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andysnorwayaffairs · 5 years

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Final Project

Pt 1; a perfect ending. feeling a rush of shared excitement - finally! just like me!

warmth, embraced, a queer kind of friendship. we sat in the grass and talked about how our lives were growing up, how our queerness was realized and how it affected the way we walk in the world. our stories are so similar yet so, so different. miles and miles of time away, you announce to your friends that you’re probably maybe gay. you start a spark in their minds, and soon after you’re deemed the trail blazer of coming out. you are brave, do you know it? you were the person who i wished for. so desperate for approval from others, and not meeting anyone like you, i took it upon myself to starve my queerness, the differentness, the part of me that i knew i could definitely be hated for. and i can’t stand the thought of being hated. and a part of me hated myself for who i was. i was taught that i couldn’t love like that, that it wasn’t *real*, that anything other than normal is impossible, wrong, destructive. so i listened, and i believed them. not completely, that is also true. that’s why i never stopped immersing myself in online queer culture, why i desperately searched for any sign of queerness in the online personas i followed and in the fiction that i read. we talked about this too, how we’d entrench ourselves in media and later realize that we were part of the group we were so obsessed with. finally... just like me

you opened your heart so quickly - your friends, they tell me that they’re so happy that you’ve met me. you open a window into your life and lend a hand to help me hop in. i see how you love others, and how they love you. we run through the lawn of a backyard riddled with ripe fruit and laugh like children at how sweet the juice is. we share a meal and spend hours talking about nothing and everything. i sometimes stop and listen to the chatter, and i feel complete warmth even when i cannot understand what is being said. we read the cards i brought and i learn how each of you sees love. i see the way you interact with your loved ones, the way you so deeply care to spend time with them. letting go, giggling in giddy joy, acting like absolute fools. finally, just like me

cried a farewell last night

thank you for offering me a bizarre, unfair amount of kindness

thank you for showing me a glimpse of your life, your entire world

thank you for extending a hand in friendship, in solidarity

thank you for being my friend

I feel like my time here, my glimpse into another person’s life, feels like a glimpse into an alternate timeline. A timeline in which I accepted myself from the beginning. A timeline in which I told a friend about my crush on Jen from Buzzfeed. A timeline when I refused to normalize myself, refused to uphold the boundaries that were unfairly placed on me. A timeline when I was brave. A timeline when I stopped being so damn scared. A timeline when I realized that my friends would still stay friends with me, and those who didn’t want to, I should let go of anyways. There will always be people who don’t match up with your values, your energies, your being. I won’t lie to myself and say that it wouldn’t hurt like a bitch, but it’s a hard fact of life that homophobes, transphobes, racists, xenophobes, ie bigots exist and there will be always be bullies and people who don’t care about you, who WANT to put you down, who want to hurt you. In a world of power, there will be those with some and those without. I was given a small window into my friend’s life and saw a life pathway built around friendships who learn and grow right alongside you. I’ve always thought about that – what if? What if I let go earlier? In my timeline, the forces around me were not as kind to me. I was told queerness was ugly, so utterly upside down. I didn’t have anyone to tell me otherwise. Perhaps if I had a positive role model to tell me that it WAS okay, that it was beautiful and wonderful. Perhaps if I had a friend like them in my life who was the first to come out and encouraged others by simply living their life the way THEY want to, perhaps I would have had the courage to do so earlier. I can’t change the past.

But I can think about how the events of my past shaped my present, and how my present shapes my future. Thank God - I DID let go! There’s no race to live your truth, but oh god it feels so good to do it NOW. I’m so thankful that I found the bravery these people I know now have embraced so many years ago. I feel like my own person, like an entire human soul. I don’t feel the need to please anyone. This queer experience, of finding yourself and maybe even fearing yourself, but, ultimately, coming to love yourself despite dominant society failing you, that is a queer experience. Regardless of any experience, something we all share is having to live in a world that ultimately does not accept us, does not want us.

An ode to knowing that although things are different here, and that there’s no possible way that I could have had a similar timeline just simply because of how different our spheres and worlds are... despite this, despite the fear and self hate and internal violence I was forced into because of the life I was born into, despite all of this, I was still able to find myself and love myself and find others who love me for my whole humanness.

There’s a lot of work to be done in the world, for our lives and our safety and our happiness. I think the friends I’ve met here are doing that work. Through their love for each other and thus their refusal to conform, to stay quiet, to accept the norms in place.

Meeting this special friend may have been completely chance, but I believe fate had a little bit to do with it too. To give me this window, to let me see what beauty it is to allow a person to be themselves. The sooner, the better.

____ DISCUSSION

Pt 3:

It’s funny to see how these ppl’s reflections of their lives fit in line with exactly what we discussed through our readings and class discussions. Norway may be progressive in law, but not necessarily in practice. Each of the queer people I asked this about, or asked them to speak about their queer experience, expressed frustration at there not being much of a strong queer community here, and how they still experienced everyday oppression (you may call these micro aggressions).

