Month: August 2010

Daughter of Zero Queens: Roleplaying as Resistance

Katherine Alejandra Cross6 Comments

 

My Cleric of Lastai, Liera- in purple with the staff- sitting 'round a fire with her friends. Yes, including the dragon.

Picture it: a World of Warcraft RPPvP server, 2006. A good friend of mine takes up a wager with a female friend of his to test a “theory”- at least it was nothing but a theory to him, at that time. She had often sparred with him about the idea that women were treated differently in online gaming and he was more than a little sceptical. If this were about treatment in, say, the workplace or the home environment or out in the street, this back and forth might have gone on forever. But this woman had a solution that only a game like WoW made available to her. She made a bit of a wager with my friend: roll up a female character, play her, roleplay (RP) her if you like, and don’t tell anyone you’re a man in real life.

My friend agreed, being the adventurous sort and an avid RPer to boot, and went forward. To this day he still tells me how his experiences over the course of the next month completely changed how he understood the treatment of women in games like this. He found himself flirted with, harassed, the target of other unwanted advances, as well as finding out why chivalrous acts could be construed as condescending or suspicious. He even discovered that in an RP guild he was fought over by some of the male officers in a way that culminated in theatrics that eventually sundered the guild.

In his own words:

“Guys used to hit on you randomly asking for ERP [cybersex] and then if you actually interact on an equal level they think you like them, and if you turn down their advances it’s rage quit time.”

Certainly not every person will have the same experiences or reactions, but what always fascinated me was how easy it was for him to suddenly see through the eyes of a woman in society because of WoW. This is but one of many possibilities offered by roleplaying that could represent revolutionary breakthroughs in how we all understand society and the lives of our fellow human beings.

For me personally, as I have alluded to many times, being able to roleplay as a woman gave me an education similar to my friend’s but also enabled me to simply be myself. Unlike my friend, I expected to be treated differently and sometimes unpleasantly, but I also took in the joy of simply affirming one’s womanhood. In those days I would publicly lie and say that I roleplayed as women to simply express my “feminine side” and what not. I didn’t want to admit to others what I increasingly knew in the most guarded recesses of my mind: that I roleplayed as a woman in part because I was one and had no other way to express my gender. Being a woman was and is awesome to me because being myself is awesome.

Roleplaying means many things to many people. For some, simply playing a single player game as a fictional character constitutes RP. For others, it means consciously and directly acting out that character’s fantasy existence through constructing backstory and plot around them, and engaging in actions and dialogue that would be “in-character” for them. In either case, though, I have come to discover that roleplaying allows an incredible amount of agency to be invested in the player and provides a gilded road that can bypass the often problematic stories and imagery that adorn many games. You may find yourself surrounded by images of women who seem to exist to only cater to hetero male fantasy, but your female character does not have to be that. Indeed she can actively rebel against it, or any number of other ideas that predominate in the game’s setting. In that lies the power of RP.

Indeed, for a long time my women characters were explicitly designed to be strong and confident, never defined in terms of the men around them, but as their equal partners in the game world. When I played Neverwinter Nights I played a Cleric of a sensual goddess. But I did not do so explicitly for sexual reasons. Most of the time she wore conservative robes, but her revealing outfits were reserved for religious festivals and rituals where the sex had a meaning beyond eye candy, as rituals that honoured the sacred act of lovemaking. Whether matronly or overtly sexual she was not simply an archetype but a complex woman who owned her body, her sexuality, and her entire self. I even RPed her journey from worshipping a more conservative god of healing to worshiping this goddess of love as one of self discovery and assertion of herself.

There was more to her still, of course. She was a wise woman (Wisdom score of 30!) who came to the aid of many characters who were having one problem or another and quickly developed a reputation as a kindhearted counsellor. Her crises of faith were born of deep introspection on her part, and as she was middle aged they were part of a “mid life crisis” of sorts. The compelling interactions she had with other RP characters made her reassess who she really was. On the flip side she also loved hard liquor and was never afraid of having a good time with the people she shared her village with, unafraid of partying after a hard day’s battle.

I could go on, but the essence of this is that in the midst of this Dungeons & Dragons environment I wove an interesting female character who could articulate sexual struggles, religion, and the social location of womanhood and still be fun to play. Some of the people I played with were not exactly radically-minded. Some were quite conservative in real life. Yet the character was loved. Strong, complex women are not “political”- they’re just damn fun and interesting.

The namesake for this screen name, Quinnae, floating courtesy of her Levitation spell; one of many benefits to being a Priestess of Elune, along with great dental.

On the subject of religion I should relate more personal insights. I often play as characters with some religious grounding, which is ironic considering my history (and I’ll get to that in a moment); Priests or Clerics, Paladins and Druids are often my primary roleplaying characters. On my shelf right now, side by side (perhaps very appropriately) with my gender studies and sociology textbook collection are my many hardbound D&D manuals, a good chunk of which are about the fantasy religions of various settings.

When I was young I grew up with a conservative Catholic father who took “God the Father” a little too seriously. Through his faith he buttressed unchecked patriarchal authority, the subordination of women, and even quite a bit of racism (particularly Islamophobia). It’s no surprise homophobia and transphobia also came to him through his idea of God, and when I came out I faced a fusillade of assaults from him that included saying I was violating God’s will by transitioning and that my “devil reading” had made this happen. I’ll not belabour these descriptions any longer as this should paint a sufficient picture of why, for a long time, I hated religion and looked down my nose at people of faith.

That hatred existed in the midst of my RP life, of course, which began in 2005. But I figured my characters were just fiction, as were their goddesses and gods, and it was all “just a game.” Yet over time, especially as I got into playing my Cleric and reading the more in-depth compendiums about pantheons in D&D I began to realise that faith as a central organising principle in one’s life was something that could be very positive. I was very much blinkered by my self-centered perspective and yet, almost as if against my will, my own characters pulled me out of it. My Cleric was a woman whose faith taught her that love was love, no matter what form it came in, to name an example. Her goddess was a symbol of that conviction in openness, love, and the idea that pleasure in moderation was utterly sacred rather than profane. I came to understand that my father’s Catholicism was not the only form faith had to take.

