Gender and Sexuality as Autoethnographic Performance

So in light of all the performance reading I have been doing specifically about Conquergood I have asked my professor to let my blog be my "archive of feeling" for the class (read: journal). I may eventually do a spin-off blog directly about my performance class-but I can't decide if trying to compartmentalize is really a good idea or not. I mean in the performance of myself, my multiple, shifting and contesting identities as Conquergood suggests, are not stable or fixed, it would make sense that sometimes I would write about performance-while other times I would not. So even as I write myself and my body into my blog I find myself having trouble articulating who I am.

Part of this is about my love and desire for queering things, and when I use queer I do not use it as an umbrella term for "the gays" as it so often gets minimized to but as a more broad term for those who do things in non-normative ways who believe that their identities, sexual and otherwise have a level of contingency upon given social contexts, circumstances, surroundings, negotiations etc...(look at me trying to be all Foucauldian stringing my synonyms together.) I like to use queer as a verb not a noun. And in saying this I still must except my positionality as a white, middle class, femme bi-sexual lesbian, who enjoys school, blogging and cheesy television shows. But I like Linda Alcoff's suggestion, that identity not be an over-determination of the spaces we occupy in the world and the behaviors associated but that simply put our position affects how we see. It is not the be-all end-all (there's a platitude for ya) of understanding but it simply gives us different ways of looking and being in the world. But within this we all have agency to a certain extent to enact social justice through whatever means we can. I mean it isn't as though our positionality is essential or innate or something ridiculous like that. It changes, fluctuates, depending on my social context and sometimes my mood.

But this doesn't help with the writing of my blog, or the understanding of how to do my performance. I mean my fingers can move the keys and I can write about things I seem to know about and truly want to understand, but I still do not know who I am. I can pick at my face to the point of bleeding hoping to reach an answer-I don't and all I have is blood and puss. This is gross-but this is the truth. This is my body.

I know my positionality, I know that my positionality changes. I see it change. When I am with the women I date who happen to be more masculine in appearance and stature I immediately notice the looks and stares we both get. My body juxtaposed against theirs says it pretty clearly. Because bodies are political and as spoken word artist Alix Olson says, "At least lesbian bodies are political." Because when my body and her body are together occupying a shared space (like a dinner table in a restaurant full of heterosexual couples the stares "their" bodies give mine and hers say, "What are you?" "Why is she with that?". "She could get a man, she's pretty enough." "She looks normal, how is it that she can like women...and that kind of woman?" "I mean it's cool if she wanted to make out with a hot chick I wouldn't have a problem with it, I'd watch, maybe they'd let me join in on the fun." When I am with a more masculine woman of color the stares become even more intense. "Why would she do that doesn't she have it hard enough as it is [in reference to being a person of color and dressing like a boy]?"

When I am in this situation my perceived heterosexuality is challenged and that is when I become gay. Before this I was a heterosexual woman as conceived by our heterosexist society. It isn't just with lovers/partners it happened with my best friend too. When I walked with her in our small college town in Iowa completely platonically I became a lesbian because that is how she was perceived. "Dykes!" they would yell as they drove by us, those high school boys in their white suv. That's what I mean by contingent-when I walk with my more feminine looking friends I don't get the same yells or stares. "They're all straight," because that's the problem with linking up gender performance and sexual identity in a "heterosexual matrix" if they don't look like women trying to be men than they must be straight women desiring men. If they only knew...

And I say I am queer, but I question that too. I mean I shop at J-Crew, I wear make-up (eyeliner is my favorite), I carry a purse, and when I walk down a street nobody would ever have to know. I could pass for straight. But I don't want to. I am pretty open with anyone you ask, "Yes, I am indeed open to loving anyone, it just so happens that most of the people I love happen to have vaginas (it is not however, a requirement.)" That too goes for friends and lovers.

I like women who look different than me. Am I homophobic? I can't imagine I am-but is my desire for difference somehow interlaced with notions about heterosexism and heterosexuality. My friend who is more masculine once suggested this about herself in reference to dating another more masculine and possibly ftm trans person. These thoughts all infiltrate my space. Maybe that's why I am queer-because the women I date and befriend are not male or female, man or woman, they occupy a space somewhere in between and yet completely different and outside at the same time.

I recognize what this means for me, I will be seen as the straight one. I am not really a lesbian-I am a bisexual, a confused silly school girl going through a phase. But I am queer-I too see my masculine and feminine traits and those that defy both of those to create something entirely new and fantastic. I am as much queer as those women in suits, or track jackets with popped collars and sideways trucker hats, even if my appearance might not suggest it. Another friend of mine once wrote about gender in her blog as being so much more than appearance but about gender play. About the way we negotiate and perform gender in social spaces WITH OTHER PEOPLE!! It is not just the way we look, I know that, than why does it matter so much to me? I am not really a lesbian, I don't look the way lesbians look. I must be a bi-sexual, an unspeakable, "she'll end up with a man one day..." I don't like femme lesbian or bi-sexual as labels, but as an identity expression I create as a daily negotiation-yeah I can live with that. I can occupy the shit out of that space-just watch me!

And how can I write this? How does one articulate that I am a daily negotiation always contingent upon my circumstance, my surrounding, my situation. I am a fractured whole-I do not actually believe I was ever whole to begin with, but instead I am actively creating different pieces of myself everyday that will probably never complete me-I don't want to be completed, I want to be challenged and complemented. And how do I write this. How do I write fluidity into such a static medium. The way I just did? Is that good enough-explain where I am coming from and the rest will tell itself in a way? How do I write my change in a way that is compelling, truthful and honest. How do I write myself into my text, when I do not know who or what I am? I may have a sense of self but this sense of self is completely unstable and at times completely lashes out at me! How do I write this? How do I perform this... Maybe I just did...