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livI really wasn't feeling purim this year. I mean, hey, it was fine, I read the Megillah competently, I made sure all the kids had a good time and the adults were unselfconscious enough to enjoy the silliness. And we had a good turn out, and people dressed up and brought food and were generally good sports, and I think that's partly because I've been talking up the festival for a few weeks, and working behind the scenes to make sure people who don't usually bother with regular Friday nights were informed.
I think this may actually be part of the problem; purim isn't a chance for me to have fun these days, it's a big organizational effort to make sure other people have fun. And I can totally phone it in at this point; I've been organizing activities for miscellaneous groups of kids since I ran birthday parties for my younger siblings as a pre-teen myself. I left the Megillah prep a bit too much to the last minute, so I didn't do it as well as I'd like, but, y'know, I totally can read a familiar text from klaf (traditional handwritten document with no vowels or punctuation) even if I leave until the day before to quickly refresh my memory of the tricky bits. I can do a good old (melo)dramatic reading with silly voices and enough expression that people who don't have fluent Hebrew can more or less follow. I can produce silly bouncy enthusiasm on command, and deliver a patter that keeps people amused and entertained and throw some innuendo to the adults in the audience without making the kids feel embarrassed or excluded.
I'm burning the expletive out, though. The community are so supportive and lovely and so grateful when I provide them with what they want out of religion at the moment: straight down the line traditional rituals done with feeling and with samples from my box of "inclusion" tricks. Stuff that's familiar from people's childhoods, but updated just enough that it isn't some boring old man droning on in a language that nobody understands. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and I'm well placed to offer it.
But what I want out of religion is intellectual stimulation, either some discussion of ways to reinvent and reinterpret and challenge the traditions, or some proper text study I can get my teeth into. I'm not gonna get that here, and honestly purim is almost exactly the wrong time for it even in the sort of community that does that kind of thing. But I don't have enough free weekends to go and visit other communities where I can be a participant instead of an organizer; either I'm running things here, or else I'm visiting my friends which I place at a higher priority than shulgoing. I haven't made it to any of the Manchester synagogues in most of a year, nor to pop over tohadassah's placement communities which I've been promising to do for ages. I've occasionally managed to combine visiting my people in Cambridge with attending the very nice, highly intellectual Reform community there, but it's not quite sustaining me. And part of the problem is that work is stressful at the moment and I am, as mentioned, over-committed; even though at lot of my rushing around madly involves doing things I find really fun, I also need more actual relaxing breaks than I'm getting.
Partly, it's buying purim presents for a completely unknown in advance group of children. I never have any idea who's going to turn up, how many, what ages, or, and I wish I didn't have to care, what genders. I don't gender police the kids, far from it, but give me a dozen children I mostly don't know and you can guarantee that some of them will refuse to touch anything even vaguely gender-neutral, let alone if they suspect it's for the wrong gender, and if the kids themselves do express interest in a wrongly gendered toy their parents and grandparents frequently correct them. I try to get a range of stuff, not extending quite out to the extremes of ultra pink, frilly princessy stuff or intensely macho toy weapons and camo designs, and mostly I succeed by avoiding Disney and Disney knock-off branded stuff which I'd want to stay away from anyway, regardless of the gender issue. But then you get things like a two-year-old bypassing all the age-appropriate toys I offered and insisting on the thing he most easily recognized as being "for a boy": a china money-box in the shape of a football, which he promptly broke two minutes later (a china football is not for kicking). My most favourite child is even more my favourite now; I awarded him first prize in the costume contest not because he's my favourite but because he had clearly made an effort to make his own costume, a really excellent Willy Wonka outfit, whereas most of the other kids had bought costumes, and he preferred some glow-stick necklaces over everything officially marketed to nine-year-old boys <3
Then there's the Megillah (book of Esther) itself. Some feminists like it because they read it as portraying misogyny rather than promoting misogyny, but honestly? for a story we make a point of exposing kids to and building a strongly family-oriented celebration around, it contains rather a lot of rape jokes. And a bunch of LOL eunuchs stuff and humour about how effeminate Persian men supposedly are. I'm complaining about this partly because I'm in a bad mood about not having people in my community I can have this discussion with; nobody is surprised that if you read the Bible as a novel it doesn't live up to modern standards of right-on gender politics.
