queerbychoice | That Interests List Meme

Hmm, all I'd be interested in are the names, really, and I supposed I could find out about them by simply doing a search. But I'm especially curious about Chang-Rae Lee, since ey sounds Korean.

Yes, he's a Korean-born novelist who grew up in the U.S. from the age of two onward and wrote a very excellent novel titled Native Speaker.

Hmm. How about "unschooling"?

Unschooling is a form of learning used in some home-schooling environments, though not in all of them. To an extent, it can be implemented in schools as well. It's simply the principle of not scheduling what students should learn and when, but rather just showing them ways to find out more information about whatever they seem to actually want more information about, so they'll see learning as something that they voluntarily choose to do because the world interests them, rather than learning being an unpleasant duty they're forced to fulfill just because other people told them to.

I went to a school like that for 1/2 of seventh grade and all of eighth grade.

I attended a school like that for K-6. Adapting to "real" school starting in 7th grade was hard. Did you find it hard to go to regular high school after the freaky-deeky school?

It wasn't as hard as I thought, because everything was new and interesting. I didn't do much work the first semester I was there, but then I got my act together the second semester. High school started really sucking my sophmore year because I was just so sick of it.

Out of curiousity, why cats?

Because: KITTIIIIIIIIEEEEES!!!!!! Most irresistably adorable cute purring balls of fluff on earth!

:-) Good reason.

"polyfidelity", because I don't think I've ever come across that particular combination of words before.

It just means adherence to whatever polyamorous people in relationships with each other happen to have promised each other, regardless of whether it's a closed-circuit polyamorous relationship or a totally open relationship in which the only thing the people have promised each other is to be honest or have safe sex or something along those lines . . . usually people in relationships with each other have promised each other something or it wouldn't be called a relationship, and the word polyfidelity just means fidelity to whatever it is that they happen to have promised. I like the word because it places an emphasis on the fact that "polyamory" should not be considered synonymous with "no responsibilities of any kind."

hey, I didn't know you were poly... you know theres a community here right?

Yes, I know. Actually I'm sort of borderline poly - I'm open to both polyamory and monogamy, but not to the extremes of either one. I like relationships with the freedom to be attracted to and flirt with other people, but where having sex with other people is a pretty rare occurrence.

Clarification: it's not the sex with other partners that needs to be a rare occurrence, but rather the addition of whole new sexual partners. I like people who are very picky about who they have sex with, who only get interested in a very small number of people.

as a trans ally, i'm particularly curious about why you don't believe in body modification for trans folks. please elaborate. before answering, please note that i have a fair amount of friends who are ftm and are well along their path to transitioning and top surgery is a very big deal for them, as it is life-changing and allows not just for their peace of mind but allows them to pass which is about 90% of the time about safety. (ps-i'm asking this is a totally honest (not hostile) way)

Saying that I'm interested in body nonmodification is not the same thing as saying I want to ban body modification. I feel that our culture teaches an awful lot of people to be unhappy with their bodies, and that depending on the severity of the situation and the personality of the person involved, either of the two options for coping with this unhappiness - modifying one's body or modifying one's attitude toward one's body - may work better. In a recent post I made in the

almost_trans community, I explained (in the fifth paragraph down) why I feel that because of my personality type, body modification would in the long run leave me feeling disastrously less able to accept my body than ever before, even though it can still be very tempting in the short run, and I'm extremely concerned about the tendency to overlook the long run when the short run is tempting.

I also corresponded at great length while in college with a post-op MTF transsexual named Airin who extremely, extremely overwhelmingly severely regretted hir surgery, because ze got the surgery at a time when everyone around hir had always told hir that everyone had to be born with either a male brain or a female brain, nothing in between, and that any mismatch between brain and body was inherently bad, so ze was made to feel like just because ze didn't feel ze fit in with males, ze had to be female and get surgery to look it - but after the surgery, ze was exposed for the first time to concepts about gender being socially constructed and a spectrum rather than a binary, and ze then intensely regretted having had surgery that had caused some nerve damage and having taken hormones that raised hir cancer risk, all to achieve a body that ze now feels is no closer to hir "true gender" than the original (ze views hirself as dual-gendered now). I believe that to be a trans ally, one must not be just an ally to the doctors who make money off of selling surgery and hormones to transpeople, but rather an ally to the transpeople themselves, an ally whose first priority is their emotional health and who will be equally concerned about any harm they may suffer from either not having access to surgery and hormones or from getting the surgery and hormones prescribed to them as the only option and not being given access to the kinds of information and support that Airin was not given.

how horrible for hir! why was ze not provided access to this information?

i agree that being a trans ally is all about being supportive of the emotional/mental health of the person in transition or considering transition (or not considering). i'm involved in a non-trans caucus that focuses a lot on being supportive of our friends/partners/lovers/family/etc. no matter what their decision as well as working on issues of transphobia including eroticizing and/or exoticizing trans bodies and how that is not hip or cool or progressive. there was a big to-do around where i live because the local drag kings decided to name their valentine's day show "find me, unbind me, 69 me," clearly ignoring the issue of binding as survival for many ftm trans folks. there were a ton of letters written and the name was eventually changed to "the love show," but they never put out an apology or explanation statement and they have yet to attend non-trans caucus despite being invited numerous times by numerous people involved.

i was just wondering about the interest listing because nonmodification sounded a lot like anti-modification (which is why i asked instead of assumed).

something else that bothers me as far as transitioning et al. is the idea that some trans folks put forth the idea that someone is or is not as trans as another person just because s/he has had surgery or access to hormones. i think class is a huge issue for trans folks and i see that ignored a lot in discussions and it irritates the hell out of me. plus, i can't stand it when people play the fill-in-the-blank-more-than-thou.

thanks for responding so quickly and intelligently.

Since Airin lived in Switzerland, I'm actually somewhat surprised that ze wasn't given a lot more information than ze was, because I though Europeans were supposed to be more progressive on sexuality/gender issues than Americans are. But apparently not enough so in this case. And it wasn't an especially long time ago, either - it would have been around 1991-92 that Airin got surgery.

I like this: de-eroticizing violence, and this: emotional intimacy (awwww), definately this: equalizing media access, and this too: fighting sociobiology (sociobiology is sooo stupid). You have a lot of authors too, which is way cool.

I don't know what family systems theory, pomosexuality, or primatology are. Please share!

Family systems theory is actually something that I'm highly unqualified to define, because I discovered it myself on someone else's LiveJournal interests list and thought it sounded interesting and looked it up in Google and added it to mine. But basically, it seems to be used in family group therapy, and is an approach that focuses on the way family members all influence one another, and how a change in the behavior of any one of them can have major effects on the behavior of all the others (though obviously, a lot more so if it's a family member with a lot of power than if it's a family member with very little power).

Pomosexuality stands for postmodern sexuality, or in other words a non-essentializing, social constructionist approach to sexual preferences. It's pretty much a synonym for queer by choice, just a synonym whose meaning is harder to decipher. It appears in the title of an anthology of essays on queer sexualities, Pomosexuals, which I own and like.

Primatology is the study of apes and monkeys. My primary interest in it is in the ways that the sexual behavior of primates other than humans can help reveal how much of humans' sexual behavior is socially constructed. My favorite primatologists are Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall.

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