BB Introduction: A Change of Heart

Holly Near, born in 1946 in California, started singing publicly at the age of eight. She has appeared on stage, on television and on film. Near decided on a career in the music industry in order to connect with audiences about the social conditions of the world. She chose to do this by starting her own independent record label, a very unusual career move for artists at the time especially women. She used this label as a medium through which to produce and promote politically conscious music and artists. She is considered to be one of the founders of the "women's music" movement. With her years of music and social activism behind her, I'm sure tomorrow's Brown Bag will be informative and inspiring.

Renyelle Jimenez

Wanted: Gender Outlaw for Crimes Against Attribution

                In honour of coming out week, and in continuation of my story, which I shared at the coming out brown bag, I wanted to talk about the opposing force that necessitates coming out: attribution.

                When you first see a person, you automatically take in their attributes and compare them against your framework for identifying people.  This is natural, stemming from the nature of our conceptual faculty.  From there, you draw conclusions about a person based on how you’ve experienced these categories.  You interact with the new person on the basis of these conclusions.  This is problematic to the extent that these conclusions are false for the new person.  This is the epistemic basis of racism, sexism, etc.

                The problem of being transgender/transsexual is not even that people draw false conclusions; it’s deeper.  It is that people don’t even conceptualize me properly, and when it comes to people, if the premises are false, the conclusions are necessarily false.  I can’t clear my face every day, because it irritates my skin, so I will often go through my day with facial hair, which outs me as male bodied.  Because I’m male bodied, it is assumed that I’m a man, and since I’m attracted to men, I’m a gay male.  This is my gender attribution.  For most people, gender attribution and gender identity match.  Mine doesn’t.

                Because I’m attributed as a “guy”, I therefore have to come out as—well, what?  I’m not a woman either.  And these are the only two categories most people recognize.  My project is even harder than just passing as a woman; I have to revolutionize the very conceptual framework that says there are only two ways to present your gender.  I have to come out as a gender outlaw every time I carry a purse when I haven’t cleared my face.  Every time I wear a skirt and sing tenor; every time I talk about my past as a gay male; every time I talk about the straight boys I’m crushing on,  I fight against every tide of attribution that says I shouldn’t exist.

                And so here I am, out and proud: a gender outlaw.  Catch me if you can.

Xavia Publius

Coming Out Brown Bag Response 10/4

What does it mean to “come out”? As one of the panelists of Tuesday’s “Coming Out Stories” Brown Bag asked, what do people come out of? After “coming out”, do people then come in to something? In our culture, coming out typically means letting people know one’s sexual orientation as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, or queer. But this begs the question: why don’t heterosexuals come out? I don’t know about you, but I never had to endure the terrifying and potentially life-altering moment of letting my parents know that I was heterosexual. It was just assumed that I was heterosexual unless proven otherwise. This demonstrates how a simple phrase, “coming out,” is a part of our language that supports the heteronormative assumptions of our society. One thing I think it is important to understand how language can be used as a tool to oppress groups and silence the voices of many because of the lack of dialogue. Our language supports categories of people (whether appropriate or not) and doesn’t leave much room for those who don’t belong in those strict classifications.

However, this panel gave voices to several queer students, a staff member, and a professor. They demonstrated that although they don’t fit into specific culturally constructed categories, their stories and lives matter. Specifically, there was a girl whose story was particularly interesting because it is a story we don’t hear very often. She is a self identified straight(ish) girl who is dating a transsexual. She talked about how people didn’t understand her decision and automatically identified her as “bisexual.” However, she did a lot of research and reading and came to the conclusion that she was straight and that her relationship was difficult (even impossible) to explain. This highlights how the binary and restrictive categories surrounding sexual identity and preference isn’t for everyone. Some people don’t belong into any category but our language doesn’t recognize this. Although gender-neutral pronouns are slowly integrating themselves into our language (ze & zir), there is still a lot of work to be done (given Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize these gender-neutral pronouns or the word heteronormative) to make our language more inclusive and less oppressive.

-Michelle Van Veen

Did Gender Equality Kill the Love Story?

First, if anyone hasn't read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, go read it. It's a fantastic novel about 70 years of family history that stems from Greece to Detroit and a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl but becomes a man. The book won a Pulitzer in 2003.

Jeffrey Eugenides has a new novel coming out in a about a week that I'm really excited to get my hands on called The Marriage Plot. Since the book hasn't actually come out yet, I'm writing this based on all the reviews I've read but there was one particular review by the Wall Street Journal that really got me thinking. The title of the review was a question that was so interesting and so good that I just had to replicate it as this blog title: Did Gender Equality Kill the Love Story?

The Marriage Plot is about Madeleine, young woman at Brown who is writing about how gender equality has taken away the most important and common plot device in literature. Ironically, Madeleine is herself in a love triangle between two men: a brilliant but depressed biology major and a longtime friend. While I cannot speak to how the book is though from all the reviews I have read, it seems to be a great read, the question of gender equality killing the love story really fascinates me.

When I think of all the books or stories that involve love, marriage, or relationships (which is probably a good portion of books ever written), the status of the female character is very defined and a bulk of the story is often about who the characters are going to end up with. Take the classic chick lits like Jane Austen novels, most of her heroines are trying to marry up or marry someone they didn't think they could marry. A high school English teacher once told me that if I ever wanted to learn about why people got married, I had to read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Jane Austen and Anna Karenina are both mentioned in the review and interview. On the flip side, when I think of the novels I have read that do not involve the marriage plot, I can see that the idea of gender equality or feminism gets mentioned or played around with, Middlesex is perhaps a good example. And at Colgate, we all read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Perhaps an extension of the question of gender equality killing the love story is why is gender difference integral to a love story? And that brings me to an idea of everyday relationships, is it more difficult for stronger women or feminist women to have relationships?

To read the full book review and interview with Jeffrey Eugenides: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/09/30/did-gender-equality-kill-the-love-story/?mod=google_news_blog

by Catherine Yeh

This Week’s Brown Bag: Coming Out Panel

In case you are unaware, it is Coming Out Week on campus. There are several events happening on campus surrounding this theme. In the spirit of that, our Tuesday brown bag will feature a panel of students, faculty, and staff who will discuss their own coming out stories as LGBTQ-identified or as allies to the queer community. Not sure what coming out is? Wikipedia - a well-known and well-trusted source - tells us that coming out (of the closet) is the disclosure of one's sexual orientation or gender identity. The purpose of Coming Out Week is to encourage individuals to be open about their identities, and also an attempt to create a safe environment for people to come out in. 

Also, this week marks the beginning of our brown bag bake sale in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month. During all the October brown bags, we will sale an assortment of baked goods ranging from $0.50-$1.00. All profits will go to SHARE.

by Che J. Hatter