Amanda Marcotte has an
interesting post up today at Pandagon about this artist who has had one of those Real Dolls (if you don't know what they are, you're probably better off) made in her own semi-likeness and then done some photographic/performance art style things with the doll-object that seem to issue a series of statements about gendered abuses of power; more specifically, about men's dominance and abuse and objectification of women.
From the perspective of a gendered class analysis, I agree with the general thesis of Amanda's post. It's kind-of basic feminism, really, that this stuff is all normalized and tends to operate under the surface, although imo it never stops being interesting to unpack it in various contexts and examine how it's functioning.
What's more interesting to me, however, as a queer person, is the frequency with which I see these same fucked up power dynamics playing out in the lesbian community and within lesbian relationships -- among feminine-identified women and couples just as much as masculine-identified women and butch/femme relationships -- and practically nobody admitting to it or talking about it.
I see a lot of assumptions in feminist discussions that: a) women don't act like this; b) lesbianism doesn't include these dynamics; and c) in those discussions I almost always see a couple/few lesbians doing that whole, "Reason #498459875 why I'm SO happy I'm a lesbian"* thing where they basically hold up the fiction that these fucked up power dynamics don't also snake through lesbian relationships. However, I have not only witnessed these same abuses of power, dominance issues, and objectification issues in the lesbian relationships of people I've known, but I've also found myself in more than one relationship where these things have been played out onto me by my female lovers. I myself have been guilty of it once (and was so horrified by my own behavior that I am still working on forgiving myself for it 20 years after the fact.)
The primary reason why I checked out of the monogamous long-term committed relationship game years ago was because of these dynamics, actually. I had fallen into them one too many times, and become too emotionally/psychologically fragile to take it anymore.
As a result of my own experiences and observations, when I do feminist power analyses, my focus is more on the power itself, how it functions, and how people are abusing it, than on the gendered aspects of it. Because as I said, it's not been my experience at all that this sort of thing is limited to masculine-identified women, so while I think there are associations with gender identity, I don't think it's an essentially gendered thing in the same way a lot of other feminists seem to.
I was once in an abusive relationship with a woman I loved -- still love -- very deeply. She didn't beat me, it wasn't like that, but she had a really bad temper that she did not control and she did get physically abusive on a semi-regular basis. Mostly this involved throwing things at me, or shoving me, or restraining me and not letting me leave during an argument, but after a couple of years it escalated past that and I finally ended it. Clearly, I should have ended it sooner. My mistake.
From my perspective, a large part of the reason why my ex's temper would flare so badly is because she had these expectations in her head of who and what I was "supposed to be", the role in her life that I was "supposed to fill", and as it became more apparent that I wasn't responsive to "supposed to's" that didn't work for me, she became increasingly controlling and angry and on like that. It was all very objectifying and didn't take me
qua me into consideration -- "I" was, in a sense, a wife-object that she had acquired, the exact same sort of construct that led me later, in college, to rail at male philosophers (mostly Hegel) for giving men full subjectivity at the same time they conceptualized women as basically well-trained house-pets. Although, I didn't label it in any of those ways at the time. At the time, I mostly just cried and drank a lot.
It wasn't until years later, after becoming a theory head, and after another failed relationship that didn't include physical abuse but did include a lot of the same objectifying and dominance/power struggle issues, that I finally identified what had been going on in both of those relationships, and that similar elements of these issues had cropped up in other relationships as well. I realized then, as I looked around (and read more, always with the reading), that these dynamics had been present in a lot of the relationships I'd seen in my friendship circles, too; hetero, homo, poly, mono, no particular arrangement was immune because it was more about the perspective of the subjects involved than any category. I came to see it as a sickness inside of subjectivity itself.
On a more big picture/grand scale, we don't
just have "gender trouble" in the sense that we have these falsely constructed notions of men and women as "opposites" and thus some perceived eternal, constant "war of the sexes" going on. I mean, we totally have that, but that's not the only problem with fucked up power dynamics. We also have some really twisted ideas, socially and broadly and regardless of gender, about how we relate to one another as individuals on practically any level, but especially on the intimate relationship level. We have a lot of social constructs in which people who become lovers objectify one another according to various sets of contextually-determined rules that are rarely articulated, and then people punish one another harshly, and it often seems to be almost subconsciously, for stepping outside of the expectations of those unspoken rules.
___________
*In my view, whenever a lesbian says this, it is a giant red flag; yeah, maybe she's just young/inexperienced, not particularly observant, and/or fortunate, but it's also the exact same kind of thing someone who's in denial about their own dysfunction will say. I watch people who say this very closely, and at least half the time, I wind up thinking it's more about denial than anything else. Of course, this stuff is very personal and I can't really know if I'm right.
Labels: feminism, relationships, theory dork
