The gentlemen have invaded our profession,” says Riyaz. “Gen-tel-men,” he drawls in sarcasm, fluttering his trimmed eyelashes and flashing a mocking smile. Riyaz, 28, is a laancch (the Kashmiri for eunuchs), traditional matchmakers in the Valley.
The “gentlemen” — the object of Riyaz’s anger — are the “retired officers, barbers, door-to-door pickle vendors, marriage bureaus”, who have turned to matchmaking of late, eroding the business of the laancch.
“This is what we have been doing for generations. In other jobs, we are ridiculed,” says Riyaz, sprawled on the double bed that nearly fills his one-room rented home in the Bemina suburb of Srinagar.
It’s mostly the middle and lower-middle classes in cities who still go to the laancch, since the “gentlemen” matchmakers have all but elbowed out the laancch from the lucrative upper strata of society. Or perhaps, it’s rising affluence, increasing acceptance of ‘love marriage’ and the opening up of society that have affected their trade.
Arranging a marriage is an elaborate affair in Kashmir and it can take as long as two years. Only a person without responsibilities and demands of a family — like a laancch — could take on the onerous job, or so it was believed. The gift of the gab, wit and resourcefulness are added qualities the laancch were reputed to possess.
Ghulam Muhammad, 67, who claims to have arranged thousands of marriages, says, “We can gauge a bride’s future in a home from the way clients serve us tea.”
The task of a matchmaker begins with getting to know the family. He sizes up the boy or the girl and gives the families addresses from his diary. From here begins an exhaustive ‘verification’ of everything from the boy’s income to the mother’s temper. If that goes well, the matchmaker arranges a meeting of the boy and girl, chaperoned by families. If any side withdraws at this stage, it means a loss for the laancch. “Two or three months work goes waste,” says Riyaz, who has faced three disappointments this year.
A matchmaker is paid Rs 100-500 on each visit to the client, and makes between Rs 15,000 and Rs 50,000 on a marriage. The payment goes up in special cases — an ageing bridegroom, for example. Sometimes, lovers who are afraid to talk to their families, ask a laancch to ‘arrange’ their marriage.
A laancch, invariably illiterate and poor, has a diary containing addresses of prospective brides and bridegrooms, the size of their family, educational qualifications, job profiles and other details. The thickness of the diary is indication of success; upstarts often carry loose pages.
Abdul Rahman, 44, and Muhammad Akram, 42, who have been working as laancch for the past 20 years, have been hit particularly hard by the “gentleman’s invasion”, managing barely six marriages this year. “Many weddings were cancelled during last year’s agitation (over the Amarnath land transfer). We had to accept whatever clients gave us,” Rahman says.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
Article by a western negatively queer male
A mile or so off the interstate that cleaves the small farming town of Bakersfield, California, the smackdown has begun. I watch as two rival gangs of dark-skinned, half-naked adolescent boys, sweating and barefoot, eye each other across a bare dirt field. Somewhere on the edge of their collective consciousness, endless eighteen-wheelers whip down the I-5; this is the town they grew up in, though few of them were born here. One of the boys on the eastern side of the field gets brave. He steps forward in his black shorts, murder on his face, ready to rumble. Like a cowboy readying to draw, Black Shorts lifts his hands at his sides, even though he's clearly unarmed. It's four against one. That's guts, I think, watching from a safe distance away.
"Stick him baby," one of Black Shorts' friends shouts behind him, and he charges.
Instead of piling on Black Shorts, though, his nemeses link elbows, forming what looks an awful lot like a chorus line. Black Shorts lunges forward and delivers a light flick to one of the chorus dancers' arms, then turns and bolts back to his friends.
I think to myself: that's it?
I had driven three hours that morning to understand the appeal of the legendarily rough sport of kabaddi, a form of team wrestling that began four thousand years ago in India's Punjab region and has more recently made its way to this dusty field behind Guru Angad Darbar, a Sikh temple. Unlike many American males, I don't like watching contact sports any more than
promotion
I like participating in them. Now, as the cheesy refrain blows into my brain — "God, I hope I get it! I hope I get it!" — I feel almost relieved at the lack of the very bloodshed I'd come to see.
Not that I'd known what to expect. Though part of the Asian Games for decades, and a staple entertainment in Punjabi communities from Vancouver to Singapore, kabaddi is still a "people's sport," its heroes still too obscure for corporate sponsorship or the cover of SI.
In the impoverished rural villages of the Punjab, however, kabaddi exceeds even cricket in popularity, for good reason: it costs nothing to play. Seven players, oiled up and usually wearing only boxers or briefs, gather on each side of a field. Each team takes its turn sending a "raider" into enemy territory to tag one of his opponents. The raider must then get back to his side of the field before the tagged opponent can stop him. It is after the tag that kabaddi gets rough: the tagged defender has almost the entire World Wrestling Entertainment playbook at his disposal to prevent the raider's escape. Scissor holds, tripping, headlocks — it's all fair.
