Preschool, Pedagogy, Permormance

I am having the hardest time trying to actually physically sit down and write my qualitative methods two paper. I can see it in my mind, visualize it, but I am just so unmotivated, tired from working at the preschool, dealing with parents, kids, teachers, that sitting down to just write up my sites of pedagogical moments has definitely been challenging. I am hoping that by Blogging them-instead of doing "scholarly writing" in word processing, strict school work format that I will allow some of my ideas about performance, critical pedagogy and the preschool to flow freely. I hope to use writing as a tool for analysis in order to think about and interpret my data which, is more about watching phenomenological situations unfold and thinking about them performatively.

--
"You look funny today Miss. Kathryn. In those gray pants and that yellow shirt," a small white blond-haired boy looks up at me and proclaims.

I am slightly taken aback. I thought I looked nice today. I dressed up wore clothes that were different from my normal outfits. I am wearing khaki tan pants and a yellow argyle sweater. My short hair is being held back with bobby pins, and I am wearing similar amounts of make-up that I normally do, which is fairly natural with a little bit of smudged eyeliner and mascara around the outer edges of my eyes. I have on my purple and black watches with witches on the wristband, and other than my double nostril piercing I have on no jewelery. I think I look nice, but not much different than what I usually look like, except that I usually wear dark colors as opposed to lighter pastel shades. His comment stings-just a little. He may only be three, but somehow I assume that my body, is being read as different, as queer, as something that looks funny, not pretty. I begin to think about how early beauty norms which, are socially constructed are ingrained so early on in the minds of children.

Not that he can be totally blamed in the situation. It is my desire to look different to be read as queer in most contexts of my life, not explicitly in the preschool setting however. I often feel that I do not "look gay enough" if this is really possible. I assume that my feminine appearance in most situations buys me a ticket straight to hetero-ville. Although I realize that even this assumption of mine is faulty because many straight women do not conform to typical standards of beauty, even as much as me, a self-identified queer lesbian. I would like to brush it all off to heterosexism, that our culture signifies who looks normal and who who doesn't, and that it is generally assumed that if you look normal you are not considered queer. But in this situation it makes no sense, I am actually looking somewhat normal and yet I am being read as completely queer. I am not even trying. Maybe that is the problem maybe they are not used to seeing me look more normative and for them that seems to queer their perceptions of me.

What is more disturbing, however, is that my appearance, except my dress tend to remain consistently similar. I usually wear jeans, short and long-sleeved t-shirts, sweaters, dress pants, and combinations of all of them. I shower most mornings, blow-dry and straighten my hair in order to get it to spike up ever so alternatively, and I wear makeup fairly consistently. However, when my co-teacher Kristin dresses up and does what she calls "making an effort," the teachers, children, and even the parents all tend to comment about her appearance.

"Miss Kristin, you look so pretty today," the children from the room next door file over one by one to tell her. it is obvious that they have been prompted by our boss, a middle-aged white woman. The older boys who are four and five tend to like Kristin and interact with her somewhat flirtatiously, which, she seems to actually enjoy. Kristin is wearing a bright blue t-shirt with a deep v, her red hair is flowing down her shoulders and has been scrunched with gel. Her pale skin is accented with the pink, white, and brown hues of her makeup. Her black eyeliner is thickly painted on around the outer edge of her eyelids. I agree that she does look nice, but more than anything I think Kristin just looks different than she normally does. But instead of being read as silly or different, her skinny, white, more normative look is deemed pretty by the children. I can never tell if Kristin likes the attention or is embarrassed by the comments they make to her. Later on in the day as Kristin was putting down Star, one of our younger smaller female children, for a nap. Star looked up at Kristin from her position lying down in the crib and in a very loud voice said,"Miss Kistin, you wook pitty t'day." Kristin tried to shrug it off and just said, "Thank you Star," however, Star in her two-year-old demeanor, kept repeating these words over and over until she fell fast asleep. Throughout the day as parents came into the school to pick up their children many of the mothers commented on liking Kristin's hair and her shirt. No one has ever complimented me in this way except one mother told me she enjoyed my sensible footwear.

While this situation may seem to be built on my own insecurities and low self-esteem I think it is significant for iterating how the children, staff, and parents in the preschool view me. I assume they all attribute my appearance to my weirdness and this obscurity is not viewed as something commendable let alone beautiful. Instead the parents see Kristin's normative appearance and compliment it in order to reinforce her appearance as a standard of beauty. I am reminded that sometimes silences and absences speak much louder than the words that are actually uttered. Although this does tend to rub me the wrong way, I am also reminded that it is my choice to not carry out my appearance in a normative way and that for the most part I enjoy what this brings to my life.

