If you haven’t
watched iO Tillett Wright’s talk on sexuality, I highly recommend you to watch
it. (http://www.ted.com/talks/io_tillett_wright_fifty_shades_of_gay.html) I
remember how amazed I was the first time when I watched her talk. She asked
those people who she took photos for to give themselves scores from 1 to 100 to
see if they are 100% gay or straight. What she found to be really interesting
was that there are a large number of people who defined themselves in the
middle, no too gay but also not too straight. As she noted in her talk, the
findings in her project actually posed a difficult question for people who
discriminate others as LGBTQ: whom do you want to discriminate? How do you
define a gay?
Readings of this
week, even though they addressed sexuality, are coming from different
perspectives than Wright’s. Focusing on the donor-donee relationship, Chanika,
Lwanda & Muula’s article talked about how Malawian politicians tried to
have donors fund their own political agenda by using the “gay right issue” as a
strategy to confuse activists and donors. Also, as Gosine noted, the assumption
of a western model of sexuality as universal is limited. She said, “words like
‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ may be recent introductions to local vocabularies . . . but
there are many names used to describe non-heterosexual acts” (p. 60). Citing
from Wright, I didn’t mean to set up her way as the only way to understand
sexuality, like Gosine said “western as universal.” But her talk did make me
think a lot on those issues, issues like “why should the marriage between a man
and a woman be legitimated but not others?” and “How should we understand
sexuality? Is it innate, something that we were born with, or social
constructed?”
Usually, I don’t
give out my answers directly. Part of the reason is because I am not quite sure
about my answer. J But I would like to talk about some
episode happened in my life and hopefully, answer will be shown in the episode.
My colleague and I used to have arguments on
sexuality. (Well, I didn’t say that our relationship is not healthy. On the
contrary, we are good friends. I will use “B” for my colleague in the following
episode just for the sake of convenience. Btw, I am a lazy cat. Addressing him
as “B” saves me a lot of time and energy.)
B: you have been
poisoned by the Western education! As a Chinese, do you really believe their
saying of sexuality? Coming on…
Me: I just think
people have their own rights to choose.
B: hey, don’t
forget Confucius. Isn’t Yin and Yang, harmonious, the basic value that Chinese
believes?
Me: yes we do.
We do believe in Yin and Yang and the harmony. But I just don’t think Yin only
refers to female and Yang refers to male. I think something like energy that people
are carrying on makes them appear to be Yin or Yang.
B (shaking his
head): you are poisoned.
Me: hey,
Confucius even said, “Only women and the base men are not educable.” So should
I believe in that too?
B: then how can
you explain “having kids” if it is same-sex marriage?
Me: well, not
everyone chooses to be in the same-sex marriage. I said that it is people’s own
choice.
…
The conversation
ended at that moment because both of us needed to go to class. But it is still
going on in our everyday life. We, as normal human beings, often confused about
ourselves, about others, and even about the world. The more we know, the more
we confused because we figure out that there are more things we still need to catch
up. In the book The Denial of Death,
Earnest Becker argued that everything we do in the world is because we are
afraid of death. I found myself agreed with what he said. I asked myself to imagine
if I could live forever, will I still think it is necessary to have a baby
before 35? Probably not, because I will have “forever” to do it! I guess you
can also say that human beings are selfish. We give birth to babies because we
are afraid of death.
Ugh, i figured out that when i am not writing academically, i write just like i talk. Ugh, i am sorry if i talked about too much non-sense above. I guess it is okay to be not-professional here. :) (please don't grade this)
ReplyDeleteZhou,
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting video! I had not heard of iO Tillett Wright previously. Her discussion of sexuality as a fluid spectrum, where a person may belong anywhere along the continuum and may move their position throughout their lifetime, was powerful. It made me think about some of the readings for October 30, particularly Gosine's (2005) article on "dissident desire" in international development. He discusses the imposition of a Western model of sexuality on countries in the Global South and the dichotomous parceling of people into "heterosexual" and "homosexual" categories. Further, people who engaged in non-heterosexual sex "were asked to relate and locate their experiences in western terms, whether in naming their identities (gay, lesbian, queer), forming partnerships ('open' or 'closed' relationships), creating traditions (coming out) or developing institutions (gay bars, the gay village, strip clubs)" (p. 60). In other words, Gosine (2005) seems to be suggesting that development initiatives tend to try to put people into the very boxes Wright suggests are erroneous -- not to mention that these same initiatives also focus on HIV/AIDS (which risks treating sex and sexuality as a contagion) at the expense of other issues and generally ignore nonheterosexual women.
This was the first time that I’ve seen this TED Talk and heard of this artist. Her work is so interesting and really relevant to what we talked about last week in class. I think it’s worth noting that even in this strictly American context that she is carrying out the project, she’s found common sentiments in a variety of areas, be it New York City or a small town in Texas.
ReplyDeleteIn relation to the readings for the past week I noticed that towards the conclusion of her talk, Wright mentions how, through this project, she realized that visibility and familiarity of those who fall in the “grey” areas is key to creating empathy.
In international development situations, like the United States, those in the “grey” are usually invisible or at least easier to marginalize based on their sexuality. This is one of the points that Sharma makes in “The language of rights” when she mentions how “othering” and distancing non-strictly heterosexual humans perpetuates silence on their concerns and existence. In the way that Wright was asking for acknowledgement of differences and complexities of people’s sexualities, she, like Sharma, is calling for the subject of sexuality to be a concern of equality for everyone, from families to policy makers.
I think you make an interesting point about the influence of Western ideas of sexuality. I myself have read that during the Meiji era in Japan in the late 19th century when Japan was importing Western ideas for the sake of industrialization and modernization, other ideas also flowed into the nation. Western ideas of sexuality were thus adopted in Japan, which greatly changed Japanese society’s view of homosexuality and the role of women in society. I think we need to be mindful of where ideas surrounding sexuality are derived from. We also need to be mindful of how limiting current dominant perspectives on sexuality can be.
ReplyDeleteiO Tillett Wright’s TED talk that you linked to was incredibly thought-provoking for that reason. I noticed how she mentioned that due to her upbringing, she was never asked to define herself when she was younger and decided that she wanted to be a boy (and later decided to be a girl). I think this act of defining is a key part of how sexuality is understood in the West. But I also do not think that problems of understanding gender as just a binary is a problem limited to the West. In general, people do seem to be predisposed to needing to find set categories to fit everything into. In the case of sexuality, I think this really works against us. In defining something, we apply a category to it, and we also limit it. Categorizing things makes them easier for us to think about and understand, but categorization is a double edged sword as it can also limit our understanding of things.