The other thing is drag. Drag is a big feature of purim, fancy dress in general, but particularly cross-dressing. Ages ago I had an argument with a trans friend who claimed that drag-based humour is transphobic, and I was really defensive and I said, no, it's funny when men wear dresses and make-up, that doesn't mean we're laughing at women dressing like conventionally gendered women! But this was very poor reasoning on my part, because in fact the very thing that makes trans women trans is that for at least some part of their lives people incorrectly think they are male. If they're unlucky, people continue thinking they're male even when they are living as their real gender. So now I have to admit my friend had a point and there is a continuum between laughing at trash drag and laughing at trans women. I also don't have a plan for how to make my community a welcoming place to gender non-conforming people while still celebrating purim in a way most people think of as traditional. On the other hand, I am aware of at least some men living in a social and religious context where genderqueer isn't a viable option, who take the prohibition against cross-dressing seriously, and find it really liberating to be able to wear a dress on purim, even if they have to pretend it's a joke.
As for me, well, I dressed up as a pirate. I decided I wanted to be a pirate rather than a pirate wench, partly because drag is in fact a purim tradition. But it turns out that a thigh-length coat, belted, over a rather fitted ruffled shirt (the most piratey thing I happened to have on hand) makes me look really really hourglassy. Which would be fine if I were going for the contrast between the somewhat masculine persona and my natural body shape, but I kind of wasn't, I was shooting for the kind of androgynous that post Johnny Depp pirates represent. I tried to wrap my braid to give a more masculine style that works with long hair, but I didn't get it right. And I know very well I am ridiculously over-thinking this, if dressing up as a pirate for purim gives me gender angst there's really no hope for me.
The other thing that happened is that when I came into the synagogue I was wearing my ordinary winter coat over the costume (it was freezing out), and people could only see that I had a red headscarf and gold hoopy clip-on earrings. So of course they guessed that I'd come as a "gypsy" and made jokes about crossing palms with silver and reading fortunes and stuff. Which made me think of all those American Tumblrs about how totally offensive it is to dress up as an ethnic stereotype for Halloween. I don't very much want to make a big fuss about people's choices of purim costumes, but I'm starting to think maybe I should be firmer about this kind of thing.
I think part of what's going on is that the Jewish community tends to have an image of ourselves as the eternal victims, and therefore any mockery that's going on is automatically mocking the powerful, which is generally felt to be acceptable. Laughing at those drunken, effeminate, incompetent Persians was at some point in history a defence mechanism because the Persian empire was in fact treating its Jewish minority pretty badly. And I'm sure everybody would say I'm being oversensitive for making any kind of connection between essentially fictional Persians and modern-day Iranians, or between drunken slapstick humour and actual real live alcoholics. But I am getting less and less comfortable with gender-based mockery, and there's a ton of that in purim.
Sometimes I've bragged to non-Jewish friends about how purim is the best festival ever, because it involves dressing up in silly costumes and getting drunk. And I do think there's some value in making the point that religion is not always against pleasure or anti-fun. But right now I think purim is the worst festival ever, and the alcohol isn't helping.
I think this may actually be part of the problem; purim isn't a chance for me to have fun these days, it's a big organizational effort to make sure other people have fun. And I can totally phone it in at this point; I've been organizing activities for miscellaneous groups of kids since I ran birthday parties for my younger siblings as a pre-teen myself. I left the Megillah prep a bit too much to the last minute, so I didn't do it as well as I'd like, but, y'know, I totally can read a familiar text from klaf (traditional handwritten document with no vowels or punctuation) even if I leave until the day before to quickly refresh my memory of the tricky bits. I can do a good old (melo)dramatic reading with silly voices and enough expression that people who don't have fluent Hebrew can more or less follow. I can produce silly bouncy enthusiasm on command, and deliver a patter that keeps people amused and entertained and throw some innuendo to the adults in the audience without making the kids feel embarrassed or excluded.