Compared to WWE stars, though, kabaddi wrestlers make relatively modest salaries, with top athletes earning $50,000-$80,000 a year. (Unlike in most team sports, kabaddi players can profit individually from their victories, however.) Success in the sport can lead players to careers in modeling and politics, as well as a healthy gambling concession. In early March, the Indian government held a kabaddi match between parliamentarians and journalists. The sport has even seen its share of doping scandals, with some overdoses rumored.
Still, despite having arrived in the U.S. more than a century ago with the first Sikh immigrants, kabaddi has only recently found notice here. I only learned about the sport after watching Kabaddi Cops, a Canadian documentary on the first all-white kabaddi team, formed by the Toronto Police Service in 2002. More recently, U.S. soldiers stationed in India have added kabaddi to their counterinsurgency training.
Sikh culture expert Gurinder Singh Mann isn't surprised, given the sports' origin in the barracks of Punjabi soldiers. "Invaders were always trying to attack Delhi," explains Mann, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. "If the war isn't going on, the army would stay fit by playing the game."
The players are proud of the game's scrappy reputation. "The
They yank each other to the ground. "Stick him, baby!" their teammate shouts. people driving by always stop their cars," says Oppy Singh, 25, son of one of the coaches, pointing to a road running along the edge of the gurdwara, or Sikh temple, where the kabaddi field lies. "They think we're beating each other up."
They must not see very well, I think, watching the next raider step up. Again, the chorus line and the sissy slap; this time, though, the raider isn't fast enough as he darts away, and the defender gets a hand around his neck. The two of them dance for a moment, then yank each other to the ground. "Stick him, baby!" the same teammate shouts.
This is what I'd come to see, this ensuing sticking. Dust flies as the defender locks his legs around the raiders'. The raider tries dragging himself and the defender toward his side of the field before his time runs out. In the sports' traditional version, the raider isn't allowed to draw a breath while on the opposition's turf, and must continuously shout "kabaddi-kabaddi-kabaddi" to prove he isn't cheating. In today's version, he has thirty seconds, and spends most of it locking limbs with his defender, the pair grinding groins together in a painful looking manner. In the end, he can't do it. The coach blows the whistle; the raider stands, dusts himself off and retreats home.
I find myself smiling and remembering games of Red Rover in third grade, the last time sports were fun for me. After that came sixth-grade phys ed, where I found myself getting dry-humped by the same irony-impervious boys who called each other faggot as soon as they reached the locker room. The sport we were learning was called wrestling, and for all his earnest effort, Mr. Van Cherry never managed to communicate its appeal to us. Even the absurd psychodrama of the WWE (then the WWF) seemed more interesting at the time. Sort of.
Therein lies the paradox. What do I, an apparently straight male, not much of a sports fan to begin with, find so appealing about what may be the gayest-looking competition on the planet?
Mr. Van Cherry isn't around to answer this question. So I turn to an expert on sports psychology, Professor Arnd Kruger of Germany's Georg-August-University. Is oiling up and wrestling other muscular men in your underwear inherently homoerotic?
"Not necessarily," says Kruger. Many if not most "vernacular sports" — those played in traditional societies — focus on endurance or raw virility rather than skill. Wrestling is a throwback to the days when sports included yanking your opponent's scrotum until he screamed, or holding your head underwater longer than your competitors, or even the "Black Knight" component of summertime jousting competitions, in which knights would see who could keep the lid of their helmets shut longer. But these apparently "manly" sports aren't necessarily any more sexual than other kinds.
"There are some sports that demand more of the male hormone testosterone than others," Kruger says. "On the other hand, there are some sports that by the symbolism of the activity have sexual connotations, e.g. shooting. I don't think [kabaddi] has more homoerotic connotation than rugby, wrestling, Sumo, Lucha Canaria, the wrestling matches of the Nuba, etc."
Of course, that isn't saying much. Wrestling is the sport that looks more like fucking than any other, the sport in which homophobes and appreciative gay fans find themselves thrust into uncomfortable proximity.
"I prefer the dusty grime of a boy fresh from the wrestling ring," enthused the ancient Greek poet Strato, expressing much the same sentiment that gender-bending WWE wrestlers such as Goldust and Adrian Adonis used two thousand years later to unnerve their opponents. Similar WWE characters, such as stereotypically-flaming twins Lenny and Lodi, were yanked after the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation threatened legal action.
While such characters may be WWE screenwriter's attempt at stirring
There was no better way to avenge yourself on the jock who called you "faggot" than to imply (behind his back, of course) that his sport was an expression of his repressed sexual desires. the outrage of its ten-year-old fans, the same sport has spawned its own genre of erotica, as well as numerous gay fan sites. Nor is the phenomenon limited to the WWE. Even "legitimate" wrestling's most famous modern figure, Gorgeous George, intentionally cultivated questions about his sexuality, as a way of humiliating his opponents and drawing in fans.
