I signed up for my Intro to WGSS (re: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) largely because of the “women and gender” part of the title (and also because it’s a prereq to the major, and I thought I’d keep my options open…). When I think about Sexuality Studies, I think about homosexuality. And I’m a heterosexual, so why should sexuality studies interest me? Right? Wrong.
Our assigned reading for today’s class was an article about homophobia–”Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism”. The author, Suzanne Pharr, writes that the patriarchal system, “an enforced belief in male dominance and control,” is kept in place by three things: an economic system that forces most people to forgo their independence (and therefore become submissive) because they must sell their labor in order to survive, violence (self explanatory), and homophobia (a weapon of sexism, as the title says). But homophobia doesn’t just concern homosexuals, it concerns everyone because of the labels and the alienation that is creates.
Homophobia was once treated by psychoanalysts as a mental disorder. It is, as Pharr defines it, “the irrational fear and hatred of those who love and sexually desire those of the same sex.” The main arguments against it, she writes, are that it is “either abnormal (sick) or immoral (sinful).” She goes on to explain that these arguments are largely irrational and expounds on how both women and men are targeted by men at the top of the social period under the institution of homophobia (she cites it as “one of the major causes of the women’s liberation movement to make a deeper and lasting change”). She discusses “lesbian bating”, among other things–which I myself have somewhat bizarrely experienced–and the fact of the current implications of being called a “feminist” (“feminist equals man-hater which equals lesbian), and she is incredibly insightful, and, I think, almost entirely correct.
But that’s not the point of this post. Moving along…
In class today, my professor guided us through an activity. She asked us all to close our eyes and imagine a time during adolescence when we felt different, targeted because we stood out for some reason or another. She wanted us to imagine the way it felt to feel so alienated, and to imagine what we changed about ourselves so that we could “fit in”. Then, she asked us to imagine a time, again, during our adolescence, when we elected not to do certain things that wanted to do, or did certain things that we didn’t want to do, because we didn’t want to be called “gay, queer, lesbian, dyke, or faggot.” Again, we imagined how we felt and what the consequences of our actions (or inactions) were. And then we all opened our eyes and she broke us into small groups to share our experiences, if we so chose, and to discuss the following question: “Why do people fear being labeled gay, queer, etc.?”
I had settled on a distinct set of memories from the sixth grade. I had always been a good student. I did well in school and was an avid book worm. And I was proud of myself too, at least until the sixth grade. In Mrs. Cane’s math class, I received my typical good grades. I answered her questions in class, won the math games we played in teams, and was fairly happy. Until my peers started teasing me. “Teacher’s pet” they called me, “why don’t you ask Mrs. Cane if she’ll move our test, since she likes you best?” they said. I abhorred it, and they didn’t relent. So I started to not raise my hand in class. I still won at the math games, so that my team would win and my peers wouldn’t dislike me, but I began to hide my intelligence. I became ashamed, upset that I was good in school because all of my peers evidently weren’t, and they were taking their frustration out on me.
When it came time to answer the second question we were put to in class, I just sat there. I’d never been afraid of being called gay or queer or lesbian. I’d never had a problem with homosexuality. I just happened to like boys, and I assumed that if I liked girls, then my friends and family would be fine with that. And I think that would be pretty much uniformly true. It actually wasn’t until I came to college that I became more conscious of my actions and how they could be construed.
I’m from New Jersey, you see, so I grew up with relatively liberal people. But now, coming to school in the South, I had best friends who were quite conservative, and I knew that they didn’t approve of homosexuality. So, even though I knew I was heterosexual, I began to think about the “what ifs”. Would she still be friends with me if I was a lesbian? At the same time, however, the label itself didn’t bother me. Not only did I know that it wasn’t true about me in particular, I also had no problem with it, so what did it matter?
When my WGSS class broke into groups, however, I began to realize that it did matter. My group mates, two guys and one other girl (and one of the guys was gay, and had come out in high school), openly discussed our experiences. One guy talked about the pressures from his parents to be a certain person, the girl talked about having to pretend that her guy friends weren’t good friends because girls were only friends with other girls. And the other guy talked about his youth, growing up being told to think for himself and suddenly, out of the blue, being told conversely that he couldn’t do XYZ because those things were what little girls did. Slowly, I think we all began to realize that while our experiences were different, at the heart of it all was the same problem: alienation by becoming the “other” at the hands of a group of people who project an image of their own image of superiority or rightness.
Sexuality studies, I realized, aren’t just for people who are interested in learning about gays and lesbians. Their applications and implications are universal, no matter if you are female or male, white or black, gay or straight.
Slightly ironic, that I came back after a class focused on sexuality studies determined to declare my major (focused on women and fiction) in the WGSS department, no?
