So I guess my presentation or introduction slash summary will be a bit more formal, but
I don't want to sound too long-winded, so I'll just run through quickly an attempt to
provide, I guess, some locomotion for the interesting article I've already read.
But I think, perhaps, Kale might do from some philosophical motivation, if you're into
his argument, because I think there's some really salient point to it.
I think for my own sanity, it's best to break the article down into parts.
We have first introduction followed by a section on performing, followed by a chunk on the
transitioning, followed by leather play and what he calls the culture of two, and then
also he ends with what I call phenomenology and coda.
So introduction, this is taken straight from the article.
Also I guess to keep in mind, I think, is opening closer because really, I think, something
important to keep in mind.
There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than
one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is, and I think to underscore this is
essential, absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.
I think that's a pretty powerful qualification.
So picking up where contemporary queer theory argues seems to leave off, C. Jacob Hale suggests
a stereotyped enterprise, though a provocative and powerful tool of introspection and interrogation
lacks far behind community discourses.
Accordingly, Hale provides an account of communities and particular sub-communities he finds to
be thoroughly undocumented and underprivileged by contemporary queer theory at Pilferty
Academy, any time you like, yell at me, say I'm completely wrong, I'm right, blah, blah,
okay.
Hale writes, community discourses sometimes reflect rich and settling nuanced embodiments
of gender that resist and exceed any simple categorization into female, male, woman, man,
and thus into homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, and that's page 223 for anybody who's following
along.
So it's to say there are people who share some intersubjectively defined commonality
and congregate around issues that challenge both contemporary notions and normative assumptions
about what constitutes, quote, natural configurations of sexuality and gender, and the reasons why
authoritative, often, jurical voices can claim the right to events categorical binary formulations
of sex and gender, so we're keeping in mind the kind of natural attitude, right, man,
and what you kind of missed earlier, female, male, woman, man, homosexual, bisexual, sexual,
or heterosexual.
I'm going fast, trying to save time.
For Hale's transgender subjectivities of particular theoretical interest are United States leather
dyke boys and their leather dyke daddies.
An exemplar subculture of the leather community held contends that gender play by these liminal
fluid bodies traveling between to borrow the bone's worlds situated in flux functioned
as a means for gender interrogation, solidification, resistance, destabilization, and reconfiguration.
To clarify the entailment of leather dyke subjectivities for external audiences, Hale
writes, leather dyke boys are adult lesbian, dyke females who embody a specific range of
masculineities intelligible within queer leather SM communities.
Their daddies may be butch leather dykes or, less frequently, gay leather men, in S-224.
Only such a demarcation of categories seems counterintuitive to Hale's theoretical leanings,
but he is quick to note the inherent contradictions within any given subject's nearly propositional
use of this language.
In Wistic, issues accounted for, Hale qualifies his exploration as one restricted to the subjectivities
of leather dyke boys and leather dyke daddies, focusing on the wide-ranging performantivities
involved in such configurations.
According to Hale, leather dyke boys perform masculinity in a wide range of ways.
Playing as a boy does not assist a age play.
Status as a boy may simply indicate a masculine bottom status, submissive or masochistic or
both, different from that of a slave.
So he's, I think, he's echoing some of those traditional leather community leather, thinking
about slaves and domes.
And so to the second part, we need to perform it.
Drawing on his own experience with queer leather communities, Hale suggests that the typical
leather dyke boy and leather dyke daddy relationship is anchored in what he calls age play.
For Hale, a boy and daddy relationship anchored by age play provides means to uncover a whole
new performative dimension for varying gender configurations, wide-ranging masculinity, etc.
For example, quote, when boy daddy age play occurs, play ages may bear no relation to
the legal ages of the players.
Daddy may be younger than her boy, according to their birth certificates.
Hale goes on to describe attitudes of boys as being inherently open to interpretation.
Some boys are letting irrespectful while others are withdrawn, rebellious, etc.
Hale writes, quote, the range of masculities over for leather dyke boys' performatives
is at least as wide, at least as wide as that open to young males.
Performance by boys' modality of age play is not restricted to behavior, however.
It simultaneously extends to the chosen raiment of boys.
Hale speculates that when situated within the discursive context of leather communities,
particularly subcultures that we're talking about, clothing functionalism symbol, signifying
these inhabitants' statuses as SM bottoms, as switches, may also vaguely indicate levels
of SM experience in the more precise ways, interest in particular sexual activities.
And I think that plays into what you're talking about with Bornstein and the safe words and
the practices might, in some way, illuminate us.
