I joined a workshop yesterday entitled “Rewriting Gender”.
It was based on the idea of a “gender CV”, a document people in germany have to write up in order to gain access to gender affirming care; a document where they describe in bleak facts and stereotyped why they were actually always already the gender they are. To make sure, the gender affirming care would make sense, in a way.
We were a group of circa 10 people. Most of them queer and I believe I was the only cis-man. (A fact that stands to be contested, for myself mostly.)
In any case, to start us off, we were asked to make a list of things that are generally stereotypically more masculine or female - behaviour, hobbies, interests, clothes, aesthetics, etc.
We brainstormed categories and then brainstormed things to fit into these categories and made two lists (masc and femme). And while I know it was not the intent to re-ify a certain binary, it was a fascinating process to watch. There was always one person writing down things for the femme side and one person for the masc side and people would just sort of blurt out words and things and it would be assumed automatically (in most cases) who was supposed to put them on their list. In a way the sorting process was fully automated, the people writing assumed that everyone in the room knew or had a feeling for whether said thing was an example for masc or femme stuff.
I had a weird feeling at some point about how we were this group of supposedly extremely self-aware and society-aware people and here we were blurting out the most trodden-out stereotypes of binary gender perception, not questioning anything. Some of it felt like trauma-dumping, people would say how they had e.g. hobbies that would be prescribed to the “other” gender usually and how they were troubled by that. People would say that men had no problem with growing old for example, riffing off of the idea of how women have to be young and beautiful forever basically, in order to maintain societal value. Which is true and terrible, yet it felt very odd.
I felt out of place of sorts, being a queer man, the distinction of gender and sexual identity or orientation is an important one and should not be mixed up but at certain points I believe they inform each other. As a queer man I feel a lot of pressure to look a certain way, not bald, not gain weight, have a more defined body etc. It feels all these aesthetic pressures apply yet here I was being told men could just grow ugly and nobody cares. I do not want to point fingers, I want to untangle how I felt at that moment.
I feel being queer puts me at odds with these stereotypes, in a way it is expected of me to betray them to act feminine and hold feminine qualities, while within this setting I felt strangely like I had to add the perspective of a “man”. Really doing double-takes here on that definition of myself. I don’t think I am fully comfortable with it.
Ruinology
Ruinology describes the study of ruins. A speculative endeavour that is concerned with open spaces of possibility. Absences define objects as ruins. These absences hold agency
Further, this speculative reconstruction cannot completel abide to a model of factual truth “in terms of a correspondence between claims and objective facts”. Ruinology creates post-truth.
Taphonomy is concerned with investigating the very process of ruination. It can focus on two things:
-either: Investigating the process of taphonomic sedimentation in order to strip away the ruination and end up again at an “original” not-ruined state.
-or: Looking into the history of the ruination in order to find out more about the Umwelt and process itself.
In a queer context, I think it is interesting to read our identities as ruinous. Not in a negative sense only. Our identities are inscribed through outside forces that chafed away at an “original” identity. We are left with traces of who we could have been if we had experienced a certain utopia in growing up (which harkens back to the question of a lack of distinction from other in utopias and an idea of the heterotopias.) As a matter of fact, we did not grow up in utopias, so our characters are shaped by outside forces, leaving traces, technically rendering us ruins. But ruins, as we have heared, hold absences of agency, the things we did not become or are scared to be are to be speculated (fabulated). This can be a process of gaining agency - fabulating the parts of me that broke away, re-contextualises the rest of me.