In junior-high school, though, humiliation worked the other way around. There was no better way to avenge yourself on the jock who called you "faggot" than to imply (behind his back, of course) that his sport was an expression of his repressed sexual desires. Many NBA fans were right to denounce retired NBA player Tim Hardaway, after he recently announced on Miami radio,"I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic." But to suggest that Hardaway's homophobia is just a means of concealing his homosexuality, or that of his fellow players, is itself homophobic.
Still, in a country with so few openly gay athletes, denouncing the openly homophobic ones is one of the few forms of political catharsis there is. So it goes with my instinctive reaction to kabaddi. Kruger tells me that if the sport seems gay to me, it's my fault.
"You should be aware that something you might find homoerotic or laden with sexuality might be just your peculiar American perspective," Kruger says.
Indeed, I am not much relieved to
A kabaddi match between Sikh immigrants in Southern California. The ancient Indian sport is catching on with Canadian cops and American soldiers as well.find out who shares my peculiar American perspective. "One of our very higher ranking police officers sent an email [to the Toronto Police kabaddi team] asking what's with you guys stripping down to your underwear," recalls Gregory Cote, director of Kabaddi Cops. "There are a lot of snickers in the locker room and talk away from the players, whether about they're being gay or sucking up to a certain ethnicity. Cops are a cynical bunch."
Less cynical is Ginda Ghakal, a twenty-one-year-old Indian-born kabaddi player from Northern California. He doesn't see anything homoerotic about kabaddi — and if I do, he says, it's just a cultural misunderstanding. "I wrestled in high school, and everyone thought we were gay. Here we're more protective. In India straight men hold hands." About men holding hands in public, Ghalal concedes, "It's a little weird for me, even."
I know what Ghalal means. While traveling in India, I myself have felt uncomfortable when a male friend grabbed my hand to help me cross the street. But it was a different sort of embarrassment than that which I felt on the wrestling mat in Mr. Van Cherry's class, back when getting called a fag left me wondering all day whether indeed I was one. My discomfort in India owed primarily to the fact that I was traveling in a country where homosexuality was illegal. To learn that hand-holding was just considered hand-holding, to be able to defer to another culture's standards when my own are so conflicted, was a nice surprise.
That, perhaps, is the answer to my question. Part of what makes kabaddi so appealing is that it is a sport whose fans (unlike those of the WWE, for instance) could care less about how gay it looks. In Bangladesh, another country where homosexuality is illegal, the national sport is kabaddi. America is both more and less advanced in its sexual politics. We are slowly coming to accept the idea that the NBA and the NFL aren't the bastions of straightness that our fathers and coaches told us they were. I doubt we'll look into the dugout and see the players of our national pastime holding hands any time soon. Unless, of course, they decide to take up kabaddi. n°
You can read comments from real men here.
"Stick him baby," one of Black Shorts' friends shouts behind him, and he charges.
Instead of piling on Black Shorts, though, his nemeses link elbows, forming what looks an awful lot like a chorus line. Black Shorts lunges forward and delivers a light flick to one of the chorus dancers' arms, then turns and bolts back to his friends.
I think to myself: that's it?
I had driven three hours that morning to understand the appeal of the legendarily rough sport of kabaddi, a form of team wrestling that began four thousand years ago in India's Punjab region and has more recently made its way to this dusty field behind Guru Angad Darbar, a Sikh temple. Unlike many American males, I don't like watching contact sports any more than
promotion
I like participating in them. Now, as the cheesy refrain blows into my brain — "God, I hope I get it! I hope I get it!" — I feel almost relieved at the lack of the very bloodshed I'd come to see.
Not that I'd known what to expect. Though part of the Asian Games for decades, and a staple entertainment in Punjabi communities from Vancouver to Singapore, kabaddi is still a "people's sport," its heroes still too obscure for corporate sponsorship or the cover of SI.
In the impoverished rural villages of the Punjab, however, kabaddi exceeds even cricket in popularity, for good reason: it costs nothing to play. Seven players, oiled up and usually wearing only boxers or briefs, gather on each side of a field. Each team takes its turn sending a "raider" into enemy territory to tag one of his opponents. The raider must then get back to his side of the field before the tagged opponent can stop him. It is after the tag that kabaddi gets rough: the tagged defender has almost the entire World Wrestling Entertainment playbook at his disposal to prevent the raider's escape. Scissor holds, tripping, headlocks — it's all fair.
Compared to WWE stars, though, kabaddi wrestlers make relatively modest salaries, with top athletes earning $50,000-$80,000 a year. (Unlike in most team sports, kabaddi players can profit individually from their victories, however.) Success in the sport can lead players to careers in modeling and politics, as well as a healthy gambling concession. In early March, the Indian government held a kabaddi match between parliamentarians and journalists. The sport has even seen its share of doping scandals, with some overdoses rumored.
