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When I first read Puar, it was so far over my head I thought maybe I should drop the class. Revisiting Puar makes me thinks I need to keep taking this class. Maybe if I continue to drill this information it will someday lead to the ‘ah-ha’ moment I’ve come so close to but never fully achieved.
The differences between intersectionality and assemblage are still subtle to me, and I think that is due to always identifying through an intersectional lense. I’ve taken pride in honoring all women as goddesses and struggling through this world with my fellow ‘sisters’ and ‘sisters of color’. Butler specifically made me question the word ‘woman’ and Puar unveiled that my WOC on my name tag did not identify anything! While ‘women of color’ thought there were putting themselves in a catergory of their own, highlighting their significance, we were actuallly saying ‘I’m not white, I’m that ‘other’ one. This doesn’t add up each individual and their experiences that have affected not only who they are but what their existence produces and how it changes in different spaces and time.
A straight Indian female-bodied woman living in Queens is not a gay Black trans-gendered woman in South Africa, so how are they both grouped together in this WOC category. Their relations with the world are starkly different and the term ‘woman of color’, which attempts to create a identity catergory, invalidates the unique becoming of these two people. Without understanding becoming, and by following the old philosophy of intersectionality, our society will continue to focus on the after-effects of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, etc., and not dissect every nuance of every trait that is affected from moment to moment and from block to block in a series of events that is an assemblage, not an identity.
Dear Journal,
How truly strange it is to write in your confines once again. Fanning through your pages I have been on a whirlwind adventure of my youth, mistakes, difficulties an all. It is a pity that only the passing of my older stepmother reunited us, but I suppose in the tragedy of her passing, you are the silver lining I so desired. If I hadn’t stuffed you in the attic and abandoned you many years ago, I am certain I would not now be seeing all my long ago experience in the way in which I now do.
So let me quickly reacquaint you to the new me. I now go by Ella, ditching the Cinderella by which you knew me. I have graduated from university some years ago, and had the privilege of becoming a published writer sometime during my undergraduate, and several times since. What I realized in reading your contents is how you truly were where I taught myself to scribe fairty tales of the truth.
In reflecting back upon my teenage angst, I begin to see where my behaviors arose from. In reading it, and analyzing it, I feel rather connected to Eng when he analyzed differently M.Butterfly. Eng stated M.Butterfly was of course a sentiment to heterosexuality, and beyond this, race too. He emphasized giving one apriority is an incomplete interpretation, as the plight and anguish of Gallimard is one of many intersections that serve to transform and modify each other.
I in much the same way feel quite the Galimard in analyzing myself. I, as having seen myself as white and beautiful, felt my ideal was to use my femininity to escalate myself to the next echelon. I felt any labor beneath me, and far exaggerated the reasonable chores my stepmother would ask of me. I identified my stepsisters as ogres who would never find a man like I would…for they were brutish and undesirable, while I was always perfect and fair…sure.
I am certain I and Gallimard are quite on par with each other in wanting to live up to our heterosexual and raced ideals. However, my revelation was not one that slapped me in the face with white pain and in the torso with a blade, but rather a slower, more gradual one.
The last entry I left you with was right before my decision to follow my then love interest, Charlie, across the country to where he wanted to go to university. I often called him, in my teenage delusions, “Prince Charming”. He was rather charming, I suppose…although aren’t all men who would trap us in young love?
Lacan would say I was desiring of the phallus he would provide to me. That he possessed power with it, would want me as his attachment, and I equally desired to be that attachment. And, I do think, in ways, Lacan would be correct.
I saw within the “Prince”, myself as the princess. I saw in him the key to a door I required open if I were to live the ideal that society and the media had put upon me. I knew every step of the way the truth behind our dance, but like Gallimard, I stepped to each beat as if none the wiser to the truth I myself was hiding…the truth that he only loved me when dressed up in the most opulent dresses and shoes; the most beautiful in the crowd…and that I only loved him when he saw me as such. Because that is who I wished to be, even if it was all but a fantasy I could come home and put on paper.
However, the good part of following him was what I justified to my stepmother (whom I so unfairly vilified in these entries). I said to her that I wanted to go across the country for my own education…and she bough it. But, it soon became the truth! I continued to write, learn to write, and love to write in college. He transferred to a more prestigious university his father had donated his way into, but I instead remained there, and blossomed. I realized my fairy tales value only existed in my ability to create them, but not to believe in them. Because at the end of the day “Prince Charming” was not who I shold have been looking toward to define and make me empowered like Lacan might suggest. It was within me to rise above it all, all along.
Looking back at those days, I only wish I would know what I do now. Then, I felt almost closer to the mice who lived here in the attic, than my relatives who I rarely gave a chance. Then I chose fiction over the brutal reality that there is no magical man who could save me from my unhappiness. If I could tell that girl who I was, anything, it would be to not drown herself in the pain of trying to be beautiful in an attempt to reach the ideal she saw for herself of the “pretty white female”. Because, as I know now, when midnight strikes, and the fantasy goes away, the shoes that we foolishly convince ourselves so adamantly are meant to fit with perfection, often cannot stay on our feet.
So, this will be my last entry. I thank you for the fantasies, and the comfort. But I found shoes that fit much better, and a happiness sprouted from within that no man could provide. And that, at least for this woman, is happily ever after enough for me.
