(no subject)

[anghraine]

Sometimes the distinction between "female but alienated from hetero conceptions of femininity" and "agender but tired" is not as strong as I'd like it to be.

Comments

[elperian]

Indeed! I don't know what this is in reference to, but I'm reading a history of undercover women in the Civil War, including one woman who joined the Union Army as a man. Her journal accounts seem to lean towards the former but how much of that is framed by context, time, and the historian is a little fuzzy!

[anghraine]

It can be very fuzzy!

It was inspired by posts about "the female gaze" that presuppose attraction to men, and I was just like... /sigh, and then "wait, do I even count as female for the purposes of this" and then "well I DON'T KNOW but there are very-definitely-female people who feel like this SO but maybe..."

[elperian]

I've been thinking about this and then came across this post with those tags from Portrait of a Lady on Fire which were very timely and relevant. I think part of the struggle there (at least, from my outsider's lens instead of yours) comes from how a) the female gaze is treated as a het female gaze (just as the male gaze is treated as a het male gaze), when being female/a woman is not conditional on being straight (same goes for men), and b) how the female gaze as a straight woman's gaze is treated as empowering, which doesn't track with the presentation of the male gaze.

It almost seems to me more an issue with the idea of the female gaze and what it means than what it is to be female/a woman in that context. I get the same struggles with devolving debates like what it ~means~ to be a woman, often centered around sex with a man and child-bearing, none of which are on my life list. Becoming a man in the Western sense is usually centered around responsibilities, whereas becoming a woman is culturally associated with m/f sex and children. And since I don't want that, how do I reclaim what it means to be a woman? Can I not just live as I am without being contextualized by someone else? Hard to do in any setting.

But your comment also touches on how, when I embraced being ace, it was suddenly revealing to me in regard of how I didn't understand het-ness and thus straight women and their wants and identity are fundamentally unknowable to me. I can talk with my friends about it, but I imagine it's just as hard for them to truly understand what my identity is like. So for all that I feel comfortable identifying as a cis woman, it's hard to disentangle that from what a society Thinks A Woman Is.

[zero_pixel_count]

Ugh, yeah.

For myself - I mean, about myself - I have kind of just given up on ever figuring it out or particularly caring what pronouns people use for me, so long as they don't attach assumptions to them. Because yeah, maybe I'm angry about the expectations people have 'because I'm a woman', or maybe I'm not actually a woman, who knows, working it out just seems like far too much hard work.

[anghraine]

Haha, yeah. I certainly don't feel like I was born a woman, but the extent to which I maybe am one but also am maybe not is just... super unclear and super tiring, so I mostly ignore it.

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, hard same.

[anghraine]

*fistbump*

[sathari]

Co-signed.

[anghraine]

At least it's relatable!