eng328 project ellefson
DESCRIPTION
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resist the
fightNORMAL
BINARYthe
Language and Gender ENG 328 Dr. Mia Kuha
This project examines:
Queer Culture
LanguageLabels
Identity Discourse
Blogs
Presentation
created byCHERI ELLEFSON
Language and Gender ENG 328 Dr. Mia Kuha
“How does language play a role in constructing gender through blogs created and maintained by queer-identified individuals and/or by individuals who create queer-identity content?”
Language and Gender ENG 328 Dr. Mia Kuha
More specifically….This project examines the language utilized in a selection of blogs with queer identity content to ascertain how queer-identified individuals create a counter queer identity and/or counter queer culture to mainstream heteronormative culture.
Community of Practice
Blog Selection Criteria: Up-to-date Discourse of queer identity, labels,
representation Connecting themes Created and maintained by individual
blogger
Community of Practice
Blogs: idreamofdapper.com exsouthernbelle.tumblr.com genderqueerfashionista.tumblr.com genderqueerconfessions.tumblr.com
But first, a few definitions…
What is QUEER?
Queer according to…
Queer Theory, An Introduction, Annamarie Jagose
“…part of its political efficacy depends on its resistance to definition.”
“Normalizing queer would be, after all, its sad finish.” (Judith Butler)
Ultimately, to define ‘queer’ is to normalize it, and queer is a
resistance to what is normal/normative/heteronorm
ative.
Queer according to…
genderqueerconfessions.tumblr.com (FAQ Page)
“How do I know if I’m queer?”
You don’t. There isn’t a queer test or anything, it’s just how we feel in our hears and minds and bodies. If you feel you genderqueer, then you are. Simple as that.
Queer according to…
genderqueerconfessions.tumblr.com (FAQ Page)
“What is ‘genderqueer’?”
Genderqueer is anything that falls outside the gender binary. Binary= male/female. Nonbinary is the spectrum between those two.
Why do we need “queer” in our vocabulary at all?
“…the impoverished vocabulary of straight culture
tells us that that people should either be husbands or wives or
(nonsexual) friends.”
The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner
Why do we need “queer” in our vocabulary at all?
“…even an expanded catalog of identities can remain blind to the ways people suffer…
from gender norms…”
The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner
How is “queer” used today?
“Once the term ‘queer’ was, at best, slang for homosexual, at worst, a term of
homophobic abuse. In recent years ‘queer’ has come to be used differently,
sometimes as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginalized
sexual self-identifications.”
- Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction
But first, a few definitions…
What is HETERONORMATVITY?
Heteronormativity according to…Queer Theory, An Introduction, Annamarie Jagose
“(Heteronormativity) refers to a system in which heterosexual identities, relationships, and practices are seen as the norm against which all sexuality is judged.”
Why analyze blogs?
Why blogs?
The Digital Queer, Julie Rak
“Activity of blogging could be a potential site for thinking about queer identity.”
blog ideology: unrestricted expression
The Digital Queer, Julie Rak
“Freedom of expression is important, particularly when it occurs outside of institutional attempts to control the flow of information.”
blog ideology: sexual identity
The Digital Queer, Julie Rak
“Sexuality as an identity therefore has had the need for confessions at its core, which based claims of sexuality on repeating and narrating experiences that “prove” what one’s real identity is.”
blog ideology: why blogging is important
The Digital Queer, Julie Rak
“…blogs set the stage for creating multiple, shifting identities.”
bloggers as part of a community of practice
The Digital Queer, Julie Rak
“Bloggers are citizens in a community…by representing themselves and their ideas as private people in a public setting.”
“Queer” Discourse
invisible discourse
New developments in language and gender research, Coates, J.
“Dominant discourses such as these appear ‘natural’; they are powerful precisely because they are able to make invisible the fact that they are just one among many discourses.”
invisible discourse
Blogs that include ‘queer’ discourse help make the invisible (invisible because they are not heterosexual, and therefore not dominant) visible. However, these blogs do not represent or generalize ALL queer-identified individuals. At least 3 of the 4 blog writers identify as white, college-educated, and in their 20s and 30s.
blog: idreamofdapper.com
idreamofdapper.com
In addition to the “about” section of the blog, this writer (and all blog authors in this project) also identify their blog content as ‘queer’ through tags
#menswear inspired #women in ties #girls in ties #queer fashion #dapper #dapper wear #wiwt (What I Wore Today)
“What do we do with particular women…who don’t speak as
they ‘ought to’?”
Sexuality as Identity: Gay and lesbian language, p. 93
idreamofdapper.com
I Dream of Dapper (IDoD) was created to extinguish the idea of “menswear” or “womenswear” as an acceptable label for fashion styles.
idreamofdapper.com: identity as female/woman
“As a cis-gender female I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve found myself looking through pages of a “womenswear” blog searching for a woman I can identify with. This idea of womenswear as skirts, dresses, flowing blouses, and heels does not encapsulate the self-expression of all women.”
idreamofdapper.com
“If you identify with this movement know this, you are not alone and in time we will prove this binary dysfunctional.”
“Clothing does not make an individual more of a man; it does not make them less of woman.”
idreamofdapper.com analysis
‘Womenswear’ and ‘menswear’ clothing, or clothing distinctly made for women and clothing distinctly made for men exaggerates the differences between men and women, and keeps their binary and traditional gender roles as feminine and masculine intact.
