Kentlynville

By all means - marry!

2009-04-30T13:28:00.002+10:00

This is the text of a presentation I gave at 'Politics in the Pub' at The Wickham on Tuesday April 28th, 2009.

Clearly our society has a fairly ambivalent view of marriage. Look at the words we use: ‘bonds’ of matrimony, holy ‘wedlock’, ‘tie the knot’ – sounds more like an invitation to a dungeon party than a life commitment to loving mutual support!

And what about all the jokes:

The Greek philosopher Socrates said: By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.

I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste.
The underlying hostility and just sheer misogyny in much of this so-called humour is hard to miss.

And then of course there’s the famous Groucho Marx quote:

Marriage is a great institution. But who wants to be institutionalised?

Well, lots of us in 21st century Australia, apparently. In 2001, the majority of the population over the age of 15 were married, almost 6% more than at the beginning of the 20th century. Australian marriage rates are higher than in most European and Scandinavian countries, though lower than the US and Muslim and Asian nations. Australians generally wait until after they marry to have children; in 2001 69% of children were born to married mothers. So getting married is alive and well in contemporary Australia.

However, pronounced cracks are appearing in the institution of marriage in this country. At the moment, about a third of Australian marriages end in divorce, and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 46% of all 1999 marriages will eventually end in divorce. More and more couples are living together without getting married first – in 2001 it was 12.4% of all Australian couples – and 72% of people now live with their partner before they marry. Yet while many heterosexual people are bypassing the institution altogether, and even more are leaving by the back door through separation and divorce, gay and lesbian people are hammering on the front door, demanding to be allowed in. I think we should pause first and consider whether it’s a social institution that will genuinely enhance our relationships and our families.

Marriage as we now understand it came into being to safeguard men’s property and inheritance rights. A man needed to know who his “legitimate” offspring were in order to make sure his property went to his descendants, so that his line would be perpetuated. Thus he needed to know that he had exclusive sexual access to his female mate. However, it was generally accepted that his fidelity would be less strictly enforced. Addressing the issue of the “double standard” has meant that monogamy is now expected from males as well as females. How realistic this expectation actually is remains open to debate! The main point, however, is that marriage has historically been about property and dynastic alliances, for the upper and subsequently the middle classes – working class people often couldn’t afford to marry, and ‘de facto’ unions were commonplace (which is why they used to be known as ‘common law’ marriages). The average Australian wedding today costs around $45,000, and once again marriage is becoming a privilege reserved to the propertied classes.

Feminist scholarship has been at pains to point out that heterosexual marriage as an institution favours men – married men enjoy better physical health and greater life expectancy, earn more on average, and suffer lower rates of depression, than single men, whereas single women have better physical and mental health, higher earnings, and greater longevity than married women. Statistics show that when a cohabiting heterosexual couple marry, the husband does less housework and the wife does more. Same couple, same home – but suddenly, different roles.

Marriage has been an oppressive institution for many women, but also for many men, a place of constraint, duty and obligation, of abandoned hopes and bitter disappointment. Yet we continue to turn to marriage as one of our highest ideals for relationship and human fulfilment, for mutual support and loving commitment. What continues to propel us there?
In Plato’s Symposium, the poet Aristophanes explains that in primal times people were globular spheres who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels; there were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the hermaphrodite, who was half man, half woman. They offended Zeus who chopped them in half. Ever since that time, the poet says, people say they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature; this is why we feel incomplete without a ‘soul mate’.
I think today, we both long for this ‘oneness’ with another human being, but at the same time we suspect it may not be possible, or perhaps even desirable – we don’t want to lose our unique identity, or give up the opportunity to grow and flourish as individual human beings. Perhaps the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray, has put this most eloquently.

“You who are not and will never be mine are and remain you, since I cannot grasp you, understand you, possess you. You escape every ensnarement, every submission to me, if I respect you, because you are transcendent to me. A gap remains between me and you, between you and me. I will never be capable of perceiving you completely, and not even of loving you, or of speaking to you completely. Perceiving you does not involve losing me or you; my perception must remain a path towards you, towards us, an us which is always disunited, distanced, always a “two” irreducible to one. We can each become, the one for the other, a bridge towards a becoming which is yours, mine, and ours. I can be a bridge for you, as you can be one for me. This bridge can never become the property of either. What captures my attention can teach me how to sustain your becoming, how to approach you, how to dialogue with you”.

Marriage is inimical to the process Irigaray describes. It fosters the illusion of security, of ownership, an assumption of intimacy and longevity unearned and taken for granted. The Judaeo-Christian tradition on which our laws and social institutions were founded promotes such a view. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians directs that the wife’s body belongs to her husband and the husband’s body belongs to his wife. It wasn’t until 1991 that the Australian High Court abolished a ruling that exempted any husband from being convicted of rape if his victim was his wife. “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife”, Genesis tells us, “and they will become one flesh”. But this one flesh was for all legal and practical purposes the flesh of the husband. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, upon marriage the husband and wife became one person under British law - the property of the wife was surrendered to her husband, and her legal identity ceased to exist.

Yes the law has changed, but I think this still illustrates the fundamental problem of marriage – that for it to work, one or both individual identities must be subsumed under the other’s identity, or some new joint identity. By its very nature it forecloses on personal growth, on taking individual responsibility for our flourishing as human beings. Too often one exploits the other, and the other becomes complicit in their own exploitation. Or both give up interests, dreams, possibilities for the sake of the relationship.

I would argue that marriage involves roles thousands of years old, roles in which we were raised, in which our parents were raised, in which almost everyone in our social networks were raised, roles that come with implicit expectations and assumptions that are often not even articulated. At least same-sex and poly partnerships offer the opportunity to interrogate and negotiate those roles; marriage threatens to lay the dead weight of tradition over the creative, complex and shifting ways we are learning to do intimacy and family.

We have a choice. We can go with the tired old traditions which no longer fit modern aspirations and lifestyles. We can settle for the same as everyone else, based on religious and legal principles that discriminate against us, exclude us, and even persecute us. Principles based on biological kinship and the protection of the interests of propertied white men. Or we can continue, as we have done up to this point, to show our society new ways to do intimate relationships, to do family. Relationships based on honesty and communication, the hard work of continuously negotiating and renegotiating our commitments to each other and to our children. Not the one-size-fits-all white shroud of a dying tradition, but the living, dynamic, risky, creative challenge of continually fashioning and refashioning the relationships that fit each one of us, in whatever combinations of individuals that we choose to have in our lives. Marriage is an illusion, a myth, truly a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. Let’s commit ourselves to continually designing and creating new garments that are reflexive and responsive to the changing seasons of our lives and the unpredictability and idiosyncrasies of our growth and development as human beings.

Washing Machine Liberation

2009-03-18T12:16:00.001+10:00

The washing machine has had a greater liberating role for women than the pill, the official Vatican daily newspaper said in an International Women’s Day commentary. “The washing machine and the emancipation of women: put in the powder, close the lid and relax”, said the headline in Osservatore Romano.

“In the 20th century, what contributed most to the emancipation of western women? The debate is still open. Some say it was the pill, others the liberalisation of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. Others go even further: the washing machine”, the article claimed, so that now there is “the image of the super woman, smiling, made-up and radiant among the appliances of her house”.

This reflection, prompted by International Women’s Day, on what has contributed most to the emancipation of women begs the question – emancipation from what?

Women's organisations and governments around the world observe International Women’s Day annually on 8 March by holding large-scale events that honour women's advancement and promote international efforts for women's rights and participation in social, political and economic processes. These advances include women’s access to formal education, including tertiary study, and thus access to paid work and the professions, including the right to keep working after marriage and having children. Political rights such as the right to vote and to run for elected office. Women’s economic rights, such as owning property, being able to get bank loans without a husband or father to be guarantor, to run their own businesses. Women’s rights over their own bodies, such as whether and who they will marry or partner with, whether and how many children they will bear, and very recently, the right not to be raped by their own husbands. The right to leave an abusive relationship. Simple rights like being able to move around in public on their own, to wear clothing of their own choosing, to play sports, join clubs, travel, read books, join or leave religious groups. In other words, fundamental human rights that most of us take for granted.

And the Roman Catholic church has actively opposed every step of this journey. Its theology of gender and human relationships revolves around the idea of women bearing children and caring for families in meek submission to their husbands; or else as servants of the church in religious orders. The Roman Catholic church has opposed education for women, female suffrage, women entering the paid labour market, and it still opposes divorce and all forms of contraception. Even its own female saints were usually vilified and oppressed during their lifetimes – Australia’s Mary MacKillop was excommunicated by her bishop who attempted to disband her order.

Which leaves the Roman Catholic Church with little to celebrate on International Women’s Day.

It opposes the pill, and abortion. It regards women working outside the home with disfavour, believing this results in women neglecting their families. The Vatican recently excommunicated the mother of a nine-year-old girl in Brazil who was pregnant with twins after being raped by her step-father, for authorizing an abortion. The doctors were also excommunicated. It still does not allow women priests. It opposes the use of condoms in Africa, condemning millions of women each year to HIV infection.

And so we are given this farcical picture of the “super woman, smiling, made-up and radiant among the appliances of her house”. It would be laughable if the Roman Catholic Church did not still wield so much power and influence over the lives of women around the world. It reveals a male-dominated hierarchy completely out of touch with women’s lives and the very real challenges they face in achieving fundamental social, economic and political rights. Western women in general, even members of the Church, have clearly come to disregard the church’s teachings on most of the issues that affect them, and have achieved a degree of emancipation despite its trenchant opposition. Women in developing nations where the church has influence unfortunately still face enormous difficulties from an institution that has an appalling track record on the emancipation of women. Where achieving justice for women is concerned, I would say the Roman Catholic Church is all washed up.

Clothes maketh the man? A dialogue with Woolf's "Orlando".

2008-08-29T18:06:00.003+10:00

Virginia Woolf (1928; 1995) Orlando: a biography. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Classics; pp. 92-93.
Virginia Woolf's close friend, Vita Sackville-West, was the model of the androgynous hero of Orlando. The deliberately fanciful story spans a period from the 16th to the 20th centuries and takes the hero, Orlando, from being a handsome boy of 16, through encounters with Elizabeth I to a love affair with a Muscovites Princess; from Ambassador Extraordinary to encounters, now as Lady Orlando, with Pope, Addison and Swift, and childbirth.

[Orlando] was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, being cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando, which was to be found even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made to his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.

This provokes me to wonder if the evolution of my gender identity would have even begun had I not gone to the podiatrist. Orthotics require particular shoes and well constructed joggers are of course the best. Wearing joggers every day profoundly changed my choice of clothes. Although I had mostly worn pants since becoming a lesbian, I now found myself wearing simpler clothes and less jewellery. After a while this became very comfortable; I especially liked not having to worry about what to wear, knowing it was most likely going to be jeans and a black T-shirt.

On those occasions when I did dress in a more feminine way, such as Joel's wedding and Zac's christening, not only were the clothes and makeup and jewellery uncomfortable, but I became resentful at all the compliments and fuss that was made of my appearance. 'This is how it works', I thought, 'this is what keeps us doing these absurd things and spending all this money, for the compliments and approval that women and men give you for doing femininity'.

That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual -- openness indeed was the soul of her nature -- something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which must result everyone has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effects it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.

I'm not sure here if Woolf is being ingenuous, or if she is playing with us. Orlando is based on Vita Sackville-West, who several times eloped with Violet Trefusis, and when they lived together Vita dressed as a male. Woolf herself was also sexually involved with Vita. Here within her experience was a woman who demonstrated the vacillation between the sexes that Woolf describes. So why does Woolf insist on the profundity of the difference between the sexes? Or is she playing with us, by stating the prevailing view, but demonstrating the complete opposite? And is there any significance in the fact that in the novel Orlando lives for a couple of centuries as a man before becoming a woman, and her process of becoming a woman takes place in the course of a week in which she lies in a kind of coma? Whereas Vita's transformations were comparatively frequent and temporary. Is this simply a literary convenience for the sake of the plot, or is she perhaps accusing Vita of being a gender dilettante?

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than 10 minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to travel downhill.

This is a lovely passage in the sense that it shows quite eloquently the social specificity of gender stereotypes, yet also how enduring they can be. The time and attention spent on clothes rings true to us today (I wonder if anyone has actually researched the comparison between men and women on the time spent dressing?) as does the male love of power and the tender-heartedness of women. However, I suspect contemporary women have equal capacities with men when it comes to drinking, gambling, and driving, and the figures are showing they are doing better than men in university and the gender gap in mathematics has all but disappeared. I know that Woolf herself was embittered that she was not given the same education as her brothers; I suspect that she is once again playing with gender stereotypes in order to expose their fundamental absurdity.

So what is she saying to us by means of Orlando? To me it seems her message is that the so-called 'profound' differences are largely artificial and perpetuated by social customs particularly focusing on dress. This seems to work in two ways; that when we take on gender stereotypical clothing we take on the stereotypes themselves, whether embodied, mental, or emotional. The other way is that our society demands that our attitudes and behaviours concord with our clothing, with our gender presentation. Perhaps then it is true that 'clothes maketh the man'.