Cinderella
Ella
Men’s Journal Article
12-6-12
“Dont take your manhood for granted”
Most of us view the middle class white straight male as the following: 1) Always in control of emotions 2) Emotions not expressed at all or 3)Emotionally Isolated. We always would pick him first if life/society was a basketball team. Men in general repress feelings. When you do see a man cry your first thought is it had to have been something super serious for him to cry to begin with and secondly if he is crying in public or around someone it makes you really think hard. Guys, especially white males aren’t “crybabies”, they put on this front of the perfect little life. White males want to be the CEO of a company, with a trophy wife, kids and the white picket fences. Some of us know this as the “American Dream”. Normal actions of men regardless of color or class are ritualized. On a daily basis we except the man to go to work, to pay the bills, to take of us “women” in every sense possible, to make us comfortable. We can also expect them to be on the other side of the spectrum. They could be a player or a “faggot”. In that case we would expect them to flirt with every girl and for the “fag”, every guy. A normal action for a man in a player position would be for him to deny his subjecting girls/women. Reading a Judith Butler article, you would come to learn that the past few lines would be interactional accomplishments of gender. Butler would consider fag an abject position as well. We see men do these repeated acts through a frame. One male doesn’t do it; they all do it–consciously, subconsciously etc. To me this is where a discourse can makes it way in. Those repeated acts done in the “frame” create the discourse for masculinity. For Example, boys play sports,boys are aggressive, boys take a girls virginity not the other way around, men are the breadwinners, men don’t cook or clean, men don’t have babies, etc. If you fall into anyone of these discourse you aren’t a REAL MAN! DIscourse can be created with the word “faggot” I mentioned earlier in the article. Labeling of the repeated acts. A faggot would be created because its outside the norm. We think “compulsive Heterosexuality”. Everything outside our conditioning of these manly actions is us thinking compulsive Heterosexuality. If you aren’t living up to the standards of what should be, you become victim to this. Hence straight, middle class, white men. We see them in this repeated frame as having no worries, no struggles, a “carefree” life. We discourse them onto a pedestal and use them as a goal of what is right and what and where you should be heading. Little do we know or even sometimes take the time to think about is they do have struggles, it doesn’t come natural and it is not fixed. White straight males especially middle class are usually the ones that fall flat on their faces. Not only do we give them standards to look up to but also achieve. When they don’t it is just downhill from there. Other races and social classes outside of the rich have fluidity to move upward and would be praised for doing so, where as a white middle class male will be scrutinized for collapsing by us a society, by his wife and maybe even his children/family. I feel the “white middle class straight man” is produced by the discourse we’ve given it since the start of time. Although there is still an imbalance we have seen them slowly and
I mean very slowly balance out with the rest of society. I believe manliness begins with your peers. A great example many of you males can relate with is a scene from your high school days when you had to prove how much of a ” man” you were by sleeping around with a bunch of girls. Most importantly who always got the girls and needed to prove themselves? The white straight male jock of the football team(or any leading sport in your school). The words i mentioned earlier, “faggot and manliness” are words we create to police manliness and stop people from straying away from it. I think it is important to not take masculinity for granted especially in the white straight middle class area because as much as we put against them, goal and achievement wise. The fact that they specifically connote to total control of emotions or emotional isolation. I personally feel they repress their emotions and lash them out in the form of abuse, domestic violence and school violence. My examples of this would be the Jocks picking on everyone(bullying). The loner shooting up the school. These are things that can come of “failed masculinity”. The greatest one would be suicide/death. We honestly should take it for granted because we many think the grass is always greener but it truly always isn’t the case.
Below is an article I read about what woman say about each other and how they oppress themselves. I thought everyone might have heard someone say one of these comments before.
Women’s Internalized Oppression: Undermining Your Own Sexuality
By Dr. Marty Klein May 28, 2009 –
Like children telling stories about a scary old man, women criticize each other’s sexuality – from a safe distance.
“Slut!”
It’s hit and run.
“Slut” is what women call a woman who is “too” sexual. It’s someone who can enjoy sex without being in love. Someone who admits she enjoys sex more than a woman “should.” In other words, it’s a woman who can enjoy sex the way only men are supposed to be able to.
“Look at her, all over him. Is she even wearing a bra? God, anyone can tell what’s on her mind…what is she, a nympho?”
But there are costs to this sisterly vigilance. Aware that others will be judging them, it makes women wonder if they’re withholding their sexuality “enough.” Or it makes them proud that they do. Either way, it says that repressing yourself is an important part of sexuality and relationships. And that’s a destructive idea.
Women are caught in a historical collision between the sexual values of the past and future. Religion, the media and our families are sending out contradictory messages about sexuality that are driving women crazy.
Consider: Today’s woman is supposed to be sexy, but not too sexy. She’s supposed to be responsive enough to validate her partner, but not too aggressive or hard to please. Sexual, but not lusty. Not frigid, but not quite red hot. Her sexuality should express love, not lust.
In short, she has to be sexual in just the right way, regardless of her actual feelings or needs. To conform, to be an acceptable female, women have to carefully modulate, and therefore undermine, their own sexuality.
Monitoring, labeling and criticizing other women are only a few of the many ways that women sabotage their own sexuality. Let’s look at several others; do you have a voice in your head saying these or similar self-destructive things?
* “Distrust lust; keep your privates private.”
“My mother taught me not to dress too sexy,” says one dynamic woman I know, “because I shouldn’t attract too much attention.” For years she followed this code, even as an adult.
WOMEN ARE SHOWN AS OBJECTS OF PLEASURE AND SERVANTS TO PLEASE MEN
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Michael
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Marie
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Gender, Sex, and Society - Group C 