid of black men in hoodies.” This is such an ugly dynamic and it’s one that I don’t really know how to untangle. But sending that out into a world in which black men are already racially profiled in super intense ways and experience intense criminalization on a daily basis is irresponsible at best and nasty and racist at worst. This is not to say that it’s racist to talk about a black man being a rapist, or to identify this one as a black man. I’m not saying we should pretend he’s not black or refuse to engage what comes up around his race. I’m just asking, in this case, what is the point of that blurry photo being circulated? If the rest of the messaging around there being a serial rapist is “he’s brutal, he comes up from behind, and he isn’t deterred by fighting back” then how is having a blurry and unidentifiable photo of him helpful for the community? If the logic is the paternal “ladies, just stay inside” then it seems to me that this photo will only exacerbate that as the message by bolstering the public imaginary that all black men are to be feared. It’s just ugly.
And then for me there’s the very personal level of struggle. I have been feeling a lot of anger, resentment, irritation with people who have been talking about this and have been having difficulty articulating why. I don’t think even I have really been able to understand myself why those emotions are coming up for me. It came up for me a lot when I was hanging out with one of my friends who lives just blocks away from the most recent attack and she insisted on walking me the one block to my parking spot when I was leaving around midnight. I wasn’t angry at her or irritated at her but I was feeling a mess of angry/frustrated emotions that I couldn’t quite place. I guess the best way for me to explain it is that, for me, this serial rapist on the loose doesn’t change things. I don’t feel any less safe knowing that that’s out there. I don’t feel any more safe at any other time when there isn’t a known rapist on the loose. I always feel that fear, I always feel like any second now it could happen again. I know that when it happened to me there hadn’t been any community warnings and so I guess I just feel like, what do these warnings do, what are they for, if it happens anyway, whether we are prepared for it or not. And, what does it even mean to be prepared for it? It’s impossible, you can’t possibly. I feel like I just have so much resentment that I can’t understand the fear that other people have about it, I can’t understand fear from the side of not-knowing. It makes it hit home for me so much that I live in a different world than they do. My normal is so wildly different. And it’s occasions like this that bring it all back to me when in general I feel like I do a pretty good job of dissociating from it in my daily life. I do a good job of intentional forgetting. Not forgetting that it happened, there is not a single day that goes by that it is not present for me, but forgetting how it makes me different, forgetting the anger and bitterness about it being the background of my daily life.
I didn’t really intend to end here. I wanted to go into a sort of brainstorming session of what might a robust and healthy community response to sexual violence look like, and how might we organize around that more rather than stopping at feeling trapped and afraid? I have thoughts. But I’m feeling drained, so I’m going to stop. More soon. Xoxo.
Gulp, it’s already the middle of January… whooops. Classes start on Tuesday, and I’ve been working and catching up with various friends the past week and a half since getting back from the east coast. Also trying to get in a lot of pleasure reading, since my books for this semester have started tumbling in and it’s veeeery clear to me that I will not have any time to read things of my own choosing this semester! So. Many. Books. ANyway, last year at the beginning of January I did a sort of year-in-review and some intentions for the coming year, and I decided to revisit that this year and see where I was last year, whether I did the things I’d been planning to do, and then look ahead to this coming year.
- continue to fall in love and deepen my relationship with ML. I’m looking forward to more great sex, more power play, even better communication as we learn each other through and through and more and more, mini-retreats (that hopefully won’t be too expensive), accompanying her to her sister’s wedding where she’ll be outing herself to all of her extended family and family friends, and maybe even moving in together (!) (but we’ll wait to see what my grad school plans are before we really talk about that seriously).
Well, I certainly had a functioning crystal ball on this one; this has all happened, and more! We’ve really fallen in cozy with each other, in a good way — we have had very few big fights this year, and the fighting has gotten easier as lurking questions like “will she leave me over this?” have faded away. While the frequency of our sex has decreased somewhat, it’s still great, and we did do some interesting work with power play this year. Mini-retreats… we went on a few I think? We went to Palm Springs in March for her birthday, and to Cazadero for Thanksgiving… That might be it. But two per year might be enough given our busy lives. Her sister’s wedding in August was lovely if also somewhat challenging, and I felt a bond with her through and after that that I describe in that post. AND, we moved in together! At the beginning of June. So we’ve been living together now for seven+ months and it’s fantastic. We both have such busy independent lives but we almost always manage to end the day together, in bed, with a bit of time before we have to go to sleep.