I have come to see my body and my look as a huge signifier for who or what I am supposed to be. I put a lot of effort into my appearance, although I am not exactly always sure as to why? I care how I look, but even more importantly I worry about what my look is saying to others. I make sure to trim my hair frequently, color it in somewhat obscure colors, always wear my nose rings and always wear something rainbow, even if just to give myself a little gay cheer throughout the day. I enjoy these aspects of myself, I like that they make me appear different, however, this also illustrates my cognitive dissonance and contention while in the preschool. While I would like to be read as attractive I am not, however I do tend to be read as the authority figure, and the children usually choose me to solve their problems whether it be return a toy to it's rightful owner or provide a hug and a holding after falling and bonking a head. I like my job and I like my position in the preschool, however, I begin to see just how easily white middles class gender norms are performed and encouraged by parents, staff, and children at the preschool. It is because of incidents like this I begin to see an even greater need for implementing critical pedagogy in the preschool classroom. The children must be exposed to some forms of difference if they are to understand and accept difference, and I am hoping that I can be a glimmer of hope in this situation.

Lesbian Utopia...or not so much....

So this past week we have been reading a lot about place and space and how that intersect with national identity, ethnicity, race, class, gender, age, and sexuality. A couple of things I have thought were interesting were the ways in which we tend to de-politicize "homeplaces/homespaces," which I believe are personally some of the most political spaces in their attempts to resist. When I think of homeplace I do so similarly to bell hooks, that "homeplace" is a place of collective resistive space for those who are outsiders, not the normative nuclear white heterosexual patriarchal family structure. One of the greatest places I found my "homespace" was in the presence of my group of queer female friends in a place we deemed "The Apartment."

In my own life I am currently changing what I know to be my "homeplace" but find that it tends to revolve mostly around the people I choose to associate and become involved with. I am currently trying to renegotiate my "homeplace" in a community of mostly straight, white, working-class people. The place I find to be the most resistive to dominant norms is the bluegrass bar where most of my more progressive friends hang out. It tends to attract a somewhat diverse group of people who bond over the mountain atmosphere, music, drinking, and sometimes progressive politics. It is a comfortable place, one where people kick off their shoes and sit in front of a fire place, or kick up their heels on the dance floor to a number of bluegrass bands. While I am currently trying to create a new "homeplace," I find that it is a challenge at times simply because I tend to stick out like a sore thumb. My somewhat alternative look does not necessarily coincide with people's mountain gear, talk of hiking and skiing (which, I do not normally participate it), or the general mountain ambiance and decor in the bar. However, I feel very strongly about asserting my difference and queerness in the space and in the conservative community it is one of the only comfortable places to be "out." The people tend to be accepting and if they weren't I know for a fact a number of friends including the owners of the establishment would make sure to "go to bat" for those of us who are openly queer.

While this is my new experience, I want to focus on my old, prominent space of "homeplace" that was created by a group of mostly queer white womyn. While my girlfriend at the time is of mixed race and considers herself to be brown, she had graduated from the college where we all attended during my stint in "The Apartment" structure and thus, besides her we all identified as white. I choose to focus on this space because it provided me a sense of community built upon similarity of culture. For the most part we also listened to the same r similar music, and when we would gather in the apartment our friends would play their guitars and we would all casually sing along and play instruments to songs about feminism, otherness, and queerness. We bonded in this space and it truly provided me a sense of community, and family especially in regards to the world outside the apartment, which, was often brutal and painful. But it was not a perfect space either. We often had personality and interpersonal problems between members of the groups, we often spent so much time together involved in every activity we would become sick of each other and annoyed. We all varied on the causes we felt strongly about and although we all tended to be progressive politically we often disagreed about issues and ways to enact the politics we believed so strongly in. As any of my friends who will read this blog will probably agree-although "The Apartment" may have been our "homeplace" a place for mainly white, queer people to gather and find a sense of relief and community, it was also always frought with contention, difference of opinions, and different ideas about engaging in political discourse and activism. Thus, the space was political not only because the group retreated there in order to find a sense of community with others whose lives were marked by the institutions of sexism, heterosexism, racism, homophobia, as well as privilege but it was also political because the space was not utopian nor was it always completely comfortable.

