Archive for July 2011
Relationship Performativity
Posted on: July 16, 2011
One of the common tropes about relationships that I’ve come across is that you’re supposed to do them in a certain way. Or that certain traits clearly are necessary to show you love someone, or a bit more often, that they’re indicative of romantic love, or just, coded as indicative of wanting a romantic relationship.
Many of these have nothing inherently romantic about them. There is probably some indication of at least some level of friendship, obviously, as they do tend to involve spending time and/or energy on another person, which, tends to be a clue of at least some sort of relationship.
An obvious example would be the concept of a date. This is significant enough to the concept of Serious Romantic Relationships as constructed by mainstream society that, in fact, the phrase “Person A is dating Person B” is interpreted as synonymous with a Serious Romantic Relationship.
At least as I have gathered,* a normative date seems to exist of arranging in advance with a person to go out and do something, more normative choices seem to be watching a movie or eating at a restaurant, or both. And some amount of formality is also normative, for example planning it in advance, putting some extra effort into looking nice, etc.
But there is nothing inherently romantic about formally arranging to go have a meal with a friend and dressing up, it is just as possible to do this with a nonromantic friend. And this by no means means that this is the only way to performatively date, either; planning to talk to a friend on IM and calling that a date, or going out for supper with a partner spontaneously because you’re bored is just as much relationship performativity, just a bit less normative.
There are of course other examples of relationship performativity. Examples coming to mind off the top of my head are such things as commemorating anniversaries, or Valentine’s day, or certain varieties of presents are coded as romantic, such as flowers or chocolate.
Nonromantic relationships are also performative, it must be noted. The tropes tend to be a bit less formalized and are treated as less Serious Business than romantic relationship performativity. Though for example I’ve seen going to bars together, or watching TV together coded as nonromantic relationship performativity, or doing something for Mother’s or Father’s day is often coded as child/parent relationship performativity.
This does further lead into an obvious way in which relationship performativity can become oppressive. In coding certain behaviors as expressions of a relationship, their absence can, in turn, become coded as absence of a relationship. For example, forgetting an anniversary could be read as a sign that you don’t particularly care about your partner, or not remembering to thank your friend when they take time for you could be read as being apathetic or uncaring about their support, and not, for example, a manifestation of ADHD, which tends to just result in terrible short term memory, and so such forgetting is a manifestation of a physical inability to consistently remember such things.
This can also lead to a situation where because a person does not feel they can fulfill performative relationship tropes that they feel that they are unable to have a legitimate relationship, for example a person with minimal ability to handle subtext or other varieties of normative flirting could feel that it is impossible for them to ever have a relationship at all.
The fact that relationship performativity can be oppressive does not necessarily mean that it, in fact, always is. Relationship performativity, especially when open to personal interpretation, can be an immensely valuable thing. Compulsory or exclusionary relationship performativity, however, can rapidly become extremely oppressive.
The concept of relationship performativity also ties into the deconstruction of relationship classification, as it is entirely possible for relationships that are not remotely romantic or sexual or other common tropes of Serious Romantic Relationships to be performative in ways coded as romantic, or for a person to have multiple performatively romantic relationships, or, on the other hand, it is entirely possible for romantic relationships to not be performative in the slightest, or for relationships that resemble close friendships in terms of performativity to be romantic in terms of the emotions present in said relationship. In short, there is nothing remotely inherent about relationship performativity tropes, and people should be free to choose or discard such tropes based on what works for that person.
*The closest thing I’ve ever done to a formal normative date was entirely nonromantic, and my relationships are more likely to involve mutual ranting about Judith Butler’s cissexism than dates, so I’m not necessarily the best at saying “this is how dating works!” based on my own experiences, though the tropes frequently show up in media, or have happened to my friends.
Deconstructing Mononormativity
Posted on: July 12, 2011
I basically want to break down the way society divides up interpersonal relationships, because it seems a lot of the time the way society declares normative relationships to work has little basis in reality, and that, considering often normative relationship models are quite limiting, it seems to me that the obvious thing is to go tell them to fuck themselves.