Still, despite having arrived in the U.S. more than a century ago with the first Sikh immigrants, kabaddi has only recently found notice here. I only learned about the sport after watching Kabaddi Cops, a Canadian documentary on the first all-white kabaddi team, formed by the Toronto Police Service in 2002. More recently, U.S. soldiers stationed in India have added kabaddi to their counterinsurgency training.
Sikh culture expert Gurinder Singh Mann isn't surprised, given the sports' origin in the barracks of Punjabi soldiers. "Invaders were always trying to attack Delhi," explains Mann, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. "If the war isn't going on, the army would stay fit by playing the game."
The players are proud of the game's scrappy reputation. "The
They yank each other to the ground. "Stick him, baby!" their teammate shouts. people driving by always stop their cars," says Oppy Singh, 25, son of one of the coaches, pointing to a road running along the edge of the gurdwara, or Sikh temple, where the kabaddi field lies. "They think we're beating each other up."
They must not see very well, I think, watching the next raider step up. Again, the chorus line and the sissy slap; this time, though, the raider isn't fast enough as he darts away, and the defender gets a hand around his neck. The two of them dance for a moment, then yank each other to the ground. "Stick him, baby!" the same teammate shouts.
This is what I'd come to see, this ensuing sticking. Dust flies as the defender locks his legs around the raiders'. The raider tries dragging himself and the defender toward his side of the field before his time runs out. In the sports' traditional version, the raider isn't allowed to draw a breath while on the opposition's turf, and must continuously shout "kabaddi-kabaddi-kabaddi" to prove he isn't cheating. In today's version, he has thirty seconds, and spends most of it locking limbs with his defender, the pair grinding groins together in a painful looking manner. In the end, he can't do it. The coach blows the whistle; the raider stands, dusts himself off and retreats home.
I find myself smiling and remembering games of Red Rover in third grade, the last time sports were fun for me. After that came sixth-grade phys ed, where I found myself getting dry-humped by the same irony-impervious boys who called each other faggot as soon as they reached the locker room. The sport we were learning was called wrestling, and for all his earnest effort, Mr. Van Cherry never managed to communicate its appeal to us. Even the absurd psychodrama of the WWE (then the WWF) seemed more interesting at the time. Sort of.
Therein lies the paradox. What do I, an apparently straight male, not much of a sports fan to begin with, find so appealing about what may be the gayest-looking competition on the planet?
Mr. Van Cherry isn't around to answer this question. So I turn to an expert on sports psychology, Professor Arnd Kruger of Germany's Georg-August-University. Is oiling up and wrestling other muscular men in your underwear inherently homoerotic?
"Not necessarily," says Kruger. Many if not most "vernacular sports" — those played in traditional societies — focus on endurance or raw virility rather than skill. Wrestling is a throwback to the days when sports included yanking your opponent's scrotum until he screamed, or holding your head underwater longer than your competitors, or even the "Black Knight" component of summertime jousting competitions, in which knights would see who could keep the lid of their helmets shut longer. But these apparently "manly" sports aren't necessarily any more sexual than other kinds.
"There are some sports that demand more of the male hormone testosterone than others," Kruger says. "On the other hand, there are some sports that by the symbolism of the activity have sexual connotations, e.g. shooting. I don't think [kabaddi] has more homoerotic connotation than rugby, wrestling, Sumo, Lucha Canaria, the wrestling matches of the Nuba, etc."
Of course, that isn't saying much. Wrestling is the sport that looks more like fucking than any other, the sport in which homophobes and appreciative gay fans find themselves thrust into uncomfortable proximity.
"I prefer the dusty grime of a boy fresh from the wrestling ring," enthused the ancient Greek poet Strato, expressing much the same sentiment that gender-bending WWE wrestlers such as Goldust and Adrian Adonis used two thousand years later to unnerve their opponents. Similar WWE characters, such as stereotypically-flaming twins Lenny and Lodi, were yanked after the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation threatened legal action.
While such characters may be WWE screenwriter's attempt at stirring
There was no better way to avenge yourself on the jock who called you "faggot" than to imply (behind his back, of course) that his sport was an expression of his repressed sexual desires. the outrage of its ten-year-old fans, the same sport has spawned its own genre of erotica, as well as numerous gay fan sites. Nor is the phenomenon limited to the WWE. Even "legitimate" wrestling's most famous modern figure, Gorgeous George, intentionally cultivated questions about his sexuality, as a way of humiliating his opponents and drawing in fans.
In junior-high school, though, humiliation worked the other way around. There was no better way to avenge yourself on the jock who called you "faggot" than to imply (behind his back, of course) that his sport was an expression of his repressed sexual desires. Many NBA fans were right to denounce retired NBA player Tim Hardaway, after he recently announced on Miami radio,"I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic." But to suggest that Hardaway's homophobia is just a means of concealing his homosexuality, or that of his fellow players, is itself homophobic.
