Ideas about Ideas and the Original Rohrschach (again)

[kiya]

A bunch of threads of stuff are conspiring to make me ponder again. Funny how threads in various places wind up talking about the same sorts of things. And some of this is why I think I was pointing at something political in rasfc yesterday, not that it seems to have helped. Also, very lengthy and not entirely linear babble.

A quote from the Principia:

DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.

Reality is a funny old thing.

One of the arguments I've been participating in lately is one about gender. Which I agree is an idea about sex. Male an idea about sex, female an idea about sex -- but there are loads of other ideas about it too, including some that are "about sex" in a way that gets parsed really oddly if certain reality grids are in play. (Watch "butch" and "femme" in a situation where "male" and "female" are supposed to be the only ones that count sometime. Except if you're already intimately familiar with this problem, in which case take five and go do something sane instead.)

I think a lot of interesting social foo gets dredged up when the fact that the ideas that are out there about sex don't actually mesh terribly well with the facts on the ground. And I'm setting aside the cases that most people recognise as complicated -- transfolk, intersexed people, and the like -- even setting aside the distinctly genderqueer. What is The Idea about 'female' that's out there?

Which brings me to my joke when dealing with people who are banging the Children Need One Male Parent And One Female Parent In The Household So They Have Appropriate Gender Roles drum -- the one about how there are career women and SAHMs and a variety of other roles that the children will need to be familiar with in order to deal with adult society, so clearly, by that logic, the kid needs one mother of each type. Same with fathers, though my perception of the available social patterns for men is a lot muddier (partly because I'm not one so I don't see them as clearly and partly because I think it is genuinely muddier). Each social category, gender role, whatever you want to call it.

They're all ideas about sex.

And they're ideas about identity.

Identity is loads of fun to play with, especially if you've got one that squishes when poked. I know that when Misty is front, I perceive myself as distinctly more female. My fluidity of gender doesn't stretch as far as some people's, but I recognise it as something noticeably present. leafshimmer perceives me as having a fair amount of male energy, and that's fair too -- and in some circumstances, that's the thing that I'm wanting to bring out and deal with. And one of the things that I'm doing with the Feri work at the moment is trying to find a place where I can perceive myself as androgynous. (Which is complicated, because of my deeply blurry sense of what people -- including myself -- mean with their ideas of male and female in the first place.)

I see multiplicity as also being an idea about identity -- well, a whole bunch of ideas about identity, honestly, since there are so many different possible ideas there. For a long time I had an idea of myself as a single distinct being, and it caused me problems, because that grid didn't manage to capture much that was useful. Realigning to hydra-mode was a better idea, because it let me see sets of things as being in relation to each other and thus being able to wiggle them more effectively.

I got awfully amused at the suggestion that the psychiatric community's current debates over whether multiplicity exists meant something in any sort of practical sense. It's an idea; one can argue about whether ideas really exist in some genuine sense or not if one wants, some days we get off on that kind of thing, but it doesn't matter: it's an effective grid for dealing with some sorts of things. Might not be useful to most people, but most ideas aren't really much use to most people, and that's jes' fine.

I don't have much investment in other people's ideas about their identities in general. (I may have investment in specific, but that's another matter.) I get irritable when people dismiss certain categories of idea as axiomatically silly or false, though, which is one of the reasons I try to avoid getting into the Perpetual Floating Otherkin Flamewar.

I come from a position where I can't see how well-grounded other people's ideas about their identity are in reality. I'm not living in those skulls, with that weight of perception; I can't make the quality of judgement that I can make about the ideas I have about my own nature. I can take their words for it, or I can try to wodge them into my grid when they don't fit, or I can do something in the middle. My ideal case is figuring out what those ideas are doing for others -- what beauty, usefulness, pleasantness they find in that grid, to go back to the Principia. Sometimes this doesn't work very well.