And so, turning to this objective state of luminality, which I guess is kind of thematic
of this week's readings, that to say crudely, one who inhabits, I guess, the borderland,
I remember we keep kind of thinking about the borderland, at least with Hale, inhabits
the borderland of two existential planes, leather dyke boys' masculine and performativities
often occur in context separate from interactions with workmates' family, that is, family defined
by law, neighbors and other friends and acquaintances outside of these particular SM queer leather
dyke communities, our context, thus they are less bound by cultural constructs and masculinity.
An upper middle class professional woman can become a 16-year-old head banger rocker dude
with a change of clothing and attitude, and that is Hale 225.
These masculine performativities are not defined as static constructs or configurations.
This, however, is not to say that they are in any way unregulated by leather dyke contacts.
For the crux of performativity is its articulation within some socially ordered space, but intelligible
to the inhabitants of said space, quote, it must be intelligible if it is to be efficacious,
and if it is not efficacious, it cannot succeed as the performative rights Hale, reinforcing
a stipulative definition of performativity.
In light of this conditional clarification of performativity, Hale articulates the subsequent
anxieties and disputes that surround both female embodiment and masculine behaviors
of leather dyke boys and leather dyke daddies.
Hale writes, quote, these anxieties become especially acute in determining the boundaries
of the category woman for amidst women-only sexual spaces due to a failed need to protect
women's sexual safety in sexual spaces.
Such contention about women's safety and, while being, locate male to female transsexuals
as the most apparent threat to the sanctity of the boundary in questioning that's Hale.
Hale isolates two salient examples, one in the Michigan Women's Music Festival, which
have continually disputed over whether to allow the admittance of female to male transsexuals,
and a more general example, disputes surrounding the essay definition of woman in regard to
a subject, i.e. female to male transsexuals, evictions to leather dyke play parties.
Hale suggests that such anxieties about male embodiment and masculine behavior share a
strong connection with symbol and signification.
Hale writes, usually, however, when unclothed embodiment is unambiguously female, a much
wider range of masculine behaviors are tolerated than when the embodiment is partially male.
Thus, such a bias would be attributed towards sex and gender history, identification, and
embodiment of things that we've been dealing with throughout the article.
And in defense, Hale's defense, not in Hale's defense, Hale's defense of, those who engage
in masculine behaviors and perform male subjectivities, Hale writes, despite these regulatory mechanisms,
masculine, gender-performing activities in conjunction with female embodiments are given
a wide range of expression within leather dyke contexts than in many other lesbian or dyke
settings.
Am I going on too long?
No, go ahead.
Okay.
So now we're on to the third part, I guess, the natural kind of, I guess, page break, which
is now where he moves on to transitioning, and the ways in which, I suppose, leather
dyke communities facilitate, I guess, transitioning and the consolidation of a masculine or male
behavior.
So Hale views leather dyke boy daddy play as both a conducive and safe modality for gender
exploration, solidification, resistance, destabilization, and reconfiguration, in particular, this mode
of play in its myriad, myriad of permutations, is capable of facilitating female to male
transitioning paths.
Hale sees this done in three ways.
Firstly, the consolidation of a leather dyke boy or daddy's self-identification as man
or male is through, quote, the conception of submission, especially to pain as the most
masculine SM position, especially when the person to whom one submits is also masculine.
Secondly, leather dyke daddy play allows for a subject to thoroughly entertain and explore
their masculine dominance at a level unavailable in other areas of their life.
Finally, the exploration of masculine boy into a leather dyke boy provides the means,
and I think this is a really powerful notion, in a sense for both the recovery of and acquaintance
with periods of life that are missing due to pre and pubescent female embodiments, reflecting
on his own experience in other dyke communities, Hale illustrates how boy daddy play facilitated
his own consolidation and solidification as jake.
Quote, this time I found someone with many years of leather experience who treated me
as boy and son.
What I was thinking was about love, support, nurturance, and guidance, about helping and
teaching more than it was about punishment.
I began to be introduced to other people as jake in settings other than leather dyke
play parties, trying out different styles of masculine self-presentation and behavior.
And this is where Hale says my discomfort with hearing feminine pronouns used to refer
to myself, solidified here, not emphasis on my own, this is on page 228.
So I suppose I'm admitting quite a few points, and now I move on to what he sees as leather
play and the culture of two, the relationship between boy and daddy.
Clearly, Hale's unexperienced and leather dyke vanguard allowed for a safe and secure transition,
wholly devoid of not only the social order's normative assumptions about sex and gender,
but a lesbian and traditional leather community's construals as well.
Further emphasizing the power of boy-daddy play in these particular leather dyke communities
too.
The culture of two depends on dissolution of context-driven social gender configurations
and the dissemination of mutual reconfigurations within his tandem.