I'm burning the expletive out, though. The community are so supportive and lovely and so grateful when I provide them with what they want out of religion at the moment: straight down the line traditional rituals done with feeling and with samples from my box of "inclusion" tricks. Stuff that's familiar from people's childhoods, but updated just enough that it isn't some boring old man droning on in a language that nobody understands. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and I'm well placed to offer it.
But what I want out of religion is intellectual stimulation, either some discussion of ways to reinvent and reinterpret and challenge the traditions, or some proper text study I can get my teeth into. I'm not gonna get that here, and honestly purim is almost exactly the wrong time for it even in the sort of community that does that kind of thing. But I don't have enough free weekends to go and visit other communities where I can be a participant instead of an organizer; either I'm running things here, or else I'm visiting my friends which I place at a higher priority than shulgoing. I haven't made it to any of the Manchester synagogues in most of a year, nor to pop over to
hadassah's placement communities which I've been promising to do for ages. I've occasionally managed to combine visiting my people in Cambridge with attending the very nice, highly intellectual Reform community there, but it's not quite sustaining me. And part of the problem is that work is stressful at the moment and I am, as mentioned, over-committed; even though at lot of my rushing around madly involves doing things I find really fun, I also need more actual relaxing breaks than I'm getting. Partly, it's buying purim presents for a completely unknown in advance group of children. I never have any idea who's going to turn up, how many, what ages, or, and I wish I didn't have to care, what genders. I don't gender police the kids, far from it, but give me a dozen children I mostly don't know and you can guarantee that some of them will refuse to touch anything even vaguely gender-neutral, let alone if they suspect it's for the wrong gender, and if the kids themselves do express interest in a wrongly gendered toy their parents and grandparents frequently correct them. I try to get a range of stuff, not extending quite out to the extremes of ultra pink, frilly princessy stuff or intensely macho toy weapons and camo designs, and mostly I succeed by avoiding Disney and Disney knock-off branded stuff which I'd want to stay away from anyway, regardless of the gender issue. But then you get things like a two-year-old bypassing all the age-appropriate toys I offered and insisting on the thing he most easily recognized as being "for a boy": a china money-box in the shape of a football, which he promptly broke two minutes later (a china football is not for kicking). My most favourite child is even more my favourite now; I awarded him first prize in the costume contest not because he's my favourite but because he had clearly made an effort to make his own costume, a really excellent Willy Wonka outfit, whereas most of the other kids had bought costumes, and he preferred some glow-stick necklaces over everything officially marketed to nine-year-old boys <3
Then there's the Megillah (book of Esther) itself. Some feminists like it because they read it as portraying misogyny rather than promoting misogyny, but honestly? for a story we make a point of exposing kids to and building a strongly family-oriented celebration around, it contains rather a lot of rape jokes. And a bunch of LOL eunuchs stuff and humour about how effeminate Persian men supposedly are. I'm complaining about this partly because I'm in a bad mood about not having people in my community I can have this discussion with; nobody is surprised that if you read the Bible as a novel it doesn't live up to modern standards of right-on gender politics.
The other thing is drag. Drag is a big feature of purim, fancy dress in general, but particularly cross-dressing. Ages ago I had an argument with a trans friend who claimed that drag-based humour is transphobic, and I was really defensive and I said, no, it's funny when men wear dresses and make-up, that doesn't mean we're laughing at women dressing like conventionally gendered women! But this was very poor reasoning on my part, because in fact the very thing that makes trans women trans is that for at least some part of their lives people incorrectly think they are male. If they're unlucky, people continue thinking they're male even when they are living as their real gender. So now I have to admit my friend had a point and there is a continuum between laughing at trash drag and laughing at trans women. I also don't have a plan for how to make my community a welcoming place to gender non-conforming people while still celebrating purim in a way most people think of as traditional. On the other hand, I am aware of at least some men living in a social and religious context where genderqueer isn't a viable option, who take the prohibition against cross-dressing seriously, and find it really liberating to be able to wear a dress on purim, even if they have to pretend it's a joke.
