Religion, Blessings, Spirituality, Mysticism, Atheism

Watching Creflo Dollar on my television brings mixed emotions.  I come to this point time and time again, where I recognize that I am able to extract from a message, sermon, (insert politically correct word here) jewels of wisdom that are applicable to my life regardless of my choice not to be religiously/spiritually affiliated.  But at the same time, feel angst every time I hear “God,” “Blessing,” “Jesus Christ,” “The Lord,” or references to “Jesus dying on the Cross” for my sins.

I watched Pastor Dollar and tried to imagine the point in his life that he became aware that he was capable of commiting himself to articulating his faith through ministry.  But I wonder to myself “What about him made him confident enough to believe that he could bring people out of darkness, out of misery, out of despair and unto to God?”  I wonder, “Where and when did he harness all of the strength that he attributes to God, enough to articulate the messages found in scriptures of the Bible?” How does he know that he knows what he knows.  

And once I begin, I end shortly thereafter because it becomes nothing more than a wildly circular conversation. “Well he knows it because he has faith. And he has faith because he believes that God is his creator and that his creator does not make mistakes. The mistakes are made only by those of the flesh who have fallen from Grace…” And on and on.  I can’t seem to step outside of what indoctrination I’ve been exposed to long enough to closely scrutinize it in a way that might either bring me back to a stable middle ground in which I remain the unmoved agnostic-Christian… or to being straight up atheist or have complete unwavering faith. 

And still I wonder, had I been taught early enough how to have faith, would it have made a difference, or would I have just be deluded earlier on and thus it would be more difficult to shake.  I am hard pressed to believe that God will never fail me, because that belief is accompanied by the thought that if things don’t go the way I wanted them to, that they weren’t meant to be in the first place.  But if you think about it for half a second you have to wonder, well “how is one to know whether or not I’ve been failed if there is a logical explanation for every occasion in which I feel like failure is in fact what occurred?”

I ponder on why people go to church week after week. But while I pondered that I compared it to the way I can go to the club week after week.  The same place, get in my club best and sweat myself SILLY… Being honest with myself I know I crave being in that space.  I have this conversation over and over again about the superficiality of the club crowd, and yet I still find myself amid it.  It is much like I critique the one-dimensionality of being classified a “Stud” in the gay community when my style of dress only scratches the surface of who I am. But in both cases I pride myself in being the exception to the rule (how self righteous of me, right?). And then again I still know that in some way or another I am playing into it all.  But I can dig that some people are church people.  They crave the self knowledge they don’t get elsewhere, that they get when they’re a part of the congregation.  Its like being an academic; at some point or another you crave the knowledge you know is out there. 

And again with the comparision to the club.  If you miss one week, you feel like you missed out on something.  Something about going every week keeps you ahead of the curve.  There might be a new dance, a new vibe, a new DJ, some fly ass shorts someone had on that you think you could dig too.  In church, you risk missing a part of a message that is a 3 weeks series.  You might miss out on a “blessing,” you may miss the altercall, you may miss palm Sunday, you may be someone struggling with dealing with self condemnation and miss Pastor Dollar’s sermon on Condemnation and how to overcome it.  And then again if you refer back to the logic I mentioned earlier, bout God never failing, and if things don’t happen in your life, they aren’t meant to happen then wouldn’t  that mean that if you were meant to be in church (or the club) one week, you’ll be there and if God didn’t intend you to be there you won’t?  Perhaps there’s a loophole there in that if you’re not a faithful Christian then it doesn’t apply.  But I can’t imagine that to be true because if God is the creator of all things, he controls all beings, faithful or not.

Just some things to ponder I guess. I’ll prolly come back to this again later. Or the next time my spiritual feathers are ruffled.  (3:44am PST- 6:44 EST).

S/he (Still Editing)

Womanliness as Masquerade v.2.0 (Studs Included) <Final>

Joan Riviere notes that not long ago, for women, being an intellectual was equated with masculinity, or a woman's desire to be a man.  Such a position implicitly treats intellectual pursuits as a kind of "property" for which women, unless taking on some essential masculinity, would not have the capacity to possess. It also obscures the fact that, then and now, "masculine" identified women, did and do, exist; but masculine in this situation is meant in terms of a woman's gender (expression).  Generally this has a great deal to do with her physical presentation, regarded by many as that which aspires to exhibit visual representations of manliness; be it in clothing choice, hair style, mannerisms, body language etc.  However, achieving manliness may not necessarily be her objective.  For at least some women, it may be more important to her that she resist the compulsion to conform to the established ideal of what is an attractive way for a woman to present herself to the world.  Or quite frankly feels more comfortable that way.

