(no subject)

For at least the past two mornings, I've had dreams about being in an English class as a student, and taking a strange series of tests that measure vocabulary, grammar and usage. Parts of them I find fun and easy, but in general I'm disappointed with my take on my performance. Today, the instructor (who sometimes looked like my father, to whom I never talk) and another student were talking about aspects of the test, and I joined in, saying the vocab/usage was the only part I felt good about. The instructor looked at me strangely and said, 'You know you're the only one passing these tests, right?' I was incredulous, then embarassed, and said something about only coasting by on the merits of vocabulary. The other student might or might not have started to look at me like the "curve breaker"; I don't exactly remember.

my history with feminism

At the recommendation of several (srl, Bitch|Lab, and likely others), I've been reading Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, and it's very much my cup of tea (oolong, if your curious). It's a fast, honest historical and theoretical overview of post 1980s feminism in the US, leading no doubt to the eventual point that I'm pretty sure I already endorse (resisting the totalizing moves of feminism).

What's been particularly interesting is tracing my emotional reaction to a lot of the 80s feminism, which I had forgotten or suppressed. I went to college in the mid-late 80s, when a lot of this stuff was very current and in the air. At the time, to external eyes I only read as a geeky intellectual boy, and was the only "boy" in the Women's Studies Department at my university. During this time, I was also identifying as a transsexual (though there were cracks in the armor that I was trying to ignore). This was the period of Gayle Rubin and Janice Raymond, as well as the time that intellectual and academic rigor was derided as "masculinist", and thus suspect. So, I was intellectually trying to engage, while keeping my identity head down, and felt relatively powerless by virtue of adherence to "masculinist" criteria to refute these positions as they were poorly mimicked by lazy sorrority girls, bad instructors, and student activists. It was a pretty miserable time for me, and probably the beginning of my issues with activism (along with gay/lesbian issues, since "queer" didn't really exist in its current form back then). Reading Halley, I find myself getting physically tense and agitated as I encounter these ideas again, but there's something in her style that makes it possible to engage, and hopefully to get past this pointless aversion.

36

There are more versions of you than most people see; I know from experience that some of them are extraordinary. From my perspective, it often seems like the more popular ones are those which draw the least on you, and as a consequence demand less from others, and if it's so, that's a shame. You have a lot to offer, both to yourself and others; I worry that allowing others to define the terms of acceptable manifestation of self, you do everyone an injustice. I could be wrong, my perspective could be off by time and distance, and I honestly hope it is; I just want the you that wants to grow to be aable to do so.