Clothing can work to erase or at least lessen perceived differences between men and women.
idreamofdapper.com analysis
Constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing gender
“Gender is the very process of creating a dichotomy by effacing similarity and elaborating on difference.”
idreamofdapper is a representation of queer fashion in that it does not “fit” neatly into either binary category of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman”
exsouthernbelle.tumblr.com
exsouthernbelle.tumblr.com: labels
some of these things describe me: activist, explorer, boigrrl, trans*, queer, activist, leftist, abolitionist
Is “boigrrrl” ‘gay’ language? Could “boigrrrl” be deployed by non-queer individuals? Is this language symbolically available to anyone?
exsouthernbelle.tumblr.com: labels II
this tumblr/blog is my attempt to create an assemblage of disparate parts of my lived experience: feminist and ex-southern belle identities, fashion and queerness, queer theory and politics/law. i think that none of these things are disparate, but they certainly appear so.
exsouthernbelle.tumblr.com tags
#PERSONAL STYLE#MESNWEAR INSPIRED #QUEER STYLE #QUEER FASHION#GQ FASHION#MASCULINE OF CENTER #BUTCH STYLE #BUTCH FASHION #TRANS*MASCULINE
genderqueerfashionista.tumblr.com
labels as a queer identity
musings on fashion and identity from a [FAAB, white, able-bodied] genderqueer lady-gent sometimes tomboy, sometimes prettyboi, sometimes femme, often dapper person. i identify as a female-bodied genderqueer person and I use she/hers/her pronouns.
solidarity
i also hope that GQF will be a way for me to connect with like-minded people of all gender expressions and identity and serve as a way to support one another and share resources and skills
“gender knows no boundaries”; ‘queer’ meanings
fashionista might be associated with the superfemme women of our society (think: the devil wears prada, confessions of a shopaholic, cher from clueless) but as we know, a love affair with fashion knows no gender boundaries. i have only seen my love of dressing fabulously grow as i have come out and am fully able to flaunt my gender fabulosity. linguistically, (assuming it were a multilingual word), “fashionista” would be a gender neutral term since “-ista” in Spanish is a gender neutral suffix- meaning “person who does the preceding verb.” gender neutral person who does fashion? soy yo!
genderqueerconfessions.tumblr.com
confessions: do I look queer?
I feel like it’s harder to accept my identity as genderqueer when I have no idea how to present myself. Sometimes I warm up to the idea that being genderqueer has no ‘look’ to it, but then I feel like I’m appropriating people who ‘present more genderqueer’ than I do. It’s making me really confused and it makes it harder to accept my identity, I don’t know what to do.
i often feel like no matter how i present myself, i always seem to look cisfemale…
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confessions: do I look queer?
I hate how I look. But then there are days when I love my female curves and I feel horrible because then I feel like I’m just making up my dysphoria. I want to cut my hair and when I get older maybe get top surgery. But if I do, then what will happen on the days I feel like a girl?
I think I give up on trying to appear androgynous. I’m always ridiculed by the people around me for doing so.. I don’t suit short hair and my face is too feminine to be androgynous. It hurts a lot to not present myself how I feel…I just wish I could be comfortable with myself and not care about what others think of me.
“
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“Instead there were ‘queer’ ways of using language –ways
that disrupted normative conventions about expectations
about who could talk about sexuality and how that talk
should be structured and disseminated.”
Sexuality as Identity: Gay and lesbian language, 98
identity through language: presentation
Presently, or in the fourth “phase” of gay and lesbian research, researchers study how lesbian identity is reflected through language (Sexuality as identity; Cameron). Though queer-identified individuals are part of the LGBTQ community, their identity, articulated through these confessions and other blogs, go beyond gay and lesbian. They grasp not only with “identity,” but how to present their identity to others and feel comfortable in their own bodies.
identity through language: presentation
In Constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing gender, authors Eckert and McConnell-Ginet note that by high school, it is assumed that everyone participates in the heterosexual market (27). Dress and body presentation, then, can be important markers that an individual is not participating in the heterosexual market, but is in fact set apart, or queer.
identity through language: labels
Queer individuals also grapple with “identity” through labels.
I thought having some words for my experience would help but it’s just getting more difficult. I feel I’m a “girl who wants to be a boy”, but I’m AMAB - a male transboy? This is the first definition I feel I could use, but thinking about it makes me confused.
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identity through language: labels
Queer individuals also grapple with “identity” through labels.
I hate all this gender stuff so much, it’s SO confusing and depressing, I just don’t know what to do with myself. It’s caused me SO much pain and heartbreak. A world without gender though, that would be my personal utopia. A place where I’m free from this sexist, homophobic/transphobic, judgmental, binary hell. I can only dream though.
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identity through language: labels
Queer individuals also grapple with “identity” through labels.
I honestly get really mad when people ask me for my gender. After all, why do they really need to know? How is knowing my gender going to affect them? Whenever someone wants to know what my gender is, I just think to myself… “Why do you need to know what my gender is? So you can pressure me to be more manly and call me a fag if I act feminine, if you find out I am male? Well guess what! I am genderqueer and I do NOT fit into your traditional “straight, masculine man” or “straight, feminine woman” category; and more importantly, I am me, and I want to be known for being me, not some gender/sexual orientation label.
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Sources
Warner, M. (1999). The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.
Annamarie Jagose. (1997). Queer Theory: An Introduction. NYU Press, NYC.
“Constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing gender.” 2003. Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet.
“Sexuality as identity: Gay and lesbian language.” 2003. Cameron, Deborah and Dan Kulick.
“The Digital Queer: Weblogs and Internet Identity.” “New developments in language and gender research.”
2004. Coates, J. pp.215-221;245