And now, I invite my reader(s) to have a similar eye-opening experience:
Monday, September 15, 2014
What if we lived in a world where . . . ?
While attending a movie festival a few years ago, I was fortunate to view a selection of short, thought-inspiring films; a selection that included the video located below. This film -"All You Need Is Love?" -takes the modern-day social conflict of homophobia and reverses it. Rather, the story focuses on a young girl's sexual awakening in a world that condemns, not homosexual, but heterosexual relationships.
And now, I invite my reader(s) to have a similar eye-opening experience:
And now, I invite my reader(s) to have a similar eye-opening experience:
Exploring Gender and Sexuality in Farizan's IF YOU COULD BE MINE
One of the highlights of my attending the Austin Teen Book Festival back in 2013 was meeting Sara Farizan, the author of If You Could Be Mine -an eye-opening book about homosexuality and trans-identity.
Prior to attending the event, I had the opportunity to read about Farizan and her book in an article on the NPR website. In the short biography provided in the article, I learned that Farizan is, herself, a homosexual and has battled not only psychological and social criticisms over the years, but also cultural. (Being the daughter of Iranian immigrants, it is understandable why an adolescent Farizan might have feared abandonment by her parents and relations on the basis of her sexuality.) Extracted from her interview with NPR, the following is what Farizan had to say in relation to her sexual identity:
 |
| Sara Farizan |
"The problem for me was that I realized from a very young age that I was gay, or at least had same-sex attractions that weren't going away. And I really struggled with that, and I was very closeted for about six or seven years, where I was just outside very bubbly and happy, and inside was very angry and sad and didn't feel like I could talk to anyone, based on where my parents were from. ... It's a very taboo subject in the Persian community..."
Although it is not mentioned in the NPR article, the dedication at the front of the book does suggest that Farizan did eventually find the acceptance and support she sought from her parents to explore her sexual identity. Today she does so while also reaching out to other homosexuals (not exclusively lesbians) through young adult fiction.
If You Could Be Mine is her first published work.
Book Summary
Sahar and Nazrin have been inseparable since childhood. Now teenagers, in modern-day Tehran, their friendship has escalated to love -of the forbidden variety. But when Nazrin's arranged marriage threatens to separate them, Sahar seeks and discovers what seems to be the ideal solution: gender reassignment. When questions about her own identity comes into play, however, Sahar begins to question her own motives to undergo the surgery.
Reader's Response
As someone who identifies herself as being a heterosexual female, I do not claim to understand first-hand what it must feel like to be persecuted -both inwardly and outwardly -for my sexuality. Having read Farizan's book, however, the ability to see both forms of crisis through the eyes of the main character (Sahar) has helped to strengthen my empathy.
As previously mentioned, this book creatively touches on both homosexuality and trans-identity. In an attempt to preserve her relationship with her lover, Sahar entertains the idea of subjecting herself to sexual reassignment. This pursuit, in a number of ways, exposes deeper layers of dilemmas involving identity and gender.
In Farizan's words:
"I think the longer people read it [the book], they'll see that there's a great distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation. I think Sahar realizes that, too ... through meeting other transsexual characters — some who are very confident and very happy and are actually trans, and then some who have kind of undergone the gender reassignment because they feel like it's their only option. So it brings up a lot of questions, the book, but I don't think it gives a lot of definite answers."
Much to this reader's horror, along with the protagonist's, a section of dialogue included a rather graphic description of what a transgender individual (once he or she is approved for gender reassignment) must go through, surgically, to achieve physical transformation. . .
To think that, at any minute, someone out in the world is preparing to or is undergoing such a procedure. . .
The mental images left by the description are too much.
A surprising element, for me, came in the form of a possibility that I had never considered before: the shunning of homosexuality by transgender individuals! At first, the hostility expressed by one transgender, the character of Katayoun, toward the protagonist made little sense -to both Sahar and me. What Katayoun had to voice on the subject: "'I am not like them [homosexuals]!... What they do is unnatural... My illness in treatable. Their malady is a bargain with the devil.'" (150-151)
For someone who, herself, once experienced feelings of persecution and displacement, would it not make sense for Katayoun to empathize -better than I, at least -Sahar's plight?
But there, again, enters the dilemma of sexual orientation and gender identity: Can a person born as a man, but who identifies himself as a woman, understand a woman who freely expresses physical attraction toward her own gender?
In the case of the character Katayoun from Farizan's novel, the answer would be 'no.'
Possibly, though, such a negative reaction could be a result of cultural upbringing. In Iran, after all, it is forgivable to be a transgender. To be a homosexual, on the other hand, is a crime punishable by death.
