Tutorial Post 1
All of my tutorials stretched my mind and challenged my way of thinking about the world. There was one theory tutorial that hit closest to home in regards to challenging my worldview. In week 5, we covered Lesbian Feminism. I read Judith Butler's "Critically Queer" her book Bodies that Matter, Monique Wittig's "Straight Mind" in her book The Straight Mind, and Adrienne Rich''s essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Butler and Wittig discuss language and how the world is trapped in a hetero-centric language that controls us and prevents us from moving forward. This reminded me of Mary Daly who, in Beyond God the Father, discusses the importance of living on the boundary and challenging everything because even the most basic things further patriarchy like language. I spent my whole day contemplating our discussion, which focused on sexuality as a spectrum. Sexuality is a spectrum, but language is so hetero-centric and focused on binaries that language fails to accurately describe the sexuality's fluidity.
We are trapped with these labels "heterosexual," "homosexual," "lesbian," "gay," "straight," bisexual" and "asexual." There is so much fluidity in this thing that we are forcing into boxes - as if it is some sort of shirt we can fold and put in a box rather than something more akin to the ocean or the wind. Even that is not an accurate metaphor because sexuality is not predictable or clearly caused by any one thing.
How do we move past this language problem? How do we change something so fundamental? How do we describe the indescribable? What would a new language look like? Is a world where individuals are simply attracted to other individuals enough? I doubt Daly, Butler, Rich or Wittig would accept the idea of one individual attracted to another individual, but I think it's a start for changing the way we function in the world.
Though it's not specifically about human sexuality, I think Helene Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa and Cleanth Brooks' Language of Paradox (from the Well-Wrought Urn) become incredibly relevant to your question. Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa is on the female identity and how there are so many different female identities that it is impossible to create a single one. Your frustration with binaries and interpretation of a "fluid" concept of sexuality seems very much in line with what Cixous argues-that because women can not be one or the other identity definitively, we must embrace all identities of women-even ones that seem to contradict each other.
ReplyDeleteThis is where the wonderful Language of Paradox comes in. Brooks explains that paradox is completely essential to the expression of language-poetry in particular. In order to accept the beautiful "indescribable" nature of language, sexuality and gender, we need to embrace the paradox.
I do agree that language disrupts the fluidity of sexuality. To further that, I'd like to suggest that it also disrupts the fluidity of gender - society is beginning to realize that there is more than just "male" and "female." However, our language necessitates that we assign one or the other to a person in casual conversation, when we must refer to a person as "he" or "she." There are certain inchoate suggestions, such a the use of "ze" for non-gender-normative people, but these suggestions have been met with varying responses. It is unfortunate that our language demands a rigid sense of sexuality and gender, when both pieces of identity are clearly so fluid. Hopefully, there will be a universally agreed upon suggestion in the future that allows the English language to reflect the spectrum of both sexuality and gender.
ReplyDeleteI find this post intriguing, as well as the comments of the two ladies preceding me. I had not previously considered how much we rigidly define gender and sexuality as binary concepts, when in fact the field is very much a spectrum with more gray than black and/or white. However, as this made me pause and consider, I realize that yes, our language is set up to pigeonhole in this binary manner, though it is not just English that forces this upon us. In fact, English is at least somewhat better than the Romance languages that use a strict binary system of masculine and feminine. I find this intriguing since those languages are Latin based, and Latin had a gender neutral construction, along with masculine and feminine constructs. Perhaps, as society becomes more accepting of the idea of the spectrum, language will adapt to accommodate and facilitate this fluidity that you speak of, rather than hinder it.
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