"The Apartment" was my friend Gabi's apartment that she eventually came to share with another friend Reese. Gabi's girlfriend also often shared the space-so that it became a space made significant by the fact it was for queer people by queer people. And while woman was not assumed in the essentialist of biological sense of the term the biology of the people that mostly gathered were women. The small, midwestern, private, Christian liberal arts school we all attended was a residential campus and thus, we all except Gabi and Reese lived in dorm rooms and ate dinner in the school's one large dining hall, "The Caf." On campus most of the queer people tended to live in one specific dorm, and ate at one specific end of "The Caf" known as the "moonlight" or "romance" section. Being part of the queer community I too lived and ate int he specific sections. While certain amounts of community were also found in these marginalized spaces it was always in juxtaposition to the larger dominant oppressive ideologies and identities on campus. Although our campus tended to be somewhat open to difference, it was heavily Christian and heavily Lutheran, and we often felt the oppressive affects of the legacy in which our university was explicitly tied to. These affects translated to our everyday lives, through interactions with conservative Christians telling us we were going to hell, although we also happened to have a hugely progressive religion department, and a lot of queer people because of the draw to the music program. While we may have always bee dealing with racism, sexism, and homophobia, religious oppresseion etc in the larger world, our campus's push to try and diversify as well as Christianize put us in a place of "dual citizenship" trying to represent the other while being hated and discriminated against at times.

"The Apartment" was a typical college apartment. Sort of shabby, the kind of thing you expect with a month to month lease, mis matched furniture, a fouton in the living room purchased from Wal-Mart-the only place to shop in our small town. There were usually dishes in the sink, hair stuck in the drain of the shower, a glasses of water strewn about the space. It was located downtown a ways from the college only a block or so away from our local community co-operative market, where we would often purchase food to make dinner with each other. It was the second level right above a restaurant with a large unstable balcony, which looked over the main street of town. The smells and sounds of the restaurant often wafted upstairs and provided us only specific times we could vacuum and burn incense. We probably seemed to be living a mundane existence in comparison to the rowdy undergraduates who would drunkenly stumble passed "The Apartment." Although we did go to the bars occasionally we usually sat above the street on the balcony casually sipping hard cider, wine, and beer, some casually puffing away on cigarettes, music slowly humming through the patio doors and windows. For once we felt above the people that often wanted to do us harm, and harass our very existence, as well as simply enjoy each other's company. "The Apartment" often provided us a safe shelter from the streets where straight white people would maliciously torment my small group of queer non- gender or race conforming friends. More than once either my friends or I had been yelled at as we walked the main street of the town. "Dykes!" or "What are you?" people in the cars passing us would yell. When we could finally get to "The Apartment" we could rest from both the physical and emotional exhaustion of just being in the world and surviving that day.

While we felt ourselves to be inclusive we were often criticized for being exclusive because we were all "lesbians." This usually made us all chuckle, of the eight of us who gathered two were more transgendered female to male, two to three were bisexual and actively dated and slept with both men and women, one did not identify, one believed he was a lesbian trapped in a gay man's body, and two identified primarily as lesbian, and mostly we all identified as queer. In the vein of many queer communities with chosen families we called ourselves, "The Fam" and often referred to our brotherly and sisterly connections with one another. Several times our conversations even turned to the topic of our sexuality and our connections with one another. we often felt that our connections in some ways transcended the fact that we were queer to being simply about connections and personalities however, looking back I laugh at our naievete. I must certainly say that we were friends because we were queer and we were queer because we were friends, it was obvious in our interactions we were connected through identity, politics, and activism. We were not connected by some transcendent form of chemistry or even love but we developed these things with each other because of our positionalities both with each other and in the context of the larger world. Because we felt connected by something greater than identity it often allowed us to justify the exclusion of others. While I am not judgmental that we did this, I do look back on it now and surely think this was a part of what we were doing. Although I loved this group of people we were also exclusive out of our own comfort and safety with each other, which we did not wish everyone to be privvy to. We faced much criticism from the gay men in the larger queer community, as well as other queer women who mainly identified as bisexual who attributed our exclusiveness to the notion that we all identified and performed lesbian identities in a certain homogenous way. Besides assuming that we all identified and performed some version of "lesbian," they also attributed the fact that many of us were vegetarians to our sexual identity, as well as our involvement in activism. This was false for me, as well as others involved in the group because I had been involved in activism long before I interacted exclusively with this group of people, although I did become vegetarian because it seemed to make the most sense after becoming good friends with the group.