Nordic model of inclusion + welfare, making this a space where it is looked down upon to discriminate for someone’s sexuality

A different relationship to Christianity

In the U.S., I grew up in a heavily queerphobic, heavily strict and monitored environment where I was even monitoring myself, reprimanding myself for all of the gay content I was consuming but allowing myself to keep doing it because I was “outside” of the community and thus could not be associated with it or have to think of the consequences.

In middle school I was fully aware that I had strong crushes on gay female celebrities but was petrified of sharing that information with anyone.

I shut myself down immediately, but continued to consume gay, lgbt, and trans media for years and years after, allowing myself to do this because I could convince myself that I was just “a straight girl” who was a big fan of the community.

After coming to college and experiencing true freedom from the expectations and values placed on me, it took me less than three days to come to the realization that I was in fact, extremely not straight. It took me 6 more months to fully feel comfortable admitting to myself and claiming the label that I was gay. It took me another year to “come out” to all of my friends and folx I really cared about.

-talk about how this is a divide between my experience and the experiences of the friends I made here. L & their friends came out when they were extremely young, in middle school actually. Our timelines diverge here.

Only recently, I began to make friends on the shared experience of our queerness. Meeting my close friends now, sharing intimate + tender moments. Loving each other and supporting one another the way family might do. A queer kind of love shared in these emotional bonds. A kind of love I had not experienced before my full acceptance and life as a queer person. Tender, radical love.

Meeting L, sharing on our experience of being queer and trans. And not to say that their life in Norway is so much better. The Nordic model may allow for some general acceptance, but queerphobia still has its roots in other malicious ways. Many of L’s friends still don’t use their pronouns. A is called the slur version of the word lesbian, and she recognizes that being a lesbian is not favorable to society. She wants to be a prof of gender studies at her uni but told me that since there is already one queer person on staff, she’ll never be hired on.

M telling me about how even tho queer ppl are accepted on the outside, and in the law, in practice, not so much.

-A telling me that people hate lesbians

-in Norwegian, the word for lesbian is also really similar to the slur, “fucking lesbian”

CONNECTION TO THE FIRST ARTICLE WE READ

Norway’s state feminism and inclusion of queerness is heteronormative, only assimilating those that fit into the family, hetero model (thinking to naked sculpture park, extremely family oriented)

Same sex has to still be straight – family, private, culturally straight.

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izzyovercoffee · 7 years

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I'm sorry if you've already answered this, but what's the deal with Mandalorian society and sexuality? Would a larger portion of the population be of one sexuality than others? Would sexuality be the same as we know it since they don't recognize gender? etc

I’m sorry for the delay in answering this !! I haven’t actually answered / addressed this topic quite just yet, bc they’re both easy and difficult questions to answer, if that makes sense.

So I’m gonna do the short/long again.

The Short Answer to the three questions is this: Mandalorians don’t care about your sexuality inasmuch as, within mandalorian community and society, specifically, it’s not a big deal — or any deal, at all. And because there is no compulsive heteronormativity, and because mandalorians as a society have a heavy emphasis on adoption and sharing the burden of child rearing with the entire clan, the population’s sexuality should not skew in any specific way.

If I had to guess, I would suggest that the society leans more bi/pan, if only because there’s no stigmatization to be tied in with a gender binary that doesn’t exist to them. Ideally, though, I would think that there would be equal representation of every combination, and every iteration, of relationship under the sun — so long as everyone involved are consenting fully-grown adults.

The long answer is … it’s complicated.

The thing is … uniquely, as a society, mandalorians don’t recognize gender in the same way that we do. So, it’s safe to assume that sexuality is dependent entirely on each individual’s personal frame of attraction. Procreation via popping out babies (crude, I know but u kno) would not take such a strong focus or precedence or moral imperative because mandalorians don’t just accept adoption as an option — mandalorian society strictly enforces the legal equality of adoption.

That is, the negative attitudes surrounding adoption just don’t exist. And because they don’t exist, the societal pressures tied up in maintaining a blood line disappear.

Our society’s understanding of sexuality is, in part, highly contingent on the framework of the gender binary and the nuclear family. I would even go so far as to suggest that a heavy skew towards a cis-centric heterosexual population is, at least in part, due to the homophobia inherent in a heteronormative society. And none of these things exist in mandalorian society.

Thus it’s hard to say if sexuality would still resemble sexuality as we know it, or if it would take a completely different definition or range, or if it would be somewhere in-between. After all, mandalorian society is not one that is wholly isolated, as it’s hard to be so when so many societies are interconnected by necessity and diplomatic allegiances across the known galaxy — and the rest of the Galaxy Far Far Away seems to have the machinations of sexism and homophobia still in place (whether or not you want to chalk that up to writers imposing their internalized sexism / homophobia on the material, knowingly or otherwise, is up to you). So even if these terms and way of thinking aren’t natural to mandalorians, that doesn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t be present at all.

That said, I’m of the opinion that the general mandalorian society may actually skew in the direction of pansexual/bisexual.

Explanation going under the cut, because this got … very long.

So. Why Pansexual? Because pansexuality is generally defined as an attraction either in spite of or without consideration to gender. The distinction of gender does not actively exist in mandalorian thought (or language) and so attraction becomes something that does not actively consider gender.