Still, in a country with so few openly gay athletes, denouncing the openly homophobic ones is one of the few forms of political catharsis there is. So it goes with my instinctive reaction to kabaddi. Kruger tells me that if the sport seems gay to me, it's my fault.
"You should be aware that something you might find homoerotic or laden with sexuality might be just your peculiar American perspective," Kruger says.
Indeed, I am not much relieved to
A kabaddi match between Sikh immigrants in Southern California. The ancient Indian sport is catching on with Canadian cops and American soldiers as well.find out who shares my peculiar American perspective. "One of our very higher ranking police officers sent an email [to the Toronto Police kabaddi team] asking what's with you guys stripping down to your underwear," recalls Gregory Cote, director of Kabaddi Cops. "There are a lot of snickers in the locker room and talk away from the players, whether about they're being gay or sucking up to a certain ethnicity. Cops are a cynical bunch."
Less cynical is Ginda Ghakal, a twenty-one-year-old Indian-born kabaddi player from Northern California. He doesn't see anything homoerotic about kabaddi — and if I do, he says, it's just a cultural misunderstanding. "I wrestled in high school, and everyone thought we were gay. Here we're more protective. In India straight men hold hands." About men holding hands in public, Ghalal concedes, "It's a little weird for me, even."
I know what Ghalal means. While traveling in India, I myself have felt uncomfortable when a male friend grabbed my hand to help me cross the street. But it was a different sort of embarrassment than that which I felt on the wrestling mat in Mr. Van Cherry's class, back when getting called a fag left me wondering all day whether indeed I was one. My discomfort in India owed primarily to the fact that I was traveling in a country where homosexuality was illegal. To learn that hand-holding was just considered hand-holding, to be able to defer to another culture's standards when my own are so conflicted, was a nice surprise.
That, perhaps, is the answer to my question. Part of what makes kabaddi so appealing is that it is a sport whose fans (unlike those of the WWE, for instance) could care less about how gay it looks. In Bangladesh, another country where homosexuality is illegal, the national sport is kabaddi. America is both more and less advanced in its sexual politics. We are slowly coming to accept the idea that the NBA and the NFL aren't the bastions of straightness that our fathers and coaches told us they were. I doubt we'll look into the dugout and see the players of our national pastime holding hands any time soon. Unless, of course, they decide to take up kabaddi. n°
You can read comments from real men here.
Friday, May 29, 2009
"Feminine" heterosexual men: subverting heteropatriarchal sexual scripts?
Publication: The Journal of Men's Studies Publication Date: 22-MAR-06 Author: Hill, Darryl B.COPYRIGHT 2006 Men's Studies Press More than a decade ago, Hunter (1993) proposed a way in which a heterosexual man might avoid heterosexual privilege. Writing from the perspective of a self-proclaimed "sissy"--a male (regardless of sexual orientation) who is in some way not masculine" (p. 153)--Hunter rejoiced in his "refusal to be a man" and in his "location outside of masculinity" (p. 152). As much as he seemed happy with his status, Hunter also related some of the problems of being heterosexual with a nontraditional sexual script. Feminine men may be more emotionally sensitive than their women partners, but this may pose a problem for women who may not be comfortable with emotional men. Their partners may also feel burdened by the obligation to initiate more sexual encounters and may not be too enthused. It seems that sissies might face some unique challenges in heterosexual relationships. | |||
TAG: queer heterosexuals: Gender Queer Hets
Posted by on November 8, 2005
I’ve had an idea haunting me for a long time now; Tristan Taormino planted the seed with her discussion of ‘queer heterosexuals’ (the passage quoted in Chapter 6 of MHB) and so has my existence, so to speak. Because it was only once I met Betty that I went back in time some and revisited my younger self - the childhood tomboy I was, the punk rocker who’d opted out of gender, the young adult who was “sirred” regularly, the crewcutted co-ed who got asked out more often by lesbians than by the boys I sought.
But at some point I learned to be more traditionally femme, mostly in order to date boys.
And then of course you might remember I got upset with Judith Halberstam by dismissing the masculinity of heterosexual women.
Today at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, where Betty and I were in a panel about trans relationships, I talked to a femme who has dated a few transmen pre-transition. She, like I, felt liberated by being with someone who was not traditionally gendered, not male or female; she, like me, found it enabled her to be who she was. In her case, she was a natural femme who had tried desperately to “look like a lesbian,” and at some point I joked with her that we should have switched either gender identities or sexual orientations.
And while it seems like I’m just going to point out again that gender identity and sexual orientation don’t go together, what I’m really after is where the genderqueer heterosexuals are.