And while we connected over our progressive politics, activism, and our acceptance of each other we also heavily disagreed on some things. Conversations about abortion sometimes turned sour when some people in the group would suggest that abortion should be legal no matter what, while others would argue that there should be alternative and better options for women and children. Other sites of contention were transgender rights in the larger GLBT movement and the fact that four of us at some point attended the controversial Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. There were also minor dissonances in dietary decisions. Most of us were vegetarians although not all of us and sometimes there were arguments over the ethical lines of choosing to eat meat and the classist attitudes of vegetarianism and vegetarians. While we varied over some things greatly we also knew that as a general rule it was also one of the only places we could comfortably disagree and be left with at least new and different things to think about. There were also many times when we would sufficiently deny our differences and not bring them up in order to avoid conflict and confrontation and join together simply for company and companionship and the newest available queer film we could get our hands on. So the space was far from perfect. We were not perfect individuals, activists, and citizens and we often disagreed about what this meant anyway, but we were able to find a sense of home in each other and in "The Apartment" with each other. If nothing else it provided us a place to resist dominant norms as well as the outside world.

My "homeplace" in "The Apartment" was a place full of connection, hope and possibility it was not a utopian space. It was a space with differeing opinions, people, genders, sexual orientations, races, personalities, making it almost impossible to generalize about us and for us to agree on anything. However, in its imperfection we were able to create beauty, lasting memories and community and that made every second worthwhile.

WSCA Conference

So I realized I had never really been to an academic conference before this weekend. I had been to the mini Black History Month Conference and the Peace Prize forum at Luther, I went to the Big Gay Conference two years in a row-but it was mostly just party-time and anger inducing. But this weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Western States Communication Association Conference. It was great because most everyone is from the West and thus and the conference itself was in Colorado only an hour away from where I live.

I was able to see some really great presentations on research being done in the field of communication studies (and some not so good too.) Most of the panels, paper presentations I attended were on my favorite aspect of communications: Performance Studies and many of them also focused on the "new queer studies" or the second generation of queer studies which does a lot more with multiple and overlapping productions of identities instead of mainly focusing on sexual orientation and gender presentation. Much of the work I saw was by graduate students many in my own department doing really interesting and progressive work interrogating "others" through interrogating the self. Mostly this gave me some hope for having a career in academia and being able to do good work even as a graduate student.

But what was most helpful were seeing the responses to papers delivered by grad students and professors alike (which happened to be administered by my performance studies professon Dr. Calafell.) Some major themes I saw specifically in regards to performance studies s being accountable to others and to the discipline of performance itself. The most heavily critiqued individuals were those who did not use performance studies scholars in their citations on papers about performance studies. In my mind this is a total disregard for the people that came before who have put their hearts, minds, and souls (through writing, performance etc...)on the line and it is somewhat disrespectful to not include their work.

It calls to mind Bowman's piece on "Killing Dillinger: Mystory" where he critiques those people who may dabble in performance studies but will not take into account the history, the repercussions and more generally what is at stake for performance scholars who engage in the kind of work that uses the self as a site of interrogation. He in fact critiques people who dabble in performance saying they won't even stick around long enough to find out the future of the discipline because they do not have the kind of investment in the work as do those who are strongly committed to the work.

There was also critique about what actually constitutes performance studies work which, is I believe related to the aforementioned point. As Ellis and Bochner say, "Not everyone can do autoethnography let alone do it well," nor ca everyone do performance studies and performative writing/ethnography. Not that I don't think people should not try-they just need to be honest about their work and credit those who came before-including performance scholars, feminists of color, feminists, and queer theorists. It is not performance studies to simply use the "I" first person in the paper-or to incorporate parts of the self into one's paper that is solely based on the work of rhetoric scholars. This lacks the reflexivity that performance studies so eagerly wants to engage with.