Queer Intimacies

2008-04-20T08:37:00.003+10:00

I’ve just been reading Michael Warner’s “The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life”, and the following passage really struck me:

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way, intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly unchartered territory – whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the “fag hag” label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our parents or school or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends’ tricks and tricks’ bar friends and gal pals and companions “in the life”. Queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from straight people. Who among us would give them up?
Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room . . . You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends. (pp. 115-116).

I feel some kind of erotic charge with most of my female friends (gay or straight) that I just don’t feel with hardly any men (geez, do you think I might be a lesbian????). It doesn’t mean I’m going to jump their bones or anything, I think it’s just a sort of joyful arousal that simply makes me feel good. Plato and his mob certainly believed this to be an aspect of the relationships between men (of their class, I hasten to add), which had nothing to do with partnering and family, and ideally would lead them all on to the love of wisdom (philosophy), but they saw no need to deny the erotic in the process.

The challenge for me is in recognising this but then knowing what to do with it. I think often in the past it’s led me into relationships that were never going to work. But having said that, I have no regrets about any of them (even the ones that hurt) because I’ve learned and grown so much from all of them.

The other main problem is that I don’t know how to go from a place of greater to lesser intimacy. It simply feels so unsatisfactory to me, like I’m not fully present, I’m on my guard. Plus I can’t bear the thought of someone I’m still very attracted to with someone else, enjoying the intimacy that I crave. Clearly I have a lot of progress still to make as a human being!

Women need men like female sharks need - well, male sharks.

2007-06-22T10:15:00.000+10:00

"Birds do it, bees do it, and now there is evidence that female sharks are able to do it on their own -- without the contribution of male DNA. A recent report from a team of American and Irish researchers has concluded that the mysterious appearance in 2001 of an infant female bonnethead shark at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo in a tank that held only two adult female sharks was the result of parthenogenesis (Gr. virgin birth.) Parthenogenic reproduction takes place without fertilization by a male through the process of cell division, when the mother’s egg fuses with a degenerative cell called a polar body, producing a new individual.

What does this mean for lonely-heart sharks on a Saturday night, or for that matter, the evolution of the species? “Parthenogenesis appears to be a rare phenomenon in sharks, and it is unlikely to have an impact on the evolution of a particular lineage,” said Saint Joseph’s University Professor of Biology Eileen Grogan, Ph.D., a noted expert in shark evolution and research associate at both the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. “However, one might conceive that this mode of reproduction could have a significant impact on small populations because there is less genetic diversity in small, isolated populations.”

While parthenogenesis can ensure the short-term survival of the species, for the long term it is advantageous to keep male DNA in the mix. “The newborn shark derived from this phenomenon would have only half the genetic diversity of the sexually reproduced form because it is based entirely on the mother’s genome,” said Dr. Grogan. “In terms of evolution, it is preferable to have a greater diversity of genes, because that offspring is more likely to have ‘what it takes’ to survive.” "

Is it just me or is there a note of panic here, requiring the explicit justification of why we still need males? And is this the reason that while billions of dollars has been poured into IVF for heterosexuals, there has been next to no attention paid to parthenogenesis as a form of human reproduction? Just askin' . . . .

My Anzac Day Heroines

2007-04-25T10:31:00.000+10:00

Maybe they were drunk . . . maybe they were delinquents . . . maybe their choice of protest wasn’t the best way to ‘win hearts and minds’ . . . but maybe they’re the last feminists left in Australia with the guts to critique the new Aussie secular religion of Anzac Day.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/sydneysiders-turn-out-in-force/2007/04/25/1177180684770.html

Five young women, aged 15 to 17, allegedly vandalised Bathurst's Carillion War Memorial last night. They had painted slogans like "ANZAC murderers" and "Aussies don't fight" in letters a metre high, along with peace symbols.

I'm not applauding graffiti, or damage to public property, but I have to say I rejoiced to find someone was protesting against the monstrous obscenity of war as it is celebrated on Anzac Day, and even more that it was a group of young women.

Seems to me the feminist critique of Anzac Day, and war in general, has become muted to the point of silence. Even women commentators I respect, like Fran Kelly on Radio National, and Geraldine Doogue, all seem keen to hop on the Anzac Day bandwagon.

Lest We Forget - war inevitably involves the death, rape and enforced sexual slavery of WOMEN. And although they try to unearth a few nurses or WACS for each celebration, the fact remains that it is an overwhelmingly masculinist celebration of bogus male virtues like bravery, 'mateship' and self sacrifice, which makes it incredibly difficult for the thousands of men who have been irreparably damaged physically, mentally and emotionally by the horrors of war to admit and then find appropriate treatment for its impact on their lives.

It's no accident that the two main focii of modern Australian nationalism - Anzac Day and the various football codes - render women practically invisible, merely cheering on hegemonic masculinity from the sidelines. Little wonder that Aussie women remain second class citizens, the structural economic and political barriers to their full inclusion and participation in Australian society largely unrecognised and unaddressed.

So I salute those young women who refused to be marginalised and ignored, no matter how many RSL branch presidents they have reduced to tears, or how "inappropriate" their methods - at least they've raised their spray cans in protest, which is more than I've managed to do.

By all means - Marry!

2007-04-22T18:25:00.000+10:00

This was a piece I wrote for my son's wedding. I didn't end up giving it in this form, but I found it a very useful exercise, to look at my hostility to marriage, and to help me see social institutions, like marriage, as a lot more flexible than I had realised - a handy idea for a sociologist!

Clearly our society has a fairly ambivalent view of marriage. At the moment, about a third of Australian marriages end in divorce, and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 46% of all 1999 marriages will eventually end in divorce. Feminist scholarship has been at pains to point out that marriage as an institution favours men – married men enjoy better physical health and greater life expectancy, earn more on average, and suffer lower rates of depression, than single men, whereas single women have better physical and mental health, higher earnings, and greater longevity than married women. Even though women participate in the paid work force more than ever before, they are still doing most of the domestic labour. The 2001 HILDA survey revealed that partnered men estimated on average that they spent 25.5 hours per week on domestic and child care tasks, while partnered women estimated that they spent 44.4 hours per week on the same tasks. But it’s not only women who have a jaundiced view of marriage - you just need to look at some of the jokes about it:

The Greek philosopher Socrates said: By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met. Rodney Dangerfield.

I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.

I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste!

And then of course there’s the famous Groucho Marx quote:

Marriage is a great institution. But who wants to be institutionalised?

Well, lots of us in 21st century Australia, apparently. In 2001, the majority of the population over the age of 15 were married, and that was almost 6% more than at the beginning of the 20th century. Australian marriage rates are higher than in most European and Scandinavian countries, though lower than the US and Muslim and Asian nations. While it’s true that more and more couples are living together without getting married first – in 2001 it was 12.4% of all Australian couples – many end up marrying, and indeed, 72% of people now live with their partner before they marry. And couples are generally waiting until after they marry to have children; in 2001 69% of children were born to married mothers. So marriage is alive and well in contemporary Australia. And while many heterosexual people are bypassing the institution altogether, and even more are leaving by the back door, through separation and divorce, gay and lesbian people are hammering on the front door, demanding to be allowed in.

I guess the thing about social institutions, even more than ones made from bricks and mortar, is that they are flexible, they’re able to change and adapt to people’s changing lifestyles, different values, and divergent attitudes and expectations. My partner is a lecturer at the Ipswich campus of the University of Queensland – it’s a delightful place, full of Federation-style buildings set in spacious grounds. Its facilities date from the opening of the Ipswich branch of the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum in 1878. Many of the surviving buildings have been heritage-listed, have been restored and are now used as teaching and library space, computer labs, and staff offices. An institution for the confinement of tortured souls has become a place of learning, growth, and opportunity for many young Queenslanders.

Marriage may once have been, and may still be, an oppressive institution for many women and men, a place of constraint, duty and obligation, of abandoned hopes and bitter disappointment. Yet we continue to turn to marriage as one of our highest ideals for relationship and human fulfilment, for mutual support and loving commitment. What continues to propel us there?
Plato’s Symposium is a philosophical discussion on the nature of love, taking the form of a series of speeches, both satirical and serious, given by a group of men at a drinking party. Plato has the comic poet, Aristophanes, explain why people in love say they feel "whole" when they have found their love partner. It is, he says, because in primal times people were globular spheres who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels; there were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the hermaphrodite, who was half man, half woman. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods, so Zeus decided to cripple them by chopping them in half. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature. This is meant to explain why we feel incomplete without a ‘soul mate’.
This kind of thinking is also reflected in the biblical account of the creation of human beings, where God took a rib from the first man as he slept, and made the first woman out of it, described as a ‘suitable helper’ for the man. Genesis goes on to say, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh’, and this has formed the major part of the wedding ceremony, and our understanding of marriage, for many centuries.
I think today, we both long for this ‘oneness’ with another human being, but at the same time we suspect it may not be possible, or perhaps even desirable – we don’t want to lose our unique identity, or give up the opportunity to grow and flourish as individual human beings. Perhaps the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray, has put this most eloquently.

You who are not and will never be mine are and remain you, since I cannot grasp you, understand you, possess you. You escape every ensnarement, every submission to me, if I respect you, because you are transcendent to me. But this not being I, not being me or mine, makes speech possible and necessary between us.

I will never be you, you will never be mine. A gap remains between me and you, between you and me. I will never be capable of perceiving you completely, and not even of loving you, or of speaking to you completely. Perceiving you does not involve losing me or you; my perception must remain a path towards you, towards us, an us which is always disunited, distanced, always a “two” irreducible to one. We can each become, the one for the other, a bridge towards a becoming which is yours, mine, and ours. I can be a bridge for you, as you can be one for me. This bridge can never become the property of either. What captures my attention can teach me how to sustain your becoming, how to approach you, how to dialogue with you. What moves me can give rise to praise, to grace, to admiration.

Irigaray seems to be saying, if we accept our difference, our inability to become ‘one’ then we can help each other to discover each other, to continue to learn about one another as we grow and progress through life, that we can continue to be surprised, delighted and yes, sometimes challenged, by each one’s journey of becoming. This is the journey that Julie and Joel have been on for some time, but which they have committed themselves to take in each other’s company today, to be that path towards each other, that bridge towards a becoming, which celebrates their difference and lovingly supports their flourishing as fully rounded human beings. As a mother, this has been my greatest hope for my kids, and it gives me more joy than I can say to see my son safely launched on this adventure of life with such a wonderful partner. May they continually be moved to praise, to grace, to admiration as they behold each other on their journeys of becoming.

Who's the Narrator?

2007-02-22T10:47:00.000+10:00

I just attended a three day workshop and symposium around the themes of Narrative Method, and Narrative Vulnerability and Ethics. Keynote speaker was Professor Catherine Kohler Riessman, from Boston University, who is a pioneer in narrative methods. Other speakers were Peter Isaacs and David Massey, co-founders of the Applied Ethics program at QUT, and various other academics, students, and practitioners of music, art, film etc. It has been a diverse and tremendously stimulating three days, and I have much to reflect on, to challenge my existing ideas, and to incorporate into my understandings.

The fundamental question that this engagement with Narrative raises for me is the nature of the Narrator. It seems to me that narrative implies a narrator, an authorial voice, if you will. Who is it that chooses what events to include or exclude, how to link them, who provides the commentary, and infers meaning from the resulting product?

I know that as I reflect on my experiences, my affects, my thoughts – as I am doing now with regard to the last three days – I craft these into a story about myself, to explain myself to myself, first, and then to others, about what kind of person I am, or am becoming. So I understand that identity is narratively constituted. If I chose to highlight different events, affects, thoughts, understandings, then a different self, a different identity would be produced. I have experienced this, in religious conversion, in coming out, in therapy, in the course of my own reflections. But the question remains – who is the ‘I’ who does this reflecting, this choosing, this editing, this constructing of identity? Where does it come from? How does it develop? What is its nature?

Furthermore – are there initially multiple voices, each speaking for different viewpoints? Are some progressively silenced, or are they made to sing in harmony, to tell the same story, in order to sustain the illusion of a coherent self, a single integrated ‘person’, so that others may feel they know what to expect in their interactions with us? Are there contrapuntal voices within, as well as without? This question arises from my own struggle to accept my incoherence, my multiplicity. I’ve come to view this as an anxious and responsible Border Collie, trying to round up the sheep and keep them together and going in one direction. Lately I’ve tried to tell the Border Collie to go off and sleep in the sun, and let the sheep browse where they will. As a gender scholar I have also observed a tendency in Western culture, to identify this multipleness with the female, and see it is as a source of weakness, as a fault. Many men like to see themselves as simple souls, consistent and dependable, while women are accused of being mercurial, fickle, always changing their minds, moody. Indeed our culture has so pathologised this multipleness, that it has come to be seen as a disorder, a failure to integrate, a handicap, a problem to be fixed, such as multiple personality disorder, or borderline personality disorder. It can also be seen in essentialist understandings of sexuality, which insists on tightly bounded identities of ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ or even ‘bi’, but which find leaky boundaries intolerable.

So I suppose my question is – who is the Editor, the Border Collie, the Choir Director, the Boundary Rider? Who tells the story, makes the voices blend, maintains the fences, keeps the sheep together? Who composes and narrates the Narrative?

