How am I supposed to forget
when I can't really remember
what happened?

Maybe it felt good
and I liked it
for a while

maybe I was too young
to even know what
liking it
meant

How am I supposed to remember
when all I want to do is forget
what happened?

I learn about bodies
write about bodies
theorize about bodies

and what they know
because they know the things

we want to remember
things we want

to forget

even if we don't want them
bodies remember

how am I supposed to live in a body
that has been hurt so many times
taken advantage of

so many times

and you may not believe me
you may not care

but it isn't about you
that's what you always said

and I was supposed to find healing
supposed to find peace

meditate
meditate on what?
a memory
of what was
what could have been

I was supposed to heal
with those black chains on my wrists
with late night talks
and kisses

but healing has to start within
not with kisses
or hugs
or chains

maybe I don't need saving
anyway


I want to remember what happened
but
I am
Dying
to forget

Estes Park Sings-really sings

Last night I attended a real piece of work-Estes Park Sings Around the World. I always find shows like this a little disturbing because they tend to overly essentialize and mock people from other countries but this my friends was the most terrible...

The performance begins in of course the small Mountain Town of Estes Park-the perfect place that it supposedly is. A straight white couple is sitting in "their living room" when they receive a phone call from their Dolly Parton-esque daughter who is going to be performing on a cruise ship going around the world. I honestly did not know that this was the premise for the show and I have been to some chorale performances etc that actually treat multiculturalism pretty well. They have to pay homage to the culture, sing along with their songs not appropriate them for their own use etc...

I knew this was not going to be pretty when the first "stop" on the tour was Jamaica. A whole bunch of white guys from the Rotary club (the sponsors of the show) dressed in shorts and their nerdy floral print shirts or t-shirts with Jamaica on them sporting Rasta hats with fake dread locks. They then proceeded to sing the song Day-O complete with Jamaica percussion in the background. Personally I do not see how this is much different from a white person painting black face and doing a "minstrel" show. I was mortified. When I said kind of loudly "Oh my goddess this is so racist. This is awful." My friend responded, "What did you expect?" I guess I didn't expect such a blatant form of racism to be pervading my consciousness right at that moment.

I recently read an article about schools' attempts to integrate multicultural education into the curriculum. The author recalled his own school's attempts as a child by having a multiplicity of dinners all themed from a different culture. He distinctly recalled "Taco Night" and how looking back on it was extremely problematic. This dinner was an attempt to learn about "Mexican culture" as though there is only one and that equates everything about it to "tacos." This is really problematic because (and I can't rememer how he phrased it) it essentialize all people of Latin/Spanish/Central American heritage down to Tacos-which, is an Americanized version of all of those cultures. It implies a whole bunch of people eat Tacos, when they probably don't and that this could stand in for their entire cultural being would be like saying some sort of food could stand in as a replacement for all the people in the U.S.A. Ridiculous yes-but people do it and this is exactly what was going on at the EPS concert. All the "Jamaican" people were whittled down to Dreadlocks, Rasta culture minus drugs, and a lazy attitude.

Besides the small town politics of "Oh this is a song this person knows so we need to incorporate it" all of the different or othered countries were extremely mocked. I mean every country and culture was mocked-Japan was whittled down to a bunch of quiet meek Geisha-like girls, Germany a large woman with long blonde braids under a helmet with horns drinking beer, and in Africa a whole bunch of again white guys dressed up in Safari like clothes singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." There was little respect paid to other cultures, no working with their traditional songs and doing them in a resprectful tone/way that honors them but instead it was all seeming to make fun. And this was my problem-using other cultures, especially "othered" cultures to get laughs is racist and colonialist and this is a problem. And this mockery besides being essentializing also further others these cultures by making them incredibly different from all of us. By portraying all people from Japan as meek little girls and dressing in traditional Kimonos seems to imply that this is what Japanese means. When most of the people currently in Japan dress like Americans and vice versa because of the globalized market economy we have going on. We are not that different looking or acting anymore and people from other countries (at least not all of them) don't walk around all day in their traditional dress. It would be like Americans being portrayed in their church best on stage. And this would imply everyone owns church best, goes to church at all, etc. They don't and as Americans we wouldn't want to be homogenized in this way so we shouldn't do it to others either.

