A meditation: I'm weird about Stuff, stuff like, as two useful and always-perennial examples, I am capital dubya Weird about Star Wars and Batman. This is a fact so robust as to be indisputable. Other stuff too, but these are good. Zelda! Ok, I'm done.
Now. I am weird about Star Wars in my way, and older people are weird about Star Wars their way. Right? These are clear delineations. I was born in 1989. My dad did not take me to the premiere in 1977 when I was eleven, and I did not get a job at Lucasarts in 1991. Right? Some things are only possible in a certain context. Now, that old fucker has no concept what is to grow up in the nineties right alongside the Expanded Universe, devouring novels featuring Young Jedi Knights and the OG Witches of Dathomir and shit, not to mention a body of comics containing some of the best one-shot storytelling and universe-building I've read in my life--and through it all, the Star Wars Encyclopedia you keep checking out from the library nestled safely at your elbow like a fully armed and operational battle station.
Because of this, and other similar factors, we absolutely did not see the same movie when we all went and saw The Phantom Menace. Right? That is an agreed-upon truth in this fandom. I think. It can be hard to keep track.
This is specifically to get away from saying that one of these things is better than the other, but they each have their own textures, and that texture is born from a context of a time and place and person's being-in-time-and-place. Right? Yes? We are nodding along with one another, dear reader?
It's the same with Batman. A movie like Batman and Robin may not have made any sense to the viewing public and the critical apparatus it had the misfortune to be misapprehended by, but to the kids it was actually made for--me and the boys--well, it made us who we are. It served us on its own merits with massive aplomb, and primed us for the Nolan trilogy, which would take us from nascent pubescence through to our early twenties, and now, dudes our age are playing Batman and the Riddler. Paul Dano was also born in 1989.
I was thinking about my style of Star Wars and Batman in relation to like ancient decrepits for whom Adam West is the only "real" "real" Batman; and my father, who was old enough to take himself to Star Wars in 1977, and people like him, for which those theater experiences comprise the main of the canon. I was thinking of them with a certain tenderness because I am this way with at least one thing I am Weird about, and dear reader, you may have already identified it by its absence: Pokémon. I am a Mark I, fully first-generation, Camp of the Ancients, Grizzled Adventurer type Pokémaniac with a very specific way of doing and thinking about things; a creature very much on the order of a Sage: I may not be one of those freaks thrashing children on the global stage with my trick 'mons and my three-thousand dollar card collections--but I have been there since the beginning, and I possess much knowledge and craft that lies disused and forgotten, though no less powerful.
All this to say: kids, who are not weird, will become weird about their shit one day. That's all I was thinking about, I guess. I am kind of weird. I was also thinking a lot about the nature of time as it relates to culture and the reflective lens which bounces it all around as it distorts it, even as it creates it, and destroys it. Again, kind of weird.
*
Wrote the following as a response to a reading assignment in a class about diverse children's literature and what that is and means. A great class. She let me write however I wanted, but I didn't take enough advantage of that--except, maybe, below.
*
There may have been a time when I was having experiences that were not colored by gender expectations and my almost uniform failure to conform to them on at least some level, but I cannot remember that time. It must have been formative, though, because one of the biggest and most forward-facing facets of my experience of gender and my thoughts about gender in society has always been “is this even real? I have some serious problems with this model as presented.”
My father claims not to remember the following anecdote, but my memory is a polished scimitar and his is a moth-eaten blanket, so we’re going with my perspective. As a very young person, perhaps four years old, after a bath, I was wearing my towel up to my armpits—not around my waist as is proper for a man—and my dad asked me if I was a girl, to be wearing my towel up so high. I answered “no” mostly out reflex in response to his tone, but of course, the main effect was to make me think about the question, constantly, for the rest of my life. There are thousands of such anecdotes, featuring my father, other male progenitors, and of course, my peers. These kinds of events demand responses, and mine has typically been a measured verbal aikido: non sequiturs applied in the matter of brutally efficient transfers of kinetic energy. It may surprise some people, people who don’t grade my papers, but I’ve always been more of a “fights with words” type of individual.