- start graduate school (speaking of).
And ever! I started the MA degree program in anthropology at CIIS here in San Francisco, and it’s got to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself. I fucking love it. I can’t wait for classes to start next week (even if it does mean less time for pleasure reading…).
- leave my job (which should be concurrent with grad school, but in case I don’t get into any of the programs I’m hoping to enroll in, I STILL would like to leave my job).
Yup, I left my job at the end of May, and continued to work somewhat part-time during the summer but with very flexible hours. The summer was nice, I had a lot of time to cook and plan and read and think and do fun stuff… but I was also ready for it to be over when it was over. Too much of a good thing :)
- continue to take care of myself and be strong enough to seek help in taking care of myself, from medication and therapy, but also from intellectual, spiritual, and physical mentors, as well as friends and family.
I think that this past year, especially this fall, I have really figured out how to be at my mental and emotional best: be busy with things that I care about. It was really that simple. As soon as I started graduate school, so much of my stress and anxiety and existential ennui and co-dependency tendencies just … started to evaporate. I’m doing my thing, and it feels right.
- come out to my grandparents. There. I said it. I made it a goal.
Uh. Whoops. I forgot that I’d made that an intention this past year. We’ll see if it happens this year. I’d love to make it an intention. Problem is my grandma’s in early stages of Alzheimer’s, and I’m just not sure what coming out to them at this point would accomplish. But it’s a possibility.
- continue to write here and use it as a platform for airing my relationship-, life-, and self-processing, and continue to strengthen my internet bonds.
I did continue to write here, although with less frequency. As I’ve said before, that’s been for lack of time, not lack of motivation. But I’m still here, and I hope to figure out a way to write weekly.
So, you see, I did alright in 2010. As for 2011, I’ve got some intentions for the record as well:
- continue to fully invest myself in graduate school, worrying less about social aspects of it (which totally have been falling into place) and knowing that the more I bring myself fully to the table there, the more things will continue to open up for me. This year I’ll have to figure out a practicum and a research focus, so one of my intentions here is to think that through and carefully weigh my options. And also, I want to start ironing out post-MA plans: Ph.D.? Here, or elsewhere? Work? I’ll be meeting with my academic advisor early this semester to start talking about that.
- continue to prioritize friendships and relationships both in my graduate program and outside of it. I adore my grad school cohort.
- with ML, continue to communicate well, to set aside time to do fun things together, to leave San Francisco every so often for a breath of fresh air, to love her and appreciate her with intention. We also want to continue to grow and expand our sexual life, and though we’re not quite sure yet what that’s going to look like, we’ve got some hopes and intentions: set aside time and boundaries to work more with power play, specifically with figuring out a way for her to push through topping insecurities and me to push through subbing insecurities; push more against boundaries of monogamy/non-monogamy, and play with how we can approach those explorations as a team and make it something fun for both of us; go to sex/play parties and increasingly take our sex life out of just our own private and exclusive domain. Very excited about all of that, and I imagine I will be writing about all of that at times throughout the year.
- travel at least once out of the country. I will have so many opportunities for that this year: my sister is living in Vienna, and wants me to visit this summer and travel to Poland and Croatia with her. One of my best friends is getting married in Paris in August. And another mutual friend of ML’s and mine is getting married in Japan in the fall. Not to mention, I would love to get back to Germany, Berlin specifically, and then there’s always the possibility that my master’s work will take me out of the country too…
I think that’s a pretty good list of intentions for this year. Of course there will be surprises too, and that’s as it should be. But I will just state for the record: I am excited about this year. And I intend to continue to make this space somehow a part of it all.
Happy New Year <3 xoxo AF
PS: I will be doing a pin-up modeling shoot in a few weeks. I’m thinking I might share some photos… :)
My mother reads Dear Abby religiously. She’s done it for as long as I can remember, always picking out the “Lifestyle” section of our local daily paper and turning to page B2. Some days growing up, my sister or father would abscond with the section before she got to it to do the crossword or read the comics, but she would keep her eye on it, calling dibs on the section next. As a kid, it didn’t occur to me to question her loyalty to the column, and in fact I blindly followed suit–reading Dear Abby, it seemed, was something one did if one was to be a Woman. I was never all that impressed by the advice “Abby” (Jeanne Pauline Phillips was her real name, if I remember correctly) doled out, and eventually I got bored of her predictable responses and stopped reading. The act of stopping wasn’t all that memorable or all that conscious; it just sort of slipped away, superseded by more important things.
