#int5

21 y/o - she/her

1. How often do you listen to music?

Every single day. It’s one of the only things that keeps me sane in my life.

2. Do you use any music streaming apps? 

I use Spotify and Apple Music. They both have different features and music that I like so it’s hard for me to use one over the other. 

3. Do you like to discover new music? (i.e. artists, playlists, genres) If so, what are your methods for finding new music?

I love discovering new music and I have a rather strange way of doing so.  When I am planning to seek out new music, I typically delete all of the music I have on my phone.  I then will go to the discover section of Apple Music or look through some general playlists on Spotify and listen to as much new music as I can find and download what I like on my phone.  I like to try different genres that I am not used to and I have found that this has expanded my taste in music a lot.  I sometimes go back and add some of the music I had on my phone previously, but I always make sure to delete everything before starting this discovery journey. 

4. Some people have friends that connect over a lot of different topics and some have friends that connect on very few topics. When it comes to music, do you find it easy or hard to connect with your friends over it, and why? 

I find it very easy to connect with friends over music.  When it comes to music, I keep a very open mind and would give just about anything a chance.  I love hearing about people's favorite songs and artists and I love learning why they enjoy them so much.  I feel like it gives me insight into who they are as a person and the things that they have dealt with in their life and I love that just simply sharing music taste can tell so much about a person.  Additionally, I truly enjoy sharing songs and artists with my friends for the same reason.  Sometimes I feel as though sharing this can make it easier to express things that aren't always easy to say out loud and it's why I love sharing and connecting with friends over music so much.

5. Have you ever or do you currently use social media to make new friends and talk about interests you have in common? 

Not really and I dont really plan on it. 

At the beginning of April there was a media storm in the USA when the clothes retailer J Crew depicted a woman playing with her young child, and the male child has painted pink toenails.

A psychiatrist called Dr Keith Ablow, who works for Fox News, wrote an article decrying J Crew and "the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity". He uses this as an example, along with Facebook, to prove that "almost nothing is now honored as real and true". I'd like to briefly pick up on some interesting points raised by the assumptions in Dr Ablow's article.

When boundaries are held sacred and their transgressions tabooed, identical behaviour performed on both sides is interpreted entirely differently. In this example, a mother who helps to paint her son's toenails is the primary actor in the scenario - it's her "pleasure", at the expense of her son. A mother helping to paint her daughter's toenails would seen to be aiding her daughter in an activity freely chosen by her daughter. Just by changing the sex of the child in the scenario, the relationship can go from being a mutually enjoyable activity to a highly exploitative activity. Where a mother is seen to humour her daughter, she is seen to force her son. I also notice this tendency when it involves the sanctity of the (arbitrarily-determined) age of consent. If two people of similar ages partake in the usual pre-relationship rituals, we might call it flirting or bonding, and the more upfront one might be wooing. If the two people of similar ages happen to be on two sides of the (arbitrarily-determined) age of consent, which varies by country, then the scenario is likely to be interpreted as something more sinister. An exploitative power relationship is set up between the two, depicting the receptive partner as powerless victim and the more active one as grooming. Same behaviours, similar ages, different interpretations of the power relationships involved.

There is a fear of modernity and change (at the expense of traditionalism and writ) that is played out in debates supposedly about gender identity. Why include in an article about gender norms the unrelated topics of Facebook and Prozak? Link: modernity. They're all symbols of modernity - about rationalism, social construction, exploded social networks and the subjugation of traditional authority to scientific experimentalism. There's a fear of the risks and uncertainties involved, highlighted by Ablow's statement that "the outcome of [homogenizing males and females] is not known." The reason we shouldn't allow our children to experiment with their gender expression is not because it has proven adverse consequences, but because we can't predict its consequences. Plenty of theorists of modernity have written about its destabilising effects, because life trajectories are no longer dictated. They're uncertain, people's decisions are individualised, and so a large part of what's necessary to navigate oneself is the ability to assess risk. Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens talk about the risk society, with Giddens asserting that risk-taking is unavoidable in our modern, innovative social environment. The moral panic created by the J Crew photograph can be seen as a fairly natural reactionary response to what's seen as the monolithic threat of 'modernity' and the 'march of progress'.

Ablow suggests that "encouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth, can throw our species into psychological turmoil". This is an ambiguous statement - is he admitting that children are given a gender identity at birth (by other people), or that they are born with some innate gender identity? Suzanne Kessler's article 'The medical construction of gender: case management of intersexed infants' [PDF] reports how babies born with 'ambiguous genitalia' are immediately operated upon so that they can be fitted into one of two working categories of sex (f/m). If sex is supposedly biologically dictated, and gender is socially constructed, then altering someone's anatomy to fit in with established categories of difference surely genders sex. Thus come debates about the social construction of sex. Genitalia that doesn't fit into our gender categories is treated as anomalous rather than demonstrative of sex variance. The 'othering' of sex variance reinforces our social construction of gender and sex. There is a chicken-and-egg scenario to be overcome here before Ablow can make any forthright assertion about how sex translates into gender, how that link can be broken, and to what effect.