Faith could evoke metaphors for beauty rather than self-abnegation.

I do not credit RP with all of these realisations, of course. A Christian woman I know and love in Canada, and who happens to be married to another woman, was a huge support in my life as I was coming out and indeed a second mother to me. She’s just been ordained in the United Church of Canada. She and her pagan priestess daughter above all deserve credit for showing me what faith can be.

And yet I also know that roleplaying was what initially opened my mind to what they would eventually teach me. As I looked through the guidebooks and found gods and goddesses for all sorts of things, and vastly different descriptions of all manner of churches, temples, lyceums, and groves for worship I came to realise that what faith was, what it could be, was not limited to bitter, closeminded evil. The Richard Dawkins style of white atheism that I had flirted with up to that point withered under that slowly blossoming realisation. The characters that I would so lovingly roleplay, from my NWN Cleric to my WoW Priest, would chart lives of faith that were not built on hate, or on othering, but on self-empowerment and a sense of social justice that infused their many actions in the game world, whether it was cleansing a den of undead or battling the Lich King or healing the wounded behind enemy lines their faith gave them the power to do what was right and resist oppression or the temptation to oppress.

Had I never been given the opportunity to roleplay religious characters I might’ve gone right on keeping my privileged assumptions about how people of faith were “irrational” and “weak minded.”

The title of my piece is a reference to the Marion Zimmer Bradley book I’m reading at the moment, Lady of Avalon,  where one of the protagonists is known as the “Son of a Hundred Kings,” a messianic figure in the classic fantasy tradition, the chosen one whose coming was foretold by prophecy, et cetera et cetera. My characters on the other hand are not built on that notion of exaltation above all others. They are the daughters of no queens or goddesses, but ordinary women called on to both do exciting things and simply muddle their way through life. They, like quite a few good RP characters I’ve come across in my time, don’t require a legacy or a prophecy to make them interesting.

Roleplaying is not just about slaying dragons or annihilating evil old gods who threaten the world, it’s about capturing the aspects of ordinary life that can make us all who we are. I love those little details. The first Paladin I ever made, Zoe, was a notoriously messy eater . My Priestess, Quinnae, is a brilliant artist and still plays with stuffed animals. My WoW Paladin, Sera, carries wine and fine cheese with her everywhere. Some come from backgrounds of privilege, like Sera, others like Zoe never knew anything but nomadic lives. But all of these little flourishes help them come to life and they evoke depth that is sometimes, or even oftentimes, lacking in the bigger characters written into the canon of all of these games.

When I RP I have no overtly political goal in mind. I never did, I never will. Certainly when I RPed as women I never expected to undergo a transgender transition in real life, or for my views about religion to change. But the effects were there all the same. Even in this fictional space I could be truer to myself than I was, at the time, allowed to be in the “real world.” Despite it all being “just a game” my knowledge of the experience of many women in society was deepened long before I came out (and it was deepened and widened much further).  I had often held a traditionally liberal view that women sometimes had a rougher time of things but it was an academic knowledge held from a distance. Playing WoW, even three years before I came into my own as a woman in the real world, made that knowledge experiential, rather than abstract.

When Gary Gygax first worked with his partners and wrote up what would become the first edition of the Dungeonmaster’s Guide I am certain he never dreamed that his game could promise salvation and comfort to transgender people who could afford to play, and yet there it is as a very positive unintended consequence. The great benefit of roleplaying worlds is that they allow people to transcend boundaries and move in social realms as someone completely different. I haven’t even talked about how one can come to a better understanding of racism or classism through RP.

But above all it allows you to take control in the face of a gaming world that is sometimes or even oftentimes hostile to women, people with disabilities, LGBT people, or people of colour. It allows you to dare to be the character that many developers don’t write, to be the character you want to see in a fantasy realm. It’s a fascinating realisation of Gandhi’s old aphorism: “be the change you want to see in the world.”

I roleplay that change.

Lost In Trans-lation: The Final Chapter/Reckoning/Cliche something-or-other

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

I’ll not preface this essay with very much, only to say that it is a swan song for the last month and an interesting opportunity that I seized to neatly tie up and summarise my academic and- dare I say- personal journey over the course of the class. My final grade in the course was an A and so was my grade for this essay.

The question I’m answering here is, basically, what did I learn over the course of the last month and how did the readings challenge (or not challenge) me and the views I held when I walked in. My response is as follows:

I walked into the class having done a good half of the assigned reading and with a fair amount of foreground knowledge of both emancipatory politics in general and feminism specifically- both its virtues and its foibles- as well as already being familiar with concepts like intersectionality, epistemological or materials hierarchies, disability studies, pivoting the centre, and many others to boot. Yet I also knew I was going to learn something new, even if it could not be organised in the neat black and white text of printed readings, it would be there etched into my memory. The first thing I ultimately found in the course was a sense of arrival at a new plateau of my own awareness, a realisation of how far I had come and how far I might have to go. While I had already learned many of the basic ideas and issues the class had gone over, they were drawn into relief by the contributions of others to the course material and by the readings I had not studied before, or by re-reading old favourites with a fresh vision. But above all it was the sense that my story, as it were, had value and meaning. As I told the class, I am often leery of alluding to my male past and claiming it gives me some additional knowledge simply because I do not enjoy reminding people that I am a transgender person, and because I fear it undermines my stated gender identity, but I did it anyway because I felt inspired by readings like Gloria Anzaldua’s Letter to Third World Women which rekindled in me a sense of pride in who I was that I had forgotten. For so long I cursed the circumstances of my birth that I felt had made me fall short of the normative standard of ‘white cis woman’- now I embrace them as making me the woman I am. Not normative, but whole. True to herself. That truth is an enunciated one, one that came from speaking up. Several readings enabled me to do that and gave me the impetus to not only tell the class “Yes, I am a transsexual woman” but also that my past gave me insight into the nature of male privilege. I spoke more about my history as a man in front of more people than I ever had before. I put my shit on the paper, yes, but I also had to cast it to the air before eyes I could see looking back at me. A few of the readings helped to make that possible but it was also the context in which these readings were assigned and analysed that helped.