Why Bisexual? Because bisexuality is defined as an attraction to same and other genders, and the logic that follows is that all mandalorians should accept all genders, aka all genders are recognized. In a society that doesn’t stigmatize any gender, everyone has their personhood recognized (heteronormativity has no place and thus little to no influence) and thus celebrated.

Either way both bisexuality and pansexuality encompasses the full field / range that would actually, actively, exist in mandalorian society.

Pan-normativity / Bi-normativity, I guess. Lmao.

I would also suggest that the nature of a population’s sexuality (and guessing at the population percentage of x sexuality) becomes difficult to discern, because it’s heavily dependent on the population and where they’re located, and how many are adoptees — and how many of those adoptees were adopted when they were children vs. already socialized adults.

How deeply has a mandalorian diaspora or ethnic enclave’s community participated in assimilation with whatever society they find themselves in? Communities that are located in, say, Coruscant under the Empire might skew towards a heterocentric human focus due to the pressures of the surrounding environment — or they might go in the complete opposite direction and raise a vibrantly rainbow one finger salute right up the Emperor’s nose.

It’s hard to say lmao.

TBH like … I want to backtrack a little bit to talk about the nuclear family.

So. Family is a HUGE part of what being a mandalorian is about. Raising children is being mandalorian — but we’ve seen that the children don’t always have to be “their’s” inasmuch as a parent to a child relation. They can be nieces/nephews, cousins’ cousins, even friends’ and friends’ family’s. The focus has always been on a community raising children together, rather than any conceptualization of a nuclear family.

Frankly, nuclear families have no place in mandalorian society anyway. Any society that engages war as a supposed common export would also have a high percentage of casualties — parents never coming home, parents severely injured in the line of their profession / duty, parents away for long periods of time. In the wake of absent parents, other members of the clan/community are expected to do their share and raise the children as if they are their own — and are ultimately treated and regarded as their own.

“Why are you so focused on children and child-raising when this is a question about sexuality?” Not that I think you would necessarily ask me that, but I think it’s an important question to be answered.

How we view sexuality, how we define it, how we see it expressed, how we criminalize that expression, how we victimize and marginalize people … is all tied up in other forces and expectations our society is built on. IMO, in order to understand what sexuality is to mandalorians, it bears repeating what mando society is not and does not have.

Example: I’ve noticed that people who are homophobic view homosexuality as a deviation from a perceived moral expectation — and it is a violently enforced moral compass that is hyper-focused on a “woman’s” (ciswoman’s) capacity to bear and raise children, and only devote her life to that one role.

Because mandalorian society is completely without that expectation, the foundations that would otherwise exist to enforce marginalization completely disappear. Can’t have children? Adopt, or help raise the kids in your clan. Don’t want / want to deal with children? Offer assistance to those who have / want to assist in raising children so they are free to do so more easily.

Because mandalorian society doesn’t recognize gender roles, the framework that misogyny and transphobia is built on ceases to exist and so anyone of any presentation is not someone to then be brutalized until they return to a gender binary, bc mandalorians don’t have a gender binary.

Because mandalorian society encourages communal raising of children, the capitalistic forces contingent on the survival of the nuclear family structure cannot be found here. There is no two parent household — everyone works and lives together, or works and lives in large groups, supporting each other.

Romance, in general, is built on an assumption of the nuclear family’s goal: two people to a household to raise children, alone. Complete co-dependency between two people for all romantic and platonic emotional and interpersonal support. You don’t need friends nor family when you have someone to share your bed — but specifically someone to share a bed and produce children with.

And tbh … because mandalorians don’t HAVE an arbitrary moral system built on a foundation of misogyny, homophobia, and capitalistic ideals of a nuclear family, I wonder if monogamy is something that would be as heavily tied with morality as it is in ours — would it really be so expected? Less so? Would polyamory be more acceptable (bc let’s face it, it’s still in unacceptable territory)? Would single-parenting also be more acceptable (bc, again, single parenting is still viewed as unacceptable, as if there’s something wrong with the parent)?

Identifying as anything not-hetero doesn’t come with a death sentence, however oblique or immediate or realized.

What I’m saying is this: there are inherent pressures in our society that we don’t think about that affect us on a personal level, every day. Being gay, being bi, being ace, being pan, being trans, being gender nonconforming — even if we don’t actively think about it, we know on some level that our status in our society is ostracized at some level, if not every level. The subtle ways in which society treats and regards us ultimately has an effect on us — and how we perceive others, and can affect how we structure sexuality and our sexual identities.

The absence of those pressures would lead to a radically different society and social understanding of gender and sexuality. Both on a micro level, and a macro level.

And that’s really interesting, imo. These are great questions to ask — it’s a great topic to address and to try to write about and build upon — and I have no idea if any of my answer is adequate, because of how difficult it is for me to conceptualize sexuality in a society that isn’t burdened by a heterocentric gender-conforming monogamous hegemony focused on procreation.

God I hope I answered your questions lmao. Sorry I’m so verbose !!

#mandalorevevo #mandalorians #izzy talks mandalorians #sexuality #mandalorians and sexuality #meta #meta: mandalorians #asks.txt

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