Quote of the day I

“Only when I got a word for it I could begin building myself a language. For that is how it is: In a world where words which do not describe what is different are not allowed, there are neither any possibility to express that one IS different.” (Trollhare, 2009-11-14, freely translated from Swedish)

New interview up!

Posted a new interview online today. Read about Danish-Norweigan feminist writer and activist Anne Bitsch in English on http://www.grassrootsfeminism.net/cms/node/414, and then, if you read Norweigan, skip to her own website http://annebitsch.com.

Learning to Blog

Now it has been some time since Iwrote here again. Of course, one reason for this is the rather obvious time issue (which really makes me realise just how much time some of the bloggers I meet and read spend on maintaining their blogs, an insight which in itself is actually rather enlightening for my research!). The other one is, to be brutally honest, that I don’t have any readers! Why on earth blog when nobody’s reading? The plan has always been to begin working on spreading the blog only once I’ve gotten some more readable stuff up here, but without any readers, it’s very difficult mor me to feel the motivation to write these entrances. Typical catch 22 situation. A blogger I spoke to earlier in the week mentioned that there are so many good blogs out there which no one finds, simply because they don’t put in that extra work to distribute it, through pinging and linking, for example. Of course, there are bloggers that want to keep their blogs semi-private, but since a research blog presumably should be about communicating something about research to someone else than the researcher herself, I really need to get more active.  It is also precisely all these practices (writing, pinging, linking) which I need to engage in for my research, as a way of learning not just what people say on these blogs, but also something about which different practices they are engaging in. As it seems (and what this little lonely blog constitutes a prime example of) it is just in theory that blogging is a quick way of ‘getting your voice heard’. In practice, if anyone is going to ‘hear’ you, you actually have to work for it.

Marking the unmarked

Movements such as the feminist movements, lesbian and gay movements and later political projects such as queer and queer feminism has always invented new terms, new words helping us to understand the world in previously unknown ways. Some of these words, like ‘date rape’ and ‘the double shift’ were once new (see Fraser 1992), but have now entered the consciousness also of people with no background in feminist activism whatsoever, in some countries they have entered the mainstream, even. Once established, it is easy to take these words for granted and it’s easy to forget what radical interventions they once were. In the late 1990s, the word ‘queer’ was such a word for me, introduced to me via my academic study as well as my involvement in feminist groups. Queer was precisely such a word for me, new, provocative, exciting, and opening up new worlds of thinking, of feeling, of asking questions about the world. Now, over a decade later I’ve been writing about it, teaching it, thinking with it so many times that I’ve started to take it for granted. It’s still useful–it still helps me to see things I would not see without it, but it doesn’t give that strong sense of novelty it once did. There are advantages with this, of course; new queer spaces have been established, making visible the invisible and creating room for alternative ways of living, thinking, loving, desiring. As a term, it is productive, and yet more terms which were not known to me and my feminist peers, at that time and place, over a decade ago, followed in its foot steps. I had never heard of words such as ‘transperson’ or ‘polyamory’ before this time, harly of ‘heteronormativity’. Living, in many respects (though not all, I wish to think) a rather conventional life myself, these terms tend to travel slowly towards me. I never seem to catch them ‘in the making’ of everyday life, but most often as part of my research or through my less conventional friends. I suppose the widespreadness of the internet speeds up this process somewhat.

Now, new gender grammars* are occuring to me. I hear they have been around for some time, but they have not previously crossed my path–cis gender being one of them. I read on activist and author Kate Bornstein’s blog that she too has just recently found out about this word. Old news to some; it even has its own Wikipedia page by now. The interesting thing about this specific word is that it does not describe the Other, some minority of which existence we do not yet know. It describes me. It marks the unmarked. What a radical intervention.

 

* I will describe what I mean by ‘gender grammars’ here at some point soon.

Links:

Kate Bornstein’s blog: http://katebornstein.typepad.com/kate_bornsteins_blog/2009/10/a-theory-of-othering-sex-and-gender-outlaws.html 

Kate Bornstein’s twitter feeds: http://twitter.com/katebornstein 

Reference:

Fraser, Nancy (1992). “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy” in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Craig Calhoun, ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 109-142.

The godesses must have been drunk

I have recently discovered the amazing blog Trollhare, literally translated as ‘troll-hare’, according  to the blog itself being a mythical animal, a hare, appearing in the woods only for hunters who are suffering from hubris, believing that they can keep taking (from nature, I suppose) without ever giving anything back. The ‘troll hare’ cannot, to the hunter’s frustration, be killed however much the hunter is trying.

The blogger of Trollhare has actually taken this name (and two others) as part of the gender correction process s/he* is undergoing, and the described myth serves as what I understand as a very poetic story of the undecidability of sexed bodies in general, and some sexed bodies in particular (see Fausto-Sterling 2000).

The blog is very extensive, and contains everything from personal narratives about living through transexualism, gender correction, Aspbergers and DAMP to political agitations for vegetarianism. Some of the narratives are, similarly to the description of the ‘troll hare’ written in a very literary, perhaps even suggestive, manner. To give but one example is the story of the conception of a boy born in a girl’s body. The text is difficult to translate, but here’s a try:

You understand what I want to get at: I am transexual. I was conceived by the time for the Winter Solstice, so the godesses must have been occupied with getting themselves drunk [in] some [midwinter sacrificial feast] when someone must have thought it would be fun to put a guy’s soul in a girl’s body. I am not as amused by the result.

In Swedish: Du fattar vart jag vill komma: Jag är transsexuell. Jag kom till vid vintersolståndet, så gudinnorna var antagligen fullt upptagna med att supa sig fulla på något midvinterblot när någon kom på att det vore en rolig grej att sätta en killes själ i en tjejs kropp. Jag är inte riktigt lika road av resultatet.

