A Dyke A Broad #34
Notes from Paris, delightful photos, plus big thoughts. Like why Judith Butler isn't entirely to blame for the profound changes in identity politics.
Hello from Paris!
So, I went to the laundry on Friday and even if I was still wary, was markedly less afraid than I had been in over a year—thanks to vaccine dose #1 and the three weeks it had to ferment. I even followed it up by a beer with The Girl at an outdoors terrace. Our first in… 9 months? 10?
Still, I can’t get my head around the fact that by late June, two weeks after I’ve had my second dose, the pandemic will effectively be over for me, but not the rest of the world until everyone is either infected or vaccinated. And right now people are still dropping like flies in India and Nepal. All those unnecessary deaths.
Deaths compounded by the multitude of people in the U.S. and France who refuse to get vaxxed. So the virus will continue to circulate, I will just have to believe in the vaccine as my personal savior and try to chill even if my nerves are shot. You should see me jump at the tiniest sound.
The only thing that relaxes me right now is riding my delightful borrowed bike through the foresty Bois de Vincennes. And the sunny bench I sit on behind the Chateau.
I distract myself, too, by writing this, because the other things I have to do are so much more depressing. Which reminds me. Buy a tee-shirt.
Now… to pick up where I left off last week…
Notes on Labels, or…
It’s not ALL Judith Butler’s Fault
I left you with this tweet.
It is, as Sheldon from Big Bang Theory says, “Funny—because it’s true.” At least kinda. On both accounts.
The Kids These Days (TKTD) do put a lot of labels in their bios. And in the Nineties, yeah, there was definitely a “no labels” & “don’t define me” vibe, but you’d already see labels here and there, like in the bios of dyke writers, which I remember, because when I finally got a poem accepted in a small journal, I proudly stuffed my own with a long, long list of them that I thought were both clever and revealing and unique.
I was in my mid-twenties and conjuring myself into being. Just like TKTD. Trying to answer, Who was I? What was I? Where were my peeps? Everything had fallen apart in my first two years of college when I got some weird illness, slept with a girl, discovered bra-burning, dumped God, found out that all writers and artists weren’t dead, and after graduating fled Kentucky entirely, and was suddenly rootless, floating weightless through the air.
That’s when the labels began. Moving to Ohio I got called a hick, in New York I was a Southerner, also an American, though not a Yankee. There were others, as well. White trash, working class. I pulled them on and off like clothes. Sick was one, too. (A little joke of my own). All trying to explain myself to myself, and to you. The last label I accepted was the word lesbian. Which took a while. Big dyke that I am now, you have no idea.
Lesbian, both a descriptive label for homo female, but also a class. Class—that thing which used to be delineated by easily definable, observable characteristics, skin color, bank accounts, bed partner, speech. In fact, the label lesbian was chosen for me the first time somebody saw the unspoken, unconscious longing in my eyes and called me, “Lez.” When those girls gathered outside the room I shared with a lover in Yellowstone and howled “lesbian, lesbian, lesbian.” When those guys in a car saw me walking alone with an awkward, unmincing gait, threw a bottle and yelled, “Fucking dyke.”
It only became an identity when I saw others like me, accepted the connection, that thing we had in common, and also the word.
So what’s the difference for TKTD? Not the fact that we’re using labels, but how they work in the age of social media when they’re no longer dependent on our public lives, don’t have common meanings. Which upends, too, how identity and classes function in the political and social realm.
This is the thing. Our private lives have blurred into our public ones as we curate, sort, categorize, hashtag, Search Engine Optimize our lives for external consumption. And our feelings, our internal lives which used to be largely irrelevant to our membership in a class take on an outward reality, grow in solidity as they are affirmed by clicks and likes and hearts, and the marketers that reflect them back to us, and reinforce them. Right or Left, Gay or Straight, every post we make, every label we assign to ourselves is information that they harvest to actively shape and target their products, whether it’s sneakers or ideologies. It’s all affirmation all the time in an endless loop.
Which means a male with all the outward characteristics of a male including dick, beard, suit and accessory girlfriend, can declare themselves not only female, but lesbian, and be taken seriously. Maybe even be given a job at a lesbian foundation though externally they’re just some straight guy hitting on dykes as they always have with the formerly laughable line, “But I’m a lesbian, too, inside.” But now, in the age of Hashtags, who dares say different?
Sure, part of it is gender as performance popularized by Judith Butler, but I suspect her basic ideas have become so popular because they reflect some broader shifts in the world regarding the role of language, in particular how feelings and the words that represent them have taken on weight like never before. For some people anyway. Not for people of color. Who continue insisting that people like Rachel Dolezal do not get to be black no matter how black they feel.
That shift makes the identity politics of the 2020’s quite different from that of the Nineties which, to sum up, was based on the old definitions of class, groups with clearly defined and easily discernible characteristics that the external world itself agreed on. Now labels, now identities are based on the perceptions of individuals, where material realities are irrelevant and words often have to do all the work.
The winners in this system? Privileged, educated people for one, who tend to be good at manipulating language and are sufficiently entitled to do it. And of course corporations, both for- and not- for profit, who no longer have to search for new geographical markets, but can create them at the drop of a mike or a hashtag. The referent doesn’t attract the label, the label creates the thing, which is instantly monetized.
And activists are hard pressed to know if the popularity of a new identity and label like nonbinary is a sign it is tapping into a need, getting ready to spark a revolution in gender, or if it’s merely a sign somebody has decided it’s an enormous, not-very-threatening market that is ripe for exploitation with nary a social consequence in sight.
Do I have thoughts on this? Yes. Will you read them? Next time as I continue to unravel my brain.
What about you?
In other news, that book Invisible Women that I’m so fond of, is starting to have an impact in the real world in the form of a British charity: Make Space for Girls founded by Imogen Clark and Susannah Walker.
The idea for Make Space for Girls came to Walker when she read Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. “In the book there’s a very small section on parks, saying there’s a holy trinity of equipment primarily used by boys” — namely skate parks, BMX tracks and multi-use games areas.
The U.K. Equality Act 2010 sets out a public sector equality duty, requiring public projects to consider race, disability and gender when spending public funds. “I was a lawyer for many years, and I can’t help seeing things from a legal perspective,” says Imogen Clark, Make Space for Girls’ other co-founder. Leaning on that law, Clark and Walker believe parks funders should be thinking about equity from the beginning of the process, identifying activities that are female-dominated, requesting design features that encourage girls’ presence and participation, and offering programming that balances arts, sports and free play.
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That said, Make Space for Girls recognizes that it is not only girls who would benefit from a wider diversity of public space offerings for teenagers. “The reality is much more complicated,” Clark says. “There is one type of masculinity that skate parks and pump tracks cater to, but they are missing a whole other type of boy and a whole lot of girls.”
There you have it. The terrifyingly hopeful idea that nonfiction written for a popular audience can make a difference.
Slightly less disgruntledly yours,
Krilly C Sharkswell
P.S. Feel free to change to a paid subscription anytime. No one will hold it against you.