It wasn’t until I was in college, home from a break one year, that I thought to ask my mother why she liked Dear Abby so much. I was sitting at the breakfast table with her some late morning (summer? weekend?), watched her reach for Lifestyle and turn to B2, and was momentarily struck with mild curiosity. “Mom,” I said, “why do you read Dear Abby every day?” She looked up at me, stricken, and sighed. ”Well,” she said, “I guess there’s no reason not to tell you.”
When she was 11, she told me, she’d been assaulted by a friend of her parents. At that age in 1964, she didn’t have the language to identify what specifically had happened, she just knew she’d been violated. And she was scared. She knew, vaguely, that babies were made by men “doing things” to women, unspeakable things, and she knew that something unspeakable had been done to her, because the man had told her so, admonishing her that it was their “secret.” She felt isolated, ashamed, and was afraid that it meant she would have a baby. So, unable to talk to her parents and lacking knowledge or awareness of any other resources at her disposal, she wrote to Dear Abby. Asking if she was pregnant. And every day, 11 years old, she read Dear Abby, hoping for a response.
And she got one. Dear Abby printed her letter, and wrote a warm and kind response explaining exactly what would’ve had to have happened for her to be pregnant, affirming that no matter what he’d done, it was wrong and not her fault, and telling her about some books that she could check out at the library for girls about their bodies and their sexuality. In printing her letter, Abby made a connection with my mom that she didn’t have in anyone else, validated her when otherwise in her life there was silence, unflinchingly and lovingly spoke to the fears and ignorance of a little girl coming of age in an environment so sexually repressive that she couldn’t even ask what exactly it was that made babies. In printing her letter, Abby unwittingly secured for herself a lifelong follower. It is an emotional connection, my mother told me, that hasn’t wavered, even though (she admitted) the printed responses these days seem more canned.
I cried when she told me this. I cried for the lonely and scared little girl in 1964; I cried because suddenly my mother wasn’t just my mother but a complete person whose life began way before I was even imagined; and I cried because I’d silenced myself, too, at 15, perhaps not so ignorant as my mother at 11 but every bit as lost and alone, when I’d been raped. I cried because I hadn’t told my mom, just like she hadn’t told hers, generation after generation recommitting itself to isolation. Wait, no, strike that — we don’t commit ourselves to isolation — isolation is imposed on us by a dominant society that reprimands and shames sexuality expressed, that awkwardly and embarrassedly approaches very limited and basic lessons about sex and sexuality, that embraces tired discourses of women as sexual “gatekeepers,” men as sexual animals, and rigid heterosexuality within the confines of marriage as the only acceptable sexual option, that does not invite questions, conversation, or any sort of genuine human connection around the topics of sex and sexuality.
My mother’s and my own fear and isolation after experiencing sexual violence is only one effect of the smothering silence. My fear in high school of being gay and praying to a god I didn’t even believe in to send me a boyfriend was another effect. My complete ignorance of any kind of sex and sexuality other than heterosexual penis-in-vagina-in-and-out-cum-done sex, including ways that non-heterosexuals have sex and specifically have *safe(r)* sex, is another. My going to the public library after I was raped to search for ways to force a miscarriage in case I was pregnant, rather than asking my mom for help or my health teacher or anyone for crying out loud, is yet another. And these are just the ways that a dearth of information and conversation about healthy sex and sexuality affected me. My heart hurts for all the other kids and teens out there now who are suffering through the silence in their own unique ways.
Scarleteen is a website that is breaking through all of that, providing a robust, inviting, kind, and healthy space for teenagers to get answers, make connections, and feel supported in all aspects of their awakening sexualities. They need support to stay on the web, and kids need them. I needed them. My mom needed them. If you can, give a little bit. If you can’t, tell people in your life, especially teenagers, that the website exists. You know, just slip it casually into conversation… teenagers don’t respond well to directions ;)
***
This post is part of the Scarleteen Sex-Ed Blog Carnival. See aagblog.com for a full list of participating blogs! There have been a lot of really fantastic posts so far.