But besides my obvious big critique being the racist/colonialist implications of such a concert and such performances are just so offensive is that not only do the performers think it is ok to put on such a performance but everyone in the audience (for the most part) laughs at them. They all think it is appropriate to laugh at white people pretending and mocking "blackness" and "brownness." But then when a Swedish performance of ABBA comes on stage no one laughs and no one gets it. It isn't funny to people because either they don't think it's funny to see a bunch of white people attempt to dance (at all) and especially dance and sing to ABBA, or they don't think it is that far fetched-at least far fetched enough from reality to be funny. Maybe it was so many of the people there's actual culture it just wasn't funny to them it was their 70's reality, or they just didn't get it because it was mocking whiteness and to them it wasn't funny. Other options here? I don't know what exactly the reason was behind not laughing at this-but meanwhile I am cracking up laughing at this whole mockery of white people. But this was the case with all the things that made fun of white people the audience (white upperclass hets) didn't get, whereas all the stuff making fun of brown or black people caused a huge roar/applause from the audience.

It was so problematic and I guarantee I would have felt this way despite taking my intercultural comm class but in light of all the reading about ethnicity, race, and culture it does give me some new ways to think about all of these things that I saw. New ways to theorize, new reasons to be upset.

I am writing tonight to update my blog for my new academic endeavors. Because I am starting a new quarter I of course have new classes. Thank the goddess I am finished with the Methods sequence of my M.A. program. Although I highly enjoyed and learned a lot from them I am excited to be continuing along in my concentration of Culture and Communication. This quarter I am involved in a lower level grad/undergrad class on Intercultural Communication as well as a rhetoric class on Public Deliberation which is also grad/undergrad but at a highly theoretical and philisophical level to a point that I often find myself going huh? I don't get it. For my Interultural class I have to make an e-portfolio using the program Keep Toolkit, which like my public deliberation class makes me go huh? I wish I could just use this Blog.

Anyway, I am writing because I am finding myself to be deeply challenged by my Intercultural Class, not because of the material but because it is somewhat simplistic and the people in it seem to have no understanding of race, class, gender, sexuality and their intersections. The readings are interesting but we are broken up into small home groups for discussion what seems like pretty much everyday. I do not want to write this to sound completely arrogant, or rude and because I truly care about implementing critical feminist pedagogy but it just doesn't work if the other people in the room are not willing t critically engage the material.

For example today we were discussing bell hook's article, Homeplace: A Site of Resistance and my group members were having a hard time understanding the article because they could not relate to it because they all but one are white privileged het girls. The other grad student who happens to be from Afghanistan and I were trying to explain that resistance works in opposition to the dominant modes of society and that people who are oppressed need a place to regroup after tiring days of being strong, staying tough, and surviving the harsh conditions of life. Now I have no idea what it is like to walk through this life as a person of color but I am completely empathetic to the fact that I do not know and can only try to be as supportive and helpful as I possibly can to people of color. I have seen the devastating effects of racism of someone who is Indian being asked what tribe they are from and their response being "dot not feather" (you idiot mumbled under their breath.) I have seen black students and faculty be racially profiled in the town where I went to college. Of course I do not have a first-hand account-I can never know what it is like to be read as a person of color-to walk through life having people judge me as inferior based on the color of my skin, I don't know what it is like to not have my narrative in the normative forms of media that others who are white are bombarded with on a daily basis. But I don't have to be a person of color to be accountable for my actions, to be empathetic, or to see my privilege, to see my dominance, and the power I have in situations simply because I am white.