Quote, when I was a boy with my dyke daddy in that culture of two, I was a boy.
Daddy's participation was necessary for me to be a boy with her, so I guess we're
forced into the issue of performativity, right, it has to be within some sort of order to
be intelligible.
I was a boy with her by engaging in gender performativity that made sense to both of
us as a boy's gender performativity.
In this culture of two, informed and structured by leather-dyke community gender codes, my
communications of a masculine gender identification was legible to someone else despite my female
body.
That contends, however, that there cannot be totalized dissolution of social gender configurations
because if not for culturally public constructs of boy, daddy would be incapable of making
sense of a leather-dyke boy's performativity.
Therefore, a total dissolution, if even possible, would serve to break down mutual communication
and boy-daddy play would become defund.
However, boyhoods provide merely a frame for these reconfigurations of gender and sexuality.
Subsequently, hell turns the tension to the phenomenon called, I think this is a really
interesting part of the article, retooling or recoding.
This phenomenon, hell suggests, takes place within the trans community discourse, the
primary concern of which is the decoupling of gender and genitals, a dominant cultural
paradigm.
For hell, recoding and retooling bodies portray as an intentional act of to borrow delusion
and terminology, de-territorialization and re-territorialization were more accurately
the deliberate disruption and reconfiguration of the dominant cultural meanings of genitals.
This is page 230.
And we get to our final phenomenon, the phenomenology and code, and this is the end of this article.
In the end of the article, hell demonstrates how leather-dyke S.N. practice that decoupled
genital sexuality from bodily pleasure lay the foundation for the recoding and retooling
of not only bodies, but perceptions as well.
Hell writes, one such phenomenon is the inanimate objects, dildos, sometimes take on some of
the phenomenological characteristics of Raja's body parts.
If phenomenology is to be considered, then this motivated assertion about inanimate objects
is starkly, who's certainly in one straightforward sense.
So we're thinking about context, and we're thinking about a very particular subculture
in the ways in which they define things, we can think of it in this way.
The meaning of objects are simply, for Hoso, I think, and his later work, I mean, the work
I did with Michael Schemelies in The Extension of the Red, and his transcendental phenomenology
talks about the ways in which things are given meaning just by a mutual recognition.
And so the meaning of objects are simply agreed upon by way of mutual perception, followed
by mutual recognition, the conclusions of which are finally shared intersubjectively
or for Hoso in a much more complex way between known ads.
Therefore, with his motivation developed further, one might not object to, well, it certainly
hurts when I slam my dick in the drawer, referring back to the issue of giving, I guess, a phenomenological
characteristic to these, I mean, I guess, what is it, characterizing a sense of penis
from dildo, right, where there are some lesbians and living communities who are like, I can
slam my dick in the drawer without hurting, right?
And so he's providing, I guess, a phenomenological resignification by way of retooling or recoding
this inanimate object, but this is also applicable to sex bodily zones as well for Hale and his
communities.
Hell writes, if the body part, a living dike daddy is fisting, is that which position
would unequivocally deem a vagina, it may be re-signified so that its use for erotic
pleasure is consistent with no masculinity.
And in closing, and I skip forward a little bit, Hale highlights the limits of reconstituting
the sexualized social spaces of our bodies.
Hale concedes that the alleged practices may help one discern the capability of one's own
agency and the possibilities for their embodiment, there are sternal impositions that simply cannot
be reconfigured.
Ultimately, Hale wants to motivate a multiplicity theory of gender, inclusive of these resistance
and shifting sex gender identifications.
For Hale, such a theory might have his genesis in a liminal zone, quote, the soft permeable
edges of space, for example, inhabited by queer leather communities.
So I guess that's the conclusion of that.
And I guess one large critical question I have is that Jacob Hale has begun to motivate
a multiplicity theory of gender, one with the ineluctable social meanings of certain
bodily zones in mind, so the dike conceives that there are these notions that we just
can't.
It seems impossible to escape, is there plausibility for us to escape?
And so the question I want to propose in thinking, I guess, in line with Maria Lagonnaise, which
is always talking about how I attempt to watch this theoretical, walk a theoretical,
practical, I guess, path.
So the question I want to propose is, now that the beginnings of a theory have been
made clear, we see that within Hale's article, what is one to do about practical issues?
In other words, what would be a method, I guess, of effective employment of theory, this
particular theory, the multiplicity theory?
What would it look like as practice within the dominant culture?
Keep in mind the normative sex and gender binary, or the natural attitude to radical
stipulations and constraints, et cetera.
That's a big assumption I have.