Performance is so much more than that. First as I see it, it takes a deep level of commitment to the discipline. This involves several things but one of them means facing rejection, facing the fact that other parts of the larger discipline are going to think performance is a joke and that looking at the self has no credibility. But if one is committed they see the value that this kind of work can do-seeing that it has the potential to not only change the academy but more largely implicates the world to change also. Two it means knowing and crediting those who came before, risked before and have been vulnerable before. I believe this means having a good historical basis for understanding the discipline-understanding how performance originated and paying homage not only lip service to those who have grappled with these issues before. Third it means a deep commitment to the other (Madison, Alcoff). This means being committed to fairly representing the other through our work including intimate others (Ellis) who we are deeply connected to. This means holding ourselves accountable and rising our own integrity in the ways we write about others and take up issues about representing the other in our work. This means not making fun of people even if we disagree with the way in which they handle themselves in certain situations. Performance scholarship should never be used to get back at someone, instead it should be used as a tool to open up dialog. This moves me to my fourth observation about performance. It should always be opening up possibilities for dialog not shutting them down. In this way performance is especially useful as a pedagogical tool. While dealing with controversial subjects performance should seek to hear fro multiple and variant positions and never silence anyone. In this way in my brain I see that performance is directly connected with feminist and queer epistemologies which, desire to uncover marginalized voices while being committed to an invitational dialogic perspective for engaging in conversations about controversies. My fifth observation is that by investing in the other we put ourselves at stake. This means we risk the self, making the self open and vulnerable for people to see and at times criticize. By implicating ourselves we show our commitment to risk for both ourselves and others. In sharing our own personal experiences we invite others to share of themselves and thus, we become vulnerable to one another thus, implicating ourselves in the work making us accountable.

It was good to see the critiques of people's work because it shows that other more advanced scholars want to help those of us who are new to the discipline. They want us to succeed and do things well-they want us to open ourselves up and make us think harder more critically, to stretch ourselves. And they do this while being generally supportive and showing an ethic of care, which is greatly appreciated.

when you read me

"In writing from the heart, we learn how to love, to forgive, to heal, and to move forward"(Norman K. Denzin 334).

How do you read my body.
My tall, slender, white body.
My hips, my stomach, my breasts...
How do you read the eyeliner, the lipstick, the earrings?
the skirt?
Don't lift it up you might be scared by my hairy legs
(no I don't shave them)
Is this the queer part of me?
Is the eyeliner?
Or is it queer because they both exist on the same body

When you see me
do you see those who came before me
walk with me
live in my house and
teach me

When you read me do you see
my great grandmother's hands
do you see that she lives in my house
do you see that I am one of her care-givers
do you hear her bellow in the night
-Kathy-

Do you see my sister?
In all of her adolescent glory?
Her female-ness complicated by her Latina-ness
complicated by her adopted-ness
Our mothers met in jail
and now we are connected forever

Do you see my mother's jail time?
Her name in the paper
My name in the paper
My prom dress in the paper
She stole so that I could have

When you read me do you see
that I grew up
raised mostly by a single mother
and a great-grandmother
Who gave so that I could have
So that I can give now
So that when they bellow
-Kathy-
I can come running

When you see my body
My tall, white, slender, queer, female body
my hips, eyeliner, and breasts
juxtaposed with another female body
a female body that looks like a male body
sometimes brown and sometimes white
sometimes with a tie, long shorts, and mohawk
sometimes but not always
Is that where the queerness lies?
In the juxtaposition?

When you see my body
When you read my body
do you see my skepticism about
myself
do you see my whiteness
I'm sure you do
even if you do not assess it the meanings of privilege
it deserves
but doesn't
do you see the time I read Malcolm X
and realized my own implications
in the systems of racist ideological hegemony
do you see my commitment to unpacking my
knapsack of privilege (Peggy MacIntosh)
do you see my contradiction?
Is this where the queerness lies?
in the contradiction?

When you read my body
do you see the fragments
the parts that don't know anything?
The parts
that question everything
from the eyeliner, the white hips and breasts
the mohawk, the masculine femininity,
the privilege

the juxtaposition

the contradiction

the queerness

Part I: Performing Coming Out as a Queer White Femme Performative Lesbian Bisexual Academic: A Multi-Part Tale

This is the first installment of my coming out queer, white, feminist, femme, lesbian, bisexual-it is a performative piece I am working on-feedback would be great within reason.

Part I.

"But you still like girlclothes?" My mother asks me

I stare out the window of her four-wheel-drive pick-up truck. Tears are streaking down my face. We pass cornfields and farmland on the way to our house and I stare at them wondering what it would be like to be a stalk of corn just blowing in the breeze. I am scrunched up pressed against the passenger-side window as absolutely far away from my mother as is possible in a two passenger truck.

I have just come out to her. "Mom, I'm dating a woman," I manage to say the words. "Her name is Sarah, and we have been having a relationship. I didn't expect it, it just kind of happened." I have the taste of metal in my mouth as I speak, it is dry and I hope that I can just make it through the rest of the conversation.

"But what about Daniel," she asks genuinely confused.