Another thing on which Ablow touches is the array of consequences that might arise from gender role transgression. Personal psychological problems are one effect. An effect on which left-wing academics may agree with Ablow is that on social order. If men and women act the same, then how will labour be divided? The 'instrumental' and 'expressive' roles that Talcott Parsons assigned to men and women respectively may be obliterated. To socialist feminists, who see patriarchy and capitalism as two interlocking, mutually-supportive systems of inequality, this would mean progress. Throwing a spanner in the works of gender roles would hinder the cultural reproduction of gender inequality, which would have a knock-on effect on the gendered division of labour, which has so far refused to subside. Ablow warns us that "it will be a very big deal if it turns out that neither gender is very comfortable anymore nurturing children above all else, and neither gender is motivated to rank creating a family above having great sex forever and neither gender is motivated to protect the nation by marching into combat against other men and risking their lives." Whilst overstepping his remit as a psychiatrist, he makes a valid point that performing gender differently means that there may be a different way of performing gender as a result. But will this really mean that we will lose parents and combatants? There is another option: we could be doubling the number of potential lovers, and doubling the number of potential fighters. If you take the gender out of gender role, you've still got a role.

Part of the media frenzy was an incorporated backlash of 'I can't believe this non-story has made the news'. Whilst this backlash is heartwarming, I do see why the story caused a ruckus. Sex and gender structure our lives - they are experienced as at the very core of our being. The grasp of sex, gender and sexuality is so ubiquitous. Whilst this goes unnoticed in most people's lives, where the heterosexual matrix of sex/gender/desire is disturbed (such as in the lives of transgender people) the pervasiveness is made visible. Everything we do is gendered, and in our society it's binary-gendered (i.e. we have a repository of just two genders). If gender is weaved into everything, then gender role transgression could be a real threat to the established order, the way that people conceptualise themselves and the way that we organise society. It's reasonable, in this sense, to feel threatened - and that's why even the progressive YoungTurks do.

The Guardian can now confirm that there has been a gay backlash against Lady Gaga. The Gay Council has ruled that Lady Gaga no longer successfully represents their homogeneous members. Hypocrites.

According to this journalist, after Lady Gaga released Born This Way the "gay blogosphere soon exploded into a flurry of backlash and counter-backlash". Or could it just be that people's opinions can differ despite sharing a sexual identity? Calling multiple conversations a "backlash and counter-backlash" turns a plethora of opinions into a dialogical narrative to be added to the portfolio of essentialised gay culture. Stand-alone debates about the quality of Gaga's music, lyrics, videos etc are marked as 'gay' because of some of the people who participate in them. It really irritates me when something has to be especially pointed out to be gay or some other Other, when it's not relevant.

There is lots of academic work surrounding this: Othering and identities and how people and norms are regulated and perpetuated. Perhaps it is relevant to talk about 'gay' subculture and 'gay' opinions, because this historically contingent identitarian category has been reified to a point where 'gay people' reflexively identify with it to structure their behaviour. In other words, the 'gay category' is real in as much as it is used in people's self-conceptualisations, reflexive actions and responses. This is close to Judith Butler's notion of performativity, whereby socially constructed categories such as 'female' are seen to be ontologically true because people believe in them and act according to their rules. These performances go on to perpetuate the pseudo-structure that created them - a neverending cycle (although, if you vary the way that you perform the identity category, you can help it to evolve, because it's only 'real' insofar as you recreate it). I hope that one day 'gay people' will be able to perform themselves out of such an essentialised existence.

Wendy Brown's book Regulating Aversion is pointing me towards some more sinister aspects of marginalised, non-mainstream identities. Usually it's just irritating that some gay people believe their sexual orientation to pervade every aspect of their being. However, Brown has drawn my attention to purposes of Othering (identifying someone as distinct from the "normal" or "unmarked" person) that are worrisome. Brown examines the Jewish emancipation movement in 18th century post-revolutionary France, from the perspective of the state incorporating this population as citizens. The state used a discourse of tolerance to incorporate the Jews into its citizenship. Features of the tolerance discourse include:

Allowing the 'tolerated' population into your 'tolerating' population as an inferior Other.

Depoliticizing, essentializing and individuating the 'tolerated' population so that their 'mark' is seen as inherently and fundamentally at odds with the mainstream. E.g. Judaism went from being primarily a set of religious beliefs (i.e. chosen) to primarily a race (corporeally embodied and completely inescapable). The 'tolerated' could never fully assimilate but it was framed as a problem with them as individuals, not with larger power dynamics or social structure.

Of course, Jewish people were complicit in this because they were finally brought into the boundaries of French citizenship. The stigmatised Other category that the French population gave them was fine because, in Jewish people's eyes, they could be citizens whilst keeping their Jewishness. So French Jews became a subsection of the new republican French population, and they were shown tolerance by the French people.

Political and civil tolerance, then, emerges when a group difference that poses a challenge to the definition of binding features of the whole must be incorporated but also must be sustained as a difference: regulated, managed, controlled.

Wendy Brown (2006)