Because I asked our contact at HMI whether or not - if such a person existed - if a heterosexual, out teenaged crossdresser would be welcome there. And then Betty and I wondered out loud why we know he’d never come out in time to go to a GLBT high school. I want to know why he’s invisible, or why het crossdressers, and late-transitioning, lesbian-identified transwomen, all seem to “come out” so much later (much later than the GLBT kids we saw hanging around today).
I decided the problem is heterosexuality. Not being heterosexual - that’s what it is. But when a crossdresser writes to me,
Sexually, I have never been attracted to ‘a man presenting as a man’ and think I would run a mile if I had discovered a penis in any one else’s knickers but my own. Similarly (or is that conversely) FTMs are (to me, and please, I would not say this to them) sexually attractive. In fact I find muscular, athletic females, and those frequently described as ‘butch dikes’ more often than not attractive too. Now the awkward bit… so are some transwomen – at least from the very limited views available on their own sites. I have no idea how I would react if I met them. . .
I wonder whether or not gender queer sexuality is just kept under wraps.
I wonder if there were guys who were attracted to me because I was kind of dyke-y and I just didn’t recognize that because - well maybe they were waiting for me to ask them out. Or maybe I was so intent that masculine boys were my only option that I didn’t see them as potential romantic partners (and maybe they didn’t see me, either). What I’m thinking these days is that heterosexuality stifles genderqueerness, while homosexual cultures - for whatever reasons - give people more room to express gender variance.
And I wonder what it would take to queer gender even in heterosexual reality. It might mean we’d have to rewrite some of the love songs. Change expectations.
When I play The Sims, for instance, I often let the women do the wooing, and it tickles me no end to see the male being wooed put his hand to his forehead, swoon slightly, and giggle in response while my female seducer, down on one knee, serenades his pretty self. But like that commercial for the guy in his wife’s slip, there is no template for that, is there? It’s like us genderqueer hets simply don’t exist.
But we do, don’t we?
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Evidence of how warped the Western society has become...
But you're so queer for a straight guy! Affirming complexities of gendered sexualities in men
This paper argues the need for expansion of the categories of sexuality and gender as these relate to heterosexual-identified males; it calls for an increased visibility of males who are straight but who, by queering straight masculinity, challenge normative, hegemonic hetero-masculinity. Queering here is seen as the disrupting of both normative heterosexuality and masculinity, presenting the heterosexual male in a way that adopts characteristics of both the feminine and that which is perceived to be gay. Drawing on a typology of “queer masculinities of straight males” (Heasley, 2003; 2005), this paper argues that this articulation of the diversity within the hetero-masculine is critical to examine for its disruption of hegemonic masculinity and its accompanying partner, hegemonic heterosexuality. By acknowledging, legitimizing, and reproducing queer straight masculinity, “another world becomes possible” – a world where both masculinity and heterosexuality takes on a new range of meanings – meanings that become associated positively with the feminine and with homosexuality. This paper uses the typology of queer-straight masculinity as well as photos and narratives from an art exhibit on intimate male friendships as a way to examine how straight males can and do disrupt the normative gender/sexual system.
Note from Reclaiming Natural manhood site:
This paper seeks to build upon the existing confusion created in the West by gender identities misdefined in terms of sexuality, to accommodate the discrepancies created in this process, rather than seek to dismantle the basic confusion and revert back to the original gender definitions.
This paper argues the need for expansion of the categories of sexuality and gender as these relate to heterosexual-identified males; it calls for an increased visibility of males who are straight but who, by queering straight masculinity, challenge normative, hegemonic hetero-masculinity. Queering here is seen as the disrupting of both normative heterosexuality and masculinity, presenting the heterosexual male in a way that adopts characteristics of both the feminine and that which is perceived to be gay. Drawing on a typology of “queer masculinities of straight males” (Heasley, 2003; 2005), this paper argues that this articulation of the diversity within the hetero-masculine is critical to examine for its disruption of hegemonic masculinity and its accompanying partner, hegemonic heterosexuality. By acknowledging, legitimizing, and reproducing queer straight masculinity, “another world becomes possible” – a world where both masculinity and heterosexuality takes on a new range of meanings – meanings that become associated positively with the feminine and with homosexuality. This paper uses the typology of queer-straight masculinity as well as photos and narratives from an art exhibit on intimate male friendships as a way to examine how straight males can and do disrupt the normative gender/sexual system.
Note from Reclaiming Natural manhood site:
This paper seeks to build upon the existing confusion created in the West by gender identities misdefined in terms of sexuality, to accommodate the discrepancies created in this process, rather than seek to dismantle the basic confusion and revert back to the original gender definitions.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
God has to be a man-woman
Ardhnarishwar means 'God who is half woman and half man.' This is a form of Hindu deity Shiva.
The Greek deities Hermes and Aphrodite combined to form 'hermaphrodite'.
The Confucian and Taoist principles of yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) balance the male with the female elements.
