The American Canadian Dream?

There is a mythology in our culture that industry, in the more traditional sense of hard work, and preseverance lead to ultimate success and prosperity.

The truth of this is that conformity and community acceptability are also very important, if not most important.

Conformity is expected in the following areas:

dress
speech
appearance
gender (both presentation and identity)
sexuality
reproduction
income
housing/decor
vehicle
politics

On some fundamental level, people inherently seem to want to form communities, and at the most basic these would have been family units, whereas now because of urbanization, and generational value changes they are becoming more arbitrary, and more selection, lifestyle, or interest based. We have the queer community and the crip community, and so on, where most of us hardly speak to our families at all.

I live in a suburb, surrounded by families. Most of the people on my street have two incomes. The only people with a similarly small income to us, are the retirees who have the other half of our semi-detatched house.

Recently we went from being a two-income family to being a no-income family, combining disability benefits, and student loans. So, now we're everything that we're not supposed to be, living here:

queer and married
childfree
butch/femme
poor
alternative
kinky
fat
disabled
leftist (green/NDP, in a liberal/PC neighborhood)
atheist (sihks and muslims on one side, jehovah's on the other)
plus, we have a really shitty car...

There was a point where, for a year or so, I imagined a life where I would have enough money that people would be forced to accept me. I realize, in retrospect, that is was a false hope, because no amount of hard work or determination was going to give me enough money to overcome that number of social deviancies from the local norm. Being born into a different social class, perhaps. But then, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Being different is not something that can be erased or overcome, and it is not something that people should have to hide, ignore, surpress, or otherwise dismiss in order to succeed.

This post was brought about in reading some of the writing over at Bilerico regarding the use of cisgendered to mean those whose gender identity matches the bits they were born with.

I agree that there's all kinds of privilege associated with fitting in with the dominant culture, but seeing as having a cunt, and feeling like a girl is the only way in which I do, I have a hard time when people try to talk to me about how much I am accessing privilege.

here's my offering:
cisabled
cisoriented
cissized
cisreproductive
cispolitical
cisfaith (cisreligious?)

i can see the appeal. Getting to label the people who label you and despise you for just trying to live your life as yourself has a certain joy. Hmm.

Self-justification

I'm in the process of trying to sort out the degree that I left half-finished, and figuring out where I want to go from there. In fact I have enough credits for two degrees, but that's an issue for another post.

The point is, that I know where I want to go, what I want to study, and what I want to do, but I'm trying to figure out how to justify it. How to convince someone that it is a valid topic to base an MA and a PhD on, and how to pull it all together into something that has a semblance of scholarship.

It's something that matters to me, and something that has validity, but it's also something that has the potential to blow up in my face, or to get pushed off into a corner and discarded. I don't know. I suppose that I'd better go and see someone at the department that I want to get into, to ensure that I can make it there.

I'm worried about having my idea stolen, which gives me an inkling that it's good. Also, the fact that I've never seen anything like it. I also haven't had anything to do with academics in ten years, and during that time I've suffered from disabling illness, and subsequent stroke damage, so I'm going to have to deal with that as well.

I'm tremendously apprehensive, read, shit scared, but also determined. I can't stay on disability. The money isn't good enough, and I can't cope with being useless. I know that I need this time to let my body rest, and it would be good to have an opportunity to re-train my brain around a purpose. I'm not ever going to be able to do the work I used to do, not the graphic design, and not anything physically gruelling, so it's going to have to be something that is time limited, largely self-directed, and academics seems to be something that I enjoy.

I'm looking forward to trying it, to be honest.

I really only did the graphics because I fell into it. It's easy, and it's good money, and it was a job, when school felt like a trip into nothingness. Probably because I was taking things I didn't care about. This will be different.

Dirty Dancing, Pop culture and 20 years of change

So, what better way to commemorate the life of Patrick Swayze than to watch Dirty Dancing, the movie, which more than ever, immortalized him in the minds of so many women.

For most of us around my age, that movie iconicized everything about falling in love, both good and bad. The right way to "do it" for the first time, as well as the wrong way, the typical fakey-fake Hollywood clean 50's crap that was so popular in the 80s, and the rest of the romantic ideal about summer romance, and how true love and standing up for what you believe in makes everything come out alright in the end.

The fact that there's sexy dancing only makes it better.

Every girl imagined herself as Jennifer Gray, and that was the point...

except, as I realized, watching it today, I didn't.

As a fat girl, I KNEW I wasn't ever going to have a boyfriend (I didn't yet know that I was queer, but that's a subject for a whole different post) who would be able to lift me over his head no matter how I balanced my weight. Given that at the time the movie came out my pants were often half again as big as those of the boys I was dating, it was completely impossible, but I dreamed it, and it added a whole other layer to the blossoming self-hatred that was growing inside me.

Fat girls didn't even exist in those days in popular media.

Lately we've been watching Glee, and it's an interesting change. I have to admit that it's nice to see a junior fatshionista on there. It would be nice to see her be something other than the representative fat and black character in the cast of geeky/gay, disabled, nerdy, religious, jock stereotypes, but at least she's there.

In the teen representations of my adolescence she didn't even exist, unless it was for the purpose of poking fun.

I wonder how different it is growing up today. On one hand there's this enormous culture of "fighting childhood obesity, and yet, there's an enormous effort being made to represent fat teenagers as normal, to avoid encouraging eating disorders, and to encourage healthy self esteem and positive body image. Also, since the zero tolerance on bullying initiatives have started taking off, and have been getting some enforcement, maybe things are getting better.

It's interesting.

I need some links in here. That's a project for next post.