To name a few examples, deconstructing Judith Lorber’s Night to His Day provided me with a platform to criticise something I’d noticed almost a year earlier, which was the subtle cissexist bend of Professor Lorber’s writing. That was a positive assertion of my identity, not only because I was using my trans female experience as something worthwhile and as a site that could produce truth and knowledge, but also simply because I critiqued it on feminist grounds. I queered feminism and the opportunity to do in a setting that was not Internet-based was riveting and satisfying. I had long since read Judith Lorber’s piece, but what it did for me this time around was open up possibilities of active resistance wherein I could make plain my own ideas and my own experience. That was the experience that told me Judith Lorber’s analysis of gender construction as a process was fundamentally correct, the experience that told me I did exactly the same thing she did on the Subway (gendering babies based on subtle cues added by the parents), as well as the experience that told me in no uncertain terms that her misgendering of Billy Tipton and her flagrant appropriation of trans identities undercut the very point that she was making. Where she had attempted to show there was nothing inevitable about gender, she turned and around and resorted to a conveniently reified binary that took a hatchet to the positively asserted gender identities of the people she used to support her argument. It was one of the first of many things that reminded me of one very important thing: how I know what I know is valuable and meaningful. What’s more, it is not something meant to idle like a gilded trophy or curio on a coffee table, a static conversation piece. It is something that had to be deployed, had to be written, had to be spoken aloud.

To that end, Gloria Anzaldua, a writer I already admired, tipped the balance for me. I had long since taken up her charge to write. Writing is a huge part of who I am, my ideological and physical transition has been blogged and analysed by me in a wide variety of ways. I spoke of my experience and wove elegant tapestries with words that others might know where I stood. Like Paula Gunn Allen I seemed to say “Where I come from is like this.” I cannot speak of Ms. Anzaldua alone, however, because the power of what she said is only amplified by the chorus of women whose voices rose in unison with hers in This Bridge Called My Back. While there were no trans women in that anthology I nevertheless felt a deep and abiding connection with the women who wrote in it. As I often say, being trans is about complex relationships. These women spoke to a great many complicated relationships- with religion, with family, with their culture and the hegemonic culture, with sexuality, with feminism. All of these were issues I shared, and all of them were things that Gloria Anzaldua said must be committed to paper loudly and furiously, riding roughshod over those who would say- directly or tacitly- that what these complicated women had to say had no academic or literary value, or at best would be a ghettoised form of literature for idle curiosities and nothing more. What she did for me personally was to remind me powerfully that even though I was not part of certain privileged classes, my voice had value. Trans women in particular are rarely taken seriously. Cis men may (quietly) seek out our dancing, our sexuality, or stereotype us as savants of gender, while others may think of us as walking comedy routines and nothing more. What Gloria Anzaldua and several other writers impressed upon me was the idea that this was not my destiny. She is not alone in this, of course. Many trans women writers, from Julia Serano to Susan Stryker to Andrea James to Raewyn Connell made that clear to me as well. But Gloria Anzaldua was, unlike the aforementioned women, also a woman of colour who knew about where I came from as a Latina, not just as a woman of trans experience. I cannot overstate how much it meant to me to see writers talking about the Bronx, about the Spanish language, and their intimate experiences with life in a barrio or in a Latino family. Even those who were not Latino also spoke of experiences and tensions that mirrored my own. Unlike, say, Gloria Steinem, I felt as if I could talk to these women and they’d immediately know where I came from and why it mattered.

I had been reading Bridge before I even registered for the class, and thus the resonance of those powerful and radical words was already thrumming deep within me. What the readings and class added was a space in which I could engage in a new form of self-assertion. I had already been writing for anonymous internet readers, but class afforded me a space in which I could also use my experience to teach, and to take a firm stand against dominant cissexist ideas. Encountering Gloria Anzaldua in the readings was just fuel for an already brightly burning fire, I suppose. But I always kept her close to my heart when I spoke because I knew that like her I was refusing to be silenced, refusing to be pigeonholed, and refusing to comport my words to dominant standards of acceptable discourse. I might frame my radicalism and the essence of myself in academic terms- what she called esoteric bullshit- but I make no bones about the fact that that is what it is. It is who I am, writ passionately in florid prose. I would not erase myself and say that I could adequately talk about sex and gender without referencing my trans-ness. I would not silence myself and say that my unique personal history was not of great importance or was not elucidating.

In another way many of the readings were a walk down memory lane, revisiting my initial journey through feminist ideology and canon, and the rapid process of self-awakening it involved. Marilyn Frye’s Oppression was an early reading of mine that helped to shape my views about oppression as an interconnected system, and as something that was not confined to one problem or issue, but rather was found in how that problem was actually linked intimately to a web of unjust actions and impositions. Her birdcage metaphor long ago crystallised for me the perfect definition of confinement, wherein focusing on just one bar occasions incredulous thoughts about how such could confine anything, taking that needed long step back to apprehend the whole cage to which that bar is connected reveals the reason for being trapped. Sojourner Truth’s timeless Ain’t I a Woman? was as evocative to me now as it was when I first read it. Her words were a righteous injunction against the racism in the suffrage and abolitionist movements, but also provided such tireless muster to the countless women like myself who never want for occasions to remind others that we are indeed included under that generic term “woman.” My experiences are dismissed by those who wish to claim that I am not a woman, or at best some lesser form of woman whose identity is tolerated at the pleasure of those whose genders are too privileged to question. But Sojourner Truth always impelled me to ask her endlessly echoing question bluntly and insistently. As she eviscerated the white male supremacist stereotypes that had bound her, and took to task the women who were handmaidens of those ideals, she provided hope for women many generations after her. Resistance is always possible, she seems to say. My experiences do matter, she enjoins. This too had a formative influence on me and I smiled as I revisited it in concert with my classmates.

