which an extended global borderland audience interacts with visual and performative artists. If Rap, as Houston Baker says, is 'the form of auditions in our present era that utterly refuses to sing anthems of, say, whitemale hegemony,' the borderland
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Constructing Gender
The sage's science…of life requires thorough investigation of principles as the first step.
- #II 'Treading,' The Taoist I Ching
Oh! It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. - Algy to Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest
(T) Reading for My Life
Today, when literary types talk about 'constructing gender,' more often than not what we're really talking about is 'deconstructing gender.' That is, we're attempting to call attention to the social and historical contingency of the ways people make sense out of the embodied experiences we come to 'know' as 'sexual.' Now, as the troubled syntax of this last sentence suggests, the effort involved in making this attempt is anything but 'natural.' Indeed, to many of its critics, this counterintuitive and somewhat abstract undertaking seems a silly ('academic') endeavor at best, unnecessarily complicating what should certainly be the most natural thing in the world. As Cole Porter put it, 'birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it,' so why can't we do 'it,' without all the fuss? Part of the problem, which the 'fuss' of deconstructing gender seeks to explore, lies in what we mean by 'it' and who we mean by 'we' here. For some of us, like lesbians and gay men, whose experiences of sexuality have been historically castigated as 'unnatural,' or women, whose supposed 'sexual nature' has been used to legitimate their social, economic, and political subjugation, or the many others whose 'eccentric' forms of pleasure have subjected them to religious, legal, medical, and moral censure, 'sexuality' has never been such a 'natural' phenomenon. Indeed, the attempt to 'deconstruct gender' is an attempt both to destabilize the systems of meaning that establish -542- certain forms of ('sexual') desire and behavior as 'natural' or 'normal' and simultaneously to create a context of affirmation in which new forms of relationship and pleasure can emerge. Thus, when we speak about 'constructing gender,' part of the project is precisely to call into question something — perhaps the very thing — that many people take most for granted about their lives in order to see if it is possible to begin to live our lives otherwise.
But of course this is only part of the project. For after the calling into question of the taken for granted has begun, there is the larger problem of how we start to imagine, let alone create, such 'otherwise' ways to live our lives. In order to understand what this kind of creativity might mean or how it might happen, it is important to consider the powerful effects of imagining generally and, for the purposes of this chapter, imagining-as-reading or reading-as-imagining specifically. I'm choosing to focus on reading here, not because I believe that it is unique among imaginative practices, but rather because, on the contrary, it is so common. For, although in our century reading has been eclipsed as a cultural activity by television watching, it still popularly functions as a (per)formative experience that shapes the ways we learn to make sense of our everyday lives. Ironically, we might argue that precisely because reading has been displaced from the cultural centrality it commanded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — where in its ubiquity it performed much of what Mary Poovey calls the 'work of ideology' — reading now takes on a more highly charged valence as 'purely imaginative' work. And the contemporary significance of such
In writing these sentences I am struck by how much they recall to -543- me my own experiences of growing up. For as a sensitive, intellectual, myopic child born to displaced second-generation, urban Jews, residing in the emphatically non-Jewish, emphatically nonintellectual, suburbanizing countryside of northern Maryland, books were the only place I felt at home. Spending hours of each day curled up on the couch in my parents' living room reading indiscriminately through classics, mysteries, romances, sci-fi, historical adventures, and lots of just plain schlock, I repeatedly fled the unarticulable pain of my own life to 'live' in the imaginary realms of literature. Yet more than my own cultural, religious, or temperamental alienation, there was an even more profound experience of aloneness — one for which I had at the time no name or concept — that drove me to seek my companions in the leaves of those tomes I pulled from the library's shelves. Retrospectively I would describe this isolation as the experience of a male child who has since become a gay man but who was then growing up in a world in which such a possibility was not only unspeakable but quite literally unimaginable. At the time, however, I could neither say nor imagine any of this and so I simply checked out more books.
It is one of the truisms of gay and lesbian self-help literature — which does not make it any less 'true' — that we often experience a kind of emotional dissociation that results from never having some of our most poignant feelings mirrored back to us by the worlds in which we live. Indeed, it often seems as if the very feelings that make us feel most alive are the same feelings that make us feel most alone: an unbearable paradox at best, a mutilating reality at worst. Unlike most other children in our culture who grow up with others who are in socially recognizable ways 'like' them (though of course not without excruciating differences), children who emerge later in life as 'gay' or 'lesbian' grow up in contexts where almost everyone — and most emphatically their parents — is not 'like' them. While in the twenty years since I was a child there has (thankfully) been some significant change in this regard, by and large it is still the case that most people who denominate themselves as gay or lesbian come to maturity in a social and historical context in which there are few affirmations of their emotional or affectional experiences. And if this is true in 'reality,' it is more true in the 'imaginary' — if we can differentiate between these realms. Thus, it is of both material
…invisibility is a dangerous and painful condition and lesbians are not the only people to know it. When those who have the power to name and socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you, whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul — and not just individual strength, but collective understanding — to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which you are thrust, and to stand up demanding to be seen and heard.
