![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Long live the enemy
May. 18th, 2021 05:31 pm"Gender is not the issue. Gender is the battlefield. Or the playground. The issue is us versus them. Any us versus any them."
-- from Kate Bornstein's play Hidden: A Gender, reproduced in Gender Outlaw (1994). This book has blown my mind.
I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment: that human conflict can generally be boiled down to "our side good, your side bad". Our culture is divided again and again into opposing factions. In many if not most cases, one faction is more highly valued than the other. Crucially, we must stay in our assigned factions -- or be punished for being uppity or sissy or just unreadable. (This last is critical for gender, but also for other kinds of categories: find an online argument on a controversy like Creationism or genetically engineered foods, and ask questions, declining to identify which side you're on. You'll be assigned the opposite side -- by both sides. You cannot be neutral.)
-- from Kate Bornstein's play Hidden: A Gender, reproduced in Gender Outlaw (1994). This book has blown my mind.
I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment: that human conflict can generally be boiled down to "our side good, your side bad". Our culture is divided again and again into opposing factions. In many if not most cases, one faction is more highly valued than the other. Crucially, we must stay in our assigned factions -- or be punished for being uppity or sissy or just unreadable. (This last is critical for gender, but also for other kinds of categories: find an online argument on a controversy like Creationism or genetically engineered foods, and ask questions, declining to identify which side you're on. You'll be assigned the opposite side -- by both sides. You cannot be neutral.)