But here's where the political part of it comes in -- the concept that the ideas about identity, in whatever form -- ideas about sex and ideas about sexuality are the most loudly controversial ones I see these days, but there are others -- are taken from a set selection, are easily enumerated, are all known -- this is a funky one. I go back to Horatio's philosophy and the world not only being queerer than I imagine, but queerer than I can imagine -- and people are very good at ideas. Not all of them are good for much, those ideas, but people will keep coming up with them.

And ideas about themselves are going to be some of the touchiest and most important of them. "Who am I?" is the sort of thing that provides grist for a lot of mindmills. "I am" is one of those potent declarations of selfness. "I am okay" is one of the declarations that gets us freaks and deviants out rattling doors and making changes.

This brings grids that might otherwise carry on blissfully unaware of their incompatibilities into direct conflict. And it makes "I am" into a poltical act, when what I am is something that needs to elbow out space to exist. (I consider this politicalisation a problem, which tends to mean that I elbow real hard in the hope that it'll stop.)

I think ideas about female have been a battleground for a while. (Which is increasingly meta, ideas about a particular idea about sex.) But the idea of femaleness that includes certain clothes, certain social roles, certain behaviours, certain places in heirarchy got questioned, and fractured into a plethora of ideas about femaleness, some of which were prescriptive and others not. Ideas about maleness strike me as being more of an incoherent blob than an explosion of sharp shards at the moment, but again I wonder how much of that is the personal importance of the question. And then there's the Other category, as always, and I'm reminded of the bit of elisem's elf-identified bisexual speech where her sister said, "But you're not a wo-" and they went into what that idea meant.

So there's this political thing: are other ideas than 'male' and 'female' (as generally defined by genitalia, with some exceptions made for medical cases, and it's a coinflip whether transfolk count as medical cases in these arguments) real ideas about sex? (For values of 'real' that are deeply nebulous.) And I'm reminded of rosefox writing about an other/decline to state checkbox for a survey card a while back. Is same-sex or other than two-exclusive a real idea about marriage? What are the acceptable ideas about human? (There's a fraught one, and also one that gets into a lot of sci-fi writing.) And there are people trying to have their I Am out there, and other people who think that that I Am is a sign of delusion, or drama-queenage, or attack on all that is good, or just don't see what that I Am has to do with anything real or significant. When the ideas about what things are are in flux, there's politics all over everything.

Which means someone should probably get a mop.

Comments

[shaddragon.livejournal.com]

As usual, you say things that make even my everythingqueer head hurt. And as usual, I appreciate it. ;) (Doesn't hurt that it's a little along the lines of some stuff I've been chewing on lately, either.)

[ailbhe]

I find this sort of thing fascinating. I don't really understand the issues, I'm *certain*, but I find it interesting.

I am comfortable with the term "woman" because I take it to mean "post-puberty with female plumbing" and not refer to my *self* at all, only my body. Therefore everything I do or say is womanly or feminine because it's me saying it and I have female plumbing.

When I say "I take it" I mean that that is what it has always meant to me. I never felt that anything I wanted to do was at odds with labelling myself as a woman because of it. I had trouble with "girl" and "feminist" and "mother" and similar things, but I don't seem to have very strong behavioural links to male / female or man / woman - they don't seem to imply much about behaviour to me.

[kiya]

I think I'm fairly close to you on this one in a lot of ways; I can't actually remember how much issue I had with 'girl' when it was relevant, though, but I believe I remember we had the exact same problemset with 'feminist' and I know 'mother' is a deep and confounding bucketful of pointy objects for me even without getting there yet.

I have found that some people's ideas about my sex are annoying, but mostly I ignore them.

On Woman

[ailbhe]

Girl wasn't a problem for me until I hit adulthood - not 18, but when I was living in my own flat and earning my own money, which was 17. Then it became a problem, because it non longer meant *only* "young woman".

Feminist - yes. Well. Hm. I remember a postcard saying "So, you feminists want to be equal to men, yes?" "Actually, we were hoping for something better." Choice. Hrmph.

