#gender deviance

Joan of Arc, burned at the stake in 1431 aged ~19 in part for refusing to stop wearing men's clothes.

Much was at stake. On the battlefield, war trauma tested the state’s ability to make war and its control over the male body. In postwar hearing rooms, pensions and compensation for indigent soldiers framed the negotiations between citizen and state. In both cases, the debate threatened to explode dominant conceptions of masculinity and separate sphere ideologies by legitimizing transgressions against dominant gender expectations. In this debate, male doctors were the arbiters, forced to defend long-standing medical knowledges and the supremacy of the outward-looking, othering male medical gaze.

....doctors were reluctant to address the issue of male trauma precisely because it was so problematic, but when forced to do so as crises arose on the battlefield or in pensioning, they relied on a medical epistemology that delegitimized the symptoms of traumatized males. In effect, doctors constructed trauma as an individual failure to meet masculine ideals in order to parry a larger challenge to idealized masculinities. In creating a link between war trauma and underlying gender and social deviance, they reinforced a residual conception of welfare that used tests of morals and means to determine who was deserving or undeserving of state assistance. At a time when the Canadian welfare state was being transformed in response to the needs of veterans and their families, doctors’ denial that ‘real men’ could legitimately exhibit psychosomatic symptoms in combat meant that thousands of legitimately traumatized veterans were left uncompensated by the state and were labelled as inferior, deviant men.”

I wonder how common this is: finding it frustrating to work on a skill you’re a beginner at, because every time you get around to it you awaken a burning hunger to be at your end goal already that is kind of overwhelming? I could cry from the intensity of it.

I get this way about Spanish, often. Although I’m not a beginner at all. But I want to be fluent SO BADLY.

This evening I got frustratedhappy first watching YouTube videos teaching words in LESCO (Costa Rican sign language) and was picking it up ridiculously quickly (compared to how fast I learn Chinese, which I have, you know, actual familiarity with) but also not getting all the details and not being able to keep up with the barrage of new words given with nearly no repetition. I was tempted to make plans to track down other learners or native speakers to practice with next time I’m there, which is extremely impractical.

Then for my exercise tonight I needed something fun so I searched for “salsa for dummies” on YouTube and found some promising looking videos, which happened to also come in a Spanish version (uh-oh...) and conveniently focused on teaching the lead role, including instructions for how to use your hands to direct your partner. And I was getting the footwork just fine but not being able to consistently remember what I should be doing with my hands if I were actually dancing with a partner, and also remembering how fun it’s been in the past when men danced with me and how terrible I was at figuring out how to follow their cues, and wondering if learning it from this side will help at all when put back in the feminine role, and argh. I really really want to dance the man’s part when I dance with people, and do so well enough to not feel vulnerable to accusations of ruining everything by taking on a responsibility I can’t handle -- basically I want to not be noticeably worse than the boys at doing boy things, there are some deep-rooted insecurities here as well as totally legit concerns to the way people will react to it -- but I ALSO want to be able to handle getting put in the other role. Because, much as it makes me feel like a Bad Queer and possibly Fake Trans to say it, I like men quite a lot and particularly like it when they find me pretty and show it in pleasant and nonthreatening ways. A guy wants to take my hand and lead me through some moves, I am there. Though ideally, what I really want in the long term, is to be able to switch things up after a bit and surprise the guys when suddenly it’s me twirling them. LIFE GOALS. It’s a dumb thing that would make me SO ABSURDLY happy, and I feel like it’s kind of a metaphor for my whole relationship to the gender system? Like I know the narrative about androgyny as the best of both worlds is Problematic and an unrealistic fairy tale but honestly, being able to pick the parts of femininity and masculinity I like and discard the rest is what I really want out of life and what’s stopping me is that it’s Scary and Hard* and I’m afraid of rejection from people who are okay with me being masculine as long as I live up to their standards for men**. I’m pretty sure defying gender roles is much more important to me than people getting my pronouns right or even than looking androgynous; I sometimes feel like presenting in masculine ways is what I’ve turned to as the next best thing since I can’t find a way to be masculine in a ponytail and clothing that shows off my curves.

*Hard because I was socialized into femininity and I can’t shake those deeply rooted habits -- I don’t know how and I don’t have anyone to teach me and it doesn’t help that I’m at-least-borderline autistic and have social anxiety so trying to change how I behave socially is really hard!