This kind of woman, one with masculine gender/expression, is almost always classified as homosexual.  Because, as a society, we have not yet reached a point where the overwhelming majority (all of which are effected by prevailing heterosexism) can comprehend differently-gender expressed people.  Let alone can they stomach the possibility that one can be differently-gender expressed and operate in heterosexual relationship. But these situations do exist.  For that reason it is easier to pretend as if all "masculine" gender/expressing women are queer identified.  Fortunately we have language (albeit amorphous) to identify these women; and for the purpose of this text we will refer to them as "Stud(s)." [1] We will explore the complications of trying to fit them into Riviere's very hetero-centric construction of womanliness; complications which are reinforced both within and outside of the aforementioned group. 

Riviere states early in her text that all womanliness is a masquerade, claiming to make no presumptions about what makes one performance more genuine than another (306).  In this formation it seems as though she is situating womanliness based upon one's  genital marking, and would thus include Stud women.  However, her use of "the mask of femininity" elsewhere, as being synonymous with the "masquerade of womanliness," patently removes Stud women from the equation.  These inconsistencies incite an interest in constructing a way to apply this concept of womanliness to include Stud women, and acknowledge how they suffer from a similar compulsion to appease the hegemonic male ego.    

This kind of application requires making a distinction between 'gender/sex' and 'gender/expression,' where such a distinction has two aims.  The first is to retain a consistency with the language used more generally, as well as within the text.  The second purpose is performative.  It demonstrates the flexibility offered by a more precise use of language, via attaching a description to the general terminology of 'gender.' Judith Butler suggests that performativity is reliant upon the repetition of speech acts (Stone). Ideally it would be preferred to use 'gender' only, to replace gender/expression, and 'sex'  to replace the use of gender/sex.  However, for the sake of being inclusive, this text will use the more cumbersome conjunction.  Interestingly enough the attempt to distinguish them, is simultaneously uses repetition strategically, to encourage the intended linguistic transition. 

The terminology is imperfect, this goes without saying, but without making a way to acknowledge Stud womanliness as distinctive, it will be subsumed under womanliness as a whole. That womanliness is fashioned off of heterosexist constructions that not only exclude homosexual women, but Studs (or masculine women) in particular.  And while at some point it would be progressive for Stud womanliness to be treated as a part of womanliness as a whole, it cannot occur without first making a space for that kind and other kinds of womanliness to exist.   This space will not take shape without a critical analysis to precede it.

While, my original critique of Riviere's work, was focused on the implications of her exclusion of an analysis of how race played into her text, that text also ignores a variety of marginalized identities; including queer ones as well as different gendered-ness.  Such is to be expected of writing from the 1920's.  No less, as a result, it seemed necessary in the last piece as well to make the distinction between 'gender/expression' and 'gender/sex' foundational to the reader.  But as a consequence, it was argued upon my completion, that I "have imposed a dichotomy (between gender/sex and gender/expression) in order to oppose a dichotomy (between masculine and feminine)" (Tobin).  I refute that claim, arguing that there was no suggestion that 'gender/sex' and 'gender/expression' are necessarily polarized, but merely that they should have the space to function independently. Furthermore, the construction of gender/expression, in this sense, is pursuant of a paradigm that allows it to have more than two places in which to reside, beyond masculine and feminine.

In my last paper, I attempted in one part to assert how culturally sanctioned hetero-normativity, if left unchallenged, can obscure the wealth of variance possible in a person's gender performance, as opposed to how one is genitally marked.  There can indeed be a substantial disadvantage to making a "terminological distinction" between gender/sex and gender/expression.  As that symbolically concedes power to the masculine/feminine dichotomy, by acknowledging its existence.  However, there are benefits to be had by first addressing the dimensions of the problematic structure, before proceeding to detoxify it from within.