But there was also another shift that the readings drew into a very vibrant definition which was embodied in several readings like Professor Bonilla-Silva’s Colour Blind Racism and of course Angela Davis’ gripping Women, Race, and Class. I was very receptive to these readings because the groundwork had already been laid, so to speak, but what they did was to give voice to musings I had been having as well as ideas that were slowly beginning to coalesce in my mind. Angela Davis’ elegantly stated radicalism drove many points home for me such as how slavery was not just about race, how the myth of the black male rapist serviced sexist and racist systems, how the suffrage movement was a home to both radical revolutionaries and selfish conservatives, among many other things. What struck me one night as I was excitedly telling my mother all that I had learned from her about various tragic episodes in American history and how they related to white supremacy was her response to all of this. She told me with a smile that I never used to talk like that and that I would just as often criticise her for saying negative things about white people. It made me step back and realise that in my younger years, right up until fairly recently even, I had been a dutiful handmaiden for white privilege and adopting many of the very same vapid arguments that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva so deftly dissects with regards to “colour blindness.” My mother reminded me how much I had changed and joked that she had to get used to it. My reply to her seemed weave various ideas from class into its warp and weft. I told her that she was right and that I apologised for questioning her experiences in the past, and apologised for dismissing her experience and her life growing up as invalid or arbitrarily “in the past” and no longer relevant. I told her that above all her life taught her as much if not more than I was learning in class, and that what she knew and could summon from her memory had great value even if it was not signified with a piece of paper signed in calligraphy.

A note must also be spared for Michael Kimmel’s Masculinity as Homophobia whose simple and I would argue misleading title belies Kimmel’s more complex and interesting points, such as that masculinity is racialised as well as simply gendered and that homophobia is often part of attempts to ‘prove’ ones adherence to true manliness. Kimmel is much closer to the academic feminist mainstream whose writing is more ‘professional’ and geared towards a style that is (mostly) impersonal and attempting to present theory in a magisterial voice, and thus lacked the deep resonance that, say, Nellie Wong or Gloria Anzaldua could sing with. Nevertheless Kimmel does draw on a little experience (like the silly games he and other boys would play) to make his points about how masculinity is constructed in a complex series of oppositions, and he reminded me that my lived experience as a male in society is valuable too and shouldn’t undermine me. This is an element of my thinking that is definitely a work in progress but over the last three months or so I have begun to seriously ‘revisit’ manhood and particularly that which I was socialised to express and pretended to for many years. It is, in a way, part of a long term project in which I try to undo my internalised transphobia and make peace with who I was rather than simply adopt a scorched earth approach to the matter. I have read with eagerness progressive work and theory on manhood in society and while the reflection of myself in such was far dimmer and distant for various reasons, I still slowly (and am continuing, slowly) came to realise that I should think just as critically about who I was as I do about who I am, and to accept that as a valuable standpoint as well. I often point out that I do not claim the same standing as a cis or a trans man when it comes to manhood. Being a pre-transition trans woman is indeed its own subjective experience that I do not intend to overinclude in discussions of masculinity. But what Professor Kimmel’s piece reminded me of was the fact that I had a lived experience in the subject position of ‘young man’- even if it was forced, false, and unasked for, things happened and I experienced life through something approximating that subjectivity. This is not a small matter nor something I should ever overlook. Sorting out its meaning will likely take me to many more distant places than what Professor Kimmel explored but gender scholars like him who think analytically about manhood have helped me realise that I could do the same.

In many of these recollections of where the various readings took me I often make a point of saying that I already had some grounding in the material and in the ideas presented. Certainly this class has not radically changed my life. I and the people I love did that. What it did do, however, was provide a temporary but powerful focus in the midst of that transition. The class and the readings therein were part of a continual flow with no easily defined beginning or end. It would be easy to say that I was one way before I walked into class and another after the semester finished. But it would also be lazy, deeply inaccurate, and uninteresting I feel. At least in my own case since it is patently untrue. But these readings were, nevertheless, significant for me. At this phase of my journey through life, this class was something I needed to be a part of. Through the prior semester I had scrupulously kept silent about being trans, selectively stealthing while I was in all four of my classes because I feared losing the goodwill of teachers and students alike, and because I value being understood as a woman. This class was my opportunity to at last stand up and speak out. In many of the readings the contextualising that occurred in class also helped to bring them to life in a way that I did not quite experience in reading them alone in my room or on the train as I so often did in the past. Furthermore, I actually found myself reflected in some of the readings, old and new, which is always a unique and uniquely wonderful experience. Finding yourself in a reading is like seeing through a spyglass and apprehending your refracted face, knowing it for the first time; then you see past it and find the whole world magnified afresh.  That was how I felt as I tore through This Bridge Called My Back, for sure. Talking about it in class somehow only made those voices louder and more insistent to me, a firm reminder to never forget Gloria Anzaldua’s words and to never stop writing. If there is one thing that the readings prompted me to do for various reasons- be it to boost their signals, to challenge or critique them, or to speak passionately about their effects on me- it is to put my shit on the paper.

State of the ‘Corn, Update!

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment

Brief posts on this site are very much like unicorns. Rare, nigh on mythical beasts whose appearance occasions the weavings of stories to be told to your mates over a few drinks.

Anyway, what’s this post about? Well as some of you may have noticed my most recent blog posts have been me reposting classwork, albeit with commentary. Fully original articles will be returning soon, however. But the other reason my creative energies have been a wee bit absorbed has been because I’ve been taken on as a writer at Border House where I’ve recently published a few things. Their editor liked a piece that originally appeared here (my ‘World of Warshaft’ one, about Blizzard and their rather flighty relationship with the concept of privacy) and I’ve been taken on as a staff writer.