Closing Thoughts
For my first exposure to gay/lesbian literature, Sara Farizan's If You Could Be Mine was an enlightening experience. For anyone who is curious or interested, I highly recommend it.
To read the full NPR feature on Sara Farizan, please click here.
"You go, girls!"
Sex is biological; gender is choice. As someone who did not choose to be born a female, there is much for me to admire and question in a person who pursues the path -both physically and/or psychologically -to become one.
Across the globe, the woman is a victim; a victim of various forms of oppression: sexual exploitation, genital mutilation, political under-representation, education deprivation, and considerably more.
From the highest to the lowest of civilizations, however, the male can also be seen as oppressed. The transexual male, perhaps, being the most persecuted of them all.
This is a post about gender self-identity. It will reflect mostly on my observations and thoughts that surfaced after reading a biographical case study that was written by the open (proud-proclaiming) transgender Betsy Lucal, titled "What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."
Blending / Bending
THE BLENDER: For the majority of my life, I have been a gender blender. As both a child and a teenager, my closet was filled predominately with jeans and t-shirts. In the third-grade, while my female peers were playing braiding each other's hair by the jungle-gym, I took to trading Pokemon cards with the boys. When most girls were developing crushes and practiced dating, I watched Dragon Ball Z and mimicked masculine toughness ("You talkin' to me?").
True, I hardly felt at home amongst my own sex; but that did not mean that I identified myself as a male. I was one of the guys, but I was not a guy. Looking back, dressing like a boy was my way of finding acceptance. It was not until the later part of high school, however, that I began to pay attention and invest in my femininity.
THE BENDER: Lucal, in contrast, is a gender bender. Although born into the body of a man, she came to recognize and develop (re-shape) her inner gender identity as a woman. Naturally, as her body was built larger and taller than the average female frame, many members of society failed to look beyond the exterior and perceive the gender cues Lucal used.
This incongruity is Lucal's lack of a groomed feminine exterior. The absence of such things as makeup and pumps causes onlookers to raise an eyebrow on such occasions as when Lucal uses her credit card or the ladies' restroom. What she sees as normal to herself, the world perceives as a joke or a perversion.
"Vagina envy"
To often help explain the aggressive demand by women for equality (in comparison to their male counterparts), patriarchy members will recycle an old Freudian term: castration complex (i.e. 'penis envy'). In essence, the argument insists that a woman who hates herself will covet the image, the symbol of man.
But what is a man?
For a number of women, man could be the embodiment of freedom; freedom, that is, from social and physical persecution and/or restriction. To envy this, however, claims the patriarchy, is childish.
But does not the average patriarchal society tend to shame women, to make them hate themselves and their bodies?
Men, too, however, are not safe from the pressures of fitting within a mold. Males are expected to be buff, to resent the feminine. When they do not, social shunning may take place.
In reverse, for a man, the woman might appear as the symbol of beauty, of divinity. (An outlook that can prove potentially dangerous, depending on the male and his urge to conquer.)
But where might the transsexuals exist in correlation to the condemned woman and the shunned male mentioned?
In the article "From Official Transexuality to Transexualities," Berenice Alves de Melo Bento provides a plausible insight:
For the transexual, the penis therefore is an obstacle. But the loss of that obstacle, as even Lucal hints at, would strip the transgendered male of her reserved male rights and make her additionally vulnerable to gender-violence.
A Plea for Transcendence
For a heterosexual female, the vagina can be seen as a source of damnation. And yet, for the transgender female, a penis keeps her from living. True, the struggles are physically different; but at heart, they are not. At the center of it all, both identities one thing: to be relieved of the pain the body and one's society places on them as women.
In a century of so many broken archaic boundaries, surely humanity can do with the loss of one or two more.
Reflecting back on my previous article pertaining to Plato, I pose this question: Might it not be time that society take aim for transcendence?
And to all my hetero and trans sisters out there: you go, girls!
Keep fighting for the right to be a woman!
Across the globe, the woman is a victim; a victim of various forms of oppression: sexual exploitation, genital mutilation, political under-representation, education deprivation, and considerably more.
From the highest to the lowest of civilizations, however, the male can also be seen as oppressed. The transexual male, perhaps, being the most persecuted of them all.
This is a post about gender self-identity. It will reflect mostly on my observations and thoughts that surfaced after reading a biographical case study that was written by the open (proud-proclaiming) transgender Betsy Lucal, titled "What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."
