The photo, titled “undesirable,” is essentially about me ultimately beginning the journey of accepting my disability as I have my blackness. More broadly, it is to protest what I refer to as the negative fetishism of poor bodies, bodies that are deemed broke and broken, crooked and criminal, dilapidated and degenerate, ugly and useless....The “I AM A MAN” sign represents a protest of how labor, disability and masculinity had come to define my own conception of manhood....Orthodoxy teaches us that muscles are the currency of masculinity....Cracked and splintered male bodies cannot perform the masculine ethic, and this inability to perform an identity that is inculcated illegitimately and relentlessly, can place a disabled male at the perilous risk of being emasculated at best and feminized at worst. And for a man, or for a male who wants to be one, convention dictates that the only thing worse than being a eunuch is being a woman because to be a woman is to be an expletive.
Ford's personal story is moving, but so is his insight into the negative judgement that is passed on men who are "feminized at worst." To understand the expectations that are placed on men to conform to a gender role is worth while to help begin understanding how we've created such a hierarchically disturbing world in which "to be a woman is to be an expletive," or to be a woman means to be without individuated identity. -Sara
3 comments:
The best commentary I've seen on masculinity is 'On Machismo...' at http://champagneandbenzedrine.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-machismo.html
I'm a computer & roleplaying geek. I currently am employed doing simulations of chemical reactions on a computer. To relax I blog about D&D and tweet.
Am I still a man? Yes. Am I masculine? Not according to society, and given what society thinks is masculine I'm not sure I want to be.
canageek,
I enjoyed reading the post you linked to. I appreciate that the author brings up two truths that need more widespread recognition: that gender is a social construct and depends very heavily on context (hence his different experiences in Europe and the United States) and that an individual’s gender identity/expression can change depending on mood. I identify with this sentiment: “Sometimes I'm Roger Moore, in a cheesy suit with a glass of champagne. Other times, I'm in cowboy boots and a leather jacket. I'm a flying ace and a pirate, a reclusive writer or a recalcitrant rogue.” To him, these are all different ways of experiencing his masculinity (though others might enjoy playing the same roles without thinking of them as “manly” or “masculine”) and they do not contradict each other.
I applaud you, too, for being proud of your geekiness and for owning your personal brand of masculinity.
However, I dispute the author's assumption that you have to "study sexuality" in order to understand terms such as cisgender and transgender. Wikipedia can clear up most of those questions in a matter of minutes.
I agree with you on the last point, though if you had no knowledge of gender issues to start with it might take more then a quick google.
By the way applying tans and cis to gender always takes me a moment and make me smirk: Those terms are still used quite often in chemistry to describe types of bonds, and taking a chem term (or the root at least) and applying it to people always seems silly to me. But hey, the term works (better then most too)
--Canageek
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