If you’re interested, my two most recent articles can be found here:

  • Ain’t I a Gamer?, about the issues surrounding the invisibility of women in gaming spaces and the subconsciously perpetuated ideas that entrench that lack of visibility.
  • Problematically In The Voice of a Night Elf Woman, which is an introspective piece about how I felt returning to World of Warcraft post-transition. This piece may also appear elsewhere on the Internets, so stay tuned.

My attention is split many ways lately, and as the articles point out, yes I’m finally back in WoW (caricature of me with Night Elf ears is forthcoming) but I’m trying to do something much more productive with that this time, and that’s why I’m writing about it and applying the many things I’ve learned over the last couple of years to it.

At the Crossroads and Other Mixed Metaphors: Intersectionality

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

This essay, as I mentioned yesterday, got an A (which is the highest grade my professor will bestow as he doesn’t believe in A+s for one reason or another). The ‘question’ I had to answer was really more of an essay unto itself but here it is:

This essay has three parts, which should be integrated into a single essay, and not answered separately.

  1. Explain the concept of intersectionality. You should discuss at least race, class, gender, and sexuality, but you may also discuss other aspects of social inequality we’ve talked about in class. This section should focus on Crenshaw and the Combahee River Collective, but you may use other texts as well.  Do not just quote a definition here, explain the concept in your own words and in detail.
  2. Discuss one or two particular historical events, periods, or issues in the context of an intersectional analysis of multiple axes of oppression. Use at least two readings not including Crenshaw. How does your choice demonstrate some of the subthemes used in Crenshaw’s piece (over- or under-inclusion, structural subordination, etc.)?
  3. Evaluate the concept of intersectionality as it applies to feminist analysis. What does it add to, complicate, or perhaps take away from analyses based only on gender?

My answer to this is as follows and I hope it provides at least a mildly interesting read:

In the many turns that various feminist and liberationist theory has undergone in recent years, one of the most significant has been the move towards what is now commonly known as intersectionality.  In brief it is a lens of analysis that openly seeks to ask how multiple types of oppression can act on a person, group of people, or on a given event, and considers various types of oppression as a confluence of influence rather than as fully discrete entities. Intersectionality, then, is a concept that elucidates on the often complex reality of peoples’ experiences with various systems of domination; whether sexist, racist, homo/transphobic, ableist, and so on, intersectionality promotes the belief that bigotry can take more than one form simultaneously. Thus something can be both racist and sexist, and intersectionality is syncretic rather than zero sum. It holds that such considerations add to understanding, rather than take something away from someone. Intersectionality adds a great deal to feminist analysis, as well as various other emancipatory epistemologies for the very  good reason that it is best able to reflect the multilayered realities of lived experience that many people; it also provides a means to identify strategies that can truly ameliorate oppressive conditions in our society by actually understanding what the problem is for the first time. Kimberlé Crenshaw and many other theorists like her, as well as liberation movements like black feminism and gay lib all laid the groundwork for understanding that people can be affected by more than one type of oppression simultaneously and that the unique positions thus created were worth understanding on their own terms.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s ‘Traffic at the Crossroads: Multiple Oppressions’ is a brief but illuminating overview of the simple reality that you cannot understand oppression without considering its many starting points.[1] She argues cogently that immigrant women, black men, and women of colour, to name a few examples, all face different types of unique oppression that are a product of all of their backgrounds. What happens to them is often not just racist, or not just sexist, but is best understood as being influenced by several types of discriminatory ideologies. For example, she says that US immigration laws that require non-resident spouses to stay married for two years in order to become permanent residents discriminate heavily against immigrant women who suffer abuse and must choose between staying with a batterer or losing their best hope of citizenship and the privileges that come with that. She holds that both anti-immigrant sentiment and sexism are acting upon immigrant victims of domestic violence and you cannot fully understand the causes of their predicament without examining both axes of oppression, and any others that may be relevant to her situation as well. Angela Davis makes very similar arguments in ‘Women, Race, and Class’- a book which is predicated on a very powerful metanarrative of intersectionality- when she points out that slavery in the United States cannot be fully understood without examining the specific ways in which black women were abused both because they were women and because they were black slaves.[2]

Davis challenges very strongly what Crenshaw might call the ‘over inclusion’ of black women in the broader category of black people; in other words their struggles are understood through a racialised context that considers the brutal racism of slavery, but not understood as being equally gendered in the specific case of black women. They would not only be beaten, whipped, and mutilated (many were disfigured, or tortured by having their teeth pulled) as black men were, but also raped and sexually assaulted. Davis shows that abusive white slave masters, who were not only white but also male, would routinely try to stifle black women’s resistance to their brutal subjugation by raping them. It is a terror that echoes with a terrifying scream throughout history- the attempts by men to use rape to silence or break women who resist or otherwise are not in their ‘place.’ Davis enjoins us to understand that the rape of black women was racist as well as sexist, however. It was a crime often legitimised by a deeply white supremacist idea that held black women were animals who could be treated as less than human, and who ‘asked for it’, giving the classic rape apologist rejoinder a racist twist that imbues black women with an essential quality of needing to be raped or otherwise used as a sexual object. The over inclusion of black women in the consideration of slavery, however, elides most of this. It erases the pregnant black women who were whipped in ditches specially dug for them (rather than against a tree) so that the master’s lash was less likely to damage the ‘valuable property’ in the black woman’s uterus. It erases the black women who found themselves mutilated or lashed until their backs ran red with blood for resisting a slave master’s sexual advances, or those of his son who was considered equally entitled to ‘have’ a black woman as a sexual object. All of these utter atrocities were visited on black women because they were not just women, or because they were black but because they were black women. Intersectionality holds that white supremacy and male supremacy must be considered together for a proper understanding to be had of black women slaves’ particular subordination and their resistance to it, which was often very vociferous and active.