I just went back and read it, and got carried away by how different things are right now. Two years, apparently, makes a big difference. Two years ago, I was working as a paralegal, about five months out of a major relationship, and was a big slut. (In a good way.) I was realizing that I could hook up with people I liked and/or was attracted to, have fun, learn something p’raps, and be none the worse off for it. Annika was one such of these affairs; there were others in the span of seven months between the end of my previous relationship and the beginning of this one.
This blog was born because, after emerging from the comfort and stability (and also heartbreak) of a long relationship, I was putting my feelers into the world “out there,” realizing that if I was going to get through the finality of that break-up, I would need to re-gain my footing in something outside of myself in the context of that relationship, outside of the context of her. So, well, I put my feet in other women. Well, my hands, and tongue and things, actually, not so much my feet, but that’s the general idea ;) And I figured I’d write about it, the sex diaries of a single queer San Francisco femme.
But, well, that seemed tired. I’m not sure why; maybe that I’m a product of a culture saturated with Sex and the City? I don’t know. But after Annika, I didn’t write about any more of them. It didn’t feel quite like the full picture of me, writing about my one-night stands. So, for most of its infancy, my blog stopped and started, not quite sure what it was doing. Somewhere in there, I met ML, and I think the first time I mention her is in this post, when we’d already been dating for over three months. And then I just stopped writing completely until July of 2009. Or, actually, this isn’t entirely true. I kept writing. But then in July, in a particularly low bout of depression, I went back through my archives until that point and deleted almost everything I’d posted, for no other reason than that the posts didn’t resonate with me anymore.
That was a silly thing to do, because of course when one is in a low depressive place, things from non-depressive times don’t resonate anymore. And now that I’m NOT in a low depressive place these days, those posts from the summer of 2009 no longer resonate with me. They’re so raw, so vulnerable, so needy. I was floundering. But then I got through it, with the help of medication and a move across the city to new digs, and things started falling into place.
And, here I am. Living with ML, in the first semester of a graduate program in anthropology, working part-time still, at that same law firm. This blog has carried me through so much, through growing into my femme identity, through beginning to explore my sexual desires and landscapes, through navigating a healthy and committed relationship. And this blog is one of my favorite things now, and although I have so little time these days with school and work and relationship all piling on thick, I always have posts sitting half-written in drafts, or partially composed in my head, and I count myself very, very lucky to be here and to have you all, my readers, who somehow, inexplicably, care.
Here’s to two more years… And hopefully more!
PS: I finally created a Facebook page, since several of you have kept inviting me … see over on the right sidebar, down below my tweets? There! Click there to facebook-like me! :)
I’m trying to grow out my hair. The reason I bring this up is because I got an email last week asking me if I had thoughts about femmes and hair, and I responded that “DO I EVER.” Well, that’s not exactly what I said, but something to that effect. I have thoughts about femmes and hair especially now because I’m in the middle of trying to grow mine out. I say “trying” because I am at the point right now where I’m on the verge of tearing it all out because it’s pissing me off so much. (Awkward in-between stage much?)
So, femmes and hair. The best angle I can really appropriately come at this from is that of my own experience and relationship to my hair, obviously, so I’ll start there. I used to have long hair. And now my hair is short. I had straight, long, light brown hair that went halfway down my back. Someone told me once that he didn’t think he’d ever seen me wear my hair the same way twice, and though that is definitely NOT true, I was able to do a lot of different things with it. I wore ponytails, obviously, when I was feeling particularly casual. “Princess ponytails” (as my mother dubbed “half ponytails”) were for when I was feeling particularly feminine or girlish. I would also wear braids, or half-ponytail braids, or pigtail braids, or French braids, or messy buns, or what’s that thing called where you turn your ponytail inside out? Yeah, that. Often I would just wear my hair completely down, blow-dry it… I had a habit of twirling a strand of hair around my finger when I was bored.
