Identities, Marked and Unmarked

[queerbychoice]

I finished reading Chang-Rae Lee's novel Native Speaker yesterday and it prompted some thoughts. In many ways I think he was trying to write a sort of Korean-American Invisible Man, a sort of ultimate parable of What Korean-Americans' Lives Are Like. This caused me to think about marked versus unmarked identities, and how Asian women writers like Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan or (my favorite!) Anchee Min tend to write novels about What Asian-American Women's Lives Are Like (with a few exceptions - Banana Yoshimoto, for example, does not seem especially female-centered in her writing to me - though she's also not American or living in the West at all, which I think may be related) whereas Euro-American women and Asian-American men tend to hardly even mention in passing the fact that the experiences they write about are Euro-American or male, and they just seem to be under the impression that their books speak for all "women" or all "[insert specific nationality or race here]-American people."

Then I was thinking about my own writing and all the different ways I've tried but often failed to find my own racial viewpoint to speak from, to speak not the viewpoints I'm told to speak about "what you're supposed to feel about being White" but rather what I actually do feel and have felt all my life, the actual ways that I as an individual person have related to my Whiteness. About having grown up being disgusted by "White people" because they were the ones who were constantly making fun of my Korean-American friends, calling my friends racist names and asking stupid racist questions all the time, and me constantly trying to disown all connection to them, surrounding myself with nothing but exclusively Asian friends. About how upset and threatened I felt if any of my friends talked to or showed any interest in other non-Asian people because my own pseudo-Asian status could only be maintained by belonging to a circle of friends who were all Asian, and if any other White people started hanging around then soon I'd be perceived as just another one of them and I didn't want to be assimilated back into them, I wanted to be an Asian separatist.

But that's the ultimate Euro-American experience, isn't it? I don't know many Euro-American people who wouldn't prefer to be anything else in the world rather than White. And even the ones who do want to be White (because I think there are some, especially in more conservative circles than I tend to hang out in) would certainly never dream of admitting that they'd ever want to be White. That would just get them in trouble, if they said anything like that aloud in public. So the White experience is necessarily either a continual effort of trying to escape Whiteness, either to become something else like I've tried to become Asian, or simply to pretend race doesn't exist at all, like the stupid anti-affirmative-action campaigners are always doing.

I feel proud of myself now for having defined the Euro-American experience. Maybe with some luck I'll even be able to carry it over into my writings, and turn my novel into a novel of The Euro-American Experience, as a marked identity for once instead of an unmarked one.

But that's only half the job I need to accomplish, because I also want to know how to reconceptualize maleness as a marked identity. For that I call upon all the males who read this. What does it feel like for you, as an individual, to be male? If you were to write a whole book about being male, what would the book be like?

I want to know what maleness feels like.

Comments

[frankepi.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure about how to write about the "male experience". i tend to be wary, of course, of univesal statements and such. it seems to me the good novels that set out to make such statements have transcended their goals by remaining relentlessly PERSONAL.

there's an interesting element to anna quindlen's BLACK AND BLUE that focusses on the fear a mothe feels watching her son grow up as the male-child of an abusive father. it's worth looking into, i think.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

so, i ask for an expression of the male experience and you tell me that the best expression of maleness that comes to mind is something written by a woman?

dear frank, don't depress me like that.

your unfinished novel thing on your long-abandoned website is actually a relatively more "marked" than average piece of male writing. it acknowledges the male body and writes about its functions. but women writers seem to spend much more time writing about all the female functions of their bodies and all the ambivalences of their own feelings toward having a body marked as female, all their attempts to reclaim and rewrite the names and feelings assigned to their body parts in ways that are less oppressive.

male bodies are just as much reconfigured by our culture. what does it feel like to have your sexual organs referred to with the names of weapons? how does one grow up to be a human being who is both peaceable and on good terms with his body in a culture where the language gives his body names like "prick" and labels thumbtack boxes with lines like "sharp steel points for easy penetration"?

i want to know what maleness feels like from the perspective of that small boy who anna quindlen wrote about. but i do not need to hear it from his mother's perspective. i want to hear it from his perspective.

[subtlyironic.livejournal.com]

the book would be really boring, because i've enver participated in anything that is considered male. when i was on a baseball team, i was always mistaken for a girl because i had long hair, and i tended not to engage in the agressiveness of the friends i had. all of my closest friends have been female. so yeah. i don't know what to say. sometimes i've felt compelled to reassure my masculinity when i've been mistaken for a female (which has happened as recently as three or four weeks ago, when i had... facial hair?). but i don't remember much of that, because it's never been a siginficant event, and i'm much more self assured as of late.

if you have any direct questions i could probably answer them. but a general overview? i don't know how much my life has differed from a females because i've never been a female.

yeayeh.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Your experience of maleness is similar to my experience of whiteness then, in that you don't much identify with the connotations it inflicts upon your identity. But still, the body is there, you have to experience it one way or another.

What does it feel like to have a body onto which cutltural assumptions of maleness are written? How do you go about reclaiming your body as your own?

Women writers have spent a huge amount of time writing about their experience of having a body marked as female, how they relate to it and reclaim it as their own. I think my favorite example of this is Audre Lorde's in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. But there's hardly any woman writer anywhere who hasn't written something along those lines. I want to read something similar from a male perspective.

[subtlyironic.livejournal.com]

I also had the same experience with whiteness; my closest friends were all Chinese. Except the cultural aspect didn't come out until later on in life when I was exploring religion.

I used to have extreme self image issues for a long time. Except, instead of being prone to the weightlifting and sports phenomenon, I had a brief bought with mild anorexia in which I lost close to thirty pounds. I don't know if it was just the anorexia, I also was a lot more active during that time than I had been in previous years. I don't really know when I stopped (although I still relapse on occasion, and I'll go weeks only eating one meal a day and occasionally a second) but I know it was a conscious decision, and I just started eating more. I also had bad acne for a long time, and I was on a lot of medication that really fucked up my body and skin even more than it was, so I decided to just drink more water and wash my face with an anti-bacterial soap and cut all the meds, because I decided the pain I went through wasn't worth it. Most recently I almost was put on a drug by a doctor who rushed me through the appointment and prescribed me a medication I was knowingly allergic to, and if it hadn't been for the pharmacist I would probably have been hospitalised. After all those experiences it was just a matter of saying "who cares, I have a girlfriend who finds me beautiful, and I've got other things going for me anyway."

How does it feel? I don't know. The body aspect isn't that important for me in terms of maleness. I have enough friends nowadays (and before) that don't (didn't) like sports so I don't (didn't) feel left out in any way. The mental aspect was different: some of my friends have basically said that because I wouldn't sleep with X girl even if there were no consequences (STDs, etc.) because I had no intellectual connection with them was "pure and utter bullshit". So, I just tend to be quiet now when my more sexist male friends (I really don't know why I hang out with them) are talking about women.

So, I feel out of place in a lot of situations, but not so out of place that it causes a great deal of suffering for me. Lately I've been doing mild exercising, but that's mainly because I'm contemplating tree-planting as a job this summer, and I'd have to be in much better shape.

I've also grown facial hair recently, which is partially because I think it makes me look more attractive, but also because it gets rid of that awkward social situation where people go "hello ma'am, may I take your order?" or similar situation.

Being attracted to men on occasion has also provided interesting problems for my masculinity. I don't really know how I dealt with that. Probably not at all, seeing as I've only five times publically stated that I'm queer. Things to look forward to? maybe.

[morganlefenian.livejournal.com]

What does it feel like for you, as an individual, to be male? If you were to write a whole book about being male, what would the book be like?


As soon as I figure it out for myself, I promise you will be the first to know.