I met Daniel my second week of college and we had been together for about two years. He was my first love and my feelings for him were genuine, just not ideal. My tone is getting somewhat defensive as the tears turn to words of anger. "We have been broken up for awhile now and he knows about Sarah. He isn't happy about the situation but he loves and respects me. You know he wants to get married and have babies, those are things I have always honestly said I did not want."

"I didn't know you were serious," she responds quietly. I see her hopes and dreams for my heteropatriarchal future disappearing before both of our eyes.

The truth of the situation is that while I loved him I didn't want the life of normalcy often situated in heterosexual relationships. He was an amazing man, a feminist, was much tidier than me, and with a knack for doing whatever he could in order to improve my life. However, in the end Daniel was still training to be a high school history teacher so that he could be a football coach and I was worried that one day he would come to me and ask me to make brownies for his team of hungry, hormonal teenage boys. And that thought frightened me to all hell. That was in fact my hell, a life of normativity, marriage, children, houses, and picket fences and that was what I saw as my future if I didn't get out. I don't want to trivialize my relationship with him, or diminish the fact that I truly loved him, I just knew that in order to be truly happy I couldn't be with him.

"Have you always been this way?" She continues the rapid-fire question and answer session.

I feel the tension rising in my voice and choking my throat. Oh goodness-how honest should I be I think to myself? "Well Sarah is not the first woman I have been involved with, although it is the most serious." It was true I had had minor flirtations, a college girl when I went to church camp, a friend in high school, and the ephemeral crushes on girls I saw in coffee shops or restaurants. I had even kissed a woman prior to Sarah, but never anything more, never a more intimate connection emotionally and physically.

I begin to sweat. The metallic taste in my mouth increases. Everyone had assured me that my mother, my feminist of a mother would be fine with my being gay. My best friends since high school had convinced me that my mother would think that this whole thing was no big deal. "She's so supportive of you I really don't think this is going to change any of that." I had in fact convinced myself that she would not think it was a big deal. This was not going the way I had expected.

"So are you a lesbian?" My mother does this thing where she grabs her mouth with her hand and sort of pulls at the sides and the corners while it is covered. She has shared with me on occasion that she does this to keep some words from coming out of her mouth-she in effect silences herself at times. I see she is doing it right now and I become worried-this is not turning out well.

Oh god! Panic ensues, the tension creeps up higher and higher. The one question I didn't want to get into. I mean it's so complicated right? It's not easy to just say yes or no in this case because I believe my sexual identity to be so much more complex than this. But I want to explain this to her in a way that isn't scary, that won't find her completely closed off to my radical thinking. I'm pretty sure with my progressive feminist politics and values she already thinks I am a little bit crazy. I didn't necessarily want her thinking that I had chosen this sexual orientation (although in many senses I believe that I did), I didn't want her to think I could just switch it back from gay to straight, or turn it off altogether. I also didn't think introducing the term "queer" right at that moment was exactly appropriate. Maybe I should have, maybe I should have given her the whole spiel on queerness and performance, in retrospect I probably should have, but I didn't.

"Well no, I am bi-sexual." I shrink sown further into the fuzzy soft interior of the truck. Maybe eventually I will just be sucked into it. Bisexual. BI-sexual, Bye-sexual, Buy-Sexual. ACK! I hate that word, BI-SEXUAL-the fact that it implies that only two sexes exist and that I am equally attracted to both, and that I am just overtly sexual and can't make up my mind-I hate it. Unfortunately I don't know exactly how to explain it any other way. I decide that of terms to use this one was however, the most useful and at least describes my relationships thus far in my life, one significant with a man one significant with a woman.

My mother's eyes grow wide with even more confusion. I can tell she is trying. Trying to listen. I don't think that she hates me, yet anyway...

I try to offer a disclaimer, "I mean I just love people mom, despite their sex." Again, not exactly my feelings but in the context I want to try and help her understand without completely dislocating her from my life. I don't like that this argument seems to imply an attitude of indecision, flittering back and forth between the known and the unknown of sexuality. This concept which is usually called fluidity makes my anxiety rise because it seems to lack introspection and reflexivity and seems to refer to an overt insatiable appetite for sexuality (which is cool too-it just isn't my feeling.)

I mean I know that on a daily basis I want my intimate relationships to be negotiated with people who are QUEER and if those people happen to have vaginas I am going to be even more thrilled-this is not something I am "fluid" about. Who that actual person or people happen to be-that's where I am more open and flexible. I am not sure she is ready to know and understand this yet. I don't know that in this moment I truly understand and know this about myself yet. What do I know I am a crazy fool in love, my first girl-love. I am excited, I am nervous, and honestly I am scared-shitless.