The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement”  provides another powerful illumination of intersectional analysis’ strength.[3] Their very name symbolises it; it is so named in honour of an 1863 guerrilla action by Harriet Tubman who, in Port Royal, South Carolina, led an insurrection that freed more than 750 slaves and remains the first military action recorded in American history that was led by a woman. Just as black women were oppressed in ways that have to be uniquely understood, so too did they rebel and resist in ways that we would do well to understand on their own terms. Carrying on that spirit of a particularly black female resistance to all forms of tyranny and oppression, the Combahee River Collective put forth a manifesto that outlined their commitment to principles that were fully cognisant of the uniqueness of both their subject position, and that of others who stood at Crenshaw’s crossroads. There is much that is worth quoting, but its fundamental thesis which defines the theme of the entire paper is perhaps the most evocative: “Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways.” In this is contained much of the gist of intersectionality, as well as one very important point hitherto undiscussed: personal perspective becomes expertise in this understanding. Thus the Black Feminist Statement recognises that black women know the myriad complexities of their experience with oppression simply by having lived it and that this knowledge is both worthy and factual. Forming an activist coalition that worked on multiple axes of oppression was, in their words a means to “develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men.” In other words, a way out of the zero sum traps of single subject position identity politics. Such things forced black women (and many other people besides, whether it was disabled women, working class women, immigrant women, queer and trans people who came from any number of backgrounds, or various subjugated men) to choose one avenue of resistance over another, which was an incomplete solution to their problems at best.

The Combahee River Collective’s famous statement emerged in a critical historical period in the midst of which a new feminism was rapidly emerging and evolving with alacrity. It was a time during which Second Wave feminism evolved out of the white male dominated New Left, and during which many different feminisms quickly grew out of that Second Wave as different groups of people realised that univocal dominance of white cis women from the middle classes left them and their unique experiences with sexism unregarded. This manifesto and many documents like it, including anthologies like This Bridge Called My Back, were part of a vital historical moment in which women of colour drew strength from multiple emancipatory ideologies and put the most modern twist on them. The purpose of this maelstrom of theorising was to, as the Collective put it, know what was really happening in their lives, and this required something that went beyond understanding, say, patriarchy or capitalism as the ultimate oppression, and understanding their liberation not “as an adjunct to someone else’s” but as a virtue and dignity in its own right. Embodied in this is a rejection of demands made on them by others, such as lesbian separatists who insist that women should build communities away from men. Such a position may have currency with the experience of white women, who need no solidarity with white men against any kind of racism, but it is an impossible and even ridiculous thing to suggest to black women, even those who identify as lesbians, because they need each other in the struggle against white supremacy. On the same token, says the Collective, they also stand against patriarchal expression within their communities and struggle with black men on the issue of sexism. This double consciousness is an example of intersectional thinking that holds many understandings together simultaneously to describe a complex position in society.

In their critique of lesbian separatism they affirm the idea that even white women’s oppression may not have a single source, i.e. patriarchy, but come from multiple locations. Put another way, what we consider patriarchy is a broad socio-political framework engendered by multiple intersecting ideologies about race, class, gender, and sexuality. To again return to Crenshaw’s ideas about oppression, the women of the Combahee River Collective believe that lesbian separatists (who were mostly white) underincluded women of colour and poor women in their analysis of sexism and patriarchy in society, as well as the men who did not benefit from what sociologist Raewyn Connell calls the ‘patriarchal dividend.’ Her own analysis of men at the margins of society finds that their own oppressive behaviour, while certainly patriarchal, cannot be understood without attention to the class position they occupied and just why it was that they were ‘marginal’ relative to more privileged men and women.[4] What this under-inclusion serves to do is to render invisible the intricate and deeper effects of what is now called Kyriarchy (a term used to describe the overarching system of interactive oppressions). This under-inclusion holds that women are oppressed- an undeniable fact- and yet refuses to grapple with those women whose class, race, sexuality,  gender identity, or disability oppresses them, seeing the only antagonists as raceless, classless men. This analysis will never reach a full understanding of sexism, never mind anything else.

Thus it is that the question of what intersectionality does for feminism is addressed at a stroke. It is not only convenient or useful, it is absolutely vital and essential that an intersectional perspective is considered. This paper has focused primarily on the illuminating examples of black feminist theory and experience, but intersectional analysis also sheds much light on the experiences of a great many people who feminism has left behind. Transgender women for example occupy numerous crossroads in various societies around the world. Trans women of colour have a shockingly high rate of HIV infection; trans women sex workers face very deep dual stigmas- both of being trans and of being sex workers; trans people who are poor have a hard time actualising their gender identity which is often gated by a patriarchal psychiatric profession and through various other arenas that cost money to access. Trans people of colour also face many other distinct issues besides, wherein they have a relationship with gender that is already complex, but complicated further by the consideration of the racial oppression they experience. For example, while many trans men who meet societal expectations for male behaviour acquire certain privileges, black trans men move into the category of being black men which is a highly stigmatised subject position in American society and acquire all the stereotypes and risks associated therewith.[5] The discussions could go on endlessly.

Yet, they do not, at least not in academic circles. Because trans people are rarely understood as people with unique experiences due to their trans-ness, their experiences with sexism, racism, classism and so on remain poorly understood, and if regarded at all are usually overincluded, by the broader cis population. In everything I have outlined in this paragraph lies the reasons that intersectional analysis brings a lot to feminism. Yes, it most definitely complicates and in some cases destroys the thesis that gender alone can provide a sufficient lens for understanding our society. But that is most definitely a good thing when one considers the fact that while we are all gendered, that is not the sum total of all our lives, necessarily. To truly solve a problem, one must identify in full what that problem is. Intersectionality offers feminists and many liberationists the opportunity to return to the real world and know it for the first time through the eyes of their sisters, brothers, and siblings in struggle.