Heteronormativity

2007-02-13T11:16:00.000+10:00

This is an opinion piece I've written for the special issue of "Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review" on LGBTI Parenting, Families and Relationships. I don't know if it will be accepted, but I had fun writing it, and I'd love your comments.

Heteronormativity: Psychology’s New (Old) Str8jacket.

We’ve all encountered it a million times. The hotel receptionist or sales assistant who immediately adopts the ‘opposite-sex’ pronoun to talk about your partner. The application forms that ask for gender and offer only two boxes. The recently married couple who are asked when (not if) they’re going to ‘start a family’. From the moment my daughter found out the sex of her unborn child, it kicked in with a vengeance. Her partner started agonising over what age would be appropriate to allow him to ride a trail bike. Baby clothes were purchased, baby accoutrements accumulated, and the nursery decorated in appropriate styles and colours. (The central motif of the latter is frogs, which at least offers some hope of future gonochorism) (Policansky 1982). A gay couple who participated in my research bought a car together; the company’s paperwork showed them as ‘Mr and Mrs Cameron or David Smith Jones1’. After her surgery in Thailand, a friend had to divorce her wife in order to change her birth certificate in Australia; two women cannot be married to each other here. Another friend’s mother vomited in front of him when he first told her about his male partner, so revolted was she by the idea of man-on-man sex.

Heteronormativity. An ugly word for an ugly phenomenon Coined by Michael Warner in 1991, it describes the pervasive but often invisible model of allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, performed gender, and sexual desire, which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect (Jagose 1996: 3). In a heteronormative society, one of only two genders is assigned to an individual at birth depending on their external genitalia. Based on that assignment, a certain range of behaviours and roles are deemed appropriate for that individual, complemented by the choice of sexual partners of the ‘other’ gender. Individuals who do not conform to this model are stigmatised, and come under varying degrees of pressure to correct their deviance from the norm. GLBTIQ2 people are often estranged from their family of origin and social networks. In some countries they may be executed, suffer physical violence, institutionalisation, and find their economic opportunities severely curtailed. In all countries, their civil and political rights are circumscribed to some degree, and they are liable to encounter prejudice and discrimination. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the realm of parenting, families and relationships. The nuclear family is the heteronormative institution par excellence, predicated as it is on the sexual relations between one man and one woman producing their genetic offspring - what Warner calls reprosexuality – the interweaving of heterosexuality, biological reproduction, cultural reproduction, and personal identity (1991, p. 9). While the private sphere of the home has often been considered the only safe and appropriate place for Qwir2 people to express their identity, it is also constructed as the quintessential site of heteronormative ideology and practice (Radford 2001; Mallett 2004).
Psychology’s history in regard to Qwir individuals has not been a happy one. Most psychosexual theories have been based on the belief that male/female pair-bonding is the developmental norm for adult sexual behaviour, giving rise to various ‘treatments’ to ‘cure’ same-sex attracted and gender variant individuals. These ‘reparative therapies’ have included psychoanalytic and behavioural modalities, such as aversion therapy, and have worked in conjunction with medical interventions such as medication, lobotomy, clitoridectomy and castration, sterilisation, and electroshock treatment (Lev 2006). But surely, since 1973 when homosexuality was officially removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), psychology’s understanding and treatment of sexuality and gender issues has become more informed and affirming?

Perlesz and McNair (2004) suggest that, at least in the area of parenting and family in Australia and New Zealand, this is not the case. They reveal the dearth of articles in marital and family therapy journals with any explicit lesbian and gay content, most particularly the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy itself, and they demonstrate the lack of student training to deal with Qwir families and issues. They find these omissions all the more puzzling because lesbian and gay practitioners are well represented among Australian family therapists, and because of the significant rise in the number of families with Qwir members and in the number of lesbian-parented families. They further document studies revealing homophobic and heterosexist attitudes among psychologists and social workers, as well as biased, inadequate or inappropriate treatment of Qwir clients. They suggest that, in this, family therapists are simply reflecting the heteronormative, heterosexist and homophobic attitudes endemic to Australian society (2004, p. 130).

More than merely addressing the deficits mentioned above, their research represents an attempt to transform the lens through which lesbian families, in particular, are viewed. Rather than using heterosexual family models as a ‘benchmark’ for ‘normality’, they attempt to present the lesbian family as a unique, highly diverse, postmodern family structure, with much to teach researchers about the meaning of family and the nature of social change. They foreground the accounts of family members themselves, of how lesbian parents construct their parenting experience, and show how these accounts point to some of the many issues that might arise in everyday therapy practice. They urge therapists to adopt a more grounded and compassionate Qwir-friendly approach in their work, through an increasing awareness of the social and legal issues such families face, and through a deeper understanding of the interface between the private lives of Qwir families and a heteronormative public arena.

What they fail to do, in my opinion, is to urge therapists to consider the impact of heteronormativity on clients who do not identify as Qwir. Michael Warner talks about a ‘queer’ politics that is no longer content to carve out a buffer zone for a minority constituency, but seeks to challenge the heteronormativity of modern societies (1991, p. 3). This is the challenge that confronts Psychology. Rather than simply seeking to understand and work with the dynamics of Qwir behaviours and institutions in a subcultural context, contemporary Psychology should be calling into question the sex and gender scripts and stereotypes that constrain so many people who do not identify as Qwir, impoverishing their lives and relationships. The gentle boy who violates heteronormative understandings of masculinity, incurring his father’s wrath and the harassment of his peers. The young man, like my son at the time of my divorce, who has to weather personal crisis with no meaningful support from his mates because they’re all are so unequipped and unwilling to talk about their feelings and to give and receive emotional support. The married man desperately trying to reconcile his overwhelming desire for sex with men, with his genuine love and commitment to his wife and children. The woman who finds herself in a heterosexual partnership after years as a lesbian, vilified and excluded by her former lesbian community, her identity universally ‘read’ as straight by virtue of her relationship with a man. The couple who choose not to have children and are forced to give an account of this decision to a myriad of hostile critics accusing them of ‘selfishness’. The list could go on and on.

Psychology should also be interrogating the ideological foundations of human institutions themselves, such as ‘marriage’, ‘family’, ‘community’ and even ‘identity’, to render those institutions more legible and liveable for 21st century human beings. This is not, as the politicians would have it, ‘social engineering’; it is simply catching up with people’s lived experience rather than trying to shoehorn them into social discourses and institutions which no longer fit. Sedgwick (1990, p. 1) asserts that an understanding of virtually any aspect of Western culture must be inadequate and in fact damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition (emphasis added). Further, I would argue that sexuality and gender are so inextricably entwined that together they must be seen as a primary category for the critical analysis of practices and institutions, even those that do not initially seem to involve issues of gender and sexuality.

These are not ‘Gay and Lesbian’ concerns, this is not a ‘Special Issue’, this is a Human Issue, that applies to us all. It embraces notions of gender, family, individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, production and reproduction, politics, fantasy, class and ethnicity, ethics and morality, trust, integrity, integration and individuation, censorship, intimacy, self/other relations, terror and violence, health, the body. There is no domain of human experience unaffected by heteronormativity, no aspect of human life that wouldn’t be enriched by liberation from its strictures. It’s time for Psychology to cast off the str8jacket of heteronormativity and challenge its constraints on the human condition.

Notes.

1. These are pseudonyms.

2. A word on terminology. (Warning: this will satisfy no-one, least of all myself).
GLBTIQ: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Qwir.
Gay – a person who identifies as male, and as primarily same-sex attracted.
Lesbian – a person who identifies as female, and as primarily same-sex attracted.
Bisexual – a person who identifies as being both-sex attracted.
Trans – a kind of shorthand term I use to cover persons who identify as transgender, transsexual, transvestite, M2F, F2M, gender variant, genderqueer, gender outlaw, gender-fucked, cross-dresser, gender-dysphoric, butch woman, effeminate man, androgyne, drag queen, people who would prefer to answer to new pronouns or to none at all, and members of non-Western European indigenous cultures who claim such identities as the Native American berdache or two-spirit status, Brazilian travesti, Indian hijras, Polynesian mahu, Omani xanith, African "female husbands," and Balkan "sworn virgins." This list is neither exhaustive nor fully justifiable. It is important to remember that these terms are highly contested, especially among those who so identify.
Intersex – persons who identify as having sex chromosome configuration, external genitalia or internal reproductive systems that fall outside the norms for ‘male’ or ‘female’ bodies. May also be known as hermaphrodites.
Qwir (a variant of ‘queer’, which I have appropriated for my own purposes from Minning, 2004) – a term I use in the context of academic discourse to connote any person who identifies as differing from heteronormative understandings of sexuality and/or gender. I use this variant spelling, much as some feminists have used the variant spelling of wymmyn, to signify a rupture with the word’s original meaning whilst still finding it useful as a descriptor of a segment of the population.
Again, it is important to remember that all of these terms are highly contested, and in all but the last, I try to be guided by how individuals choose to identify. For example, I would only refer to both-sex attracted individuals as ‘bisexual’ if they themselves actually embrace this identity category. I have adopted the term qwir as defined above solely for ease of communication, fully cognisant of the fact that the term is repugnant to many I would describe in this way. For this I apologise, and welcome any suggestions of a better way to negotiate the highly contested terrain of terminology.
I have arranged the terms in this order because that is the order in which I have most frequently encountered them, and not to rank them in importance, numbers, or prestige.

Reference List

Lev, A. I. (2006). Psychotherapy. glbtq: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender & queer culture. Chicago: glbtq, Inc.
http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/psychotherapy.html

Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature. The Sociological Review, 52 (1) 62-88.

Minning, H. (2004). Qwir-English Code-Mixing in Germany: Constructing a Rainbow of Identities. In W. L. Leap and T. Boellstorff (Eds.) Speaking in Queer Tongues : Globalization and Gay Language (pp. 46-71). Urbana : University of Illinois Press.

Perlesz, A. and McNair, R. (2004). Lesbian Parenting: Insiders’ Voices. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 25 (2) 129-140.

Policansky, D. (1982). Sex Change in Plants and Animals. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 13, 471-495.

Radford, N. A. (2001). Wolfenden, John Frederick. In R. Aldrich and G. Wotherspoon (Eds.) Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History, p. 455. London, Routledge.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet. Social Text, 29, 3-17.

In Defence of Wives!

2006-10-01T07:03:00.000+10:00

I had a bit of a dummy spit on the "Oz Married Gays" e-list recently, when one of the guys posted a bunch of those tiresome 'jokes' about marriage - you know the sort of thing -
"Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them." Dumas
"I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me." Anonymous
"A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong." Milton Berle

Later I sat and tried to figure out why it had ‘pressed my buttons’. Partly because I’ve been hearing these same sad jokes my whole damn life. Yes, there are anti-male equivalents now, but these are a very recent development, and there certainly hasn’t been 5000 years of history with everyone from Moses to Socrates to Confucius to Luther to Shakespeare to Shaw to Freud to bloody Mark Latham discoursing at length on what is wrong with men-as-a-sex, as they have done about women-as-a-sex. And that’s not counting all the knobs and tossbags (thanks Mark) that have tried to prove our inferiority ‘scientifically’ from the size of our brains to the ‘wandering’ nature of our wombs! But don’t get me started . . .

But my reaction was also formed in part by what I’ve learned from sociology about marriage as a social institution.

Marriage as an institution has been shaped over centuries to serve the interests of men as a class (note, I’m not saying all marriages work to the advantage of all men as individuals, I’m talking about statistical generalities). The institution evolved to ensure that men were able to pass their property to their biological offspring, by policing women’s sexual fidelity whilst allowing men a lot of sexual latitude. As recently as the 1950s in Australia, a man could divorce his wife for one act of infidelity; a wife could only secure a divorce if she could prove repeated and long-term sexual infidelity of the husband (and presumably once he’d been caught by a private detective, he’d be a bit more circumspect!). Marriage as an institution also worked to ensure that men had access to the unpaid domestic, sexual and emotional labour of women; it gave no corresponding guarantee of financial support to women. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1898, upon marriage everything a woman owned automatically became the property of her husband, and any money that she earned was also his by right. So Louisa Lawson, Henry’s mum, had to surrender the money she earned from washing, sewing, and taking in boarders every time Henry’s dad decided to come home, only to see him drink it all – not a thing she could do about it. It has only been the last hundred years, really, that women could get an education and training to be able to support themselves – before that the vast majority of women had to be supported by a father or husband because they simply weren’t allowed to earn their own living. The Harvester Decision of 1907 granted every man (whether married or not) a ‘family wage’ sufficient to support a wife and three children in ‘frugal comfort’; women’s wages were pegged at 55% of this, irrespective of whether they were single, or a widow supporting a tribe of kids. Yes things have changed a lot, but marriage still confers more benefits on men than on women. The statistics show that men today do on average one hour a week more housework than they did 20 years ago, and that the full-time employed wives of unemployed men do more hours of housework each week than the full-time homemaker wives of full-time employed men. Rape in marriage only became a legal offence in the ‘90s. Women still earn only about 60% of what men do for exactly the same work. The fact is, all the measures show that married men live longer, are healthier, suffer less depression, have higher rates of employment, higher wages, and higher rates of promotion, than single men. Married women, however, have higher rates of mental and physical illness, worse prospects for employment and promotion, less disposable income, and lower life expectancy than single women. Women who have children either leave the workforce completely, or interrupt their careers, only returning to the workforce in part-time, often casual positions, with no prospects of further training or promotion. The tax system and costs of child care make it more profitable for married women to stay at home and care for children, but Welfare to Work forces the unpartnered mothers of very young children back into the workforce, without offering substantial opportunities to acquire skills.