"Is it my fault?" my mother asks timidly. "I known you don't really have any good male role models. I mean my relationships with men haven't exactly been the best. Or is it because you were…you know…"

Oh no! My other place of worry, she blames herself and she blames my lacking relationships with men. She thinks I am this way because of men because men have personally hurt me and violated my body. She thinks I am this way because I was molested as a child and raped as a teenager. She thinks I am this way because of her relationships with men and the fact that she has been personally hurt and violated by them.

I don't know if this is true or not-if this is why I might be queer-I am not ready to rule it out as taboo and politically incorrect as it sounds-I just honestly don't know why I am the way I am. I don't like to think things are quite this simple, that my sexuality is a direct effect of a man or even more generally of masculinity in my culture-I am also not ready to completely dismiss that my sexuality might have a link to the fact that as a social creature I saw my mother's and other women's unhappiness in their boring heteronormative lives, internalized this and decided that I would rather be with women in order to avoid this potential sense of unhappiness I interpreted as being with men. I also cannot say that a piece of me, as anti-essentialist as I am, that somewhere my brain doesn't blame masculinity for having hurt my body and made me feel at times safer around women-I know this is silly, but I believe those men that hurt me were social creatures too. I don't know if I should say these things to my mother-the fact that even I question where my sexuality came from . I don't want to blame anyone especially her, she has enough guilt in her life.

"No" I reply, "It's not your fault and it is not because I was raped either." I am disappointed in myself for not trusting her enough at this moment with my feelings and my story for not giving her everything but censoring what comes out of my mouth so as not to offend her .

I realize it is hard to come out as a queer academic (and I use the term academic loosely as a 21 year old undergraduate.) It is not as easy as simply saying, "Mom, I am a lesbian, or mom I'm gay." In my realm of existence it is so much more complex than that. And maybe it is this hard for everyone because sexuality is such a contradiction for many different reasons, I just know that my knowledge of big words like queer, negotiation, performativity, and contingent all play a significant factor in my realm of understanding my sexuality. I am glad it is complicated and complex-I also know this makes it no easier to explain it to anyone outside of academic discourse.

But how do you approach a "coming-out" that is not really a "coming-out" story in the conventional sense of the phrase.

How do you start a conversation and say mom, "I'm not a lesbian but the romantic relationships I will mostly be persuing from here on out will most likely resemble what we typically think of as a lesbian relationship? The difference will be that I do not wish to be considered normal or normative-even with a female as my object of desire. I do not want to partner up and live in a house with a picket fence in the suburbs. I will not fight for my right to get married because I do not want to marry anyone, EVER. I do not wish to reinforce an institution of the dominant heterosexual, capitalist patriarchy (hooks). I do not want a lesbian wedding or a commitment ceremony. Instead I will do what makes me happy, complete with negotiating queer sexuality on a daily basis possibly through butch and femme encounters, femme drag performativity, sadist and masochist sexual practices, and more generally deciding the kind of person I am going to be with based off their embodied sense of politics." I will never ever make the brownies for a female partner anymore than I would a male. It's not exactly easy to say these things to one's mother.

"But you still like girlclothes right?" My mother asks me sliding the words girl and clothes together into one word.

"Of course" I assure her, "Just because I'm bi-sexual doesn't mean I am a different person," I find myself choking out the words and laughing a little to myself. I picture the most stereotypical looking lesbian imaginable complete with black dyke boots, flannel shirt, and mullet haircut, I then picture this identity on me. I chuckle a little harder.

In this moment I realize how inextricably linked my sexuality and gender presentation have become. In this moment my mother has helped to normalize my sexuality by ensuring that I will in fact continue to be feminine in my appearance. I decide that to be accepted by my family in this moment I probably shouldn't play with my gender appearance too much, despite the fact that I might secretly desire to do so. I will just gave to find other ways to be queer. The message becomes loud and clear-it's ok to be gay (not desirable perhaps) but what is really necessary is that I continue to make sure I look feminine because once that goes everyone is going to talk.

"I just feel like I don't know you anymore. There is a part of you I will just never understand now." My mother says sadly as though I have just offended a best friend-someone who knows you as well or better than you know yourself. It is as though I have offended my mother mostly by not confiding in her sooner, she is hurt that I have held back and not invited her into this part of my life.