What intersectionality adds to the understanding of gender is that how we do gender is vastly differentiated throughout various groups in various societies. To know gender as a powerfully active force in our lives is to hold one of the great keys to knowledge of our world. But gender is not a skeleton key. The lock that bars our consciousness requires many keys, which requires not just a multifarious understanding that includes the now well-worn subjectivities of race and class in addition to gender, but also a multilayered understanding of gender itself that does not over-privilege or universalise the gendered experiences of white women as being indicative of all women everywhere. It would even hold that womanhood is not the only thing worth understanding in this context. Masculinity in its various forms is also worth taking into deep consideration, as are transgender and genderqueer genders and sexualities. Transsexual peoples’ gender can be very binary and thus similar to the subject position of most white feminist women, or it can be more complicated. But in any case, the specific textures of simply being trans in this society make it stand out, and intersectional analysis allows for that. Thus what intersectionality brings to gender is perhaps the most sophisticated understanding of it to date. Such knowledge can only be manna from heaven for anyone interested in gender liberation.

[1] Sisterhood is Forever, by Robin Morgan, ed., p. 43. Traffic at the Crossroads: Multiple Oppressions, by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

[2] Davis, Angela Y., Women, Race, & Class, 1983, p. 5-30.

[3] Anzaldua, Gloria, et al., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour, 1981, p. 210, A Black Feminist Statement by the Combahee River Collective.

[4] Connell, Raewyn, Masculinities, 1995, p. 114.

[5] http://www.colorlines.com/archives/2008/01/becoming_a_black_man.html

Lost in Trans-lation: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Part IV

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

So, it has been a while since a preface was put on one of these. I should provide some more background on what’s happening in class and what the environment is in which these essays are being written. First and foremost I should talk about the grades as well as what has been going on in class. A lot of my writing for class makes no bones about trans issues and what I will post today is quite blistering in that respect. My teacher also knows I’m a trans woman since I outed myself to him. What my writing and my commentary in class has done, much to my surprise, was prompt my professor to devote a couple of class days to transgender issues specifically, the first of which was this evening. It went quite well, I have to say. I also got the grade back for my first essay, which I will post tomorrow. It was an A. All the articles you’ve seen posted since Part I have received perfect scores (10 out 10 on the grading scale he uses for these journal entries) and this one was no exception- he actually thanked me for taking the time to write it.

This is all, in various ways, monumental. It means the world that in the very bastion of feminist theorising where once stood transphobic cis women who used their perches to rain fire down upon their sisters and brothers of trans experience that I am now so openly accepted and finding my trans perspective acknowledged, embraced, and graded highly. It also is quite telling that by speaking out, by refusing to be silent, my professor owned up to what he himself described as his privileged oversight of trans issues in the syllabus and bits of transphobia in some of the readings, which have already been explained at some length in this space and in the class itself. By speaking out, I made my voice heard and ensured that all of the other students were given more education on trans issues than they would’ve otherwise had. It’s a tiny step, but it’s still something from which I take a good deal of hope.

The class tonight was relatively good. I was more than a little disheartened when the professor had to write the names of two trans writers we were reading today (Jamison Green and Susan Stryker) with the respectively appropriate ‘he’ and ‘she’ pronouns beside them because people kept misgendering Mr. Green even as they seemed to agree with a lot of what he was saying. Nevertheless, when I came out to the class it appeared to be well received and a good discussion was had to which I unashamedly contributed. I had often spoken up about trans issues throughout the course (and many other things besides, I should hasten to add) but often from a third person perspective. Today I was able to say “I” and “we”- that was powerful and it felt good, it felt right.

It gave it a bit of a twisting dagger effect when I spoke of trans chasers who over idealised trans women as somehow more docile and submissive to male power than cis women, to which I said “and I often think ‘well, you haven’t met me, brother.’ ” I got a few smiles and laughs for that, and that was the power of the positive seizure of my identity as a trans woman in a public space.

So, that’s where things stand. Matters are going very well in class, both academically and socially. What follows is a piece whose fire was born directly of the readings it cites and is something whose boundaries fall far outside the walls of my classroom. It was a piece that surprised even me as I was writing as it carried me to many places I didn’t fully expect. It details one of the realisations I’ve had recently- that more than my gender has changed. My outlook and my politics have changed, quite powerfully and radically. From my transition came second thoughts about my culture and my place in it, what it meant to be Latina rather than Latino among so many other things. It’s a piece that I think fits in fairly well with my autobiographical entries and it charts an element of transition that most people don’t think of when they imagine a transsexual or transgender transition. Without further ado, here’s entry #4 of 5 in our ongoing series:


In No Turning Back this week Estelle Friedman explored women in art in broad strokes overviews that provided a good smattering of information on the subject, and she began with the seemingly unrelated issue of language in regards to sex and gender in society. Along with Laurel Richardson in her thoughtful essay “Gender Stereotypes in the English Language” it provides a formidable introduction to the subject of linguistic politics. We often understand language as being value neutral and simply reflective of the realities we are surrounded by. The points made by both Richardson and Freedman illustrate that language often reinforces cultural subordination and social stereotypes. The pseudogeneric “man” is perhaps the best example and is quickly used by both academics to buttress their arguments. The widespread idea, weakened now but still powerful, that both men and women can be presumed to be included under “mankind” and the generic “he” and “his” is illustrative of how men are still socially perceived to be the default sex, the unmodified human, whereas women must be specifically marked- whether it be through the use of suffixes or titles like Mrs. that construct the woman in relation to a man in her life, or in relation to men in general. The backlash against efforts to change this language as so much “political correctness” is evidence of the fact that in some quarters this language is still deeply cherished.

I feel Freedman deserves credit also for shining a light on the fact that linguistic questions are not just a preoccupation of western or white feminism, but have also long been understandable concerns of non English speakers with their own languages. One of the best parts of No Turning Back, I feel, is that Freedman does more than most of her contemporaries to at least introduce readers to feminism as it has been expressed globally, and by women of all races throughout the last two hundred years. Although her narrative on non-Americans feels like a “oh and these people did this too” at times, it feels much more expansive and insightful than most histories of feminism and definitely introduces even to experienced activists events and issues they may not have known about.

