Posts tagged Dean Spade
genderqueer
beyond the binaries
You can see this discrimination when facilities that are gender based, like women’s drug treatment facilities or domestic violence shelters, refuse to admit trans women. There logic is often that other women will be triggered or made uncomfortable by trans women. This is what is called the “bigots veto” in the law- a policy that allows the misunderstandings or biases of a general population in a institution to excuse the exclusion of a person with a characteristic that makes hir out as different. By shaping policy around the presumed biases or beliefs of the women in these facilities, administrators and other bureaucrats are verifying those biases of beliefs and saying that yes, trans women are not really women and do not deserve access to women’s services.
(Source: transqueery, via iamgrey)
What we are wearing is political and has really high stakes! The conditions of production of the actual materials we wear are life and death, and the consequences we all face for how we use clothing, grooming and style to craft our appearances are life and death. I’m thinking about racist laws that have attempted to ban sagging pants in some jurisdictions or use certain colors of clothing as methods to identify and criminalize youth of color for purported gang membership. I’m also thinking of the long history of sumptuary laws, and the horrific regulation of gender-related clothing and grooming items that trans prisoners are constantly fighting. Fashion is definitely a political question.
It’s interesting because fashion and style is a site of liberatory feelings at times—moments of pleasure, mutual recognition, belonging, escape, and rebellion. But there is also the broader context of extreme violence and coercion in which we dress ourselves. There is the constant danger of feeling wrong, being punished, and being stared at. These two elements are often happening simultaneously. I think about this when I engage with people who I know are making choices about their appearances that are both highly endangering and also feel urgently important or wonderfully expressive. It is amazing how much so many people risk to wear their look. Certainly, many trans people exemplify this, risking extreme violence walking around offending gender norms and being beautiful.
(via besttumblr)
No pronoun feels personal. I’ve chosen it because the act of saying ‘he’, of looking at the body I’m in and the way that my gender has been identified since birth, disrupts oppressive processes that fix gender as real, immutable, and determinative of one’s station. I’m not hoping that people will see that I’m different, paste a fake smile on their faces and force themselves to say some word without thought. I’m hoping that they will feel implicated, that it will make them think about the realness of everyone’s gender, that it will make them feel more like they can do whatever they want with their gender, or at least cause a pause where one normally would not exist. Quite likely, this will be uncomfortable for all of us, but I believe that becoming uncomfortable with the oppressive system of rigid gender assignment is a great step towards undoing it.
(Source: shayrhymeswithgay, via hairyqueerkid)
Why I have a hard time with the arguments that some people are simply adopting an identity for political expedience, and that even if they are, that their identities are less “real”: “My project would be to promote sex reassignment, gender alteration, temporary gender adventure, and the mutilation of gender categories, via surgery, hormones, clothing, political lobbying, civil disobedience, or any other means available. But that political commitment itself, if revealed to the gatekeepers of my surgery, disqualifies me. One therapist said to me, “You’re really intellectualizing this, we need to get to the root of why you feel you should get your breasts removed. How long have you felt this way?” Does realness reside in the length of time a desire exists? Are women who seek breast enhancement required to answer these questions? Am I supposed to be able to separate my political convictions about gender and my knowledge of the violence of gender rigidity (which has been a part of my life and the lives of everyone I care about) from my real “feelings” about what it means to occupy my gendered body?
(Source: pinebark, via yellowbeesteward)
made while thinking about some stuff i want to write for my deleuze & guattari directed reading; specifically i’m thinking through the uses of ch. 7 - year zero: faciality from “a thousand plateaus” for trans / sex / gender stuff, and i was reminded of this quote, which i like very much
gonna read that article later; i like this quote too
dean spade
Dean Spade on body modification and resistance
“Countless people who purportedly share my feminist values have argued to me that rather than having my body modified, the proper course of action would be to come to view it differently, such that it was not in contravention to my internal gender picture. Sometimes folded into this argument is a notion that trans surgery is a part of the capitalist construction of dichotomous gender. Rigid binary gender serves capitalism by setting a norm of extreme masculinity and femininity that none of us can achieve, so that we must constantly try to buy our way out of the gender dysphoria we all feel, In extreme cases, the argument goes, trans people buy gender transition procedures in order to cure ourselves of the fundamentally political condition of gender dysphoria, and we therefore sell out our own resistance to the binary gender system. I wholeheartedly agree with most of this analysis, except for the part where trans people are selling out everyone’s chances at gender resistance when we alter our bodies.
What this argument misses is twofold. First, there is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies, just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination. To see trans body alteration as participating and furthering binary gender, to put trans people’s gender practices under a microscope while maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional, but no less active and important gender practices of non-trans people, is exactly what the transphobic medical establishment has always done. This is why trans people are required to go through years of bullshit proving and documenting ourselves in order to get gender-related procedures, while non-trans people can alter their gender presentation through normabiding chest or genital surgeries and hormones as quickly as they can hand over a credit card.
The second blindspot here is in the assumption that trans surgery has a single meaning.” (read on…)
Dean Spade is a trans activist, lawyer and scholar.
I think sometimes being anti-fashion leads to a false notion that we can be in bodies that aren’t modified, and that any intentional modification or decoration of your body is politically undesirable because it somehow buys into the pitfalls of reliance on appearances. This critique is true, lots of times what we mean to be resistant aesthetic practices become new regulatory regimes. Certain aspects of activist, queer, punk fashions have fallen victim to hierarchies of coolness that in the end revolve around judging people based on what they own, how their bodies are shaped, how they occupy a narrow gender category, etc. Perhaps it is inevitable that the systems in which we are so embroiled, which shape our very existence, should rear parts of their ugly heads even in our attempts at resistance.
More importantly, when we appeal to some notion of an unmodified or undecorated body, we participate in the adoption of a false neutrality. We pretend, in those moments, that there is a natural body or fashion, a way of dressing or wearing yourself that is not a product of culture. Norms always masquerade as non-choices, and when we suggest that for example, resisting sexism means everyone should look androgynous, or resisting racism means no one should modify the texture of their hair, we foreclose people’s abilities to expose the workings of fucked up systems on their bodies as they see fit.
