I was born into the cultural ferment that began in America in the Fall of 1967. The Student Movement was turning towards Marxist-Leninist insurrection. The liberal Civil Rights movement had given way to the armed revolutionary message of Huey Newton and Oakland’s Black Panther Party. And, in New York City, the early Women’s Liberation Movement was reinterpreting Marx and Engels’ analysis of the bourgeoisie and proletariat into the Patriarchy Theory of male as the oppressor class and female as the oppressed class. The New York Women’s Liberation Movement adopted Black Liberation’s Consciousness Raising (CR) as their primary means of organizing. CR-groups are sort of a cross between the Gestalt encounter groups that were mushrooming across California and Mao’s 1930s, ‘Bitterness Speaking’ method of empowering Chinese peasant women to organize against and depose the corrupt patriarchs who had traditionally ruled chinese villages. This form of early Radical Feminism has been called CR-Feminism, and it came up with the slogan ‘The Personal is The Political’ which meant that every aspect of your life and relationships is subject to feminist analysis. CR-Group Feminism hit my household in a big way around 1977, when my three year older sister and my mother converted to feminism. I converted to male feminist identity, which partly meant that I learned to hate myself for being male and to feel superior to other males who did not share my self hatred.
Male Feminism was my creed for decades, until 2009 when I began a personal journey of gender exploration. My gender identity first destabilized in a series of encounter groups up in a California, hippie hotsprings which had begun life as as a Gestalt encounter group commune in the early seventies. These groups eventually led me to question my own male identity and to take on a series of gender-variant identities, culminating in a new identity as a transgender lesbian and radical feminist. I lived for a year in queer women’s separatist space and avoided all contact with ‘cisgender’ straight males. Looking back, I see my trans-lesbian identity as a both continuation and a radicalization of my earlier Male Feminist identity.
One point of continuity between my Male Feminist and Trans-Feminist identities was my dedication to revolutionary cultural change. I was raised to think of myself as growing up in a very barbaric time and place. I became ‘political’ around 1978 in Salt Lake City, Utah. I grew up in a Mormon theocracy, during the Reagan Revolution. I clung to atheism and feminism to give me self worth in a society where I was seen as ‘lesser.’ I learned to be prejudiced against men and I wanted to destroy the patriarchal society. I wanted the whole theocracy to come tumbling down, in a kind of millenarian, feminist-secularist apocalypse. Similarly, when I transitioned gender, I embraced programs of radical social reconstruction. I first explored a transsexual, lesbian feminism that became popular after Oakland’s Julia Serano published ‘The Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity’ in 2007. I held a transsexual identity for three, very artistically active, but brutal months. In this identity, I extended my earlier hatred of men to include my own male body. The feelings of anger and oppression were the similar but I interpreted them through the lens of my body image. My mindset was remarkably similar. It was a bourgeois, sense of victimhood that Nietzsche correctly analyzed as ressentiment or ‘slave morality,’ an identification with your own marginalization and ‘wounded attachment’ to the oppressor who you dream of destroying.
My childhood male feminism, was limited by my male identification, I did not see myself as ‘the revolutionary subject,’ in contrast to my later transsexual feminism. Back in Utah, my Mormon oppressors fought for traditional gender roles, the girls played with dolls and the boys played sports. I embraced radical feminist ideas of gender as socially constructed in order to feel ok about myself. At home, I was socialized by my mother and sister not to be a ‘typical’ boy. This become part of my identity toolkit, a boy who was not like other boys. The problem with this is that it is not a positive identity. I was still a boy, but a boy who failed all tests of masculinity. I identified with what I was not and I was depoliticized. Fast forward 30 years to Bay Area, and I am myself experiencing oppression first hand as a trans* person. This experience of fighting against my own oppression was radically different from the depoliticized position of being a non-conforming male. I myself became the marxist ‘Revolutionary Subject,’ rather than simply being a self-hating male. This brought about a period of intense artistic creativity and political activism. For me the Personal had also become the Political. Now the Male oppressor was catcalling me on the street and I was no longer safe walking alone when dressing how I wanted to dress. My revolutionary consciousness was intensified when I learned that transwoman-hating lesbian feminists ruled the roost in Bay Area radical feminism, and they were willing to resort to violence to keep control. This experience of the hypocrisy of other feminist activists burned away my residual guilt. Basically, in the end I learned to revalue myself with my own mix of gender-variance and maleness, which was a radical break from my childhood prejudices and internalized hatreds.