And yet what the ‘jokes’ seem to suggest is that women are all busily scheming to trap men into marriage and life-long bondage and then act as their jailers. I get incensed by the hypocrisy of a society that does its best to force women into marriage and motherhood, and then blames them for being dependent on men.

I was 19 when I married, and 41 when my marriage ended – and I was absolutely petrified. I was not your clinging violet kind of wife, and had worked my way up to middle level management of a large company, with company car etc (all without formal training – it couldn’t happen today, you need a TAFE certificate to do filing these days) – but I honestly didn’t know how I was going to cope on my own. I gave the dog away because I didn’t think I could afford to feed her, and I couldn’t eat or sleep for six weeks after he moved out. And I was glad to see him go! As women we’re made to feel that we’re incomplete without a man, and that our highest calling in life, irrespective of any of our other achievements, is to be a wife and mother (just look at the nauseating parade of female celebrities earning megabucks for every movie or high-ranking politicians or bureaucrats who piously proclaim that being a mother is the most important thing in their life – and maybe it is, but no-one’s requiring a similar affirmation of their commitment to fatherhood from blokes).

I confess I hadn’t realised until joining that discussion group, how trapped and miserable many men feel by marriage, and that has made me rethink some of my attitudes. I guess in the final analysis that’s the problem with institutions, no matter how admirable their aims – no ‘one size fits all’ arrangement is going to work for the huge variety of human beings, and even when it does work quite well for some, there’s no guarantee it will do so throughout their lives. Which I suppose is why I find it so ironic, that a large number of gay and lesbian people who have a chance to do things differently are frantically trying to gain admittance to such a flawed insititution, when str8s are abandoning it in record numbers!

"Shaddai": God the many-breasted!!!

2006-09-10T08:40:00.000+10:00

Disclaimer: I am not a theologian, nor am I a Biblical Studies or Hebrew scholar - these are just the humble musings of a rank amateur. But they blessed me, and so I share them.

In the Old Testament of the Christian bible, there are many different names used to describe god. One such is 'Shaddai', usually translated the 'Almighty', such as in Psalm 91:1 (NIB): He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty (Shaddai).

This word is actually derived from 'shad', the Hebrew word for breast. My learned friend Michael Carden, author of "Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth", says that he likes to think of 'Shaddai' as maybe god the many-breasted or god the bountiful.

I can't help but wonder if this name doesn't reflect an earlier concept of the Mother Goddess. I started looking through all the OT uses of 'Shaddai'. Gen 17:1, 28:3, 35:11, 48:3 and 49:25 - they all use this name for god in association with blessings of fruitfulness and fecundity. 49:25 is absolutely gorgeous, get this:

. . .because of the Almighty ('shaddai'), who blesses you
with blessings of the heaven above
blessings of the deep that lies below
blessings of the breast and womb.

Cool, huh?

Gen 43:14 is Jacob asking that 'Shaddai' grant Judah mercy in bringing his brothers back from Egypt.
(That’s all the Genesis references).

Numbers 24:4 and 16 are Balaam pronouncing a blessing on Israel instead of a curse, as he was employed to do.
Ruth 1:20, 21 is Naomi’s complaint against Shaddai (grounded in the loss of her husband and sons, which meant her loss of nurturance, and all provision of her needs).
Psalm 91:1 of course is Shaddai as refuge, fortress, shelter etc.

All these references so far seem to me to present a strongly feminine aspect of god – the nurturing, sheltering, merciful, fruitful aspect (and thus linked to sex – it’s interesting to me that the breast is both source of life-giving milk for the infant, but also an erogenous zone. We’ve so dis-eroticised motherhood in our culture, we don’t seem to be able to hold the two concepts together).

There are 31 references in Job to 'Shaddai'. It’s my understanding that Job is one of the most ancient biblical texts, so perhaps more in touch with that earlier concept of God.

So then, the only Exodus reference led me thus:

Ex 6:3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El-Shaddai, but by my name the Lord (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.

Refer Ex 3:15 God also said to Moses, ‘Say to the Israelites, The Lord (YHWH), the God of your fathers – the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob – has sent me to you’. This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation'.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch (though others would doubtless disagree with me!) to ask if this doesn’t mark the ascendance of the patriarchal masculinist god (associated, interestingly enough, with Moses the law-giver) at the expense of the nurturing, merciful womanist god.

And I think it's very interesting that if 'Shaddai' was always associated with the breast, that the English translators have chosen to translate the word as “Almighty”, thus completely masking all its associations with the female.

The later uses of shaddai all reinforce the masculinist associations:
Ps 68:4 The almighty scattered kings . . .
Ezek 1:24, 10:5 . . . roar of rushing waters like the voice of the almighty
Is 13:6 and Joel 1:15 (which are practically identical)
For the day of the Lord is near; it will come like destruction from Shaddai.
That’s all the uses of Shaddai in the OT.

On a personal level, this has been really important to me as I’ve tried to make sense of my years in the Potter’s House (the Pentecostal sect that my husband and I pastored in). I’ve had a sort of revelation lately that I was serving the gracious, merciful, loving god, but the god who kept attacking me and trying to suppress me was a different deity, a strongly anti-woman, masculinist, judgemental, legalistic god. So maybe I was serving 'Shaddai', whilst Potters House was serving 'YHWH', which would explain why I kept getting attacked and (spiritually) beaten up!! And it might be helpful to keep in mind when we talk about christians, that they also might be either following 'Shaddai' (and these are the ones who embrace GLBTTIQ folks and honour their spirituality) or 'YHWH' (and these are the ones who continue to see us as an 'abomination' (Lev 18:22 etc.).

Why the Fundies will never accept us

2006-09-09T15:02:00.000+10:00

First I should start by outing myself. I was a Pentecostal pastor’s wife for 22 years, in a group that was so extreme it makes the AOG look like a Sunday School picnic. I also want to make an important distinction between the Fundamentalist brands of Christianity (such as most Pentecostal, some Baptist, and Sydney diocese Anglicanism) and the very many groups of christians who do not base their faith and practice on a very literalist reading of the Bible (and some of these dwell within Fundamentalist groups and are trying to bring change from within). I’ve been mulling over the nature of our engagement with fundamentalist christianity lately, and I think my views on this are changing. This has arisen partly from the gay marriage debate, and the recent synod meeting of the Uniting Church that debated gay clergy in that denomination.

It all comes down to the age-old dilemma of how to bring about meaningful change – work patiently within the existing system or by constructive engagement with it, or adopt an actively confrontational stance. And also about the kind of change we want to see – in this case, do we want the christian churches to become less homophobic, or do we want to see them discredited so that they will exert less influence over the wider society when it comes to law and policy reforms to remove discrimination against gay and lesbian people? In the past I have advocated constructive engagement, but now I’m not so sure.

The fly in the ointment from my point of view is the essential incommensurability of their understanding of truth with our own. I have come to believe that they have no room to move on this. Fundamentalist christianity is by its very nature patriarchal – it cannot, it dare not, make any accommodation with feminism or homosexuality because its subjection of women and suppression of other sexualities is integral to its theology and its power structures. And quite apart from doctrinal or theological considerations, it is in the interests of these groups to demonise homosexuality as a convenient rallying point for mobilising people and resources, thus shoring up their power base, increasing their visibility, and maximising their influence. Can you think of anything else, except perhaps abortion, that Peter Jensen, George Pells and Andrew Evans (AOG) could agree on?

As a social researcher I find myself appalled at the tactics of some of those who speak on behalf of fundamentalist christianity, because it is impossible to have an honest debate with these people. The GLBTTIQ community can bring forward study after study with impeccable credentials, based on scientifically conducted research which has been peer reviewed, only to be met by reports of dodgy research done by dodgy special interest groups in the US which is completely scientifically invalid. The message that the public takes away from all of this is that it’s just a matter of opinion – you can find ‘experts’ to back up either point of view. Which of course is totally incorrect, but the media have made sure we have a citizenry now who are completely incapable of critically engaging with arguments and evidence. Certainly some christians honestly believe this stuff, but they wouldn’t have exerted much effort to ascertain its reliability – the problem with all ideologies, be they social, political or religious, is that you start with a belief, and then look for evidence to support it. (The queer community is also frequently guilty of this). If scientific discourse was able to sway them, we wouldn’t still be having debates about evolution, or see groups in the US trying to get around state sanctions by rechristening Creation Science (now there’s any oxymoron!) as ‘Intelligent Design’ and get it taught in schools.

Many people marvel at my evolution from Pentecostal pastor’s wife to lesbian feminist gender scholar. Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. If I had to identify the most crucial step in the process, I would say it came after reading several of Mary Daly’s books in the first couple of months of 1999, deciding that christianity was irremediably patriarchal, and evicting the christian god and all his dogmas from my heart and mind. A Back-From-Damascus-Road experience. What was crucial was not so much jettisoning the explicit beliefs of christianity, but rather the monotheistic view of truth, with all its rigidity and exclusivity, to make way for a more multi-facetted and perpetually evolving understanding of reality. And this is why I have come to the belief that dialoguing with the fundies is a doomed project. I think it’s ultimately futile to contest a few ‘false beliefs’ without addressing the total paradigm which undergirds them. I have come to see all the monotheisms as pernicious, because of their view of truth as revelatory, uni-dimensional, and not negotiable. God/Allah/YHWH cannot, by his unitary nature, change his mind, and so neither can his followers.

I also suspect that the danger in constructive engagement is somewhat similar to what the Democrats and Greens did in the first three terms of the Howard government. By constantly amending the Coalition’s legislation in the Senate, they prevented the Australian public from understanding how ideologically-driven, cynical and merciless the Coalition’s policies actually are, and people were lulled into a false sense of security. Now it has a majority in the Senate, the gloves are off – welfare-to-work, work choices, terror legislation, offshore processing of asylum seekers – the list goes on and on. But what I find most distressing is that the Howard government has managed to insinuate its neo-liberalist philosophy into the public’s mind-set over the last ten years, to the point where most people seem happy to accept its dishonesty, cynicism and gross materialism. It has actually changed the nature of Australian society, and we’ve allowed that to happen. Similarly, feminist theologians have criticised inclusive language versions of the Bible (“God the Mother and Father”, “for God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Child”, etc) for allowing the Bible to masquerade as a document that seems less androcentric and friendlier to women than in fact it is.

It seems to me now that if we cause groups like the Assemblies of God to tone down their rhetoric on homosexuality, we prevent the wider community from seeing their true colours. Every time one of their spokesmen makes an egregiously homophobic statement (such as lesbians should be burnt at the stake, for example) I think the Australian public start to realise how rigid, narrow and intolerant these groups are, and how far they are from the kind of ‘live and let live’ philosophy most Aussies are happy to embrace. I think our best hope for law and policy reform for the GLBTTIQ community is to accentuate the chasm between us and fundamentalist christianity, and make the general public aware of their homophobic, sexist and moralistic stance which is aimed just as much at the secular community as it is at us – even though these churches don’t talk publicly much anymore about wives obeying their husbands, fornication (premarital sex), adultery, and submission to church authority.

So for these reasons, I don’t believe I can any longer engage constructively with fundamentalist christianity without becoming complicit in their oppression of their own people and their pernicious influence on society as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to start preaching on street corners against them (my street-preaching days are over!) but neither can I grant them the credibility of engaging in a ‘dialogue’ which I know is actually entirely one way – they neither want to, nor are capable of, hearing anything which will really make them change their minds or their practice. This is purely a personal decision, and I still profoundly respect those people who are paying the price to attempt dialogue with fundamentalist christianity, if only for the sake of the tortured souls within those groups who are trying to reconcile their sexuality with their faith.

Mostly on Sexual Identity

2006-09-03T04:25:00.000+10:00

Now from the Married (or ex-married) Gay List:

On sexual identity, and other ways of doing 'family'. 20/08/06

About sexual identity: Broadly speaking, there are two main ways of looking at it: “essentialist” – I was born this way and there’s nothing I can do about it – and “constructionist” – we all have some predispositions, but it’s a mixture of circumstances, opportunity, and our own choice what we do about that. I know some gay and lesbian people who have known they were “different” since the age of three, have never felt a scintilla of desire for a member of the opposite sex, and will gladly (or not!) see themselves as gay or lesbian until they die. Doubtless there are many heterosexual people for whom the corresponding (i.e. never been attracted to the same sex) is also true.

