In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Smile!

piny

From The Gimp Parade, another iteration of the Stupid Question Quandary, from Awake to Dream:

Her: “Oh, wow! Can I just take a picture of you both? It’s so rare to see two people in wheelchairs together and you two look so good together!” She smiles broadly, beaming, clearly enamoured with her own brilliance.

She also links to Thagmano’s post about her own experiences with stupid questions:

3. Another WCW, who walked into my office while I was making an
appointment for a haircut.

WCW: Sorry to interrupt
Me: No problem. I was just making a hair appointment
WCW: Oh, what are you going to get?
Me: Nothing, just a trim. I’m trying to grow out my hair
WCW: Oh, really? Why don’t you just get a “weave” [she totally said weave like it was a word in a different language that she didn’t understand]

I posted my list a few months ago. My hands-down favorite was a pair of questions received via email:

Do you have a penis?

If so, how?

To be fair, he sent me an email beforehand asking me if he could ask these questions. Something to the effect of, “I never met an ftm before and I’m curious.” I said, sure, you can ask. I don’t think I ever wrote him back. I remember feeling very tired. The format was just a little much. How do you answer that question, anyway? I think a straightforward No would have been the opener, by his reckoning. Should I have described all my attachments? Maybe just one or two? Should I have defined clitoromegaly? Should I have discussed surgical options and then explained why those hows were not my preference? All three, probably. Maybe that would have occasioned more emails.

Awaketodream’s iteration isn’t exactly a question (“Are you related?”), but the encounter is imbued with the same anthropological connotations. Their constitutional, her spectacle. Ooh, isn’t that interesting! Two of them at once! And they make such a pretty picture! This isn’t the way you treat someone you meet on the sidewalk. This is the way you treat an animal at the zoo.

The commenters at blackademic’s post and many of the echoing stories that were subsequently told pointed out one common thread: These stories involve an assumption of difference. The subject of the curiosity is exoticized in ways that they don’t necessarily agree with, ways that frequently remove them from their rather mundane lives. Oh, you have a spouse? Oh, you have sex? Oh, you go for walks? Oh, you tan? Oh, you have a job? Oh, you like to read? Oh, you have children? Oh, you play sports? Oh, you attend church? Oh, you like privacy? Oh, you need intellectual stimulation?

This is not a reflection of the way life is for different people. It is not the result of careful study or even glancing acquaintance with the lives anyone actually leads. It’s the result of segregation exacerbated by popular stereotypes focused on difference and the fact of difference. Common characteristics are downplayed in favor of exotic difference. Common needs are downplayed in favor of dehumanization. The end result is the reduction of a pair of human beings to a display.

8 thoughts on Smile!

  1. Yup, from time to time I too get variations of the “Do you have a penis?” question. It sometimes annoys me, but I usually respond that I’ve had bottom surgery. My degree of annoyance usually reflects how the question is worded and the context in which it was asked.

    But really, why the hell should my genitalia matter? I’m still a woman and I’m still Stacy regardless of what biological structures exist between my legs. Plus, the main reason I can answer that question in the negative is because I have had the economic resources necessary to make surgery a reality. Among other things, the “penis question” implicitly ties “true manhood” and “true womanhood” to economic privilege. That’s pretty awful, if you ask me.

    Perhaps I should respond, “Since I’m not interested in having sex with you, I find your question to be irrelevant.” Or less flippantly, perhaps I should refuse to answer the question and instead, discuss the irrelevance of genitalia in determining the legitimacy of a person’s gender and how that issue ties in with privilege.

    In spite of the annoyance factors, I do like to spend time educating folks about transpeople and the issues we deal with. However, there is a fine line between raising someone’s awareness and unwittingly serving as the subject of voyeuristic curiosity.

    There’s a funny kind of duality that exists among some cisgender people. Some are absolutely disgusted with transpeople and want nothing to do with us, while others find the more intimate details of our lives to be thrilling and titillating. It’s easy enough to figure out who is disgusted with you. However, it can be much harder to distinguish between people who express sincere curiosity and people who wish to satisfy their need for titillation.

    To make matters worse, some individuals express their voyeuristic curiosity through sexuality and become what is commonly know as “tranny chasers”: people who seek out sexual encounters with transgender people out of a fetishistic attachment to transsexuality. I’ve read of other people developing similar sexual interests in relation to disabled people and people of various races and ethnicities.

    Bah! It’s all really quite annoying.

  3. Josh beat me to it. Though I have to say, I doubt searching for “trans penis details” on google would lead you to the desired results. Maybe Wikipedia?

    Interestingly, I don’t happen to know any trans or disabled people personally, but the only people I’ve ever seen grilled like this (and, okay, maybe once or twice grilled myself before I caught what I was doing and felt bad) are practicing religious people (specifically Jews who keep kosher, and a practicing Catholic friend of mine… though that was more him trying to ease the Catholic church’s bad name by explaining that the pope believes in evolution). Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson about minding my own business.

  4. I have to day, hurrah! what a great discussion of what my post failed to examine in depth. I was just so ticked at the assumption that woman made about us that I didn’t really go into it. Interestingly, my friend Jess and I have run into this problem in multitudes since we started hanging out together. Neither of us has had another friend who is also a wheelchair user, and so we find that our presence in duplicate tends to attract the indelicate, curious and awkward of our society looking for a little break from the mundane.

  5. I have to day, hurrah! what a great discussion of what my post failed to examine in depth. I was just so ticked at the assumption that woman made about us that I didn’t really go into it. Interestingly, my friend Jess and I have run into this problem in multitudes since we started hanging out together. Neither of us has had another friend who is also a wheelchair user, and so we find that our presence in duplicate tends to attract the indelicate, curious and awkward of our society looking for a little break from the mundane.

    Right. The, “Wow, two at once!” bit was what made her sense of you as a rara avis so clear.

    I’m glad you liked the post. We aim to please here at feministe. You know, I seem to have a carnival allergy, but it’d be fun to host a carnival about ignoiant questions and potential responses, or about visible difference. I know that some people feel very differently from me about both issues.

  6. Pingback: a w a k e : t o : d r e a m » I need this shirt

  7. College was my first opportunity to find and develop friendships with other mobility-impaired youth, which I believe is true for most people disabled in their mid-teens. I remember discovering a subversive joy in traveling in micro-herds of chairs and having crowds on campus part for our passage or openly stare. It was a gratifying feeling to experience the nondisabled attention with other gimps for the first time after so long of it being an individual and isolating experience.

    Several of us used to fantasize about getting jackets like a motorcycle gang to solidify our outsider group persona, then whiz around at top speed together. There was a real temptation to outlandishly flaunt our Otherness that I think exists in many minority groups. It’s a way of grasping the power of the gaze back for yourself that I think is also part of the discussions about porn and fetish we’ve been having. There’s an entirely different feel to an encounter where you are Othered than there is to one where you first get to Other yourself. Strange, but true.

  8. Several of us used to fantasize about getting jackets like a motorcycle gang to solidify our outsider group persona, then whiz around at top speed together. There was a real temptation to outlandishly flaunt our Otherness that I think exists in many minority groups.

    That’s exactly what I thought of when I read josie’s post. A motorcycle gang of people in chair cruising around and intimidating the squares.

Comments are currently closed.