On the subject of elevating historically unheard voices, we turn now to Gloria Anzaldua’s powerful Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers, which in many ways I felt was speaking to a part of my soul that I had long suppressed. I’ve owned This Bridge Called My Back for a couple of months now and each reading feel as if it reawakens and reinvigorates something I had trained myself to suppress. I was once ashamed to be Puerto Rican and very much an apologist for white privilege. “White liberalism” was a concept I only began to understand in the last two years but it was something I had lived for many years before that. This is the backdrop to my very personal response to Speaking in Tongues and indeed much of Bridge as well. Many of the articles are united by a sense that has stalked me all my life, a sense of being caught between worlds and running between consciousnesses, a never ending struggle to reconcile different worlds I inhabit, and being the titular bridge that people use to understand others different from them. What it meant to be a writer and a thinker in the midst of that also preoccupies many of Bridge’s authors. I always found myself- and still find myself- struggling to hold together my academic bend and lived reality, doing everything I can to let the latter inform the former, rather than letting those from on high tell me how I should articulate my vision. That struggle is, in part, at the core of Anzaldua’s Tongues piece. For me I have tried to pull together the white milieux I have often inhabited with my Puerto Rican heritage, and the fact that I was socialised male with the reality that I was female, and all the myriad complexities of gender that come with simply being a trans woman. The battles great and small, the little daily negotiations, the stray hair on my wrist, the croak of my voice, the fear walking down the street. This is what fills my pen even as I write my most turgid academic prose, and when I read Gloria Anzaldua’s piece for the first time I felt like she was describing some of the conflicts I felt as I tried to do so. I do not want to sell out, to be la Vendida, I do not want to forget where I came from; indeed I put a grinding halt to my decade long effort to do so, not coincidentally after I came out and understood oppression for the first time.

As I read Tongues I found it suffused with the same passion and glorious rage that often guided each stroke of my own hand, each thrust of my finger on the keyboard, and my soul sang out once more as I felt acknowledged in reading this. She was talking to me, I thought. Here is, at last, a powerful, intellectual feminist activist who knew where I came from and could scold me for not taking more pride in it. Here is someone who knew the streets I walked down, who knew my abuela’s voice, my father’s abuse, who knew the symphony of a subway train, and the hot summers of the inner city. I had the same feeling when I read earlier pieces in this anthology, including “…And Even Fidel Can’t Change That!” by Aurora Levin Morales whose words still haunt me for how true they rang with me. She too was a precocious and intelligent Puerto Rican girl from the South Bronx who was all too keenly aware of the gossamer thin line between her and the many people around her who “didn’t make it”- who fell into poverty, drugs, and prison, who was keenly aware that luck saved her from that. Not her intellect or her skill, sheer good fortune at having a father who could access the middle class saved her. Morales made me confront the fact that I knew exactly the same thing, and I nearly  wept because I knew in my heart- knew beyond knowing- that it was true.

Anzaldua enjoins us… enjoined me… to reach inside and find that part of myself that I had buried, that had denied the fact that I was Latina, that even whispered to me in words dripping with temptation to use and abuse my passing privilege to forget I was a transsexual woman, to leave behind my brothers and sisters because I had a shot at power, at conditional privilege. I know now I would rather listen to her and the benefit of her hard won wisdom. She exhorts us to cast aside pseudo-objectivity, that ‘point of view from nowhere’ that Donna Haraway rightly identified as something that obscures reality and silences voices that do not conform to those who get to decide what objectivity actually is. Gloria Anzaldua does not just entreat us to consider an alternative, but openly cheers us on to embrace our deeper voices, our emotions, our passions, and above all our actual lives. She reclaims the lived life as a site of epistemology without equal for both Third World women and all marginalised peoples. In that oppression, she seems to say, we can find the strength to propel past its strictures and dare to raise our voices, dare to be heard, and dare above all to be real and true to ourselves as we speak.

Being trans is a lengthy and ongoing exercise in being true to one’s self. I came out as a woman in perhaps the ultimate exercise in doing so; it was a fundamental rejection of conformity, knowing all the challenges I would face and the immense privileges I would be conceding, I did it because truth to who I was mattered above all else. I know now, in no small part due to writers I admire like Gloria Anzaldua, that once that great act of magic is performed, there is no stopping it. It is a gale force storm you summon, whose wind changes everything you thought you knew. I had felt that all that would change when I came out was my gender. I didn’t know my writing would go with it. What fills my pen now, what makes the swirls appear on my page is something altogether different that Gloria Anzaldua pinned down perfectly in this piece. It is the accessing of a rich, powerful anger that arises from both experience and a potent, perspicuous sense of justice.

It is hard for me, if not impossible, to remain “objective” when speaking about Bridge and that is altogether fitting. This is what Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua wanted, I believe. That emotional reaction that can only come from a woman of colour seeing their faces shimmer in the reflection of their blood red words. Many of these authors spoke to me and identified parts of my soul that make up the woman I am. La mujer de color that I am now proud to say I am. They know my struggles with my words, with “unlearning the esoteric bullshit and pseudo-intellectualising” that I picked up from years of schooling and reading the New York Times. What I got from that was not that I should break up my often ponderous writing style, because that multisyllabic pattern is very much my own. I will always be the geeky woman. But I will no longer be simpering or an apologist. I will no longer deny myself the power and the fuel I need to write with potency and meaning. I embarked on that project long ago when I first came out, and the difference showed, the new self awareness showed. What I have written, the words that flew from my fingers, powered by Katherine-who-is-trans, by I who said from the beginning I would not be ashamed of being trans, has moved people to tears, has inspired them, has helped other trans women come out, has comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable…

That is power that makes known to me the visceral veracity behind Anzaldua’s words.  It was how I knew what she said was utterly true even as I read the words for the first time. I knew my strength came from taking power from the truth of my life, my self-knowledge, and my experience. Not from trying to regurgitate a cis-friendly, cis-centric perspective on my life. As I go forward I will try to relearn and recapture what I had denied myself of my Latina heritage, which will take more time. But coming out, I find, is a journey that never ends.

That is what I got from Speaking in Tongues. I hope I do Gloria’s spirit proud.