There are others, however, like myself, who were happily heterosexual for a longer or shorter period, but then their sexuality changes. I was a pastor’s wife for 22 years, with two gorgeous kids, and only became really unhappy with it in the last three or four years of the marriage. A lot of gay and lesbian people have tried to convince me that I was gay all along and just didn’t know it, but I’ve examined my past fairly rigorously, and I don’t agree. In this I’m not unusual – the sociological and psychological literature suggests that attraction is much more fluid for women than for men, and the studies of young people coming out these days suggests that their sexuality is more fluid than perhaps it was for many in the past.

I think it’s important that we accept that our experiences are all different – that it’s not an ‘either/or’ situation, but a ‘both/and’ situation. Some of us are born that way, and some of us get there by many other routes. This can be pretty tricky politically. Many people think that, if we can prove we’re born that way, the christians who currently condemn us and rave on about the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ (complete with feather boas and track lighting, no doubt) will eventually have to accept us. I sincerely doubt this, for a number of reasons which I won’t elaborate here. Even if this were true, please don’t forget there are those of us who have chosen to be gay or lesbian – and are pleased and proud about this choice, and believe that [name of your deity here] made us choosing people for a reason.

I also want to say something about ‘desire’. Is desire only sexual? Freud believed that in childhood we’re all ‘polymorphous perverse’ – that pleasure can be derived from lots of different activities with or without lots of different people, and it’s our upbringing that causes us to narrow our erotic focus down to certain permissible activities with certain permissible people (or one person, most often). Over time he came to understand ‘libido’ (which we often see as exclusively sexual) as ‘life energy’, in counter distinction to thanatos, the death instinct. I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that we can be ‘attracted’ to many different people in different ways, and that all of this is liable to change over time – as are we. We all know that the ‘best’ sexual partner doesn’t always make the ‘best’ life partner – and vice versa! And that someone who was absolutely the right partner at one stage of our life is entirely the wrong partner at another stage. Which is why I don’t see my marriage as ‘failed’ – we just grew out of it. Lucky for us, this happened when our kids were in their late teens – I can’t imagine the anguish for all of us if it had happened earlier, and I see that is something that many married gay people grapple with. Part of me thinks that for a relationship to work long-term, the partners can’t change and grow as much as human beings should – another part of me hopes I’m wrong and that someone will come along who will glory in my multiplicity and constant evolving, as I will in theirs (whether two such creatures could actually live together is a moot point!).

Please pay no attention to that dodgy ‘there’s-no-such-thing-as-a-bisexual’ research – the experimental design is hugely flawed, but so also is the fundamental premiss – ‘attraction’ is a very different animal to simple ‘arousal’ – as I’m fond of reminding people, the biggest sex organ is the one between our ears.

And to all I would say – let’s get out of our mental ‘straightjackets’ and remember that there are so many ways to do family – be creative, think up new ways of your own. I know several gay couples where the ex-wife of one is very much involved with them, sometimes even lives with them, sometimes there are kids involved. In my opinion, a kid can never have too many parents – only too few. Now I’m not saying this is easy to negotiate; this has usually taken years and a lot of angst. But each family who does it differently gives everyone else new ways to imagine their lives. I think queer people are the vanguard of social change in this country, and rather than trying to knock down the doors of the old institutions to let us in, we should be out in the fresh air, pitching our tents, and getting to see the countryside!

On sexual fluidity, and other things that are hard to grasp. 24/08/06

(Someone asked me if I thought sexual fluidity is more common among women).
Up to now, yes it has been. The literature reports a much higher number of men who have known they were gay from an early age, and have never been involved in heterosexual relationships. The trajectory of most women however, has been from heterosexual relationships, often marriage, and then a later life transition to a lesbian identity. More women (in Australia at least, it’s different in the UK and US) identify as bisexual than men do. I haven’t seen any actual statistics, but I suspect more women than men go back to heterosexuality. Again I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that has more to do with having children and a socially-recognised family than fluidity of desire or identity (more on this later).

I think this may be changing – there are a larger number of young women claiming a lesbian identity at an earlier age (however, they also become sexually active with both sexes at an earlier age than str8 kids, and are at higher risk of pregnancy and STDs – sex ed in schools has little to say about their particular situation, surprise, surprise!).

I don’t think this necessarily means there are any fundamental biological differences between male and female sexuality – apart from the obvious differences in libido caused by blokes having 10 times more testosterone running around their bodies than sheilas do! (Which might help explain why there aren’t many lesbian beats). There are some social factors involved though. First, it has only been a comparatively recent development that a woman could survive financially or socially without a male breadwinner – very few jobs or professions were open to women, and unequal pay meant that a factory girl, for example, didn’t earn enough to keep herself in food and lodgings. Even though the world has changed a lot, many women are still raised to see themselves first and foremost as wives and mothers, and so haven’t prioritised education and career. The statistics show that post-divorce, especially for older women, their standard of living drops substantially, often because they have to return to the workforce without skills or experience. So many women in the past who were same-sex attracted could do little about it, because they could not see any way to support themselves outside the context of a heterosexual marriage.

Another factor is the way ‘desire’ is constructed in contemporary society. From a gender theory point of view, in heterosexuality the man generally takes the initiative and sees himself as the one who desires; to be normatively feminine is to be desired, and fairly passive in erotic relationships. I love that, as a lesbian, I can ask a woman for her phone number, ask her out to dinner, send her flowers, ‘seduce’ her. Some women, however, find all this too terrifying for words, and in my own research I’ve heard bittersweet stories of women who’ve known each other and secretly been in love with each other for years, before one of them got up the courage to say anything. If you’ll forgive my being blunt, a man can’t get it up unless he desires his sexual partner (or am I wrong here? Please let me know!) whereas a woman can lie back and think of England! Which might explain why something like two thirds of married women have never had an orgasm. “Girl Power” notwithstanding, for the most part a sexually aggressive woman is still one who flaunts herself in such a way as to show she’s willing and to arouse desire in a man (raunch culture), not one who initiates a relationship or a sexual encounter. This is just my opinion; others may have a different experience and I’d like to hear about that.

I predict that as women become more economically independent and used to autonomous living, male and female sexuality will become a lot more similar. Time will tell, I guess. But to all you new lesbians out there, don’t be afraid to ask another lesbian for a date – if they haven’t asked you it’s probably because they’re just as scared as you are. But don’t go trying to convert your het friends unless you’re ready for a whole lot of trouble.

Hello Again

2006-09-02T10:41:00.000+10:00

I'm reactivating this blog because lately I've been writing heaps on a couple of e-lists (notably Lesbian Parents Australia: Lesbian_Parents_Australia@yahoogroups.com and Australian Married Gays: ozmarriedgays@yahoogroups.com). I've so enjoyed the dialogue with people of very diverse backgrounds and points of view, and I find that writing helps me to clarify my thiniing.

I don't pretend to have the 'truth' - I don't think there is such a thing - everyone has their own 'truth', and for some, that 'truth' is constantly changing (especially us Geminis!). So I would really value everyone's comments, especially if you disagree with me (as long as you're nice about it) because we can only come to a deeper and richer understanding if we all share our truths with each other.

So here's a selection of my recent postings, and I'll try to keep putting thoughts here regularly and I'll be looking forward with excitement and curiosity to your comments.

First from the lesbian parenting group:

On known versus unknown sperm donors. 20/08/06

If my reading of “Re: Patrick” is correct, the birth mother and her partner initially agreed to the donor having some involvement in Patrick’s life. However, the more he actually did so, the more distressing they found it. They felt that his involvement tended to invalidate them as a family unit, and especially the role of the female co-parent. So they tried to decrease his involvement, and then he took it to the Family Court.

As I read the decision I was very struck by the ‘maleness’ of the Law. The judge was very impressed by how ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’ the donor was, and was appalled by the emotionality of the birth mother. And of course, as far as the law is concerned, whatever was initially agreed to should be upheld – no matter how much you find on reflection that it’s not working for you. How can any of us know, ahead of time, what it’s going to be like with a new baby, what impact that’s going to have on our relationships, and how we’ll feel about our donor’s participation? Donors, too, can change. I have a friend whose donor agreed to be hands-off, no day-to-day involvement etc, but from the moment he found out she was pregnant, he wanted to dictate where she lived, what she ate, what she did – it was a nightmare. And because she put his name on the birth certificate, the Child Support system insists that he contribute to the child’s upkeep.

Because of the political climate at the moment (with a certain prime minister and his cronies in the religious right) the “best interests of the child” are usually construed as being a right to know and have a relationship with a male parent – irrespective of what has been agreed to beforehand.

On the unknown donor side of the equation, I have heard from lesbian mums in Brisbane that there are only about seven donors who have agreed to donate their sperm to lesbians (yes, they have a choice) so most of the children of lesbian parents conceived from sperm-bank donors are related. Which might cause problems later on. But this may just be an urban myth!

On role models and such. 21/08/06

One of the lesbian mothers told us how her son gravitates to men and seems to be completely fascinated by them.

If we could disconnect it from gender specifically at this point, I think it illustrates one of the more challenging aspects of parenthood. I’ve come to the conclusion that no matter how well-intentioned we are or how hard we try, sometimes we are not the parent our kids need us to be – and sometimes our kids aren’t what we want or need them to be. I was a lousy parent of infants (crying babies send me into a panic attack); very creative and resourceful parent of toddlers; mixed report card on pre-teens; fantastic parent of teens (according to them); still trying to figure out how to parent adults (I reckon this bit is the hardest of the lot!). Just to give you an example, when my son hit Year 11 he goofed off, smoked too much dope, didn’t do much work, and finished year 12 with a pretty dismal OP score. I did my utmost to encourage him, help him, give him the resources he needed – but it’s not in my nature to be authoritarian, I always stressed to my kids that it’s their life, their decision, and they live with the consequences of their choices, so I didn’t force him to do homework etc. Maybe he needed a firmer hand – or maybe he would have rebelled – who knows? But I blame myself a lot for not giving him more ‘guidance’. And as for them – I’m a gender scholar, but neither of my kids are the least bit academic, and my daughter’s not even a feminist!! (I mentioned this at a Feminist Mothers’ discussion group I go to, which promptly sent a couple of the mums into a tailspin. I mean, imagine if a kid raised by lesbians ended up homophobic? Not a pretty thought).

No family can supply enough ‘models’ of all the kinds of behaviours and experiences and ways of being in the world that kids need. Het families supply no models for their queer kids, non-musical families can’t contribute much to their budding virtuosi, Quakers can’t provide much of an example for their kids in the military, etc etc. Which is why, I guess, the old saying arose, “It takes a village to raise a child”. In most tribal societies, some or all of the parents’ brothers and sisters stand in loco parentis to each kid, which is brilliant – no single human being, or even pair, can give all the guidance, attention, skills, affection and time that every child needs. In the concern I see so many lesbian parents expressing about providing appropriate models for their children, I see an acknowledgement of our inadequacies as parents that not many heterosexual families are willing to admit. In actual fact I think lesbian and gay parents on the whole do a brilliant job just because they’re so aware of their limitations, and think and work strenuously to compensate for them.

So this little boy, now, is fascinated by males. At other times he’ll be grooving on people who can teach him stuff he doesn’t see much at home – like maybe chess, or hockey, or geology, or ballet, or whatever. Blokes seem exotic to him now, perhaps later it will be Greeks, or Buddhists, or Police!

On the difference between the ‘public image and the private self’.

I suspect for some of us at least, it’s more likely to be ‘selves’. Our culture tends to promote the view that there’s some essential self, someone who is truly you, inside somewhere, and somehow we have to peel off all the layers of conditioning or artifice or whatever to get down to the core self. I don’t know about you guys, but I say and do things all the time that are completely at odds with my cherished ideas about who I am, so now I think I have multiple selves which are constantly in a state of flux (other Geminis should at least know what I mean!) Sometimes outside factors will influence which self we inhabit (such as family censure or workplace requirements), sometimes it might be what we’re reading or thinking about; I think it’s also influenced by our bodies (I feel more butch when I’m overweight, more fem when I’m slimmer, but then get more butch again when I get fit), and it also varies in the context of our relationships – someone on the list was saying their butch partner kind of pressures them a bit to take more of a fem role and she’s happy to go along with that (for now!). So instead of seeing the ‘public’ image as somehow inauthentic, I’m more inclined to believe now that we can be ourselves in lots of different ways, and the person we are around our family of origin is just as much truly 'us' as the one who sits on the couch at home with their partner.

On parenting styles

. . . some of it is ‘habitus’ (a nice sociological term for the way we are raised, so that some attitudes and behaviours become unconscious for us – we don’t even realise we’re doing them), some of it is the particular style of gender that feels most comfortable for us at this stage of our journey/today/at home, some of it is what we have consciously chosen because we have become convinced that it’s a better way to be. None of the gay boys in my study (nor the lesbians for that matter) had ever seen their dads do indoor chores beyond some cooking or dishwashing – but all had adopted a lifestyle that involves men doing housework. It might feel ‘wrong’ or ‘odd’ – but they do get used to it! Because everything in our society is seen through the lenses of gender (which is not inevitable – it could be different) if our sons see their two mums doing all the housework, they might still make the assumption that such work is more appropriate for females than males (especially when you add in TV, movies, other people’s families). So I guess bottom line is – when you’re deciding on male role models for your sons, make sure they have a vacuum cleaner – and know how to use it!!!