While I can never connect on this level I have provided a sense of homeplace for people of color because people of color's situations are not homogenous and not all people of color only feel at home with other people of color. Specifically my ex-girlfriend who is multi-racial was raised in whiteness and feels at home with white people. Although she does share a bond with people of color sometimes it is not always the case. I do not want to be presumptuous but I do know that many times she came to me and not only because we were partners but because we were friends and I was supposedly a person who "got it" that she was able to feel most at home with me. Of course as a queer person I do understand being othered to an extent although completely different but connected. Oppressions are connected, the manifestations of oppressions and inequality are not the same. Although my queerness does not exempt me from my participation in the domination of whiteness I am able to connect through otherness often with people of color.

My largest and most interesting thing that happened was that during class we were introducing ourselves and against my better judgement I came out as queer/lesbian whatever. But we also were discussing the articles and the focused on race, I was trying to be helpful in discussing issues of race since everyone in my group that is an undergrad is a whitey whiterson. They apprently could not connect to the article because they had never had to resist anything and then relayed that this was the case because they were fortunate. As though by their good luck they were born white and hetero and middle class and they had never experienced discrimination based on their female-ness. WTF?!?! They have never resisted and they can't connect and thus understand because they see themselves as so different. So to give an example of homeplace I talked about the Apartment which, I have written about a few times in this Blog. I discussed facing oppressiona nd discrimination based on sexual orientation but even more so for those who do not conform to normative modes of gender presentation. This they could completely understand. It made complete sense. Again..>WTF?!! Now I know this is not performative and Bernadette would chastise me for not being very compassionate to the students in the class but I couldn't believe it. No one else in the group is openly queer and most openly identify as heterosexual so how can there be understanding in relation to queerness and no relation to understanding the same principal but for the concept of race.

I have to think it is somehow fashionable to have gay friends but the stigmas for people of color run so deeply that people do not feel they can find comonality in any way. And maybe it is the histories of both of these groups of people and the guilt (King) people feel for the enslavement and genocide of people of color. And while the gays are discriminated against it is not in the form of making gays slaves or servants. And the truth is that most gay people especially gay men have/make more money then people of color allowing them to blend into mainstream society in the way that a person of color cannot. i don't know but I am so astounded that I could barely speak and knew that I just needed to write.

I know that I need my goal to be to reach people pedagogically to allow for personal experiences and ways of knowing enter the conversation but I have a hard time just letting the conversation flow if no one is willing to think critically about issues. And I shouldn't say no one because the Afghani grad student I know is thinking critically but as she told me after class, "Thank you for saying what you say and the comments you make. Otherwise I am always come off as the angry brown woman and since I am usually the only one in the room I am the only one advocating for this position. So thank you." So she doesn't always speak, which I understand but want to change because her voice needs to be there telling her narrative. Without it the group will truly miss out because it is a voice often shunned and degraded. I am hoping to do my part but I find myself really just searching for more. I know that I have a chance to reach some people in this class but in other ways I just want to be like really-this is my responsibility? but I know that as a member of the dominant and oppressive group that "gets it" it is indeed my responsibility and unfortunately because of my privilege maybe someone will listen to me. Argh...

Performance of Identity and Consumerism

http://liminalities.net/4-1/16thstreet.htm

check it out, it is my qualitative methods professor and one of the doctoral students in my program at DU and it is all about downtown Denver. Is a very interesting read on consumerism culture and identity as performed on the 16th St. Mall.

Shout out to them!

Personal Narrative as Political Praxis...

Dear Performance Studies,

This might be a silly way to start out my concluding remarks about my Performance Ethnography class, however, after many attempts at trying to write about it, this is the only way that makes sense in my brain, my hands, my heart. First of all I would like to thank you. You have done a lot for me in a short amount of time. I'm not exactly sure what I would have done without you, especially in the field of Human Communication Studies.

But I must regress because I feel like you need a little background, a little personal narrative, something that can maybe help you understand where I have been and where I am going, and how I need you to be in my life in order to do the kind of work I want to do. Langellier's () idea of using personal narrative as political praxis to illustrate that personal stories matter in terms of self-definition especially juxtaposed with what Corey () terms the master narrative that conveys ideology of the dominant discourse. Corey tells us that these stories need to be told in order to empower the teller, but also in order to evoke something in the reader or listener and possibly even implicate them into the story. This calls writers/tellers, and listeners/hearers to be accountable for their participation in perpetuating ideologies of domination and asks them to disrupt these normative ideas in some way. This is my story that needs to be told about why I need performance studies in my life in order for me to do the kind of work I want to do.