I think to myself-you don't know me anymore-because I haven't let her know me, I haven't been honest and I haven't given her my entire story. How could she know me when I am holding back, when I am the one unwilling to be vulnerable, unwilling to share my true experience with coming out, coming out in my own queer white academic feminist femme lesbian bisexual way?

I say nothing but continue to press my body against the door and window of the passenger side of my mother's truck. The arm rest is digging into my side and I continue to cry-quietly this time, almost in complete silence. I stare aimlessly out the window staring at the corn between my tears running down my face. The snow begins to fall and we ride the rest of the way home in silence.

Thank the Goddess it's Friday...

Yes it's Friday and yes most normal people are out at bars, or enjoying the company of others, or at least live in a town where restaurants don't close for an entire month for cleaning. Instead I am enjoying being inside locked closely away from the frigid temperatures and 30 mph winds, it is actually so cold it is freezing snot in my nose before it can be excreted, I am reading, I am breathing (short inhales and exhales), I am trying to focus. The live guitar music in the background is only slightly distracting as I pick at my own set of keys. I wanted to get all of my reading done, wanted to be productive but find that even more than that I want to write. Just sit down and let it flow out of me. I have been writing in my head in my sleep for the past week, I can't stop-I don't want to. I toss and turn because in my head I am writing the two pieces I am working on one on preschool pedagogy, and the other on my own identity formation in regards to sexuality. I write them as performance pieces-I don't know if that is what I am supposed to do but I guess as I am writing them i am envisioning my bodily placement in relation to other bodies and characters and who could play them if not only myself.

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. I never thought I would do well as a fiction writer because in my past I thought my stories would be too autobiographical and I wonder if most fiction generally is. But then at the same time I have been so annoyed with scholarly writing conventions that say topic sentence here, support here, analysis, and conclusion there. I remember my mother telling me years ago "You are such a good writer, I am so upset that your teachers [highschool] try to stifle all of your creativity into five paragraph essays. I just wonder how much benefit there is in that." As if we weren't drawn into the five paragraph essay formation enough throughout our lives, the same boring repetitions we tend to encounter as if writing scholarly articles mimics my daily routine, wake, shower, work, home, bed. It is all the same stupid story and it ends up being the slight disruptions that have the most impact. And performance and performative writing has disrupted my pattern and gives me something to look forward to a sense of joy . I just know there is a lot of pressure to be great at telling a performative story especially through performative writing and I worry that I am not good enough. I think i have good stories that I can tell-but worry that people will think my stories are not worth telling or hearing. And I want so badly to be good at this-because I need so desperately to be good at something and not for only myself that would be much too small, but I want to do something good in this world for someone, for "the other," because I am an other, and my best friends are others, and my mother is an other, and my lovers are others, and my girlfriends are others and even I see how great it is to make those human connections through art (writing, music, painting, poetry, cooking etc...) because those are the things we can and do connect through. Those are ways we create empathy and understanding for each other. So that is the first part; my self-centered desire to be good at performance writing and performance for multi-variant reasons.

The second part. Performative writing/performance has a lot of potential in my mind but I wonder if it is problematic to center human experience as the focal point of the exploration. I should clarify, there is no way to get around human experience and in reality this is the problem. If we cannot get around human experience then is it possible to argue or contest someones lived experience to really create dialogue? How can anyone speak to a situation that is not "their" personal experience except to offer someone their personal experience. I don't think this is wrong I just think it has the potential to be limiting. This is confusing and I am confusing myself as I write it. I just see it (tonight) as a situation that if we clarify or preface our stories saying, "This is my personal experience," that has the potential to be the end of the conversation because no one can say (or if they did they should feel kind of bad) anything negatively about the experience because it is someone's personal experience. it can almost sediment the experience as something that "is" instead of something that is perceived, negotiated or contingent. I just worry about that-I don't think it always happens but I think it can and sometimes does in certain contexts and it just worries me that no one can contest even at a slight level one's personal story and experience without looking like as asshole because people tend to walk on eggshells in this regard because if it is personal experience and especially if it is negative you don't want to question or offend someone. I know i am writing myself into circles because while I am ariting this I am kind of thinking well isn't that kind of the point with the whole thing to talk about personal experience and offer up differing personal experiences to create a larger more diverse composite of human experiences? I just don't want to see the interrogations of the self, the reflexivity of the self end solely in the personal experience, the location of the experience without reflexivity happen I guess. But in the end I have to finish in the only way I know how...I just don't know.