On biolgical ties and their role in making 'family' 29/08/06

A friend was telling me recently that a fellow turned up on her doorstep one day and announced he was her half-brother (her father was a notorious philanderer and gave her long-suffering mother a dose of the clap on more than one occasion). My friend was horrified and pretty much slammed the door in his face. I felt kind of sorry for him; clearly he’d gone to a lot of trouble to track her down. But I think this illustrates a very important point – to some people biological ties are hugely important, and others don’t care about them much at all. Some adopted people move heaven and earth to find their birth mother, and others don’t feel the least curiosity about finding their bio parents. And you can almost guarantee, whatever your feelings are about this, your kids’ will be polar opposites. (One of life’s little ironies). You may want no involvement from your sperm donor; your kid will probably want him to give her away at her wedding!

I think this also illustrates another characteristic of ‘family’ – it often seems to be about defining who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’, who’s included, who’s excluded, policing the boundaries. I’m sure in evolutionary terms there was a lot of survival value in maintaining a tightly knit kinship group who looked out for each other – still is in developing countries who don’t have a social welfare system like ours (we do love you Centrelink, honest!). I think the poet Robert Frost once remarked, ‘home is the place where, when you have nowhere else to go, they have to take you in’. Bleak, but kind of expresses the survival thing pretty well.

Talking about half-siblings possibly hooking up made me think about the incest taboo. It is almost universal, but not completely. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs usually married their sisters (most often half sisters), and this custom was also common amongst some of the chiefly families of the Pacific Islands. Genetically we know that the more closely related partners are, the more likely that recessive genes will be expressed in their offspring. Darwin married his cousin, and many of their children had serious health problems which he attributed to inbreeding. And of course we all know about the haemophilia that passed from Queen Victoria to most of the royal families of Europe through her multitudinous offspring all marrying their royal cousins. Someone talked about the ‘yuk factor’ in thinking about half siblings partnering, and I know it is a gut reaction for most people, but there’s no logical reason for it. Especially in this era of genetic testing, it’s really no more harmful or ‘unnatural’ than, well, being homosexual for example . . .

Bottom line, I guess, is that we all have different ideas about what family means to us, who we want in our families, how important biological factors play in all of this. But I think it’s important to remember that our children will often have very different ideas and feelings about these things – and that our own feelings may change, especially as we get older. I left home at 18, have never lived in the same city as my parents or my only brother, and had very little time for biological kinship. But since Mum’s death, I’ve got a lot closer to my brother’s family, my cousins, and my aunty – and it feels kinda nice. Conversely some people seem to spend half their lives breaking free from those claustrophobic family connections that stifle their individuality. As someone else said in a post – family can definitely be a two-edged sword.

Melancholia and Moralism

2005-07-09T07:20:00.000+10:00

Just finished reading Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, by Douglas Crimp (2002, The MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.

This is a series of essays Crimp has written, from 1987 through to 2002. Crimp was sexually very active in New York City during the 1970s and early 80s, but remained HIV negative until very recently. He was also a founding member of ACT-UP and Sex Panic! and these essays confront the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 80s and early 90s. He critiques the false opposition between "so-called ordinary homosexuals and a marginal group of sex radicals" (p. 298) and mourns the denigration of gay culture because of the continuing spread of HIV/AIDS.

In light of his own recent seroconversion, he reflects about the illusion of safety and the very real possibility that some will contract the disease, no matter how well informed and responsible they may try to be. I really like this paragraph:

"How might queer theory help us [accept the possibility, even the inevitabily, that some of us will fail]? How does saying that we are human differ from the conservative journalists' traditional humanist view that we are no different from anyone else save for whom we choose to love? The answer to this question is as complicated and disputed as all the work of queer theory occupying the sehlves of our university libraries. But I will attempt to shorten the answer to a few sentences. Queer theory, like much recent postmodern theory, tells us that humanity is not a unversal and natural condition of being but a contingent and cultural construction of historical, social, linguistic, and psychic forces. Knowing this, queer theory also knows the political urgency of understanding how and why we are denied our humanity within and through those very forces. The abjection of homosexuality is not a simple matter of ignorance to be overcome with time, education, and "progress', but a deep-seated psychic mechanism central to the construction of normative subjectivity and thus of social cohesion. Armored with this understanding, we can protect against sacrificing our humanity in the very act of struggling to get it recognized, or purchasing it at the cost of another's humanity, which is the perilous ethical cost of accepting the regimes of the normal. What queer theory has yet to learn is no less urgent: how do we make what we know knowable to legions?"

And what makes Crimp think the legions would have any interest in knowing it? But I agree with him, insofar as there does seem to be an attempt to gain the acceptance of the heteronormative culture by stressing that, fundamentally, we are no different. It is our difference that I celebrate and aspire to. I often feel disappointed that my own lifestyle probably looks so "normal" except for the gender of my partner, and wonder if I am missing the true liberatory potential available to me in this culture. I like to think that how we do our monogamy is profoundly different to how it was done in my heterosexual marriage. That we do not feel we own each other's bodies or allegiances, that our monofidelity is freely chosen on a daily basis, not imposed on us by fear or duty, and always retains the potential to be renegotiated or reinterpreted.

I think that what the twenty-first century is teaching us is that society will not disintegrate if we embrace difference, that it is not social diversity that threatens social cohesion, but rather the struggles for power and domination that characterise the effort to impose a normative subjectivity on any social group. True social cohesion can only come when each individual's rights to self determination are respected and protected. Social cohesion is more like the fluid bonds between water molucules than some kind of rigid crystal structure. Queer theory does at least allow for the flow of identity - solution, absorption, transformation.

Who will I be today?

2005-06-15T11:42:00.000+10:00

Today I read:

‘Twenty-first century dis-ease? Habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus’, by Paul Sweetman. The Sociological Review 51 (4): 528-549.

The article contends that identity has become a matter of choice – individuals must now choose their identities from the range of possibilities on offer. Self-identity has become a ‘reflexively organised endeavour (Giddens 1991:5) and ‘individuals must now produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves’ (Beck 1994:13).

This project is not unfamiliar to a certain kind of christianity. It’s probably best described in Romans 12: 1-2 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform [suschematizo]1 any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.

We were engaged in a continual process of working on the self, which involved resisting all the pressures of contemporary culture (‘the world’) and being remade in the image of Christ. Rom 8:29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed [summorphos]2 to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

Although described as transformation, this was not a passive process. It was extremely effortful, both in not conforming to the world, and in striving to attain the quality of union with Christ through the Holy Spirit to allow ourselves to be remade in this way. I remember picturing myself like the branch ‘abiding’ in the vine (John 15) so that the life of Christ would flow through me, and produce the fruit of the spirit. The effort was not directed at producing the fruit, but at the whole process of ‘abiding’ – of submitting thought, emotion and will to God in every moment of the day, a constant yieldedness.

So this idea of working on our identities is not new. The difference is that, now we’re no longer trying to become carbon-copies of Jesus, we have to decide for ourselves what we want to be. O terrifying and invigorating liberty! Instead of only one option, now there is a dizzying array, and how am I to decide who I should be?

So is it all the years of training in the christian ‘technologies of the self’ that has made me susceptible to the late-modern project of self construction? Or would Bourdieu contend that there is something in my upbringing that formed in me a habitus of self-surveillance and self-modification? Could it even be said that this project is one familiar to every woman – the sense of being the continual object of scrutiny, and engaged in a project of making oneself more acceptable to others – mothers, grandmothers, fathers, boyfriends, husbands, employers, other women – and that men are only now having to adopt these regimes and are seething with resentment because their right to ‘be themselves’ is finally being called into question? Which is why girls are now surpassing boys in many areas of achievement, because their reflexive habitus fits them particularly well for the exigencies of late-modernity.

1 from sun: union with + schema: to fashion alike, conform to the same pattern.
2 from sun: union with + morphe: shape, nature, form.

. . . and the greatest of these is love.

2005-05-22T03:05:00.000+10:00

Back when I was first launched into my lesbian adolescence, and I found myself doing relationships with women for the first time, I was much perplexed by a series of relationships which didn’t work. I realised I had been working on the assumption that we were all wanting the same things from a relationship, or had the same core values – I mean, after all, we were all lesbians, right?

My core values have always been about love. When I became a born-again christian in the ‘70s, the bible verses that adorned the walls of my bedroom were all the love ones:

1 John 4:7-8 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
v18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

I always thought it was obvious that what christianity was all about was love – it says it right there – God is love. It wasn’t until long afterwards, as I tried to come to grips with the heartache and exploitation I experienced in the pentecostal cults to which I belonged for 20 years, that I began to understand that other people saw different core values in christianity – for some it was power, for some it was righteousness (especially an assurance of their own righteousness), for some it was certainty in an increasingly uncertain world, the list could go on and on.

I brought this same assumption to my relationships – that it’s all about loving and being loved, intimacy, connectedness, honesty, being real, being known. But again I had to confront the fact that people want very different things out of relationships. Some want safety – and feel that can only come from not being known. Some value independence and autonomy, and think that preserving those can only come at the price of eschewing true intimacy. Some just want peace, and that means never dealing with issues. Some don’t know what they want – but expect their partner to figure it out anyway!

Love, of course, means different things to different people. You only have to listen to the discourse about “tough love” currently in vogue in the christian right to realise that one person’s ‘love’ is another person’s judgemental, prescriptive oppression. Jesus gave a very great insight when he said, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” But even that presupposes that everyone needs to be treated in the same way. I think what we need to do is get to know the ‘others’ well enough that we understand how they would like to be treated – to find out their core values, and honour them as much as we can without doing violence to ourselves. All of this of course requires a lot of hard work – both to understand ourselves, examine our core values, and realise that they are not self-evident to everyone; and also to really listen to other people, and respect their values even when they are not ones we can find much sympathy for (imagine such a dialogue between the christian right and the queer community for example, or between feminists and fundamentalist Islam).

This is particularly true in the arena of intimate relationships. I came into lesbianism assuming that it was all about freeing ourselves from gender stereotypes and having relationships based on equality, reciprocity, mutuality. However, for some people same-sex relationships can also be about the possibility of inhabiting a different gender role than the one society prescribes for them. A woman, for example, might be drawn to the idea of inhabiting the male role in her relationship with another woman – whether she sees that as dominance, or as providing and protecting. I experienced something of the power of that when I first came out, and found myself being the pursuer instead of the pursued, a ‘husband’ rather than a ‘wife’. For me (I’m not saying for everyone) that marked a transition from a contingent to an autonomous subjectivity – really awesome stuff. Political dykes might be horrified by such an arrangement, but then run the risk of being as judgemental and prescriptive as the society we are seeking to remake. Love might be allowing ourselves to be honest and vulnerable with our partner, allowing her to see our fears and inadequacies. Or it might be keeping those things to ourselves so that our partner has someone strong to lean on. Both might be honest expressions of love – or manipulative, even abusive behaviours.

I suspect many relationships come to grief because of incongruent core values. Not to mention that sometimes our core values may change – which is why a fundamentalist, evangelical pastor’s wife can end up as a lesbian feminist baby sociologist. Ain’t life grand?!

But what does it all 'mean'?

2005-05-17T03:55:00.000+10:00

Still looking for a focus for my investigation of domestic labour in same-sex households. I really like what Kitzinger and Wilkinson have to say about accounts:

“It must be emphasized that in social constructionist, discourse analytic research, the focus is on participants’ accounts as primary data, rather than on the compilation of accurate and reliable facts about lesbian transitions. The aim is not to reveal the real histories, motives, and life events of the participants but to understand how they construct, negotiate, and interpret their experience. “ (from ‘Transitions From Heterosexuality to Lesbianism: The Discursive Production of Lesbian Identities’ 1995).

So what might I hope to learn from people’s “accounts’ of how they handle domestic labour?

I suppose, primarily, the “meaning” of housework to them and to their relationships.

Housework as service – work fit for servants; ‘I’m not your slave’ – and thus the province of the person with lower status, lower income, less ‘power’ in the relationship – OR – a means of expressing the egalitarian values the relationship is meant to embody, a litmus test of reciprocity/mutuality.
Housework as punishment – KP in the army, used as punishment in institutions such as prisons.
Housework as a means of ‘doing’ gender – the person who takes responsibility for domestic labour is the ‘woman’/’femme’/’mother’. Housework as a means of creating family - doing domestic labour for someone else for free signifies an intimate relationship.
Housework as a labour of love – a means of taking care of partner and children, an expression of nurturance.
Housework as an expression of autonomy, responsibility for self, full adulthood.
A way of breaking with a previous heterosexual identity and constructing a new gay/lesbian/queer identity (e.g. a wife and mother might develop housework aversion, a man might permit himself to embrace his delight in ‘homemaking’).

Come on folks, this is where I would really value some comments – any other ideas of what domestic labour ‘means’ to people?????

So what kinds of questions would elicit the kinds of responses where people might give an ‘account’ or reflect on what domestic labour ‘means’ to them?

I suppose all the standard ones about who does what, and why, have the potential to do this, if we give people space to talk about these things instead of just answering a question. I’m reminded of a discussion in class recently where a Singaporean student was telling us how her father does the marketing – and she went on to explain that this was necessary because her mother was illiterate. The kinds of explanations people offer for their arrangements can indicate how they think they deviate from the ‘norm’, and how they explain this to themselves.

