terça-feira, 30 de agosto de 2011

Lesbian activist Carolyn Gage explain more about .


Brandon was born female, but felt male inside. Her story outraged many and captured headlines, and it has been powerfully re-told in the film Boys Don’t Cry and in the award-winning documentary The Brandon Teena Story. But to a few people in Nebraska, it is simply the sad tale of the child, sibling and friend they loved and lost.
Brandon Teena was born Teena Brandon in Lincoln, Neb., on December 12, 1972. Her mother, Joann, remembers she was handful at an early age. “As she was growing up, she was ornery and full of life,” she says. “She was a prankster, and she was a tomboy.”Although Brandon carried out life publicly as a boy, her mother says she refused to acknowledge her daughter’s new persona at home. Brandon’s growing frustration as she tried to date other women, coupled with the humiliation and name-calling she faced in town, led her to attempt suicide. Her best friend, Sarah Lyons, says she took Brandon to a crisis center.


I want to talk about an inconvenient truth. I want to talk about the fact the person who was named Teena Brandon was a survivor of incest. You won't hear this mentioned in Boys Don't Cry, and you won't hear it mentioned in the documentary "The Brandon Teena Story." You won't read about it in the current Wikipedia entry. It is, like I said, inconvenient. "The Inconvenient Truth About Tina Brandon" is an inconvenient essay. It has a history of publication rejections. It has been construed as transphobic, and it has been challenged for disrupting tenets of Queer Theory. This is to be expected, because it is about trauma, and trauma is trauma specifically because it resists being accepted or assimilated. If this paper fit comfortably into existing categories of identity there would have been no need to write it and Teena Brandon might be living today.In my experience, protracted conflict can be an indication of inadequately and/or inaccurately conceived contexts. Trauma research offers radical perspectives on identity, both lesbian and trans, and opens up new space for dialogue, space with a possibility of common ground. Trauma literacy can inform radical feminism, and I wrote the paper with that intention. Does this essay belong in a journal issue with the title "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" The answer is "no," if that means it should insist that Teena Brandon was really a lesbian with a case of mistaken identity. This paper does not make that claim. What it does claim is her status as an unrecovered survivor of incest with Complex PTSD who appeared to be in active syndrome up to the time of her death. I believe this paper does belong in this issue of Trivia, which is why I submitted it. Many lesbians are survivors of child sexual abuse. The last decade has seen increasing numbers of biological women who formerly identified as lesbians (like Brandon) transitioning to claim male identities. Positions in the lesbian and trans communities have become polarized, opening deep divisions between us. Accusations of "essentialism," "pathologizing," "misogyny," and "patriarchal privilege" are hurled back and forth across the battle lines.


She explains about misogyny :


If gender is considered an aggregate of sex-caste markers in a system of dominance based on biological sex, then it is simplistic and misleading to characterize it as "performative." Viewed in the context of a patriarchal culture, gender is emblematic of a system of dominance in which women are universally oppressed as a caste.According to the studies of Jacobs and Herman, the victimized daughter's repudiation of a female identity and her internalization of an idealized male represent responses to childhood sexual abuse.The victimized daughter who adopts a male persona is not "fucking with gender." Gender has fucked with her, and, in attempting to identify with the power that has hurt her, she is adopting the strategy of a desperate child whose only option has been to alter her perception of herself.What the transgender movement calls gender-fucking is simply an exercise in moving markers rather than any fundamental change in gender. Gender still exists. It is still an organizing structure for society. What's different is that you just 'do' it differently: it is 'allowed' to be attached to different bodies. The aim of transgender politics is to allow you to be 'be' the gender that you 'are.' However, being your gender still means what you wear, what you do, how you express yourself and is still attached to fundamental notions of what it means to be men and women… And it's no surprise that what is female and what is male in this view exactly tracks what is already defined as male and female. (Corson, 3)Transgender politics does not disrupt the positions of men and women in the gender hierarchy, but what it does do is "render women's choices to oppose this hierarchy as women and on behalf of women incomprehensible."(Corson, 3)In addition to its participation in the larger political system of male dominance, the GID diagnosis also acts on a more personal front to protect the perpetrators. If the victimized daughter's "gender dysphoria" is a post-traumatic response to sexual violence, it reflects an attempt to dissociate, or split off, the trauma.A trauma that cannot adequately be represented or narrated remains estranged. It is an alienated chunk of experience that resists any assimilation into the personhood of the host on whom it feeds. Dissociation can also be understood as a narrative act. It narrates fragmentation, breakage, rupture, disjunction, and incommensurability. (Epstein and Lefkovitz, 193) .
Is this a lesbian paper that belongs in lesbian space? That question can be hotly debated, and what better qualifier for inclusion?


Carolyn Gage is a lesbian feminist playwright, performer, author, and activist. The author of nine books and more than fifty-five plays, she is the 2009 winner of the Lambda Literary Award in drama. Her website is www.carolyngage.com

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