If my gender falls in the forest, and only Judith Butler is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Meditations on playing in the masc end of the sandbox, the weaponized vulnerability of Lana Del Rey, and the impact of chronic illness on identity.
I. King of the goddamn fairies
“Tarry, rash wanton!! Am I not thy lord??”
-Oberon getting his macho on, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (punctuation mine)
In 11th grade I transferred from a large, chaotic public school to a tiny all girls school. Mr. E. was the drama teacher there, and I guess he saw something in this tiny, shy teenager, all stutters and elbows, who hid behind her hair and kept her anger in a lockbox.
Anyway, he cast me as Oberon in that years production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On the first day of rehearsals, he handed me a leather biker jacket and cap, and a literal riding crop. When I put them on, I looked like some kind of cross between motorcycle Marlon Brando and a Tom of Finland drawing, though I wouldn’t have gotten either of those references at the time, and he didn’t offer them.
And I loved it. I got absolutely high. It was gender euphoria.
Mr. E. taught me how to walk with a swagger, how to stick out my chest and bluster and sneer and generally embody machismo and entitlement as king of the goddamn fairies. And I had such a good time, moving around like I owned the stage, acting the part of a genuinely selfish douchebag. I would slap the crop—stingingly!—against my thigh for emphasis as I belted out my lines. My stance changed. My face took on new expressions: smugness, complacency, arrogance, bravado. The jacket smelled foreign, sensual, evocative in a way that was both deeply familiar and strange. It creaked when I swung my arms. The zippers jingled.
And the experience loosened something in me, something that I think my gender socialization up to that point had repressed.
Looking back I admire Mr E.’s nerve, and I’m grateful for all he helped shake loose.
II. Lana Del Rey and the erotics of our own undoing
“I can here sirens, sirens
He hit me and it felt like a kiss.”
-Lana del Rey, from “Ultraviolence”
Lana Del Rey! I love her bluesy sound, her draggy, weaponized femininity, her audacity, her pettiness. Her edgy eroticism and her sheer vocal virtuosity. Her point-blank refusal to let you get away without acknowledging the violence in your gaze.
Lana’s voice flips from breathy, empty femme-bot to deep, grief-roughened blues in an instant. She never lets you escape the uneasy paradox of her hyperbolic femininity and her urgent agency. Her kitschy sentimentality and ruthless intelligence. Her wholehearted, unironic investment in deeply toxic relationships that stylize heterosexuality to the point of absurdity.
It’s not satire—Lana is absolutely sincere. But also, at least for me, her project kind of functions as satire. The way camp is both. The way drag is both.
There is a way in which Lana appeals to the best in me, my empathy and intelligence and my awareness of the booby traps and time bombs planted in my own eroticism.
There’s a way in which Lana appeals to the worst in me, the part of me who is in her early 20s, who is just beginning to understand the impact her body has on the men around her, and who is incandescent with rage. Who wants to run herself through on the blade of the misogynist’s gaze to just to make visible the blood on his hands.
Femme sexual power under heteropatriarchy is a double-edged sword. My power to attract is my vulnerability. So often, women’s seduction results in men’s compensatory acts of violence.
There is a part of me, when I put on a dress and makeup like war paint, that reminds me of Lana. That wants men to look at me in a way that damns them. To revel in the erotics of my own undoing.
III. If my gender falls in the forest, and only Judith Butler is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
“Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.”
-Judith Butler, from "Imitation and Gender Insubordination"
I have always experienced gender as a kind of drag. It is a site of power and surrender, creativity and play, triumph and dysphoria, fraughtness, fascination, and fun. Where I can experiment with compliance with, and resistance to, gender norms that I did not choose, but cannot escape, that are part of the cultural air I breathe. My body is a billboard on which I can articulate desire and rage, anxiety, playfulness, and resistance; where I can create paradox, make political statements, and surprise myself.
But all this occurs in a kind of dialog with the world around me, and the gaze of people around me. So what happens when I’m no longer being perceived by a gendering gaze?
When you’re sick for a long time, your identity starts to get soft around the edges, as if illness, or the isolation that it requires, is a solvent. Or as if, when you’re isolated from the outside world, there’s nothing to push up against, so you begin to lose your shape. You’re no longer mirrored back to yourself by how your environment, and other people, respond to you.
I don’t feel particularly gendered here, stuck in bed. It’s been almost a year since a surgery triggered a severe flare of my illness (ME/CFS, a neuroimmune disease that currently has me knocked flat). My body is giving me feedback around pain and symptoms, around triggers and the limits of what I can do. But I’m not getting feedback from others that makes me feel like a gendered body in the world.
Judith Butler is a kind of academic celebrity in the gender studies world, and in college, I was absolutely starstruck. Her work electrified me. Reading Gender Trouble felt like suddenly waking up to my own experience.
For Butler, gender is something that is done to us—with prejudice. Gender identity shimmers into existence, like a hologram, when we are interpreted based on norms and standards that the culture dreamed up, that we never signed up for or agreed to. How others see us is a process we can participate in, but can never fully control.
I try to make a practice of looking for the backhanded gifts of illness, and there are absolutely gifts to this strange lack of external feedback around my identity. Others’ projections and desires can be so destabilizing. In their absence, my focus is drawn inward to my experience, rather than outward, into the mirror of others’ gaze. I feel more grounded. I’m not caught up in other people’s bullshit gendered psychodramas.
And I find myself looking, in the absence of outer feedback, for an inherent feeling of gender, of being gendered. And finding…nothing. I don’t know if that’s true for everybody. But it seems like, for me, the experience of gender is entirely relational.
What has happened to that part of my life? Where do spare parts of us go when we are ripped out of the environments, the relational ecosystems, that define and cocreate them? In the absence of feedback, our edges become diffuse. There’s a certain feeling of groundlessness. Frictionlessness.
I don’t know the answer to these questions. But I’m posing them here, nevertheless.
Dearest gentle reader…
When have you experienced gender euphoria? Do these observations about gender land for you, or is your experience totally different? Let me know in the comments!
Wow absolutely in love with your writing style, perspective, and decadent word choice. Such a delight to feast the brain on.
"Or as if, when you’re isolated from the outside world, there’s nothing to push up against, so you begin to lose your shape. You’re no longer mirrored back to yourself by how your environment, and other people, respond to you."
This is a very astute observation, and it's something that I think millions of people experienced during Covid, although to a lesser degree of intensity than yourself.
In my high school acting class, we were supposed to create a little 2-minute play about ourselves. I was dumbfounded at the notion of somehow making my inner life outer; it seemed impossible to do in a way that anyone else would experience as entertainment. I ended up coming up with and reciting funny nicknames for all my classmates. I did not consciously understand this at the time, but the statement I was making was that this "I" you insist on talking about exists only in relationship to you observers out there. I don't have a "real" personality and never have.