Carrington also has some specific questions, such as:

‘Tell me about continuing discussions/points of conflict or unresolved feelings with your spouse over these kinds of cleaning tasks’.

I also like:
‘Tell me about the standards you follow for housework.
Where do you think those standards come from?’

He also asks respondents to engage very directly with concepts as well as experience:

‘Tell me about your attitudes toward traditional roles for men and women in the family in our society.
Do you feel like the prescriptions for such roles influence or shape your relationship/ Why?
In what ways would you like your relationship/family to more closely resemble the relationships/family life of heterosexual marriage?
What would you think of your partner or yourself engaging in homemaking full-time and working for wages only partly or not at all?

What influence does your ethnic identity have upon your relationship with your spouse?
How does it influence the kinds of household tasks and responsibilities you each do?’

I think you could ask similar questions about class (especially if the participant is aware of occupying a different class location as an adult than they did as a child) and the impact of previous heterosexual relationships.

What I like most about all this is how open-ended it could be, the potential for participants to say something quite original, that I haven't even thought of yet. The very opposite of what they tell lawyers: "never ask a question that you don't know the answer to"! Nah - come on folks, surprise me!

'Do you come here often?' 'Only in the mating season!'

2005-05-12T04:15:00.000+10:00

I’m wondering if sexuality, sexual identity, sexual object choice, whatever we want to call it this week, may not be about genital sexuality at all for some people, but more about affective factors.

The Australian Study of Health and Relationships, to its credit, makes an attempt to distinguish between sexual identity (whether you label yourself bisexual, lesbian, gay, straight, etc) sexual attraction, and sexual experience (which they define as ‘any kind of contact with another person that you felt was sexual. It could be kissing or touching, or intercourse, or any other form of sex’). This does presuppose a fairly unproblematic kind of continuum, from sexual attraction to sexual experience, to sexual identity – albeit with the potential for disruption along the way – for example, reporting same-sex attraction but a heterosexual identity.

I wonder if this might be something of a masculinist model? Sex therapists have long reported the difficulties that arise for heterosexual couples, because female sexuality does not seem to work this way. They are continually reminding men that women require affection and non-sexual touching as a prelude to genital sexual activity. Is it possible that many women don’t experience sexual attraction in the same way that men do, that for them the emotional and affective factors play a much larger part in sexual behaviour than simple sexual attraction? Perhaps some individuals may be sexually active with people for whom they don’t actually feel any ‘sexual’ attraction, because sex is a part of the total relationship, not the reason for the relationship.

I’m conscious here of the frustration of talking about essentialising categories such as ‘men’ and ‘women’ when what I probably mean is, for example, ‘individuals with an XY pair of sex chromosomes who call themselves “men” and who do the kind of hegemonic masculinity prevalent in 21st century Australia’. I’m not saying there is some biological determinant that makes women value affective factors more than men do, I’m fully cognizant that this stuff may be socially constructed. Although I do wonder if having 10 times more testosterone in your system might be a factor in understanding why sexual attraction can be a lot more compelling for men than women. (Can you feel me wanting to start putting apostrophes around those terms? Scary, ain't it?)

What, after all, is ‘falling in love’? Do some of us only fall in love with people to whom we are sexually attracted? Do others fall in love with people to whom they are not sexually attracted at all? (Yes folks, I’ve just watched “De-Lovely”, the movie about Cole and Linda Porter). We hear laments about “lesbian bed death” but why should a relationship be considered invalid in some way simply because there is no genital sexual activity taking place? I think this is a hangover from the patriarchal discourse of marriage – an ‘unconsummated’ marriage can be annulled, because it’s not complete if a penis has not discharged sperm into a vagina. For me being a lesbian is first and foremost about being a ‘woman-identified woman’, about giving the best of myself, investing my emotional energy, into another woman, and having her do the same for me. Sex is one (very, very delightful) expression of that, but not the central principle by any means.

Family Diversity and Well-Being.

2005-03-29T04:45:00.000+10:00

Alan C. Acock and David H. Demo (1994) Family Diversity and Well-Being, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, Calif.

In this book, Acock and Demo do a comparative analysis of four types of families: first-married mothers, divorced mothers, remarried mothers, and continuously single mothers, all with at least one biological child living with them. They evaluate the well-being of children and mothers, with enough statistics and tables to rejoice the heart of the most rigorous quantitative researcher.

One of their major findings is that family processes, rather than family structure or family resources, are the most important factor affecting the well-being of people in families.

Seems blindingly obvious when stated baldly like this, but so much of the debate has focused on structure alone, and it seems that whoever speaks the loudest gets to set the parameters of the debate. So comparisons have been made between children in “traditional” nuclear families (“Whose tradition?” I keep wanting to ask) of mum, dad and their biological children, and children in post-divorce single parent families, or in blended families resulting from parents re-partnering. As Acock and Demo observe, “Mothers who are happy and have happy children are not likely to get divorced. To estimate the effects of divorce on children, the ideal study would compare these children’s well-being to what it had been before the divorce” (p.229).

I think the biggest disservice of fundamentalism (be it christian, jewish, muslim, confucian, or structural-functionalist) is this idea that ‘one size fits all’ – that there’s some kind of pattern, whether divinely ordained, biologically determined, or evolutionarily selected, that if people would only adhere to, everyone would be well-adjusted and happy. That there’s one way of doing femininity, masculinity, sexuality, family, that will ensure the optimal functioning of each human unit. In sermons I’ve heard it referred to as following the manufacturer’s manual. (Well, we all know what a doomed project that is!).

If we unpack that analogy a little, however, we immediately expose some of the flaws in this line of reasoning. What two VCRs are programmed to work in the same way?? As many of us have discovered to our cost, especially once the kids have moved out. I still can’t program my VCR, and if my kids saw how I work the DVD remote, they’d be laughing from now until Christmas. Nevertheless – it works for me. It does what I need it to do. My use of technology is what you might call minimalist. My son, on the other hand, has this huge integrated system with all his techno-bits hooked up together in ways the manufacturer probably never thought of. (How much technology is enough? Just a little bit more . . .).

Surely that is one of the distinctives of humanity – the species is endlessly inventive, endlessly adaptive, continually coming up with new ways to do things and new things to be doing. I imagine the divine, who made every fingerprint and every person’s DNA profile different, would have expected no less of us. How then could it possibly be true that there is only one healthy way to do gender, sex, or family, when the individuals doing these things are characterised by such amazing diversity?

Sociology needs to be careful not to blindly accept the parameters set by the fundamentalists. “Which family structure results in the greatest well-being of children, women and men?” No. Wrong question. More like, “What factors influence the well-being of people in families? And how can people identify what they need at this point in their lives, and how best to obtain that?”

The problem of course is that all of this may change, and not only once, over the course of a person’s life. What I thought I wanted or needed when I married at 19 is a far cry from what I think I want or need now. Am I wrong to have changed? Au contraire - if I hadn’t, what a sad specimen of humanity I would be. How healing it would be if we could realise there is no such thing as a failed marriage – just people who change, or people who didn’t realise at the beginning that they were hoping for quite different things from their relationship, and that sometimes these differences in core values are too great to be reconciled.

This is the great hazard, as well as the great attraction, of fundamentalism - there is no room for change. “For I am the Lord, I change not . . .” (Mal 3:6). Unchanging principles give the illusion of security in a world where nothing is stable or trustworthy. The only thing that hasn’t changed in my life in the last 5 years is my mobile phone number (thank the goddess for number portability!). Sometimes I miss the certainties, the dependable framework, the assurance that there is an answer to every question. My life now feels much more insecure, sometimes terrifyingly so. The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m changing and growing – ask any biologist, and they’ll tell you that any organism that isn’t changing and growing is dead.

an Open Letter to Anique.

2005-03-27T06:52:00.000+10:00

The following is a response to an email I received recently, soliciting funds to build a Temple to the Goddess. Abandon all expectation of academic objectivity - this is a cry from the heart from someone who spent too many years in thrall to patriarchal religion (23 years in fact) and who is profoundly worried about what she sees happening to the women's spirituality movement. With perfect love and malice to none.

Dear Anique

I read your recent email “Building the Temple” with an ever-rising sense of consternation and dread. You want to build an “Australian Goddess Temple” on land that belongs to you, with money donated by people who love the Goddess. This takes me right back to all those dark years when I was involved in Pentecostal christianity. I have sat through countless solicitations for donations for building programs. Every single one employed features of your letter. They all could point to remarkable circumstances, or “signs” which illustrated that their project had divine inspiration and divine blessing. All urge people to sacrifice and make donations and trust the divine to take care of them because they were on god’s path and doing god’s work.

I don’t doubt that you, and many of these “men of god”, were and are completely sincere in their belief that they are acting in obedience to divine command, under divine inspiration.

I solemnly warn you of the terrible consequences that may ensue if you choose to go down this path.

It is happening already in the women’s spirituality movement, and it is making me sick at heart.

The goddess makes the beauty of nature, the sun and the rain and the sweet earth, available to all without price and without preference.

But who can attend the ceaseless round of workshops, seminars, conferences and trips? Only those with money.

The humblest of the creatures are as precious to Her as the greatest. But already we are seeing kudos and recognition given to the highest donors, whilst the labours of others that aren’t ascribed financial value go unacknowledged.

One of the most valuable things to me about the revival of Wicca and similar practices is the empowerment of ordinary people. The broom, the cauldron, the athame, were all implements any woman might have in her own kitchen. The goddess is worshipped under any tree, on a riverbank or seashore, on a hilltop or by a creek. There are no gatekeepers, no-one to police who is included and who is excluded. When you build a temple, there are doors – and suddenly someone has power over who can enter, and when.

Even christianity in its saner moments, warned against this:

“Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands; as the prophet says,
‘Heaven is my throne
And the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, God asks,
Or what is the place of my rest?
Did not my hands make all these things?’ “
Acts 7:48-50, quoting Isaiah 66:1-2.

You style yourself a priestess of the goddess and a singer of the sacred songs. Every woman is a priestess, every woman has the sacred songs within her. Goddess forbid that we should start having hierarchies, or have “professionals” who will only share what the goddess has freely gifted to them, for money.

Forgive me if this seems ungracious, but I fear for the soul of our wonderful movement to empower and ennoble all women, that we will be seduced by the power and prestige of spiritual elites and end up no different than the patriarchal systems we have so recently freed ourselves from.

From one who also loves Her

Sue Kentlyn

The Minimal Family

2005-03-14T07:30:00.000+10:00

One of the things I really appreciate about Carrington's book (No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men) is that he's very sensitive to issues of class and the effect of social and economic factors on people's ability to create and sustain families. He maintains that one of the critical lapses in the contemporary debate over lesbigay families is the failure to examine socioeconomic inequalities between them. Amongst the families he studied, there were many who lacked the time, money, kin networks, and energy to create 'family', and he styles these 'the Minimal Lesbigay Families', drawing on the work of Dizard and Gadlin. This concept intrigued me, so of course, I had to read their book.
Jan E. Dizard (don't get excited, it's a bloke) and Howard Gadlin, 1990, The Minimal Family, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst.
Very helpful book, big picture stuff, which I love. Only 6 chapters, so here they are:
(Remember all this is from a totally American perspective)
1. The Emergence of the Modern Family
2. The Transformation of Dependency
3. Dependence, Authority, and the Desire for Autonomy
4. Varieties of Modern Family Life
5. The Limits of Autonomy and the Fate of Familism
6. The Familial Public.
The chief things I got out of this book were first of all, an historical perspective on the process of changing family forms, and especially the interaction between the two discourses of individualism in the US. They term these "repressive individualism" and "expressive individualism"; each is nourished by contradictory impulses of the economy and defended by opposing political groups. The former resonates with the accumulation phase of capitalism, and stresses self-denial, thrift, hard work, duty, deferred gratification, mutual obligation. The latter is sustained by the understanding that capital accumulation will be thwarted if markets do not steadily grow; and for this to happen, people must be continually increasing their consumption (meaning that wives must work, wages must increase, and credit be affordable). I was reminded of Bush's exhortations to the American people after 911 to demonstrate their patriotism by returning to the malls and spending up big! They demonstrate that even though the latter seems to conflict with the conservative agenda, when conservatives are in power, they tend not to totally dismantle the social programs that underpin the population's ability to consume. This was very comforting, and furnished me with ammunition for the ongoing dialogue I carry on in my head with Family First!
They chart the progress from the Professionalised Family (male breadwinner, female homemaker) to the Dual-Career Family, propelling women out of the home and leading to more emphasis on developing children's capacity for autonomy. All of this has resulted in families needing to source increasing amounts of goods and services from outside the family to sustain the family. The emphasis on autonomy and individualism has resulted in people investing less of themselves, and sourcing less of what they need, within the family. So in effect, their argument is that we are all living in Minimal Families, and that any return to more traditional family forms would be totally unacceptable to most of us. Carrington has taken their reasoning a step further, to show that doing family at all now requires so much in the way of resources that it is becoming the prerogative of the wealthy.
The concept of expressive individualism is a valuable one, especially to those of us women who have come out of more traditional family forms feeling exploited and abused, and are determined to make a new life for ourselves. But then I've also agonised over the apparent need for mothers to become as selfish and uncaring as everyone else if they're not to be exploited, and what's to become of children when that happens? As lesbians we nurture the illusion that our relationships are more truly egalitarian, because there are no gender roles to prescribe what we do, but I've observed that selfish women are just as willing to be waited on as selfish men. I've longed for reciprocity, true mutuality, but had my concerns dismissed as "score-keeping". I think my relationship with Susie works so well because we were both wives for 22 years, we are both mothers, and we both have an ethos of nurturing love and service, so that neither feels taken for granted or used. But having fought so hard and paid such a high price for our freedom, we are also fiercely committed to our autonomy and independence, and very careful to respect that in each other. It can be pretty exhausting though, continually monitoring myself for selfish or inconsiderate behaviour - Foucault would be proud of me!