The continuity in this gender journey comes from the radical nature of the dream, the vision of millennial transformation, which I have never lost. The difference is how I learned to recognize and act on my own oppression, rather than feeling shame and guilt for the actions of others.
My Gender History as a Feminist Consciousness Raising Experience
Posted: July 14, 2013 in feminist historyHey guys, its been a long time since I wrote a personal post. I have been spending my time on twitter since I got involved with #Occupy Oakland. It is a powerful tool for journalism, but in the end it has not gotten the word out better than blogging. So, here I am again I made this personal video, it’s 7 minutes and ‘not boring’.
Please follow http://twitter.com/thepostgendrist for my sex, gender, queer tweeting, and http://twitter.com/jaspergregory for my Social Movement history tweeting.
Through Occupy I have come to believe that Martin Luther King & Gandhi pioneered the social tactics which change societies. I have critiqued the Rage Feminism of Daly, Dworkin and Jeffries as well as Transsexual Rage and Transfeminist Rage of Julia Serano’s The Whipping Girl. Now I see that these rage movements have a lineage stretching back to Malcolm X and Black Rage. This is important, because the Black Rage movement was a dialectical reaction to Martin Luther King and the ‘Love Thy Neighbor’, and Radical Hope tactics that the Black Freedom struggle used to great effects. The Spiritual, Radical, Non Violent Direct Action is therefore a blueprint for the destimatization of Male Femininity, Autogynephilia, and other male genders. It is also a way to form alliances with Radically, Nonviolent feminist, and racial justice activists. The video is about 10 minutes long and I highly recommend that you watch it for a very fresh view of MLK and even the nature of Social Activism in America
in this video I talk about MLK’s ‘rebirth’ as a Zen Buddhist Awakening, Radical Love and Understanding as Freedom Tactic.
I am ‘Tickled Pink’ about the vid. I have been struggling to Find a Authentic Video Blog Voice for the #occupy movement. Threw last 6 away
#Occupy Martin Luther King’s tactics of Radical Love: Occupy The Dream MLK day Jan 16th #ows http://twitter.com/jaspergregory
Historical lessons on Consensus-Based Unstructured Decision Making #OccupyWallStreet @bruces
Posted: November 9, 2011 in OccupyWallStreet*I believe that The Occupy Movement is in danger of adopting Groupthink instead of Democracy. We have seen this movie over and over since the 1960’s and we no how it ends. If you have attended an Occupy Decision Making Council (General Assembly) then every word in this essay will be familiar to you. Freeman’s essay covers a period when consensus-based Radical Feminist groups purged their movement of Butch Lesbian and Male-To-Female Transsexuals. Consensus does not lead to reason. It leads to Groupthink.
The Tyranny of Stuctureless. (Freeman, 1970)
FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness — and that is not the nature of a human group.
This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly “laissez faire” philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.
For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. “Structurelessness” is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not he used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.
This is not What Democracy Looks Like! rethinking consensus at #OccupyWallStreet
Posted: November 9, 2011 in OccupyWallStreet*Occupy Wall Street is the biggest chance we have had to change society in half a century. Please let’s learn from history. Radical Feminists, Situationists, Autonomists, and Squatters all adopted the horizontal consensus model that is being used by Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster. Consensus models bring Orwellian NewSpeak. It is not to late to institute transparent democratic structures. Please read this plea from someone who has seen this before.
via I cite: The Tyranny of Consensus –Mark Read.