Questions about my gender and sexuality, even friendly ones, have always exerted an uncomfortable pressure on me, and to delineate a firm response has, to me, always felt like a losing position. I hate, hate, hate labels, hate being put into a box—to ask me, aggressively, to put myself into a box be a cultural norm and something that happens at least every other week and sometimes multiple times a day has made me feel and on occasion actually take the position that culture, all forms of it, and perhaps even human interaction at a base level has been a fundamental error. We should never have come down from the trees, etc. I had to settle on Queer and will defend the usage of the terms until I die because “weird person” isn’t a gender even though it’s my actual gender. But again, who gets to decide these things? Why are we all subject to some kind of shadow board, which confers legitimacy sight unseen? I understand it, like everything else on the human continuum, is decided in a discursive forum, but I find it tyrannical. I find all “nonconforming” groupthink tyrannical, and language generated by consensus one part utile, two parts ephemeral, and one part searing brand pressed into the psyche, just like straight people have. It never ceases to amaze and wound me to witness fellow queers deny legitimacy to gender identities or expressions for whatever social set of reasons happens to be important to them because they have attained some form of power thereby.
I prefer amorphous to delineated; I take the concept of a nonbinary continuum very seriously, even though I find it very comfortable and convenient to exist as a “man”, and to problematize and redefine masculinity thereby. I am a quantum liquid within and without masculinity which corrodes and nourishes at the same time. I attach no special significance to organic mechanisms except from a healthcare perspective, so primary and secondary sex characteristics cut zero ice with me as far as gender goes. Behavior as a gendered concept is frankly impenetrable as such; the scaffolding on ancient monuments whose legibility was always questionable and whose continued existence amazes me. What I like, what makes sense to me, is retaining an open conceptual space for every individual I have ever encountered and may ever encounter for them to define themselves as they are, whether they want to use one of two readymade templates on the ancient binary, or identify as a plant, winged wolf, transmasc lesbian with rolling pronouns, or radiant photonic being. Indeed, a rejection of gender altogether is relatable. To be confronted with something entirely new, something I have no interpretive toolkit for yet, that is exciting—who am I to say what a person is or isn’t? It is for them to tell me, to change their minds about it whenever they need to, and to be treated how they want to be treated around it, and to still have to live in a world where people make the case that a person is not a person unless they are a 1 or a 0 and are able to secure legal support in favor of this position to the material detriment of anyone not a 1 or 0 is frankly incredible. Like a joke, but the least funny joke imaginable.
Well, there are complementary terrible jokes involving variable melanin levels and dominant/recessive phenotypes among genetically identical organisms.
It would be a simple matter to go on for pages and pages and still not scratch the surface of everything I want to say around this particular topic. Perhaps we have enough to go on, even though I feel I have barely communicated. So! When Aidan Became a Brother was wonderful, and as the oldest of three, the excitement around a new baby was very relatable; being a good big brother is one of the cornerstones of my identity. Older sibling is probably a better fit. Certainly, “not fitting”, even when you have a lot of sympathy and empathy and love for what you’re not fitting into, has powerful parallels with my lived experience.
Once again, a main takeaway from “Why Are There So Few Girls in Children’s Books” revolves around the strange warping influences of economic and viability concerns around the production and dissemination of literature. Can it truly be that our fear that we will not sell enough books or that boys will somehow become illiterate as a population if we have a few more girl protagonists determines the wholly misogynistic nature of an entire publishing edifice? This is the kind of thing that sets my teeth on edge. It is absolutely fear, not function, that is the determining factor here, and that is unacceptable. We need more of everything and everyone in all literature, and that is guaranteed to strengthen literature and literacy. On this point, I am confident. The idea that more girls in literature will weaken literacy is concussed and craven.
Tate and the Pink Coat has some pretty strong ideas for creating gender-inclusive classroom spaces, and I would certainly want to utilize the kinds of aesthetics and concerns they’ve outlined in building and stocking a classroom, though I also think there is a case for retaining some “gendered” objects in order to allow for the subversion of their use. For some, expression making use of the genderedness of certain artifacts is an important avenue for selfhood, whether to their traditional ends or to the “opposite” of those ends. The important thing, I think, is the openness and support provided by the educators themselves, which ties the whole concept of physical expression together and grants the explorative aspect of interacting with the physical and social space the safety and approval that it needs in order to nourish the participants.
Three things to remember about nonconforming gender and children’s books:
• They are getting easier to find, which is miraculous, but also being pushed back and even censored, which is troubling—but the reason they are being censored is they represent the potential for a radically new and more inclusive world, which is very scary for people who farm the misery generated by the world we have in order to satisfy their psychic vampirism. The books are more powerful than they are, though, and they know it.
• They provide help and relief to children having experiences for which the dominant culture provides almost no handholds.
• They provide a humanizing touchstone for children not having these experiences and growing up in a culture that otherwise amply rewards them for ostracizing and villainizing the children in the above bullet point.
*
Hey, who the fuck knows. Who the fuck cares.
As before: did not reread except so far as to determine viability. And with that, RDF4CoF, or,
RAW
DOGG
FUXXX
4
CHEEP
or
FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
--JL