When I was 20, I cut my hair short. Pixie short. Largely, this was part of my coming-out process. It was a signal that I wanted to be taken seriously by the queer community at my women’s college, that I wasn’t a LUG. (That is a whole sociological can of worms right there.) As I’ve written before, I understood that being taken seriously as gay necessitated toning down femininity and taking on androgyny or masculinity. (What I didn’t understand was that having a pixie haircut did NOT automatically make me androgynous or masculine!) It turned out that I *loved* the short hair. It framed my face better, made my eyes more prominent (I already have pretty prominent eyes as it is), was super easy to take care of, and looked flirty and fun. Once I passed safely to the other side of my masculandrogynous stage, I totally embraced my pixie hair as femme. Not in an “I’m femme… but I have short hair” way, but in a “hell YEAH I’m femme and I have short hair!” way. No “buts.”
And, yeah, I definitely think that’s put more of a burden of proof on me, in a way. In a community that has so much protection around labels (another whole sociological can of worms that I’m not going to open right now), there have been plenty of occasions I’ve felt weird about my short hair, have felt that I can’t actually be femme with short hair, and that I’m co-opting someone else’s identity by claiming I’m a femme with short hair. (White) femininity and long hair are closely linked in a biconditional relationship in our culture — if you’re a white woman with long hair, you’re perceived to be feminine, and if you’re going to be perceived as feminine, you need to have long hair. It’s a closed loop. But of course, there are so many exceptions to this. Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman, Keira Knightley, and now Emma Watson are all white female celebrities who totally pull off the short hair but still feminine thing.
And yet. Female celebrities cutting off their hair is generally perceived by society-at-large (and forgive the sweeping generalizations) as a bold step away from docile girlishness and toward the re-defining of the self as a “strong woman.” When I Googled “emma watson cuts her hair,” the underlying themes in news articles and blog posts linked in the search results seemed to me to be shock and trepidation: words like edgy, boyish (though I think she looks *far* from boyish), and drastic, and questions posed to the audience like “what do YOU thinkabout Emma’s new look?” underline the notion that white women cutting their hair short is “making a statement” that people can agree or disagree with. Comments to those blog posts and news articles tend to go in one of two directions: either people support the “bold move” and take a “rock on, girl” pro-girl-power stance, OR they think it looks horrible and wax nostalgic about her long hair, regretting the move away from traditional femininity. Long hair, then, can be read as a symbol of traditional white , while short hair is a symbolic move towards liberation. (Emma even calls it “liberating” and “incredible” herself.)
Obviously, Emma is straight (or at least, she has a boyfriend and has never made any statements to the contrary), as are the other celebrities I mentioned. So how do femmes fit into this? I think white femmes who typically pass as straight (which is probably most of us) probably are perceived similarly to straight white women in terms of our hair: long hair is more traditionally feminine, while short hair is a distancing from traditional femininity. Since gayness is also a distancing from traditional femininity, at least in terms of dominant definitions of femininity (which define it in oppositional and exclusive relation to man/masculinity), it makes sense that cutting one’s hair short is a move many women make when trying to find a place in the queer realm. On the other hand, many femmes participate in actively re-defining femininity as un-relative to men and masculinity, partly just by virtue of not being sexual partners of men, and partly by their intentionality in regards to their gender presentation. In that sense, a white femme having long hair, I think, uses a traditional marker of white femininity in a non-traditional way, thus also “queering” the discourse around traditional white femininity. (I think I’m talking in circles now.) A white femme having short hair is still probably read most often as being non-traditionally feminine (if read as feminine at all by hetero-dominance — I think there are many folks in my life, for example, who take ONLY my hair as being signifying of my gender presentation, and assume that just by virtue of having short hair I *can’t* be feminine) and, because even queers are typically socialized by hetero-dominance until a certain point in their young/adult lives, white femmes with short hair might not be taken seriously as feminine by fellow queers, either.
All of this a round-about way of saying: I have short hair. I’m femme. Even if you don’t perceive me as femme (especially when I’m wearing jeans and chucks and no make-up), I’m still femme. Short-haired femmes and long-haired femmes alike are re-defining femininity in our own images, distancing ourselves from a male-defined and male-owned femininity. [Aside: this isn't to say straight women can't participate or aren't participating in re-defining femininity in their own image too. Of course they can and are. I do think, though, that it's probably gotta be a more intentional thing for straight women.] AND, my growing out my hair right now has nothing to do with changing my orientation towards or relationship with my femme-ininity. The reason that I am growing out my hair is that I no longer have an income, and so I can’t afford haircuts. That’s it. The end! Though I think it will be very interesting to see how my understanding of my queer identity and my position in queerness and in community changes, both internally and in terms of external perceptions, as a result of growing longer hair.
