Eloquent Protest

NOTE: This post was the origin of Eloquent_Protest, so I'm including it here for, as mentioned last post, for historicity's sake. Slightly edited to make more sense in this context.

I was scrolling through my old lj entries when I came across this post from May 2005:

On forming an understanding of human sexuality, part something-or-other.

The notion of "coming out" has never sat well with me, because I feel that it forces the queer person to say "look at me, I'm different from you." In no way does it undermine the basic societal assumption...

It's one of those posts I know I put a lot of thought into at the time, but I'd pretty much forgotten about it. Relatedly, I've lately been reading The Transgender Studies Reader. When I mentioned this to tonight, she asked me the terribly complicated question, "So what's your position on gender?" I fumbled for a few moments and then just started talking, and realized something else.

I like talking about gender theory and queerness and I want to do it more. Even in the twenty two months since I created [livejournal name deleted] my thoughts on my own gender identity and sexuality have changed, and my philosophical thoughts on the subject are ever evolving.. Not everybody will want to participate in this, however, so I am hereby [starting a gender theory blog]. The post above is probably a good measure of what these posts will be like, though I can't guarantee they'll always be that, er, eloquent or planned. I suspect the first one will be a reorganizing of the gchat conversation I'm currently having with [my girlfriend]. It perhaps goes without saying that I want to open this up as a conversation, because I am greedy when it comes to knowledge and wisdom and Ways Of Looking At Things and I want to have it ALL.

Excerpts:

*I very strongly desire to be viewed first as a Person and only secondarily as a Female person and I try to take other people in that way as well; not because I reject my womanness but because I reject the need for that identifier in situations that have nothing to do with procreation.

*I also think that the social construction of Man as strong-competitive-violent is as detrimental to the psyche of boys as is the construction of Woman as soft-nurturer-victim to girls.

So. Welcome to my brain.