"Remaking Men" by David Tacey

2005-03-06T13:30:00.000+10:00

I've just finished reading this wonderful book by David Tacey: "Remaking Men: The Revolution in Masculinity". It was the last of my holiday reading, but I think it has some interesting insights to offer my study as well.
I think the book is incredibly brave, honest, and thought-provoking. However, as a feminist, I am somewhat troubled by the whole archetype thing. It seems to me there is a tendency to treat archetypes as some kind of self-existent, primordial types, but the ones we are working with at this point in our history are themselves cultural constructs, bequeathed to us from the written myths of patriarchal systems. As such I believe they are largely androcentric and tainted by the misogyny that is endemic to our cultural systems. “Man and His Symbols” indeed! There simply aren’t any archetypes to vivify or inspire the ‘new man’. Take housework for example (my area of interest). Alfred burnt the cakes, and Herakles cleaned the Augean stables without soiling his great hairy mitts! It’s hopeless! Practically our whole mythic repertoire perpetuates gendered stereotypes. The Women’s spirituality movement has been criticised for harking back to a golden goddess past that never existed, and I think this may be a valid criticism, but if recorded history denies us any truly women-empowering archetypes or paradigms to work with, then women must make their own. I myself work with a tarot deck that substitutes a series of goddess figures for the major arcana – it’s either that, or live with a perpetual sense of internalised gynophobia.
I’ve seen it written that the negative aspects of the Great Mother archetype include the Witch and the Dragon. Modern paganism is attempting to rehabilitate the image of the witch and the crone, to make the image of wise and powerful women less threatening. The Dragon in particular is interesting. In the East, the dragon represents fertilizing power and cosmic energy – it is largely beneficent, though to be treated with respect due to its great power. However, in the West, under the influence of christianity, it has always been a symbol of threat and destruction. Tacey talks about the ‘devouring’ nature of the maternal archetype and the need for men to develop enough masculine potential to ‘oppose’ the dragon mother. But what if men are opposing that which actually has the power to help and heal them? Look at the dragon in ‘Shrek’ – a movie which wonderfully subverts pretty much every archetype and stereotype in Western culture – she becomes their staunchest ally in their ‘heroic quest’.
Here I think the myth of Isis and Osiris has much to offer. The destructive competition between brothers led to the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Set. The incredibly faithful and redeeming love of Isis for her husband and brother led her to search for him, heal him, and revivify him. Isis did not use her power to castrate her man, but actually to repair his virility so he could father their child.
I’m continually amazed by the redemptive love of women for men. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a woman respond to questions about why she doesn’t leave an abusive or otherwise unsatisfactory husband or lover with the words, “because I love him”. We are tempted to shrug impatiently and think to ourselves “co-dependent”. But what if it’s true? What if this love of women for the men in their lives is actually the path to life for these men?
The way Tacey describes men achieving a masculine identity strikes me as being at the root of the fragility of that identity. The need for death and rebirth means a man must continually be cutting himself off from his child self and the world of women and manufacturing his new male identity on a daily basis (just like a born again christian has to be ‘in the world but not of the world’, constantly separating themselves from the dominant culture and manufacturing a separatist identity). With women it’s more of a natural progression, we’re allowed to stay in touch with our child self (we’re allowed to cry, and be weak) to keep what has gone before and incorporate it into our mature adult identity.
I read somewhere that there are two fears that bedevil relationships – the fear of abandonment, and the fear of engulfment. It seems to me that men are fearing engulfment by the Feminine (especially as her true power is being revealed). But if men could befriend the dragon, instead of opposing her, perhaps they would see that her power is available to them for their health and virility. Women want men to be men, as long as they can attain that identity in alliance with women rather than in opposition to them.
So what about domestic labour? If the only way men can establish their identity, manufacture and maintain their masculinity, is in opposition to the feminine, then it seems obvious they will have a lot of energy invested in avoiding activities and concerns that are strongly identified with the feminine. And this may even affect gay men, especially if, as Carrington asserts, that gay liberation has fought extensively against notions of the effeminate man, and a hypermasculinity has come into existence over the past few decades to combat this notion (p.15). He even quotes our own beloved Bob Connell as saying that gay men in Australia embody quite traditional patterns of masculinity: "in this sense, most gays are 'very straight' ". Can't wait to do some interviews with gay men!

Gender Outlaws?

2005-03-02T16:00:00.000+10:00

Reading "No Place Like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men" by Christopher Carrington (U of Chicago Press 1999) - fabulous book. He builds on Berk's theory that household tasks function as occasions for creating and sustaining gender identity. He maintains that to violate the gendered expectations of others often leads to stigma and to challenges to the gender identity of the violator; therefore, men performing domestic labour or women who fail to do so, produce the potential for stigma, a matter of great significance for gay and lesbian couples, where the reality of household life clashes with cultural gender expectations. Because household work generally constitutes women's work, whoever does more of it attains womanly status. Carrington detects two trends in his interviews with gay and lesbian couples. The men collude to protect the masculine status of the partner who takes greater responsibility for household work, in that the other partner claims to participate more than he actually does. The woman who takes greater responsibility for household work, on the other hand, claims that her partner does more than is actually the case.
Carrington believes that the gender strategies deployed suggest an abiding concern about maintaining traditional gender categories, and particularly of avoiding the stigma that comes with either failing to engage in domestic work for lesbian women, or through engaging in domestic work for gay men; and that partners tend to manage the identity of their respective partners.
I find this assertion curious. As a general rule, gay and lesbian people are perceived as gender outlaws in the most fundamental way imaginable - by choosing a sexual partner of the 'wrong' gender. Compared to that monumental transgression, what's a bit of cooking or vacuuming? At least among the lesbians I know, their subversion of gender stereotypes is a source of pride and a sense of accomplishment or 'specialness' - part of what differentiates them from heterosexual women. I don't know about gay men (yet!).
If there is any delusional collusion, I think it lies more in maintaining the myth of egalitarianism, which is seen as possibly the most important distinctive of lesbigay relationships. Lesbians are keen to prove that no-one is being exploited, and gay men are keen to prove that no-one is exploiting or abusing power. So it would be interesting to investigate: 1) Just how egalitarian lesbigay relationships actually are, in terms of the division of domestic labour; and 2) The whole process of negotiation around who does what, including the relative merits of a sense of fairness, or love expressed as nurturing behaviours - and whether gender is a factor in this.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

2005-02-22T16:24:00.000+10:00

I've just finished reading "Doing It Down Under: The Sexual Lives of Australians", which is the book based on the Australian Study of Health and Relationships. They did telephone interviews with a "representative" sample of 10,173 men and 9,134 women aged 16-59 years from all States and Territories of Australia in 2000-2003. Here's the bit of particular interest to me. Among men, 97.4% identified as heterosexual, 1.6% as gay or homosexual, and 0.9% as bisexual. Among women, 97.7% identified as heterosexual, 0.8% as lesbian or homosexual and 1.4% as bisexual.
Only 0.8% of Australian women are dykes? Well, they must all live in Brisbane 'cos I reckon I know them all, and then some!
They then go on to deal with sexual attraction and sexual experience. Big discrepancy here. Overall, 7% of men and 13% of women have been attracted at least once to someone of the same sex. About 6% of men and 9% of women have had at least some sexual contact with a person of the same sex in their lives. So that means about 4.5 % of men and nearly 11% of women identify as heterosexual but have some same sex attraction or experience.
I find the format of these questionnaires so frustrating. I dated boys from the age of 13, and was married to a man for 22 years. But the last five years, most of my lovers have been women, and I identify very strongly now as a lesbian. But if I were to answer their questions in the context of my whole life experience, I would have to say that I identify as a lesbian, but I have felt sexually attracted more often to males, and I have had sexual experience more often with males. That may be historically accurate, but it just seems to violate the truth of who I am at this point in my life.
These numbers of queer people seem ridiculously low. Is everyone still in the closet, even for a phone survey? Maybe - especially for older gay people, who have had to pay a horrendous price to be out. And what about the whole "random" thing? We do know that glbt people tend to be clustered in certain suburbs of large cities - I don't think there's really a parallel with any other population group. [The Yankelovich Monitor Survey of 1994 reports that close to two-thirds of lesbigay people in the US live in cities with populations exceeding one million residents (Lukenbill, G. 1995. Untold Millions: Positioning Your Business for the Gay and Lesbian Consumer Revolution. New York: Harper Business.)] They assert in the book that they don't believe gay people have been underrepresented in the survey, but they don't really explain on what grounds they make this assertion. Aw hell, maybe we were all out partying when they made their damn phone calls!
It is interesting, I have to admit. Being a dyke now is very similar to having been a born-again christian. You can live in this incredibly coherent sub-culture, quite apart from "mainstream" society, and construct a kind of alternate reality. I get a shock when we go out, like when we went to the Elvis Costello concert, and I see all these het people wandering around - they look so strange, like they so don't belong together. It's a sobering thought that, although I spent nearly 30 years as a fundamentalist christian, today I don't have a single one in my friendship group. I wonder how many straight people don't know a single gay person? (Or at least, don't think they do.) I was 40 years old before I actually knew a lesbian (and I don't mean in the biblical sense!). I guess it comes down to Benedict Anderson's point about "Imagined Communities" - I feel a certain solidarity with the queer people of this country, the vast majority of whom I'll never meet (and probably wouldn't like at all if I did!)
OK, so I'll simply make this prediction - the next "random" survey they do will show a lot more queer people. And it won't be because we've been successfully proselytising for the 'gay lifestyle' - it will be because more and more people who are that way inclined will feel safe enough to explore it, and talk about it afterwards.

Welcome to Kentlynville

2005-02-19T01:53:00.000+10:00

Kentlynville is a happy place, where queer people live blissful lives of domestic harmony in committed monogamous relationships, untroubled by conflict over who cleans the toilet or does the vacuuming.
Right.
Actually, this blog thinggy, which I've just discovered thanks to Laurence at UQ library (thanks Laurence) is meant to document my journey as I undertake my Honours program in Sociology at the University of Queensland. I'm going to be looking at the Division of Domestic Labour in Same Sex Households. It's a mouthful, I know, but it's actually pretty exciting, because not a great deal of research has been done in this area, and none in Australia to the best of my knowledge. Though I'm happy to be proved wrong on that one - let me know if you know something I don't!
This week has been very productive. Until the beginning of this week, I knew of only one journal article on the subject:
' "Queer Housewives?" Some Problems in Theorising the Division of Domestic Labour in Lesbian and Gay Households', by Sarah Oerton, University of Glamorgan, Wales, 1997.
Then I did an "Information Skills for Researchers and Postgraduates in the Social Sciences" workshop in the UQ Library this week. It's called an ISRAP, in the usual University fetish for acronyms. That's one thing they have in common with the Queer community. When I first came out I tried to remember GLBT by its similarity to a certain sandwich - and now, goddess help us, there's GLBTTIQ with more being added every day. It's sobering to think that my allegiance to Queer Theory might have come from no higher motive than a simple antipathy to acronyms . . .
Anywho, as my deardarlingdaughter would say (I love you, Zanna, and always will) I have now discovered a plethora of new books and articles (well, one book and maybe four journal articles, but that's a start!) none of which are held at UQ. I've ordered the book from Amazon - I hate doing that, I'd far rather use local bookshops ( a number of whom I am singlehandedly keeping in business) but when the book is in the States, Amazon is faster and easier. And UQ has a service called 'Document Delivery' so I can get articles held by other libraries. Things are looking up.
I was surprised to be the only Honours student doing the course - all the rest were Masters and PhD folk. It made me acutely aware of how much I don't know, but I am determined to tackle this stuff, even if it kills me. The Universe seems to have set me the challenge this year of becoming more technocompetent and less hostile to the process - I get so frustrated and infuriated by, for example, not being able to figure out how to get my photo into my profile on Blogger. My continual lament: "why does it have to be so bloody hard?" You know, like starting lawnmowers or checking tyre pressures. I'm sure boys make it hard on purpose so they'll feel smarter. Bit like Foucault's prose really.
I could rave on forever, so I'm going to post this and take it from there. A very small step for Sue Kentlyn, an even smaller step for Womankind, but although I may be like the little kid trying to keep up with all the older sibs, at least I'm on the journey.