When I first started the Human Communication program at DU I was extremely nervous. I didn't know how or where I would fit into the space. My background was always in cultural studies and specifically in women's and gender studies and I didn't know if there was room for a person with such progressive and at times radical politics in a discipline like communication studies. During the opening orientation process I was excited to see students interested in queer theory and interesting cultural communication topics, some of the professors seemed to be doing interesting and valuable work but I just didn't know how I would transition.

I'm not a huge fan of "women's studies" in the way it is normally conceived as it tends to place gender and woman at the center of a matrix or the top of an ill-conceived hierarchy as though that is the most important part of a person's identity. I found this to be problematic because I don't feel that gender above race, class, gender or sexuality is more important to understanding one's experiences in the world. I instead believe all identities inform other aspects of identities although they do not always hold the same weight at every moment in someone's life. I believe in a process of intersectional analysis and find that this is most helpful when trying to understand someone's experiences.

I was also resentful of women's studies especially at the graduate level because all of the great things I had learned about activism and giving voice to the voiceless, consciousness raising, and queering were all left behind at the door to the academy I was becoming a part of. Instead everything was replaced with theory especially that of dead white guys. Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, "the great theorists of the world." I was confused what these guys were saying and why I needed to know it in terms of feminist theory-it just wasn't what I expected. I see now that this did prepare me and provide me with some background theory knowledge that is helpful and useful and if nothing else helpful in that it taught me to "learn to read [theory] better" But I was distraught that all of my passion and dedication to justice and liberation was being eaten away at by theory, and that I was beginning to lose my sense of purpose.

When I first began my course work in communication studies which was not so long ago, I began to see that I was in a minority of people who considered themselves to be feminists, and who had actually read works by feminist and queer scholars. This is not so much a judgment on the other students in my class as much as it is an observation of the differences in our interests and educational backgrounds. I also think I may be the only actual gay person who came in with this specific class, at least I am the only one who has ever talked about it. Instead I am generally in contact with people who are married and have children, or folks with heterosexual boyfriends and girlfriends. I felt sort of alone. Not that it was better where I was before, as I have come to realize that just because people are feminists does not mean they have the same common goals, interests, or personalities. They are just as different as any other group of people. It had been awhile since I had found a place where I felt like I fit.

I was also going through one of the most hellacious times of my life because my female partner of three years and I were going through what can only be described as a divorce. She and I were no longer just girlfriends but we were intimately a part of each other's lives and she had become like a part of my family. I know people have gone through divorces in our cohort, but when societally your love is not really recognized as significant in the first place, it is hard to explain to people what you are going through when significant queer relationships end. I wrote one of my Qualitative Methods One papers about this trying time in my life and my inability to focus on anything else. While I received a certain amount of sympathy I definitely got the impression that I should not write about this again, so I didn't.

I was supposed to write autoethnographic sections about my experience at the preschool, my joys, humors, and frustrations-that is what would be really interesting. But I was frustrated because no one at work knew what I was going through, so I suffered through it alone. The kids became somewhat my release, their unconditional love giving me the strength to keep going, to keep coming into work everyday. There shiny, smily, happy faces made me feel joy I wasn't feeling from many other places and I felt in debt to them for giving me something to do everyday to forget about the pain I was going through. Children respond much better to happiness and joy, than saddness and depression. These were my emotions in the site, not that I was really shocked by the fact that the boys didn't want to eat off a pink and purple place mat. When I would share my progress reports in class about my site I often had to fend off tears and having to excuse and collect myself.