Mother I'm working on. I think it's partially a role description, which is why since I got sick Rob has won Mother of the Year award. I need to think about it more.

My father in law took a long time to figure out that I do more DIY than Rob does. He's getting the idea now. Breastfeeding and powertools, white wedding dresses and flatpack furniture.

From Balsamic Dragon

[(Anonymous)]

This was a really interesting post. I have a question for you, as this is something I've been doing a lot of thinking on as well: to what extent is this statement true: "male and female are ideas about bearing and raising children" Again, not limited to that area, but how signficant is the idea of bearing and raising children to gender?

I tried to have a conversation with iresprite about this, in which my ideas were totally mushy and confusing, but the basic principal is this: IF a person decides to have a child and IF they decide to do it the old-fashioned way (pretty big IFs) their gender becomes pretty important to how they think about it. Do they perceive bearing children as centered around one important action, followed by protection and support of another person? Or do they perceive it as a long, growing process in which physical, emotional and social sacrifices are made, culminating in a traumatic, but joyous event? Perhaps maleness includes the ability to stand back from what has been created, to lose a connection with it in the hopes that one will find it again later. While femaleness includes an ability of patience and sacrifice, working towards the creation every day in small ways.

Anyway, food for thought. Not sure if I like the idea yet, but it is percolating.

Re: From Balsamic Dragon

[kiya]

It doesn't make any sense to me; that doesn't mean it mightn't make sense to other people, though.

Those are questions about biological sex in one of those situations where it actually turns out to be relevant; they're not much questions about gender to me.

[redbird]

At the risk of obviousness, a lot of the problem isn't with "I am thus-and-such," it's with "you are thus-and-such"--with people who will insist that someone else must be X, and fit their values of X. As ailbhe said, in the basic physical sense I have no problem identifying as female--the body is here, complete with menstrual blood even as I type. That doesn't necessarily map onto someone else's ideas of what a woman "is"/should be.

[thastygliax.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it just occurred to me that your strong feelings about gender and semantics must be connected at a very fundamental level. You are keenly aware that definitions are arbitary at best, but most people don't seem to understand that, and their ignorance (and its consequences) constantly frustrates the hells out of you.

No wonder you find Khemetic ideas about Names so fascinating. Reality as word play. ;-)

[kiya]

Indeed.

The universe makes much more sense if one thinks of it as a cross between a complicated mathematical formula and a pun in the mind of Thoth. ;)

[queenofhalves]

Which brings me to my joke when dealing with people who are banging the Children Need One Male Parent And One Female Parent In The Household So They Have Appropriate Gender Roles drum -- the one about how there are career women and SAHMs and a variety of other roles that the children will need to be familiar with in order to deal with adult society, so clearly, by that logic, the kid needs one mother of each type.

is it really a joke? i mean, obviously, you can't have half a dozen primary caretakers for each kid, but i think it would be a really good thing to raise children in a multi-adult household, or in some kind of cooperative living situation, where all of the adults took at least a minor role in raising children, and children chose mentors for periods of time. i know i could have used a wider variety of role models when i was a kid -- i might have learned some ways of being female that would have suited me a lot sooner, and skipped my adolescent fear of being stuck home pregnant with the women while the men went out and Did Things.

[kiya]

It is and it isn't.

Personally, I think the "nuclear family" is completely bugfuck insane (when I'm feeling generous and forgiving about it), but setting that aside for the nonce:

The joke, such as it is, comes of poking at a blind spot. If Children Need These Role Models In The House, then clearly they need as many role models as they might potentially adopt roles; if, on the other hand, they are capable of taking as models other adults they know -- neighbours, teachers, relatives, and so on, then the idea that the modelling needs to be in the immediate family clearly doesn't hold.

Nucular Fambly

[ailbhe]

My nuclear family isn't all that bugfuck and insane. It helps that we have... ahh... um. A support group of people with babies the same age as ours, met at antenatal classes. I see. Yes. Well. Never mind.