Quote:
Originally Posted by honeybarbara
fine. no one in butch or femme land ever does anything remotely heterosexual. we made all of our own dynamics up from thin air and out of our own bums. we were born blind to gender roles and created our own from scratch.
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More thoughts.
We can't change gender norms over night. We understand sex and gender via the current construction of them. It's the world we grew up in and still live in.
So what would you have us do? We all repudiate some parts of heteronormativity. We reconstruct other parts of it, and we accept others -- because they work for us. Are the parts we accept perhaps reinforcing heteronormative expectations in our community and outside of it? Yes, probably.
But we don't live outside of history and culture. We live in it. We are all doing the best we can. There are people who support and endorse male/masculine superiority . . . well they are here but sorta marginalized. And there are people who kinda like it but are stealth or coy about it . . . seems like there are quite a few of those around. And then there are a lot of femmes and butches (more femmes) who are so hot for the dynamic that they try to enforce their version of it in an unexamined way -- because they want to find what they want out there. They want a world that makes them feel hot and validated to be real and populated. They want it to seem inevitable/natural. They do harm (e.g. femmes making fun of butches for wearing clothes made for women), but it's more that they are narcissistic and immature than deeply committed to some version of butch-femme that isn't even the status quo (never was, in fact).
And then there are people who do not believe in gender inequality, who understand that in the real world it's a human rights issue. However, these same people, some of them, may live lives and have relationships that look heteronormative. They are working it out for themselves in this world, where they grew up and learned what it means to be (insert ID) and what is sexually hot for them.
I am not all that alternative. I may be leather and may have been poly, but in most ways I am pretty conventional. I expend thought and energy to address sexism in my relationships and in my communities. I do. But I also choose to live the life that works for me. What else can I do? What else can anyone do?