The Tyranny of Consensus –Mark Read
The occupiers have inherited and adopted a decision-making process that has come down from earlier left movements and is lauded as the most democratic form of decision making. Of courser those who wish to see a more democratic society naturally gravitate to what has been billed as the most democratic way to make decisions. Consensus is what the radical left has responded with, for generations. Those of us that have worked within a consensus process model should know better by now, and we do a disservice to younger activists by allowing the myth of consensus-as-always-most-democratic to persist. We were told that the trade off was less efficiency for more democracy, and this simply is not borne out by experience, and most of my long-term comrades have come to recognize this. The only place where I believe that consensus process is genuinely more democratic than a majoritarian aka voting process is within a close and closed community of collaborators/co-habitants that have practiced the process for years. In virtually every other instance it yields less democratic decisions and processes, not more. The consensus process, when applied to large heterogenous groups such as the one at #occupywallst, yields hierarchies at least as persistent and pernicious as other forms of decision making, probably more. I, and many others, would argue that voting yields more truly democratic outcomes, if practiced responsibly and ethically ie requiring 75% majorities and allowing ample time for discussion. In the current context the consensus process favors those that feel comfortable addressing crowds, and feel entitled enough to argue endlessly for their point of view. This does not describe most people, and these traits are most prevalent in people that come from privilege, particularly educational privilege. I hate to coin a Nixonian term, but the “silent majority” are those that don’t feel such confidence. For most people voting on something is the best way to ensure that they have a say in the outcome. The very idea that a marginalized, or even just shy person should be expected to feel confident enough to participate in an alien and confusing process, much less powerful enough to block a consensus decision is just plain ridiculous. So, in practice, the very people that are intended to be emboldened and empowered by a consensus process, are in fact marginalized and silenced. They cede the floor to the loud and the confident and the certain. That is not what democracy looks like. The other problem that many of us know all too well is the creation of “invisible heirarchies.” These come about in large measure due to the cumbersome nature of the decision making process. Consensus process simply does not scale well, and it becomes so inefficient that groups of people begin to take decisions on their own, because they are essentially forced into that position. This leads to problems of accountability, accusations of betrayal, etc… And for what? A decision making model that falsely claims to be more democratic than voting? Many of us from earlier movements are very familiar with these problems, and yet too many of us uncritically jump on the bandwagon of consensus. Without some hard headed honesty about this, the fetishization of consensus will damage any efforts to build a more powerful, broad and diverse movement.
Ballet Shoes and Ballerinas as Technology: A History En Pointe – Suzanne Fischer – Technology – The Atlantic
Posted: November 9, 2011 in 2011
Laemmli argues that the new shoes forced dancers’ bodies to move in new ways. Dancers on this pointe regimen developed characteristically long, lean leg muscles. Balanchine also encouraged dancers to let the shoes remake their bodies, including developing bunions that gave the foot just the right line. And as their bodies were remade, dancers became “like IBM machines,” modern and indistinguishable. This had consequences for labor, too. For one, stars became a less central feature of dance companies as dancers became more interchangeable, and second, dancers came to spend hours working on their shoes — altering, gluing, and caring for them. In fact, in 1980 dancers threatened to strike — not over hours or pay, but for better pointe shoes, and better management of them.
Call for action at #occupyoakland. Love occupation of joy now at city hall #audio #photo
Posted: October 27, 2011 in 2010
iPhone
Male Beauty in San Francisco, Folsom Street Fair
Posted: September 27, 2011 in 2011Tags: folsom street fair, genderqueer, san francisco, street fashion
Yesterday was the annual Kinkster Festival called Folsom Street Fair. The street style is a very playful way of creating a Public Sphere with experimental genders and open expresion in the Kink tradition. This year I documented a lot of Male Beauty in the form of gayboys, radical metrosexuals and crossdressers.
I found an abundance of curvy female beauty. I also noticed that the chubby boys are being male objects of beauty as well. The Bears have not all become Muscle Boys.
Quiet Riot Girl has convinced me, I too am an Ardent Simpsonista. I think that anyone interested in Male Femininity in the 2000’s should familiarize themselves with his excellant writing about male gender and sexuality.
via Insider Interview: author, journalist and ‘motherfather’ of the metrosexual Mark Simpson
GG: Make up for men has pretty much been a flop in commercial terms with many companies who launched products having since discontinued them. Why do you think this is when things like manscaping and even eyebrow shaping have taken off?
MS: Oh, I suspect male make-up will make a comeback in the near future. I hear it’s already been a success in the Asian market. After all, make-up is just another, more ‘in-yer-face’ form of cosmetics – and even good old Gillette shaving gel is choc full of cosmetics these days.
The problem though for men’s make-up and the reason why most men in the West are still holding out against it is that it isn’t something you can deny. Most other male cosmetics come with the alibi that no, you haven’t fake-baked you’ve just been working in the garden a lot….
The problem for men is that while they are increasingly expected to and indeed want to look good, unlike women they often feel they have to go about it semi-secretly. They need to be beautiful but they should also feel slightly ashamed about it. There’s a double standard about male beauty now. Men are expected to look fabulous, but pretend that they haven’t tried ‘too hard’. Make-up is currently defined as ‘trying too hard’.
On the other hand, Russell Brand gets away with it all the time.
GG: Many commentators complain that men are ‘becoming more like women’ with their grooming/beauty regimes. What would you say to this?