Himalayan Buddhists use the words yab-yum instead of yin-yang. Hopi Native Americans believe that modern life has been thrown out of balance because the sacred feminine has been eliminated. The Jews call God Yahweh, JHVH or YHWH. The Christians use the name Jehovah. All four names unite the masculine, Jah (Psalms 68:4) wtih Havah, which is the pre-Hebraic name for Eve.
BY PERWEZ DEWAN
The Greek deities Hermes and Aphrodite combined to form 'hermaphrodite'.
The Confucian and Taoist principles of yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) balance the male with the female elements.
Himalayan Buddhists use the words yab-yum instead of yin-yang. Hopi Native Americans believe that modern life has been thrown out of balance because the sacred feminine has been eliminated. The Jews call God Yahweh, JHVH or YHWH. The Christians use the name Jehovah. All four names unite the masculine, Jah (Psalms 68:4) wtih Havah, which is the pre-Hebraic name for Eve.
BY PERWEZ DEWAN
Friday, January 16, 2009
The third gender in twentieth-century America
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1996 by Randolph Trumbach
George Chauncey's brilliant and often persuasive study of male homosexual relations in early twentieth-century New York was published two years ago on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that inaugurated the recent gay liberation movement. The world that he describes was the product of a major shift in western sexual behavior that had begun two hundred years before, around 1700. And his book is in dialogue with the scholars who over the past twenty-five years have tried to analyze that shift. The nature of the problem to be discussed can be indicated by asking whether homosexuality and heterosexuality are biological categories that divide the world into a majority and a minority that can be found in all times and places. To such a question most western people today would reply yes. And while they would probably wonder why a minority should be homosexual, they would simply accept without question that most people are heterosexual. Since the 1970s, however, the work of some historians and sociologists has radically challenged these presumptions. Mary McIntosh in a classic article in 1968 began the discussion by proposing that homosexuality in modern society was a deviant role into which some men were socialized beginning around 1700. Nine years later in 1977 Jeffrey Weeks and myself, under McIntosh's influence but independently of each other, rephrased McIntosh's proposal. Weeks maintained that the modern homosexual role emerged in the late nineteenth century when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented.(1)..... click here to read more.
George Chauncey's brilliant and often persuasive study of male homosexual relations in early twentieth-century New York was published two years ago on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that inaugurated the recent gay liberation movement. The world that he describes was the product of a major shift in western sexual behavior that had begun two hundred years before, around 1700. And his book is in dialogue with the scholars who over the past twenty-five years have tried to analyze that shift. The nature of the problem to be discussed can be indicated by asking whether homosexuality and heterosexuality are biological categories that divide the world into a majority and a minority that can be found in all times and places. To such a question most western people today would reply yes. And while they would probably wonder why a minority should be homosexual, they would simply accept without question that most people are heterosexual. Since the 1970s, however, the work of some historians and sociologists has radically challenged these presumptions. Mary McIntosh in a classic article in 1968 began the discussion by proposing that homosexuality in modern society was a deviant role into which some men were socialized beginning around 1700. Nine years later in 1977 Jeffrey Weeks and myself, under McIntosh's influence but independently of each other, rephrased McIntosh's proposal. Weeks maintained that the modern homosexual role emerged in the late nineteenth century when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented.(1)..... click here to read more.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Sounding gay
At first blush, schoolyard taunts might not seem a fruitful source of truisms about the human condition, but the epithet “it takes one to know one” does have some basis in reality, at least for gays and lesbians, who are often attuned to the special somethings that subtly and covertly distinguish gay from straight. In gay vernacular, the ability to identify who is gay and who isn’t is termed gay radar, or gaydar. But exactly which signals does gaydar pick up? And what differentiates the signals given off by gays and straights?
The voice offers a few clues. Though popular stereotype holds that gay men lisp, lisping is quite rare and is often evidence of a diagnosable speech impediment. The most famous lisper alive today, boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, hardly fits into the “gay” category. But the lisping stereotype is not altogether removed from reality: In fact, some North American gay males do pronounce sibilants (s, z, sh, and the like) in a distinctive way – by adding more sibilation, hissing, or stridency, a phenomenon phonologists call assibilation.
Here, of course, the dangers of stereotypes become apparent. Gay men are not the only group whose members sometimes speak with assibilation. A habit of assibilating “stops” like t and d is a prominent feature of Quebec French, for example, and the source of much derision from national French speakers. A word like térébentine (“turpentine”) in certain Quebec French dialects is pronounced something like tsérébentsine. Many New Yorkers of all persuasions, and some American Jews, also assibilate in ways similar to Quebec French or stereotypical gay speech. Moreover, gay men who speak with what a North American newsreader would consider an “accent” – such as British, Australian, or even Texan gays – rarely assibilate at all. Nailing down just what makes a gay voice gay is as vague and slippery as human sexuality itself.