In other news, our date on Sunday evening was perfect. We went for a walk up to Corona Heights, got winded, sat on a bench overlooking the entire east side of the city and felt appropriately invigorated. We ended up deciding to eat out (graduate student budget notwithstanding) and that was an excellent decision because it was so nice not to have to wash up dishes and whatnot. Plus, we got cocktails and fondue — you can’t argue with that! And then, just as planned, we camped out on the living room floor with our featherbed and lots of pillows and blankets and watched old movies on our projector. And then we fucked. It was awesome. It also really subdued my rising anxiety about not having time for and with each other. I feel a whole lot better. This week has been very busy, too, and not without its moments of frustration and anxiety and stress between us, but my anxiety is no longer consuming me in quite the same way it was before.
[9/20/10 Edit: I was thinking some more about this this weekend and realized that I needed to clarify that I'm talking about white femininity and its queering so I went back through and added "white" where necessary. As a white woman, that's the world I have the most thorough understanding of, and I don't feel comfortable making sweeping statements about discourses around femininity in WOC and POC communities. That's actually a topic I'm interested in delving into in graduate school -- but that's another post...]
You’re welcome. Yes I did feel a bit awkward, and I’m sorry if I didn’t seem talkative or friendly, and just nodded in acknowledgement when you said thanks (it was a long day).
I could see that you were handling yourself fine on your own, but it looked like the guy just wouldn’t let it go and I didn’t want him to escalate the situation, so I stepped in between you two to try to defuse the situation verbally.
As a guy, I can’t possibly know how annoying it must be to be in that situation, but I have two younger sisters, and I’ve seen them be harassed in a similar way before. I just don’t like to see it happen.
Thank you. Thank you for having my back, even though you probably felt a bit awkward about it. Maybe you felt like you should’ve said something, come to my defense, but honestly? Just the fact that you were there, watching, alert, making yourself visible to the douchebag who was all “what, can’t I look at your legs?” and when I said “uh, no” was all “oh I see how it is, you’d rather have a LADY look at your legs, right? Amiright? fucking San Francisco” and kept harassing me, so that he’d know that if he tried anything with me, you would do something about it. I don’t know, I think you did exactly the right thing. If you’d said anything, if you’d stepped in to defend me verbally, I mean that would’ve been fine but honestly I was glad to use my own voice to defend myself, to tell the guy to fuck off. You let me stick up for myself, but also subtly let me know that I wasn’t alone. And then you got on the 47, and a few minutes later I got on the 12, and that was that.
So, thank you. In this city, you’d be surprised how often people just look the other way when that shit happens, and you’d probably be even more surprised to know that even a small gesture from a stranger makes a world of difference.
At my Frameline volunteer shift the other day, I was doing will call with an older gay guy, John, and since it was the middle of the afternoon and thus a fairly quiet shift, we got to chatting. And by “we got to chatting,” I mean mostly that I asked him questions about his life, which he warmly and enthusiastically answered. He’s lived in San Francisco for over 35 years, in the Castro for 35 years. He was 22, he said, when he came out here, realizing he was gay. He moved here because of the Cockettes, whom he met when they were on tour in Milwaukee. He hung out with them after their show and just decided to go with them on the rest of their tour and then back to San Francisco.
He lived in San Francisco during the Harvey Milk days. He teared up when talking about the sadness and anger and overwhelming solidarity when Milk was assassinated. He lived in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis, and had to stop talking for a few minutes, he was too overcome with emotion to speak.
He told me that he sees the splintering in the gay community as tragic. “What splintering?” I asked, curious about what he was referring to.
“Everyone’s concerned with their own issues,” he said. “People come together to fight for marriage equality, sure, but at the end of the day marriage equality is about personal relationships. It’s about us as individuals. It’s not about all of us, together. And it allows us to think we’re fighting for ourselves rather than for each other.”
I nodded.
“During the AIDS crisis,” he said, “there was a real sense of camaraderie. I have such close, intense relationships with many lesbians from that generation. They really came out of the woodwork in support of us during that time. There hasn’t been anything like it since. Everyone does their own thing now.”