In detail, of course, because you’re me, and that’s what you do. Some people watch movies or play games with their friends, others write elaborate deconstructionist theory posts on their blogs… with their friends.*
Anyway, it seems like the way mononormativity works is there’s two, maybe a few more, but mostly two major classes of relationships. First, you have the Serious Romantic Relationship, it generally consists of romantic attraction, sexual attraction, and a relatively overt degree of identification and commitment (and by commitment here I mean “you will put an effort into making this relationship work”; I know also because of mononormativity commitment and monogamy are often conflated.).
You’re also expected to only have one of it, and it’s expected to have all these parts. Also it is Serious Business. Though I have noticed a lot of motifs where actually having a strong friendship with the person is considered optional. Which is probably a symptom of homosocial norms (ie men hang out with men, women hang out with women type things.)
Now, in addition to this type of relationship, you have everything else. Other relationships are supposed to be not sexual and not romantic. Really the definitions are a lot looser here I think, though some degree of commitment probably is involved. They’re also less Serious Business, which is probably why society has been a lot looser at defining them. (Not that there aren’t tropes for them, like BFFs or bromance or the like, they’re definitely discussed.)
But basically the obvious extension to rejecting the idea that There Can Only Be One with regards to Serious Romantic Relationships, is that really, there’s no reason to accept the validity of the definition as a whole period. This is especially clear to me also I am somewhat less sexual than normative, which tends to me quite honestly I don’t particularly care one way or another about sexual interactions. (There’s also a varying degree of sexuality in interactions, obviously; it’s not always clear where said boundaries are, either, and I do like certain types of physical interactions that are moderately less sexual quite a bit, and often they feel more engaging emotionally then normative sex. But that is yet another rant.)
Basically, if I take the sexual requirement and the monogamy requirement out of the Serious Romantic Relationship, and can include sexuality in nonromantic relationships, it becomes increasingly clear that you could easily also add romantic attraction to a non-SSR, at which point the distinction rapidly becomes meaningless, and it becomes apparent that, fuck this, you might as well make your own categories, mixing and matching tropes from other types of relationships society likes to insist are the Only Way.
So anyway the obvious practical result of this theory is that me and Devyn went and created a new category because we didn’t think the ones that existed did want we wanted, and we ended up calling it “brain twins” because we seem to have weirdly-but-awesomely similar problems and histories.
And for some further areas this could be expanded on, I didn’t really touch much on family either, which I think is probably an important element of this, I haven’t had too extensive identification of people as my family so I’m not super experienced at this. Obviously the main tropes with family seems to be you’re supposed to be commited to them (whether you like them or not, which, obviously is a prime thing for abuse) and that you’re genetically similar to them, or they are your One Serious Romantic Relationship.
Nor did I touch on heteronormativity or, for that matter, how cissexism contributes to this (Serious Romantic Relationships are always between One Man and One Woman and obviously we can always readily tell who’s a man and who’s a woman and who’s one person and nobody’s anything else) or how commitment goes from being a healthy thing (“Let’s put some effort into resolve conflicts!”) to an extremely unhealthy thing (“Care about your family! Wait what your parents are abusive? YOU STILL MUST CARE ABOUT THEM THEY REALLY LOVE YOU.”) in the hands of kyriarchy.
There’s also a point, which occured to me recently, is that a further extension of this theory is also that you could quite readily have a relationship that is called, for example, “marriage” but lacks almost if not all the characteristics of a Serious Romantic Relationship, beyond, of course, the name, and that, furthermore, this relationship would be entirely valid as marriage. Which, obviously does mean we are threatening the sanctity of marriage. …but more obviously, marriage shouldn’t have any sanctity in the first place, that undermines people’s ability to live their lives how they want.
*I have the BEST friends. 😛 …also I now have a Deconstruct All Things category. Ha!
