Cyborg Bodies

Believe it or not, I don't spend all of my time thinking about resumes, bodies, or fashion (though it probably seems like it to those who read my academic work). In the last couple of days, I've been returning to a text that I have found useful in a lot of contexts to work with ways that it can tease out different aspects of what I've been focusing on lately - fashion, bodies, queerness, the academy, and me (at heart, isn't most academic work about the academics themselves?).

The text is Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Haraway's background is interesting - she started as a feminist-socialist biologist and has since kind of slid into a poststructured, postmodern position against some pretty traditional feminist stances rooted in biology and binary politics and identities. In this book, she specifically advocates differntial politics for "inappropriate/d others," a phrase borrowed from Tinh T. Minh-ha which refers to a historical positioning of those people who refuse to adopt the personae of "self" or "other" offered by the dominating narratives of identity and politics. For Haraway, these inappropriate/d others are often those most dismissed in the world - women, people of color, members of ethnic or national groups which are considered "primitive."

Some of us, she says, become "cyborgs" - a chimera or intentionally-created hybrids of both the natural and the mechanical or constructed. This allows for room for many of us to move outside of binary concepts - Am I this way because I was born this way or because I was taught to be her? - and start to find a place in this hybridity.

The rejection of binaries has always been an attractive thing to me - to deny that people are one or the other, never both and certainly neither has an appeal that rings true in my experience of the world. It may be the baby punk that still lives somewhere inside me, but having someone tell me who and what I am, what that means ... it chafes.

What would it mean, then, for my body to be a cyborg body? How does that play into the discomforts I've been mulling over for the last couple of weeks with fashion and professional identity and queerness?

There are obvious constructs at play here -- "professional," "academic," "grown up," "woman," "queer," "feminine," so many others -- and many of them are at odds with each other. There are also things that I might want to call "natural" -- the concept of my own sexuality that I choose to call queer, the physical presence of my body. The tensions exist not just in the biological-to-construct parts of this story, but even within both groups. It is not as if my biology is rejecting the constructs or the constructed is rejecting my body; something far more insidious is happening. Each of the parts pulls at the others.

Even the tension of what clothes I put on to go to work this morning live within these points sometimes pulling and sometimes pushing at one another. A lot of people probably find this either ridiculous or depressing, but I am pretty sure that I find it comforting - I've always wanted to have explanations, theories, possible ideas that help the world make more sense.

And if the world, if it's this cyborg body, if it's the way that we construct ourselves, then it's not just me.

Clothing, Redux.

Tonight, I had a conversation for the fosterkidlet of some friends. She's 12 and, goddamn, is 12 hard. And she is AWESOME. She is doing an awesome program to increase civic engagement in junior high and high school students in DC this spring and we were talking about whether she was excited about it.

"I guess so," she said, shrugging.

"You're NOT?" I said, amazed.

"No, it sounds cool, but I'm not excited about the clothes."

Apparently, students are expected to dress appropriately - no jeans, no Uggs, business-casual at least.

So the friend-fosterkidlet and I made a pact - we'd go shopping together to find stuff that was awesome that made us both feel good.

Maybe I need to start at being 12 years old and not hating myself as much. Maybe.

Clothing, Bodies, Gender, and Professionalism

I've been trying to write more ... substantive journal entries, at least to make up for the fact (or to validate) that I'm writing fewer of them.

Since I started at my job at the university as a career advisor, I've been struggling with professional clothing and the ways that they affect perception of me as a professional and my own concept of myself. This will only be exacerbated when I start instructing next quarter.

Clothes are more than a little fraught for me. They always have been. Unlike my academic-fashionista kin, I have not always loved clothes. I wasn't someone who was really clever with pairings or daring with how I dressed. I just ... wore clothes.

The history of my discomfort with fashion is bifold and it's the oldest queer girl story in the book (or one of them, at least); it's about gender presentation and body dysmorphia.

Right? It's like a highlights reel of every substantive post I've written over a decade of blogging. But just in case you've missed that decade (which every one of you has, unless one of you has managed to find my old hand-coded journal from 1998), I'll review.

Fashion and Body Dysmorphia
I have never had any clear idea what my body looked like. From the time I was seven and decided I should just eat fruit for breakfast (which quickly became nothing by the time I was eight) to the full lifetime of taking a range of six sizes to the dressing room not just because clothes are inconsistent but because I honestly cannot see if I am a size eight or a size eighteen.

This makes fashion a little bit complicated. You know all of those articles, probably even useful ones, that talk about "good jeans for those with big thighs?" or "How to maximize your body shape?" I, basically, am not sure what column to look at. Combining the lack of understanding of my own body with my total inability to know what size I am basically results in shopping being a horrifying experience. Every pair of pants I try on, every shirt that doesn't button over my breasts (which is most of them) is like a personal failure. It is the world saying "Yup, you're still doing it wrong."

So I didn't do it. I have found a fair number of slacks that look okay and some t-shirts and sweaters that fit okay. There are a couple of skirts that fit right and I'm most comfortable in knee-high boots. So I make it. But it's not like the bloggers at Threadbared, Academic Chic, Fashion for Nerds, Blue Collar Catwalk, Bright Side Dweller, or any of these other pre-professional/professional women who look pulled together and genuinely seem to enjoy fashion.

Gender Identity and Fashion
Which leads to the second point of discomfort. As much as I love the aforementioned blogs, they're all variations upon femininity and femme-ness. Which is great, but it's not necessarily me. Occasionally, sure, I'm interested in some kind of queered femininity, often pairing something softer with some kick-ass boots or something, but in an average day, I'm not comfortable being that girly. I'm not masculine-presenting, exactly, but I am uncomfortable with compulsory femininity and, in a lot of ways, I'm not feminine.

This is, of course, complicated by being an out, queer woman who is partnered with a woman. Even in the notoriously liberal higher education field, assumptions are laid upon both of us in terms of presentation and expectations.

And so my options in professional clothing diminish. Because it seems like the options are the currently boring look I'm rocking or too consistently feminine.

This is, of course, oversimplification and hyperbole. Unfortunately, I have a lack of role models. So I pull together what I can, trying to take the ideas I get from blogs and people whose clothing I like and doing what I can with it without sacrificing what feels right to me.

So I've done a few things. I'm learning better skills of accessorizing, I'm trying new color combinations, and I'm trying to have fun with this.

But it's a pain in the fucking ass. And some days like today when I've spent a while trying to find fun, funky, sorta-punky clothing combinations that still look professional, I kind of want to wrap my whole body in a blanket and call it a day.

But there are other days, too. So maybe I'll just finish dying my hair, tie it back in a bright green scarf, throw on a purple long-sleeved shirt and some dark jeans with my knee-high black boots and maybe that will work.