I was also going through a major life shift. I had moved back home after being away for five years because my great-grandmother who had raised me had become extremely ill. I thought I would be coming home to attend her funeral, but the few times I had made the journey from the Midwest home, she never died. I would enter her hospital room and immediately burst out into tears. This was my great grandmother but in many ways she was my mother or at least a mother. She looked so small and frail lying in this medical bed with the adjustable head and foot. My mother who was also raised by my great grandmother began massaging her muscles with a strong menthol scented lotion because of her constant pain. We wanted to get her blood flowing through her body and so we rubbed. In my mind I remembered learning about healing touch in an embodiment movement class from college, I imagine planets circulating around each other and her organs become a solar system that is just a bit stagnant. Her body is not able to go through it's normal rotation on its own any longer, we are there to help with the flow. The next day the hospital found she was ok to go home, and I have always thought it was because of the work of my mother and myself that saved her that time. Although she continues to have issues with her inner ear and often becomes dizzy and in turn has fallen, her heart and lungs continue to be strong. They continue to pump and move involuntarily, despite the fact that she often talks about wanting to die.

Moving home meant moving to the mountains in order to save money by living with my parents. My great-grandmother also lives with us as does my thirteen year old adopted Latina sister. My mother also takes care of my brother's children between three and five days/nights per week. In any given time we have 8 people in our house ranging from one to 93 years old with all ages in between. We are far from a typical nuclear family structure and we are most definitely dysfunctional but I began to settle into living in a new place, settle into my new job. I felt myself getting healthier and stronger and falling in love with living so close to a natural space. I had been so far removed from the land for so long, being next to a clear flowing river had the tendency to lift my spirits. Needless to say my living situation also worked makes it challenging for me to be connected to the place where I am trying to achieve scholastically. I do not have the same stake in the University that others have or that I might wish to have some day. When I would drive down the mountain canyon for class I rarely felt connected to a lot of the material I was reading let alone the people I was in classes with. I wanted to write about my life, my family, my new friends I was making, mountain culture, and bluegrass but I didn't feel that there was room for my stories in "True" scholarly work.

People in my cohort, critical scholars doing work on performance and performativity, race, class, gender and sexuality told me to wait it out that it would get better that I would take classes more oriented toward culture and that I would feel more satisfied. When I started my second quarter classes and had Performance Ethnography, within the first couple of days reading Conquergood I realized that there was something different in this idea of performance studies. It seemed to incorporate feminism, queer theory, personal narrative, commitment to self and other, all adding to the emphasis on social justice work created by performing this type of scholarship.

I fianlly found a place where it was ok to be personal, to talk about my narratives and my life. This class gave me the freedom to explore my own connections to dominant ideologies and my own implication in them. The journal especially gave me a chance to not only make the theoretical connections with my life stories but also gave me the chance to write my own stories through autobiographical performative writing, which Gingrich-Philbrook believes has always connected private life to political sectors. I was finally able to engage in dialog with myself, to really reflect on my own otherness and yet be reflexive in this thought process that I am not always other, but that I am privileged in certain situations and marginalized in others and often times both simultaneously. As Conquergood (1985) writes, "Dialogical performance is a way of having intimate conversations with other people and cultures. Instead of speaking about them, one speaks to and with them…"(178). I felt like this class helped me to know myself better so that I can engage in dialogic performances with others and be more reflexive and accountable.

Although we read no queer female performance scholars' work I felt myself able to connect with those people who wrote about the differences they experience on a daily basis. Fox, Alexander, Calafell, Cory, all used personal experiences with racism, homophobia/heterosexism, classism, and sexism to inform their work and I felt connected to their work because of the dialog around difference created and performed in their pieces. I also feel that queer female voices are needed in this field of study and I look forward to hopefully making some sort of contribution to this type of scholarship by adding my voice to the body of literature in performance studies. In many ways I cannot see myself doing any other sort of work because I don't think I could do the kind of work I want to do in talking about domination, oppression, marginalization, and social justice without engaging in work that has a history of being committed to talking about these things. I feel that this is the only way I can be sane and still do scholarly work and so I am excited to continue learning and growing in this line of inquiry.

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.