MS: I think it’s more a case of men no longer tying one hand behind their backs when it comes to the increasingly important business – both in private and public life – of looking good. Happily married Lord Sugar, for example, sometimes seems to display a weakness for an attractive, nicely turned-out male candidate. And of course, more and more bosses are female.
Instead of men becoming ‘more like women’ what we’re seeing is men being less inhibited in their behaviour by worries about what’s ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. In much the same way that women have been since the feminist revolution of the 1970s. Likewise, ‘male beauty’ is no longer a completely verboten conjugation that has to always be euphemised with ‘male grooming’.
Basically it’s the end of the Victorian division of bedroom and bathroom labour that persisted for most of the 20th Century. Men want to be beautiful and sensual too now. And no one, even bitchy commentators, is going to stop them.
. It is Free and advertising supported. This magazine is more international than the last. I have left out the words and just present 50 Ethnographic Street Style photos.
Internationalisation
I am launching the Magazine in all of Apples supported language. So it is in every Itunes App Store everywhere on the planet, listed as a local language Magazine. The translations are rough, so let me know if there are big problems:
English, Russian, German, Chinese, French, Italian, Korean, Portugese (Brazil) Spanish. One of the big benefits to these App Store translations is the translated keywords. My first magazine was available in all of the stores in English, but if the user was searching with terms in other languages, they would not find it.
50 Street Style Photos
This Issue includes the 21 photos from Curvy Girl Superheros, but it also includes the other Queer, and Transgender street culture that was on display at the 2010 Superhero Street Fair. A beautiful Sister of Perpetual Indulgence is now the first of two screenshots. This visually marks San Francisco Street Culture as extra-ordinary and very genderqueer.
Advertisements SF Street Culture is free to download. It displays ads from Apple’s iAds network. So far my experience is good, but Apple is not able to supply ads everywhere, so I will be supporting multiple ad providers in the future.
I am very impressed by this discussion about Male Bisexuality. Quiet Riot Girl (QRG) is doing some very important work by creating space to understand Male Sexuality through a post feminist lens. I can’t recommend her work highly enough. The UK is having a complex and Nuanced post-feminist discussion about gender. Think of QRG as an introduction to this discussion.
It seems like a lot of her work at the moment is a curation and reworking Mark Simpson’s very important groundlevel descriptions of male gender and sexuality mutation in the UK.
I keep reading and hearing that young English straight boys are kissing each other and putting pictures up on Facebook. To my American ears this sound incredible even in sexually progressive San Francisco.
http://rachelrabbitwhite.com/whats-up-with-the-bisexual-double-standard/
According to a study by Eric Anderson of Bath University in England, there are a growing number of college-aged straight men kissing each other. In the study of male university students, 89 percent had kissed each other on the lips, and 37 percent reported engaging in “sustained kissing.”
Anderson says that this trend stemmed from professional sports, and the recent popularity of soccer players sharing passionate kisses after goals. “That made kissing between men acceptable for college and high-school players. Then the players took the same behaviors to nights out in pubs, spreading the trend to non-athletes” Anderson reports to Live Science.
We see this come to life in the “gay chicken” videos on YouTube. Gay chicken is a game in which two straight, alpha-male types make-out, and the first one to pull away is a “pussy.” In the linked YouTube video, two athletic-looking young men make out, while a crowd of people holding plastic cups, cheer them on, their phones held out. The boys only wear underwear, pressing against one and other as they kiss, not coming up for air for the full three minutes.
hat tip to QuietRiotGirl
Glitterboys, a 70’s genderqueer outbreak in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury #transgender
Posted: September 21, 2011 in 2010The seventies in San Francisco brought a huge rebellion against gender dualism. The original outbreak of the genderqueer hippie freaks also rejected sexuality dualisms.
(Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence by Jasper Gregory)
I am fascinated how the Glitter Queens of Haight Street evolved from the bisexual, bigendered groups like the Cockettes and the Angels of light into are related to later groups like the gender exclusive Radical Faeries and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
The 2002 Documentary on the Cockettes is an excellent resource for understanding the genderqueer
What was their influence on glam and disco? Also, how were these groups related to the Berkeley Effeminists.
These groups give post-gender social historians a concrete example of Male Genderqueerdom.
I am including a 3 page pdf excerpt of a genderqueer analysis of the Native Funk & Soul fashion which these genderqueer hippies helped to define.
Jasper's Wardrobe 