Queerland - blog post 2

Remember Rocky Horror?  The movie theaters that would show it all night Saturday?  The audience play-alongs, like the toast and rice? (After 15 years of work in the janitorial sciences, I am amazed that any theater in its right mind would allow this)  Friends who reenacted the whole movie on a stage in front of the screen?  That was probably my favorite introduction to queer in pop culture, but it was by no means the only place queer was springing up.  In hippie university towns and UU churches where I did my growing up, there wasn't much off limits in terms of expression.

I was a child of the gender-neutral seventies, when our feminist mothers dressed us, no matter our genitalia, in red and blue t-shirts and overalls.  In fact, I found it sort of sweetly nostalgic to see the twins from Red Without Blue were color-coded the same way my sister and I were.  Things have changed a lot in everything from clothing to the marketing of Lego toys (which only came in primary colors for everyone) in the time since then - I'd wager the Reagan era spurred it on.

So now my children, particularly the pink boy, are queer in the kid world, because the gender lines became ever so distinct and uncrossable.  My boys wear pink when they want to, and for one of my stepsons, that's daily.  Three of the four boys have long hair, and the one who particularly loves pink carries a pink purse.  The youngest two boys are Girl Scouts. In Georgia, boys aren't technically allowed, but my boys are welcomed into the troop with their sister, nonetheless.

So how is it that if my sweet pink-wearing, kitty-loving, long-haired, "feminine" little stepson should actually express his feelings to someone outside of his family who happened to have a psych--- title, he'd be disordered?  How my well-adjusted stepson could be considered disordered is beyond me, but as Butler cites, "a marked preoccupation with traditionally feminine activities" is considered by the DSM to be a diagnostic criterion.  Checkmark number one.

Undoing Gender gives me little hope for the current diagnostic model, not that I ever had any.  From a personal standpoint, I think the whole thing is bunk.  I suspect my shrink does, too, but I won't speak for him.

A little person who has a penis and likes wearing pink skirts shouldn't have to be queer.  We all like what we like.  But the fact that he does, that he is willing to disrupt the norm (and we live in Cumming, so he's stepping out on a limb), is absolutely queering up childhood.