either/or
I spent a good few hours yesterday reading foundational theory for the Gender & Sexuality class that I’m taking this semester. A common theme among the assigned articles was the breaking down of false dichotomies like woman/man, female/male, gay/straight, etc. This is a concept that feels very intuitive to me. When I first came across the formal idea years ago, it was less of an “aha!” moment and more of an “of course” one.
Mutual exclusivity, generally, has never sat well with me. I’ve said this here before: I am a lover of intersections, of cross-roads. The places where things meet and intertwine excite me and, in many ways, I enjoy the murkiness that presents itself when things are less Black/White and more one big pile of messy gray. As well, I simply don’t think most things can be pulled apart that easily. Different people, ideas, cultures exist alongside one another simultaneously, and often spill over and drip onto each other. We can try to compartmentalize and separate them, but it’s not a simple chore.
I wonder, too, if it’s necessary. To be elementary about it, can’t we all walk and chew gum at the same time? I often think many things at the same time, and I would venture to guess that you do, too. (“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” said the Queen.) We all have ideas about things that bump up against our ideas about other things. Sometimes we contradict ourselves, sometimes we sound like hypocrites. Human beings, and the ideas and objects we produce, are multi-faceted and diverse. That’s one of the reasons that I like being one so damn much. We have a lot going on, and not all of it makes sense or fits together easily.
For Christmas, my Mom gave me a Kindle. I love it! It’s fun and exciting and convenient and clever. A couple of days later, I stopped by a bookstore to pick up a book that a friend suggested I read. Since then I’ve gone back and forth between reading books on my e-reader and reading the kind that require you to turn pages. The experience of each is different, yet far more alike than not. When we dichotomize concepts (or physical objects), we set them apart from one another. Each thing is the opposite of the other, the absence of the other. If a book is on paper, it is not electronic, and vice versa. But that idea does not often hold up in real life. I can both enjoy my Kindle and my hard copies – each has its place in my life and aside from their obvious physical differences, you can’t separate them neatly. They’re both books, after all, just different versions of one other. Saying a paper book written with ink is distinct from an electronic book denies the very real fact of electronic paper and electronic ink. The separation between the two is gray (as is their individual value).
Then again, if you’ll allow me to walk and chew in real-time, it’s also entirely necessary to pull things apart, to look at different pieces, figure out how the cogs work individually. We have to analyze the parts in order to make sense of the whole. When looking at sexuality, for instance, we have to understand how the categories of Gay and Straight function in order to make sense of anything in between or outside. In some ways, the compartmentalization of ideas allows us to broaden our definitions of them. The only way we can call a dichotomy false is if we understand that there are parts that don’t fit within its boundaries.
So where does that leave us? We need to compartmentalize to make sense of a thing, but we can’t compartmentalize most things entirely. We have to look both at the tiny pieces to understand the whole, and the whole to understand the pieces, often at the same time. There are overlaps and underlaps and circularlaps and… now I’m just making up words. Messy, indeed.
Posted by erin | 2 comments