That’s not to say the problem hasn’t been studied. In one experiment, Rudolf Gaudio, an openly-gay linguistics student at Stanford University, asked four gay and four straight men to read two passages into a tape recorder. The first text was a dry excerpt from an accounting volume, the second a dramatic passage from Harvey Fierstein’s play about gay life, Torch Song Trilogy. A group of 13 subjects of both sexes listened to selected snippets of those recorded passages and ranked each one according to a “semantic differential” technique, i.e., on a seven-position scale between opposite terms: straight and gay, effeminate and masculine, reserved and emotional, affected and ordinary.
As Gaudio noted, “listeners’ guesses about speakers’ sexual orientation were largely accurate: with ‘straight’ at the left pole of the continuum and ‘gay’ at the right pole, all the straight speakers rated on the ‘straight’ side, and all the gay speakers were to their right (i.e., sounded ‘more gay’).” That pattern held true for both the accounting and dramatic passages.
Gaudio’s research was not concerned with gaydar per se; rather, his interest was in correlating pitch measurements with the listeners’ ratings. Oddly, though, in a range of pitch measurements taken from the actual sound waves of the four gay and four straight men’s voices, there was no significant correlation with the listeners’ judgements. The experiment, then, could provide no quantifiable reason why the listeners’ perceptions about gay and straight speakers were correct.
Gaudio explains this anomaly by noting that his experiment considered only a narrow range of measurements; gay and straight men’s speech might well differ according to criteria Gaudio did not measure. A leading openly-gay linguist, Arnold Zwicky of Ohio State University, echoes that interpretation and adds that gay men’s speech can differ from straight in a number of ways; listeners might pick up on only one or some combination of those factors – and not necessarily the ones Gaudio measured. Still, the likelihood of further research in this area, according to Gaudio and Zwicky, is remote due to the political touchiness of studying gay speech.
[Originally published in the Economist, 1995 ¶ Posted 2001.05.07; updated 2006.07.26]
The voice offers a few clues. Though popular stereotype holds that gay men lisp, lisping is quite rare and is often evidence of a diagnosable speech impediment. The most famous lisper alive today, boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, hardly fits into the “gay” category. But the lisping stereotype is not altogether removed from reality: In fact, some North American gay males do pronounce sibilants (s, z, sh, and the like) in a distinctive way – by adding more sibilation, hissing, or stridency, a phenomenon phonologists call assibilation.
Here, of course, the dangers of stereotypes become apparent. Gay men are not the only group whose members sometimes speak with assibilation. A habit of assibilating “stops” like t and d is a prominent feature of Quebec French, for example, and the source of much derision from national French speakers. A word like térébentine (“turpentine”) in certain Quebec French dialects is pronounced something like tsérébentsine. Many New Yorkers of all persuasions, and some American Jews, also assibilate in ways similar to Quebec French or stereotypical gay speech. Moreover, gay men who speak with what a North American newsreader would consider an “accent” – such as British, Australian, or even Texan gays – rarely assibilate at all. Nailing down just what makes a gay voice gay is as vague and slippery as human sexuality itself.
That’s not to say the problem hasn’t been studied. In one experiment, Rudolf Gaudio, an openly-gay linguistics student at Stanford University, asked four gay and four straight men to read two passages into a tape recorder. The first text was a dry excerpt from an accounting volume, the second a dramatic passage from Harvey Fierstein’s play about gay life, Torch Song Trilogy. A group of 13 subjects of both sexes listened to selected snippets of those recorded passages and ranked each one according to a “semantic differential” technique, i.e., on a seven-position scale between opposite terms: straight and gay, effeminate and masculine, reserved and emotional, affected and ordinary.
As Gaudio noted, “listeners’ guesses about speakers’ sexual orientation were largely accurate: with ‘straight’ at the left pole of the continuum and ‘gay’ at the right pole, all the straight speakers rated on the ‘straight’ side, and all the gay speakers were to their right (i.e., sounded ‘more gay’).” That pattern held true for both the accounting and dramatic passages.
Gaudio’s research was not concerned with gaydar per se; rather, his interest was in correlating pitch measurements with the listeners’ ratings. Oddly, though, in a range of pitch measurements taken from the actual sound waves of the four gay and four straight men’s voices, there was no significant correlation with the listeners’ judgements. The experiment, then, could provide no quantifiable reason why the listeners’ perceptions about gay and straight speakers were correct.
Gaudio explains this anomaly by noting that his experiment considered only a narrow range of measurements; gay and straight men’s speech might well differ according to criteria Gaudio did not measure. A leading openly-gay linguist, Arnold Zwicky of Ohio State University, echoes that interpretation and adds that gay men’s speech can differ from straight in a number of ways; listeners might pick up on only one or some combination of those factors – and not necessarily the ones Gaudio measured. Still, the likelihood of further research in this area, according to Gaudio and Zwicky, is remote due to the political touchiness of studying gay speech.
[Originally published in the Economist, 1995 ¶ Posted 2001.05.07; updated 2006.07.26]
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