Blending / Bending
THE BLENDER: For the majority of my life, I have been a gender blender. As both a child and a teenager, my closet was filled predominately with jeans and t-shirts. In the third-grade, while my female peers were playing braiding each other's hair by the jungle-gym, I took to trading Pokemon cards with the boys. When most girls were developing crushes and practiced dating, I watched Dragon Ball Z and mimicked masculine toughness ("You talkin' to me?").
True, I hardly felt at home amongst my own sex; but that did not mean that I identified myself as a male. I was one of the guys, but I was not a guy. Looking back, dressing like a boy was my way of finding acceptance. It was not until the later part of high school, however, that I began to pay attention and invest in my femininity.
THE BENDER: Lucal, in contrast, is a gender bender. Although born into the body of a man, she came to recognize and develop (re-shape) her inner gender identity as a woman. Naturally, as her body was built larger and taller than the average female frame, many members of society failed to look beyond the exterior and perceive the gender cues Lucal used.
"My gender display -what others interpret as my presented identity -regularly leads to misattribution of my gender. An incongruity exists between my gender self-identity and the gender that other perceive." (Lucal 787)
This incongruity is Lucal's lack of a groomed feminine exterior. The absence of such things as makeup and pumps causes onlookers to raise an eyebrow on such occasions as when Lucal uses her credit card or the ladies' restroom. What she sees as normal to herself, the world perceives as a joke or a perversion.
"Vagina envy"
To often help explain the aggressive demand by women for equality (in comparison to their male counterparts), patriarchy members will recycle an old Freudian term: castration complex (i.e. 'penis envy'). In essence, the argument insists that a woman who hates herself will covet the image, the symbol of man.
But what is a man?
For a number of women, man could be the embodiment of freedom; freedom, that is, from social and physical persecution and/or restriction. To envy this, however, claims the patriarchy, is childish.
But does not the average patriarchal society tend to shame women, to make them hate themselves and their bodies?
Men, too, however, are not safe from the pressures of fitting within a mold. Males are expected to be buff, to resent the feminine. When they do not, social shunning may take place.
In reverse, for a man, the woman might appear as the symbol of beauty, of divinity. (An outlook that can prove potentially dangerous, depending on the male and his urge to conquer.)
But where might the transsexuals exist in correlation to the condemned woman and the shunned male mentioned?
In the article "From Official Transexuality to Transexualities," Berenice Alves de Melo Bento provides a plausible insight:
"The transexual experience revises [the penis envy theory]. Penis envy become, metaphorically, 'vagina envy.' The penis (the universal signifier) loses its power and is transformed into 'something that will not let me live.'" (371)
For the transexual, the penis therefore is an obstacle. But the loss of that obstacle, as even Lucal hints at, would strip the transgendered male of her reserved male rights and make her additionally vulnerable to gender-violence.
A Plea for Transcendence
For a heterosexual female, the vagina can be seen as a source of damnation. And yet, for the transgender female, a penis keeps her from living. True, the struggles are physically different; but at heart, they are not. At the center of it all, both identities one thing: to be relieved of the pain the body and one's society places on them as women.
In a century of so many broken archaic boundaries, surely humanity can do with the loss of one or two more.
Reflecting back on my previous article pertaining to Plato, I pose this question: Might it not be time that society take aim for transcendence?
And to all my hetero and trans sisters out there: you go, girls!
Keep fighting for the right to be a woman!
Work Cited
Bento, Berenice Alves de Melo. "From Official Transexuality to Transexualities."
Sexuality, Culture and Politics - A South American Reader (2013). 366-389. Print.
Lucal, Betsy. "What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous
Gender System." Gender and Society 13.6 (Dec. 1999). 781-797. Print
Got Transcendence?
The road of female persecution does not lead to Rome. Rather it can be traced further back to Ancient Greece, to the lecturing halls of one of civilization's most respected thinkers: Plato. He, the Father of Western Philosophy. . . and the recognized enemy of most feminists.
Plato favored mind over body, spirit over vessel. To be part of the world, to him, meant to compromise the freedom of the soul and mind for the empty promises of the world.
Women, as Plato viewed them, allowed their minds to become too distracted by the cultivation of physical beauty to attain intellectual enlightenment. In essence, women were the symbol as well as the product of the earth.
From his resentment for the earthly and synthetic, Plato developed an ideology best known as 'mind/body dualism.' Simply, the core concept of Plato's mind/body dualism is that the focus and nurturing of one's mind will, in turn, feed and liberate the soul; whereas the focus and nurturing of one's body will lead to the crippling and enslavement of one's self to the dominating world of the superficial.