I think it's one that I'm always constantly confronted by in thinking about, I guess,
very heavy or very heady theoretical enterprises that I think have a huge amount of merit
and are very innovative and provocative, how then do we move to include, I suppose, a much
more broad, I guess, expansive people, how do we include, how is it inclusive?
I'm sorry, I went on so long, but I'm very formal about the present.
It was very detailed.
I know it was very detailed.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no.
Good.
I mean, seriously, it really got into the article grapple to me.
Can I have added a lot of things to nobody interjected?
I want to sort of like, unless there's anyone else, you know, for anything to jump in on
something, I wanted to ask, I wanted to sort of like, clarify something, because you're
talking about, so Hill's got this idea of kind of sort of this multiplicity of the gender
status, right?
So one of the ways he brings that out is that, you know, sort of at the door, you're getting
into a particular space, right?
Then you may need to be female body or whatever.
But when you're in, when you're in, then you're a boy or, you know, someone.
And so this is the multiplicity he's talking about.
At least that's one of the multiplicities.
And him sitting at his desk writing how he's unidentified by the government, yet he is...
So this is where I'm going about this.
So this multiplicity, though, for Hill already is mainstream.
I mean, sort of like, this is where I wanted to sort of come back with you, because...
Mainstream and what's that?
Well, mainstreaming that there's different documents, government documents that say different things.
So already, as a matter of fact, in mainstream society, you know, one card says one thing,
one card says another.
One document he needs, he says one thing.
One document he needs, he says another.
So what I've pointed is that if that's the kind of multiplicity we're talking about,
the Hill is pressing in his pieces, one of the things he's questioning,
is to have an answer to your question or to kind of like sharpen your question,
isn't it already mainstream?
Because aren't there already multiple services?
No, I'm just saying.
We're always already included.
Yeah, I think in the second tribulation thing, right?
We're already there.
We already got the multiple general statuses going on.
The multiplicity in the sense that he's talking about, it seems like it's much more...
I mean, it's like the idea of world traveling, right?
There's something extensive that you have access to as you move throughout these particular discursive contexts.
It's like entering in, right, showing me an occasion shirt.
It shows this governmental issue thing like here, this is my name, blah, blah, blah.
And then it becomes I'm a leather-died daddy, and then I might be a boy,
and I'm shifting or changing as I walk through these particular contexts.
But it seems like...
Good. Are you guys following this?
This is one of the things that I want to kind of pull apart in the Hill article that...
Because one thing I find more interesting than the other.
And it's the last thing you're talking about that I find especially interesting in my life.
I really like about this article.
Did you all get a chance to look at the Maria Lagona's article as backdrop to this?
I don't know if you did or not, but...
I mean, so an ongoing theme in this article...
And I'm just gonna, you know...
We have sort of like a dominant world.
And then we have like this, you know...
Subcultural world.
So this is one of the multiplicities that Richard is talking about.
We're talking about this multiplicity.
And this is a multiplicity of meaning.
And this is where you, for example, draw attention to this issue of like retooling.
Which is a fun plan of words.
Re-signification.
In this world, it's a vagina.
In this world, it's a fuckhole or a boyhole or something like that.
But different body parts are meaning different things.
There's re-signification going on.
Different meanings are being inscribed to bodies, different practices.
And this makes some tension here that he talks about.
That's one multiplicity.
And that's, I think, the multiplicity that captured your imagination mainly.
Is what capital, or at least is what capital is my imagination.
I think that this is really important in Hale.
And I actually want to distinguish it from the other thing that he talks about.
Like these multiple gender statuses.
Because I think that, like, I mean, he does talk about this idea that when you check in at the,
if you're going into the love scene, you're going to check in where, you know, you have one status.
And then when you're in the door, you have another status.
And he compares this to the fact that even now sort of in more mainstream sort of dominant culture,
one can have different legal statuses in terms of one's gender, right?
One can have one sort of, like, you know, thing on one's driver's license.
And another thing on a birth certificate.
Another thing on a passport.
I think that that's different from that.
Thanks so much.
Those are two different concepts, yeah.
I think that one's, I think it's really an essentialist notion.
As for this one, it seems to be a much more, there's many more permutations of, I think, what he's getting at the multiple.
It's not just necessarily, like, an assignment or designation on legal documents as a male female.
I mean, the fact that he, I think he highlights, what is it, the middle class, professional women,
who once within freely moves into that space, then becomes, you know, a head and finger rocker.
So that's not, I think it's, that's one of the big wedges that's driven between is that I think, yeah,
we can talk about the multiple and the understanding of multiple might be available through these legal documents.
But then there's this other one that's unavailable and it's not this essentialized, I guess, like,
male female assigned by legal documents with a very different ideal of multiple.