Riviere treats queer women on a whole, as tangential to her analysis, even if in moments she acknowledges their existence in it.  But at the same time, with remarks like "[t]he capacity for womanliness was there in this woman – and one might even say it exists in the most completely homosexual woman," she suggests that by simply being queer, one is less of a woman (Riviere 306-7).   Ironically a Stud's identity appears to be a hybrid of both what Riviere would call the masquerade, as well as the very structure the masquerade is intended to fight off.  She states:

"Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to posses it" (Riviere, 306).

For a Stud, her womanliness does not strive to "hide the possession of masculinity," in fact one could argue that her womanliness complicates any definitive understanding of what masculinity is altogether.  But then again, even a masculine expression of womanliness however, could too be interpreted as being "worn as a mask," and one that unfortunately upholds a masculinist regime (Riviere, 306).

Some Stud women are affirmed in their masculine gender/expression, while others find labeling it as such to be confining.  I posted a questionnaire asking my peers, if they were categorized as some variation of "Stud" and had friends who were categorized similarly, to respond.  Only five people participated, stifling the depths to which the analysis could have gone.   But, fortunately the responses came from women whom I would probably never categorize as the same, offering some variety to the limited pool.  When asked if they self labeled or felt they were labeled by others, all but one was complicit in accepting that they or others used labels to describe them.  She answered the questionnaire probably because, as she intimated:

I didn't label myself until I was about 20, when I made the conscious decision to be a stud (I went to college in the south, [where you] had to be one or the other), but now it's more of you get what I give you and I no longer identify that way" (E).

Her experience suggests that one's self identification is pivoted upon the environment in which one exists.  She felt incapable of genuine self expression in the South, in having to choose one positionality rather than function comfortable in whatever her gender/expression truly was.  But she has regained that confidence, with age and upon her return to the Los Angeles area, and with friends that accept her no matter her form of expression.

There is a sense of community that can come with being identified as a "Stud" even if it also has its downsides.   None of the participants felt that labels were 'important,' however at least one thought they were 'necessary,' even if only "to identify with other similar people that carry the same characteristics. [I]t's a way to form close bonds and friendships with people who enjoy the same types of things," and develop a kind of kinship (S).

Yet even still, forming that kinship can also be damning. It becomes a problem when shared interests turn into criteria for entrance in an exclusive "All Boi's " Clubs.  Riviere's mask analogy is representative of this new uniform, when it becomes primarily about the image of one's being a Stud.  Tracey Sedinger argues that:

imaginary identifications enforce homogeneity: they produce or underwrite a particular type of collective or class on the basis of a resemblance between their members, most often based on a shared property, which can often be represented in visual form.  The produce a substantive community: each member participates in a common substance" (48).

A Stud's imagined self, as articulated through one's gender/expression, could be regarded as that visual form.  Although who that same Stud does or does not date could also fall into that category.   It is problematic however, in both examples, when those that are aberrant to that homogenous structure, are ridiculed, discriminated against or de-legitimized for their individuality.  Such is the case in situations where "E" was told that her choice to date people who are labeled similarly to her, or the choice of "two non femmes to date," was "REALLY gay or some faggot shit."  This kind of commentary is as much ironic, coming from someone who is assumedly also queer, as it is unfortunate. 

A friend of mine hypothesized that "Homosexuality is constructed in opposition to Masculinity in the States."  Elaborating further with, "In other countries men hold hands" (Paloma Salazar).  It would make sense to take her words to heart in this case, where masculinity even from a woman, could be seen as gay (read unfit masculinity), if she should choose to engage in anything more than platonic with another masculine woman.  When asked if they date women categorized similarly to them, three participants said they did not, although none of the participants expressed that they felt there was anything wrong with the practice. At least two of them chalked up their choice to being a matter of personal preference.

References

Appendix A. Questionnaire

Appendix B. Questionnaire Responses

Riviere, Joan. Womanliness as a Masquerade, International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1929) 10: 303-313.

Salazaar, Paloma. Conversation. May 2007.

Sedinger, Tracey. Nation and Identification:  Psychoanalysis, Race, and Sexual  Difference, Cultural Critique (2002) 50(Winter):  40-73

Stone, Alison. "Towards a Genealogical Feminism: A Reading of Judith Butler's Political Thought. " Contemporary Political Theory  4.1 (2005): 4-24. General Interest Module. ProQuest. *** Occidental College Library, Los Angeles, CA ***.  08 May.              2007 

Tobin, Jeff. Email Correspondence. 30 April 2007.

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