There's a piece in the Fashion & Style section on tensions within Lesbian communities over how to accept (or whether to accept) transmen.
My question, I guess, is what it's doing in the Fashion & Style section. There's something either very radical or very problematic about talking about gender as fashion. Vulgar performativity theory sans any consideration of violence and power, maybe. I'll shut up now.
good point. i'm now slightly embarrassed that i read the piece without being struck by how weird it was that it was in the fashion section.
ReplyDeleteMy wife Camille said the exact same thing. "Why is this in the style section?" I guess because homosexuality is considered a "lifestyle choice?" Where else could they put it, though? Medicine?
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting that they can show a "topless" shot of a post-masectomy transman, but they'd likely never show a topless female, unless she was in the medical section and had just had a breast cancer operation. Well, maybe not interesting.
I don't think it's that much of a stretch to recast this as a national news story. I wonder if it gets instead lumped in with stories about elvis enthusiasts because of the peculiar way in which "the nation" can never include, for the times, transgendered people in a meaningful way, and thus they are tellingly displaced to the frilly effluvia adjacent to the weddings and celebrations.
ReplyDeleteOn re-reading, I think the ostensible hook for putting it in the Styles section was that the lead was about The L-Word. (Of course, that could also be a reason for them to put it in Arts and Culture, which might be even stranger.)
ReplyDelete