Reading: Gender Outlaw (Kate Bornstein) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapters 9-11 related tags: #HNvPtS
What do fools have in common? Well, they don’t play by the rules, they laugh at most rules, and they encourage us to laugh at ourselves. Their pranks of substituting one thing for another create instability and uncertainty, making visible the lies imbedded in a culture. Fools demonstrate the wisdom of simplicity and innocence. These are valuable crafts, these are skills we could use in our problem-laden world.
I've always been interested in the role of the jester, especially in fiction. They're more frequently the person who is doing exactly this, and it's something I appreciate immensely.
Any healthy civilization would certainly have people performing these fool skills at every level of the culture. In our civilization, the only people doing these things are considered trouble-makers, whatever their line of work.
I also agree with this. Those of us who prompt people to ask questions, who demand that people try to see from any other perspective than the dominant one... We're treated like fools and jesters.
In the new version of the book, this anecdote is added:
I had the great good fortune to accompany Caitlyn Jenner and company as a regular cast member of E! TV’s reality series I Am Cait. It was one of the very best times of my life. I remember at one point, Caitlyn Jenner was defending her right-wing politics to several of us, saying that if a right-winger ever ended up as president of the United States, she, Caitlyn, would be in a great position to be that president’s trans ambassador. Well, that made me think. And think. And think. And about a week later, I announced my solidarity with CJ, saying I would be in a great position to be that Republican president’s court jester.
While I don't think Bornstein means it in a way that's harmful, this quip (particularly from Caitlyn) sounds rather sinister in light of what's happened in the US. I wonder how Bornstein feels having added this bit in now that some of the assimilationist right-wing trans people got their way. (Honestly, even just the assimilationist trans people in general. Considering how no side wants to actually stand in solidarity with trans people... this comes off even worse.)
Given any binary, it’s fun to look for some hidden third, and the reason why the third was hidden says a lot about a culture. The choice between two of something is not a choice at all, but rather the opportunity to subscribe to the value system which holds the two presented choices as mutually exclusive alternatives. Once we choose one or the other, we’ve bought into the system that perpetuates the binary.
I actually find this to be a very good thing to do in most situations, and it is something that I've been doing for a long time. Looking for the third+ option and then questioning why it is that we only select one of two things has really shifted a lot of my thinking.
In going from male to female, I discovered that men don’t seem to think about gender in the same way women do. The preferred gender in our patriarchal society is male, and so males mostly take gender for granted, most men do not try to analyze what it means to be male. Even the men’s movement seems more predicated on a desire to not be drawn into some web of femininity, rather than a desire to question the construct of male identity. Women, on the other hand, have been taught that they’re the “second sex,” the distaff gender, so their lives are an almost daily struggle with the concept of gender. The trap for women is the system itself: it’s not men who are the foe so much as it is the bi-polar gender system that keeps men in place as more privileged.
At least someone recognised what Robert Bly was on about. If this text were in conversation with The Will to Change, they'd be saying very different things. And this piece at least recognises that Robert Bly and later iterations were about maintaining the power and privilege of being (cis) men.
Male privilege extends into sexual harassment, rape, and war. Combine male privilege with capitalism (which rewards greed and acquisition) and the mass media (which, owned by capitalists, highlights only the rewards of acquisition and makes invisible its penalties), and you have a juggernaut that needs stopping by any means. Male privilege is not the exclusive province of men; there are some few women who have a degree of this horrifying personality trait. Male privilege is, in a word, violence.
Again, in conversation with bell hooks, they'd be straddling different parts of the fence. I think, also, that the final sentence would get misread by “pro-men” people as assuming that all men are violent when the statement is that the privilege of men is violence. They are allowed to enact violence on others. (I do also like making it clear that there are non-men who also utilise this.)