Quoting Spelman: "According to Plato, the body. . . keeps us from real knowledge; it rivets us in a world of material things which is far removed from the world of reality; and it tempts us away from the virtuous life." (111)
 |
| . . . A recommended read that chronicles the shifting body image of women in Western civilization since the Victorian Era. |
But despite his misogynistic leanings, did Plato think it possible for women to be virtuous? In fact, yes. As Spelman notes, Plato implants within his dialogue Meno the belief that virtue is virtue; it is not and cannot be defined by sex (i.e. 'man's virtues' and 'women's virtues'). (117)
Possible, yes. Capable. . .? Perhaps not.
". . .[T]he body, or the irrational part of the soul, is an enormous and annoying obstacle. . ." (113)
Whether in Ancient Greece or Postmodern American, the female body being a quote-on-quote obstacle is a fair accusation to make.
But at what point, at what level, can a woman consider herself above Plato's low and (rather) degrading expectations?
To answer this question, Spelman channels the famous female philosopher Simone de Beauvoir: "Although de Beauvoir doesn't explicitly say it, her directions for women are to find means of leaving the world of immanence and joining the men in the realm of transcendence." (121)
Transcendence, according to Dictionary.com, means "the quality or state of being transcendent"; which then translates further to "going beyond ordinary limits; surpassing; exceeding."
But how does the modern woman reach transcendence in a global society that invests in and feeds on her insecurities? Constantly, from billboards to commercials, the average female is bombarded with ads centered on dieting and beautification. Rarely does a promotion that advocates education and culture find dominance in that 30 second time gap between show and movie segments.
The bullying of magazine articles also attributes to this harmful conditioning: the rating of celebrity attractiveness; tips on perfecting makeup application; the comparing of fashion trends; etc. Over and over again, provocative images and oversize headlines prove distracting to focus and progress -mentally or physically.
Society reduces women from people to products, from beings to dolls. Still tied to the primeval symbol of Mother Earth, we are each seen as but plots of land for a man to conquer and possess.
So where then do we turn? What must we do to elevate ourselves? We should start at the heart of it all: ourselves.
Until we tune out the distractions and focus on more intellectual and spiritual riches, we will remain but subordinates to our surroundings.
Once again referencing de Beauvior, Spelman councils that "woman's emancipation will come when woman, like man, is freed from this association with. . . the less important aspect of human existence." (120)
And the "less important aspect" that she is alluding to...? The human body.
The female body.
Work Cited
Spelman, Elizabeth V. "Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views." Feminist
Studies 8.1 (Spring 1982). 109-130. Print.
Studies 8.1 (Spring 1982). 109-130. Print.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
The Feminist in Me
What does it mean to be a "feminist"? More importantly, though, what does it mean to me to be a "feminist"?Born into the generation fondly known as "Y," or "Millennial," my peers and I have grown up within an interesting and trying frame on the North American timeline. We grew up in a generation of warfare, both in the Middle East and on the American home-front.
But the ride, for many of us, is only a quarter of a century in-progress (give or take a few mile-markers).
Some of us may remember the ending of the Gulf War or the Bosnian Conflict. For sure, though, all of us can remember the tragedy of September 11, 2001; as well as the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
On the home-front, most of us grew up around the social warfare on military support, illegal immigration, cultural acceptance [mostly for Arab-Americans], same-sex marriage, and abortion legalization.
Between these two brief lists, a common theme emerges: shattered security.
Or was the 'security' an illusion?
I grew up as a fish without a bowl, one among many -flopping in a puddle of spilled water and broken glass, in all that was once familiar. The good economic and social times that my generation was promised had evaporated. The best of times began to descend into the worst of times.
But as frightening as displacement could be, the reality it unearthed left an unshakable impact. Like Neo waking from the Matrix, I saw the world -for the first time -as it truly was. The boundless utopia of my childhood -a place of unconscious gender-blending, with Pokemon card-trading and Brittany Spears -had disappeared, swallowed up into the abyss like Atlantis.
At last I also realized what it was that my male peers could not make me understand: I was female, and that -apparently -was problematic.
Although my metamorphosis began years before, in high school, I did not learn of the term "feminist" prior to taking an ethics course at a small university in the crossroads region of South Texas. Now a graduate student in a much larger 'pond' (school), I am beginning to explore this social, political, and philosophical platform on a more personal -as well as academic -level.
In this blog, many of the posts will be influenced by the featured articles and inspired conversations in my Women's Studies ("Images of Women") class. By nature, many of the topics will be controversial. Part of becoming a feminist, as I understand it, however, means learning to be open-minded and accepting of ideas and practices that are generally suppressed or persecuted by the over-looming patriarchy that is modern Western society.
In short: Consider this Pandora's box opened.
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