Happy 99th International Women's Day
1. The Projected Futures of Children
What a traumatic time it is to be a child. There are contradictory assumptions that children are both asexual and heterosexual. "Boys your age don't have girls on their minds." But boys definitely don't have other boys on their minds. In between these two sexualities are the desires of adults as projected onto children’s bodies. There are reasons why your reproductive organs are named as such. Not because they have the potential to create life, but because they will.
Xiu Xiu - Nieces Pieces (Boat Knife Version)
2. The Regulation of Bodies
Gender is as much a relation as it is a performance. Biology only matters if it happens to align with heteronormative desire. Why else would there be a need to separate men and women in change rooms and washrooms? The repetition of performances is reinforced so often that it goes unquestioned. But the associations that help people make meaning of sexual difference are almost insane. How exactly is hairlessness more feminine anyway? What does muscle bulk have to do with maleness?
Crass - Shaved Women
3. Bodies Inside Bodies
I keep coming back to David Lynch's Eraserhead when it comes to thinking about pregnancy and childhood. Babies might as well be born elephants or worms. It's a miracle everything comes out in the right place as it is. The experience of conceiving and birthing another human is an experience I will never know directly, so I think I'm justified in being equally fascinated and repulsed by the sheer foreignness of it all. I cannot think of anything more unknowable.
Lamb - Alien
4. Liminality
As Yoko Ono suggested over 25 years ago, it's dangerous to critique any of the normative constructions of gender and sexuality, but it's only when things are on the verge of breaking that any real change is possible. And that may mean accepting differences within groups as well as between them. Here's to unsettling hierarchies of power and knowledge and building coalitions of difference, wherever possible.
Yoko Ono with Jason Pierce - Walking On Thin Ice