How do you fail at this
Posted on: July 5, 2011
Colorblindness isn’t rare, and at least one of WordPress’s themes is completely inaccessible to me. (Red hyperlinks, black text, no underlining except with mouseover. Can’t see the difference.) I haven’t looked at the others in depth or anything but how do you manage to make your prepackaged themes inaccesible. You’re not a person throwing up a blog in thirty seconds and not putting that much thought into their theme, you’re one of the most popular blogging sites on the internet.
This is something you should have figured out by now!
…you know, with my “Actually guys if I want to peel off my epidermis or bite myself or stab myself with needles or bang my head on things, maybe you can let me decide for myself whether I can cope with the pain, okay?”
Yep. I’m the person who actually wants society to enable their weird behaviors and isn’t going to let allistic supremacy get in the way of my self-determination.
And it occurs to me that society has this habit of treating pain like it’s a nuisance and needs to be overcome when it comes to, for example, exercise (“No pain, no gain!”) or other things it has deemed beneficial, or will readily tell you that you need to be strong and magically get over your unpleasant reactions to things when said pain is coming from things that society doesn’t think should be painful.
I’ve been told to stop peeling scabs off my wrists, which, while physically painful, isn’t particularly an unpleasant feeling to me and generally makes me feel better, but when I point out that talking on phones can give me panic attacks just thinking about it and that I can walk to places I need to call and speak to people in person and there’ll be less sobbing in a ball on the floor, and I’m told Avoiding Things Is Bad.
It’s almost like society doesn’t really care about whether you’re hurting yourself and really just wants you to not look neurodivergent.
[End warning]
And related, I really want to start using “enabled” as a way to talk about people who aren’t disabled, especially wrt psychology. Because the way enabling gets used in psychology to be like “We can’t accomidate your behavior! That would be ENABLING you to act neurodivergent!” (Because the goal is always to be Normal like the rest of the world) seems like… I just want to snark YES I KNOW THAT WOULD BE ENABLING MY BEHAVIOR THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT!
Like, when you drive to a grocery store to buy chicken, the fact that there’s roads is enabling your choice to get around by driving and the fact that you can just buy it there is enabling your choice to not be a farmer. But nobody ever calls those things enabling because they’re normativized. In fact, if you did choose to farm your own chickens in the city people would probably look at you weird. They definitely often don’t seem to understand a preference for walking places because you can’t (and may or may not be able to) drive.
See, walking to a doctor’s office instead of calling them is dismissed as enabling your phone-phobia rather than “Yeah, that’s a really good idea, it also would get you excercise and that tends to help with depression too!” That’s a problem.
…well they aren’t the same thing, they’re hyponyms* of a broader category and we’re generally mostly just concerned about the broader category; forcing sex and gender to be different things serves to marginalize trans people by forcing gender onto their body parts.
And doing so usually involves copious ignoring of facts, because everyone who decides my sex must be male apparently sees a penis and stops; they don’t bother to notice that because of hormones I have breasts, and body odor and skin texture that’s within the norm for women, and because of lasers my hair coverage is again, normative for women.
This isn’t to say that a woman who doesn’t have those traits body is still not female, of course. Just that very frequently the idea that sex is what’s in your pants serves to completely ignore everything outside of said pants, which, actually makes it relatively clear how objective said fact really is. But even if your body entirely conforms to the general societal expectations of men’s bodies, you can still call your body female; and telling someone who does so that their body is male is very much cissexism.
And I do want to be clear that people may not necessarily identify their sex as the same as their gender. I’m not entirely sure at this point whether I do or not, myself. Respect people’s identities and don’t take this to mean you can yell at people who call themselves “male-bodied.” (Calling other people who don’t identify that way things like that? Yeah yelling may be appropriate) The point is, however, people can identify both their sex and gender however they want and the actual gendering of specific classes of body parts is a socially constructed convention and IT IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT and HIGHLY OPPRESSIVE TO TRANS PEOPLE.)
*it occurs to me “hyponym” may not be a well known word. It’s like… there’s a broader category that the words that are hyponyms belong to (eg. “chair” is a hyponym of “furniture”; “furniture” is a hypernym of “chair”)
Eater of Trees 