(quote: http://trollhare.wordpress.com/om/vem-ar-immanuel/)

Trollhare’s blog is telling us something about the value of blogging on making available accounts of modes of sexual identifications which have previously, if at all, with only a few exceptions** mainly been told by mainstream media and/or medical ‘experts’. While I am not trying to say that blogs are necessarily more ‘authentic’ (whatever ‘authenticity’ would mean here), at least this blog is one proof out of many that stories which might previously have remained untold–or at least remained hidden for a ‘mainstream audience’–can become visible, become produced in the mediated ‘space’ which is the blogosphere. And as sociologist Ken Plummer (1995) has shown, some sexual stories has historically served, and still do serve, important emancipatory purposes (e.g. coming out stories, rape stories).

Inspired by Plummer and others, I am particularly interested in what role blogging (and other media practices) serve in the production and reproduction of what I in search of a better term now call ’sexual grammars’–of which Trollhare constitutes a prime example.

* I’m still looking for a pronoun to translate the Swedish gender neutral ‘hen’, a neologism which have become all the more commonly used in queer feminist contexts in Sweden instead of ‘han’ (he) and ‘hon’ (she). Not sure that s/he is the best translation, nor that Trollhare ‘henself’ would like to be labelled as such. My reason for using a gender neutral pronoun in this text is that ‘hen’ is used in the blog.

** I will get back to some of these exceptions at a later date.

 Links:

http://trollhare.wordpress.com/

http://trollhare.wordpress.com/om/varfor-namnet-trollhare/

http://trollhare.wordpress.com/om/vem-ar-immanuel/

Literature:

Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.

Plummer, Ken (1995). Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds. London/New York: Routledge.

What do I feel like writing today?

I’ve been a very bad blogger lately. Departmental life sometimes tends to eat into every spare moment–and, as in this case also into my research blogging, which is supposed to be a really crucial aspect of my online ethnography!

I think one reason the blogging has been one of the tasks which has been put on the shelf during this hectic period is simply because I haven’t really learnt the skills of keeping it updated also when time is short. I realise that many (most?) of the bloggers who’s blogs I read must lead equally busy lives, so I assume the difference must be one of priority and possibly also one of being a fast writer, and accepting that there is only a limited time to spend on each blog entrance. In a recent interview I made with blogger Alexander Alvina Chamberland you can read that:

“I’m using many platforms for my writing, but I use the blog as a place where I without censoring myself can write about whatever I feel like on that particular day.”

I need to learn from this, not least because my intentions with starting the blog in the first place was to find another form of writing about the resarch process and write precisely about the everyday process of doing research–without having to work hard on every formulation and have my text feedbacked by 10 colleagues as you would in the case of a research article before publishing.  

So, today I found another interesting Swedish blog I haven’t read before, namely that of Comix-artist Karolina Bång–who concidently will be coming to Hallongrottan here in Stockholm for ‘release mingle’ of her new book Relationshandboken (The Relationship Handbook) on Sunday the 25th. I just hope I can make it, because anything else will be missing a good opportunity.  

Links:

Karolina Bång’s blog: http://karolinabang.blogspot.com/

Hallongrottan’s blog: http://www.hallongrottan.com/2009/09/21/1441/ 

Interview with Chamberland: http://www.grassrootsfeminism.net/cms/node/326

 

Male Breastfeeding

Recently, a heated debate has been going on in Swedish media both on- and offline. The controversy regards the topic of male breastfeeding, a topic which has previously been raised in the leftist magazine ETC by feminist writer Martin, who also blogs on ‘Vi som aldrig sa sexist’ [literally translated to 'Us who never said sexist'] and which has been reactivated by Ragnar, a soon to be father of two who has decided to try breastfeeding his still unborn child. Ragnar appeared in the television program Aschberg on Channel (2/9 2009), and then again on ‘Debatt’ ['Debate'] on SVT (8/9 2009), one of the state funded channels.

In brief, Ragnar has publicly discussed his attempt to induce lactation by use of frequent use of a breast pump–and this attempt has raised many opinions as well as emotions. This topic has been discussed in several blogs- (feminist and others) as well as in the online versions of the tabloid press. What strikes me most in this debate is how polarized it is, how hostile so many comments are, and how this topic seems to have reactivated simultaneosly hopeful utopian exclamations and dystopian fears of ‘gender equality going too far’. Interestingly, and somewhat paradoxically, biologist arguments are used to argue both for and most notably against Ragnars experiment–as if the ‘truly natural’ would give us a right answer.

You can follow Ragnar’s own blog on: http://www.tv8.se/blogg/mjolkmannen

‘Debatt’ is still available on: http://svtplay.se/v/1683213/debatt/del_4_av_18_tisdag].

The Power of Googlibility II

I’m now officially googlable. I’ve got ‘googlibility’ (= google visibility). Pressure’s on to produce something which is actually worth reading.

The Power of Googlibility

Tried to google my own blog again (!), but to no avail. I’m not yet googlable.

Serious Play at Work

” [...] I resist the notion that working on the Web, whether ‘surfing’ or creating the pages, is always or necessarily insignificant, marginal to women’s lives and to cultures of feminism. I reclaim the activity known as ‘surfing’ as serious play which can create and maintain relationships, be they between individuals, organizations or hypertext documents.” (Wakeford 2000:  352)

Reference

Wakeford, Nina (2000). ‘Networking Women and Grrrls with Information/Communication Technologies’, The Cybercultures Reader (David Bell & Barbara L Kennedy, eds). London: Routledge.