I said I thought so too, that I’d noticed something similar. I thought of the post I wrote last week.
He said, “it’s sad. What we’ve been fighting for all along is happening, equality, justice, acceptance, visibility. All of that. It’s happening, at least it’s happening in San Francisco. But it means that there isn’t as much of a need for us to watch out for each other anymore. Straight people don’t all watch out for each other. Being straight is hardly something to think of as having in common with each other. The more we get what we’ve been fighting for, the more we become normalized here, the less ‘being gay’ is something that brings us together. We’re becoming complacent.”
Is this true? I hadn’t thought of it this way. Does getting to a place where we’re no longer oppressed, where our society is no longer heteronormative, where we are fairly represented in government and where we’re systemically, institutionally, and socially equal to straight folks mean that we won’t have solidarity with each other anymore on the grounds of being queer? And if that’s the case, is it worth it? To me, that seems like such an unbearable loss. And John, tears in his eyes, seems to be suffering that loss. Or are his thoughts just tainted by nostalgia? After all, he knew three quarters of the people who came up to will call while we were sitting there together, men and women alike, and they all seemed to have so much love and support for each other.
I don’t often link to events, but when I do, they’re events that I *highly* recommend and that I will personally be attending (unless otherwise noted). I am very, very excited about CUAV’s SafetyFest this year, and will be attending at least two of the events. Here is CUAV‘s mission statement:
Founded in 1979, Community United Against Violence (CUAV) works to build the power of LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) communities to transform violence and oppression. We support the healing and leadership of those impacted by abuse and mobilize our broader communities to replace cycles of trauma with cycles of safety and liberation. As part of the larger social justice movement, CUAV works to create truly safe communities where everyone can thrive.
Yes. Yes. YES.
And here’s what they say about safetyfest:
safetyfest is a 100% free festival celebration of all the fierce ways queer and trans people in the Bay Area stay safe and strut our stuff. Our communities already have so many of the tools we’ll need to end violence and be truly safe in all the ways we deserve to be–we just need to share them!
Awesome. Count me in. (If any of y’all want to meet me, lemme know! I’ll definitely be going to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s workshop on April 17th, and probably also the closing celebration. I wish I could go to Jen Cross’s writing workshop, too. Sigh. Next year?)
Declaring Our Erotic: A writing workshop with survivors of sexual trauma Jen Cross
• 870 Market St, San Francisco
Saturday, April 10, 1-4pm
Writing our desire is writing our resilience and our resistance—Gather with other queer-identified survivors to create a space in which we struggle with and celebrate our gorgeous, complex sexualities.
Transforming the Pain: Healing from Trauma
Prajna Paramita Choudhury
Hand to Hand Kajukenbo Self Defense Center,
5680 San Pablo Ave. Oakland
• Saturday, April 10, 1:30-4:30pm
After crisis, after dealing with its immediate effects on our lives – how do we move forward
in wholeness? This workshop will facilitate this discussion and provide some tools.
The Revolution Starts At Home: Practicing Community Accountability In Real Life Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Modern Times Bookstore; 888 Valencia St, SF
• Saturday, April 17, 2-5pm
$5-20 suggested donation (no one turned away)
In this hands-on workshop, we’ll talk about the nitty-gritty of building accountability, justice and violence-free zones in our lives.
Basic Self-Defense for Women and Trans People Self-Defense for Self-Determination
Hand to Hand Kajukenbo Self Defense Center,
5680 San Pablo Ave. Oakland
• Saturday, April 17, 1-4pm
Open to Women and Trans folks Come yell, kick and talk it out with us! Learn and share skills for the daily verbal and physical self-defense situations we encounter.
Work It Out: Closing Celebration! Co-Hosted by CUAV & El/La Program Para TransLatinas
SOMArts, 934 Brannan St, San Francisco
• Sunday, April 18, 4-8pm
$20-60 sliding scale (no one turned away)
Join us to wrap up safetyfest 2010 with a fierce and tender afternoon of dazzling performances from your favorite queer and trans rockstars, fabulous drinks and edible delights, glamorous prizes, and a chance to strut your stuff on the catwalk/dance floor. Parents and kids are invited to take a load off in the Family Space. Don’t miss this chance to party with your people!