Yeah, no, no, no, you're right.
It's very different.
Although, I guess I do want to say that he seems to be really into this idea of the fact that there's not one gender status
even at a time, even in mainstream society.
So, and I think that's actually important to him.
So the thing that this is part of his project of messing with the natural attitude.
If I start pointing out, you know, before in our life being women, what we get is this
idea, well, actually these categories don't reduce to one single feature, actually they're
fuzzy.
Actually, you don't get a sharp dichotomy.
Now you get, even in mainstream society, you don't have one sex status.
You can get these cases where you have multiple sex statuses at once, depending, right?
So one agency is going to recognize you one way, another agency is going to recognize
you another way.
And so I do think that that's important to him, past that point, and I think that it's
part of this general agenda of his, of disrupting the naturalized.
Does that make sense to you guys?
But I actually do think that it's a different kind of multiplicity than that kind of multiplicity
that we're talking about.
I mean, it seems like one that he's trying to work out that kind of animates the mutual
between the two, I think, right?
Say again?
He's trying to animate some understanding, right?
That animates for function in the sub-world, in the dominant world.
And he's a drunken analogy, I guess.
Yeah, I guess.
So I'm kind of discerning them, I'm not sure.
Because he says, I mean, he says, I currently do not have a unitary sex gender status.
You know, my California U.S. license bears MSX designation, then my birth should get
betters.
But then he goes on to talk about control, medical, these disorders that forcefully reinscribe
me.
How are you all with this right now?
I just sort of felt like I'm sensing some of the builds drifting away, so let's just
come on.
Yeah, I think this is pretty confusing.
Yeah.
I don't, I shouldn't.
The one I was asking, who was he talking to, right?
I mean, it sounds like you were talking to me, you know, these scholars or something like
this.
But I mean, if, because I was thinking, like, if somebody wanted to just be disrupted.
A bad girl.
Right?
Or something like that, right?
And you go into, you've got to make a decision about which bad, right?
And I mean, you've got this problem of, like, well, even if you could lawsuit some of this
kind of thing here.
How does this, any of this help within, like, real back at all?
With those issues?
Yeah.
I feel like that's too insulated at the moment, though.
It's too isolated from what he's trying to do.
I will level up.
I mean, I suppose you feel a little bit criticism of what you're saying, how it feels like he's
talking to scholars, right?
Sure, I think he's very, he's a very particular audience of mine.
And that's people who have been initiated into this discourse, right?
Very, you know, theoretically, like, heavy discourse.
But I feel like, yeah, somebody walking into, like, the wrong bathroom is not what he's
pointing at.
I mean, I suppose I'm like some kind of, like, it's like a microaggression, right?
I think it's something.
What does this actually apply?
What does it actually mean?
Can I, can I answer that?
Here, I want to say, I want to address, I do want to separate these two points.
Because actually, I think that in some ways, they're kind of too closely, too closely blended
in here, and I think they're different.
I find this to be an important framework.
I find this very, very useful, what I've drawn up there.
And I can front this in my daily life.
Okay, so this for me, it doesn't apply all the time, every day.
Well, I find that in certain mainstream cultures, right, Chan's people and Chan's bodies are
subject to particular interpretations.
This is who you are.
This is what your body means.
So for example, you take Chan's guy, and you say, this is, this body in mainstream
culture, you get, this is really a woman.
And this is not a man.
And this body part is a vagina.
And the vagina is what proves that this is really a woman, right?
Okay, this is not a man.
Now, the same individual operating in subculture.
So Chan's talking about particular, you know, leather-dyed subculture.
What I like about this model, you know, is thinking about it more broadly in terms of,
for example, Chan's subculture.
You know, in Chan's subcultures, a person, who they are and what their body means,
may be read very differently, but what it signifies may be read very differently.
So within a particular subculture, that person may say, well, I'm a man.
My body's male.
And this is not a vagina.
This is something else.
And maybe you call it something else.
Now, in that world, in that universe of meaning, it's accepted.
It is what it is in that universe, okay?
So now you have an issue, a tension between a mainstream interpretation of this person
and a subcultural interpretation of this person, right?
You have a contest of meaning, conflict of meaning.
And I experience this almost every day, right?
I think that it captures a situation, a political situation,
where a person may find themselves, right,
in having different interpretations of who they are.
And there are political stakes here, right?
Political stakes here in terms of how that person is going to be treated, right?
So, for example, in a mainstream context, right,
access to restrooms may operate one way in a subcultural context in the operated different way.
Which you have an issue here are two different ways of life,
two different forms of culture, two different interpretations of individuals and their interactions.
And I think those are over-simplified, but there's talking about two, by the way.