As for me, well, I dressed up as a pirate. I decided I wanted to be a pirate rather than a pirate wench, partly because drag is in fact a purim tradition. But it turns out that a thigh-length coat, belted, over a rather fitted ruffled shirt (the most piratey thing I happened to have on hand) makes me look really really hourglassy. Which would be fine if I were going for the contrast between the somewhat masculine persona and my natural body shape, but I kind of wasn't, I was shooting for the kind of androgynous that post Johnny Depp pirates represent. I tried to wrap my braid to give a more masculine style that works with long hair, but I didn't get it right. And I know very well I am ridiculously over-thinking this, if dressing up as a pirate for purim gives me gender angst there's really no hope for me.
The other thing that happened is that when I came into the synagogue I was wearing my ordinary winter coat over the costume (it was freezing out), and people could only see that I had a red headscarf and gold hoopy clip-on earrings. So of course they guessed that I'd come as a "gypsy" and made jokes about crossing palms with silver and reading fortunes and stuff. Which made me think of all those American Tumblrs about how totally offensive it is to dress up as an ethnic stereotype for Halloween. I don't very much want to make a big fuss about people's choices of purim costumes, but I'm starting to think maybe I should be firmer about this kind of thing.
I think part of what's going on is that the Jewish community tends to have an image of ourselves as the eternal victims, and therefore any mockery that's going on is automatically mocking the powerful, which is generally felt to be acceptable. Laughing at those drunken, effeminate, incompetent Persians was at some point in history a defence mechanism because the Persian empire was in fact treating its Jewish minority pretty badly. And I'm sure everybody would say I'm being oversensitive for making any kind of connection between essentially fictional Persians and modern-day Iranians, or between drunken slapstick humour and actual real live alcoholics. But I am getting less and less comfortable with gender-based mockery, and there's a ton of that in purim.
Sometimes I've bragged to non-Jewish friends about how purim is the best festival ever, because it involves dressing up in silly costumes and getting drunk. And I do think there's some value in making the point that religion is not always against pleasure or anti-fun. But right now I think purim is the worst festival ever, and the alcohol isn't helping.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 06:26 pm (UTC)I also see the discomfort with dressing up and the rest. Much love, M
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 06:42 pm (UTC)But also you really really understand what it is to get burned out on running religious community events all the time. And I miss having lots of intellectual-religious discussions with you. I have Liar's Gospel on order, so at least I can offer to discuss that with you soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 07:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 06:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 07:09 pm (UTC)then again, I also really understand the burnout factor. I have had a few years off now, so I'm getting ready to be enthusiastic again. But at the time I left work to buckle down and finish Rabbinical school, I was so tired of being enthusiastic about things that offended me that I think it was even obvious to the community, which is not the way I want to be when I do Jewish in public.
I have more, but I'll talk again later.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 08:46 pm (UTC)I want to cheer a little bit for living in drag and reading the Megillah to your partner, though. That makes me feel better, somehow.
Burnout: it's not that I mind being enthusiastic, it's that I seem to be stuck in what Clive Lawton calls "paediatric religion" just now. I do understand that the community I'm working with need comforting religion, it's really privileged for me to be pining this much for challenging religion, but that's where I am.
And yes, sometimes it's not just childish and simplistic, but actually offensive, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's offended as if I were some kind of a super-special snowflake with my raised consciousness about gender issues etc, but I don't know how to deal with this. At the moment probably my biggest gender issue is that the old men in the community like to kiss all the young, pretty women, and (to my complete non-surprise) some of the women find this really intrusive and boundary-crossing. I wish I had either the authority or the skills to do something about this beyond just sitting around feeling uncomfortable.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 08:59 pm (UTC)On your last point, are there any older women who might listen to you and to whom the older men might listen?
The pretty young women may be facing unwanted physical attention elsewhere in their lives too; do they talk to you about it? can you point them at Captain Awkward on hugging? http://captainawkward.com/2013/02/08/444-do-we-hug-because-my-feeling-is-that-no-we-dont/
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 09:18 pm (UTC)Demographics: we have a bunch of men in their 80s to 90s, mostly widowers, some of them I can see very well are desperately touch-starved. It's not appropriate really for them to go around kissing everyone female (some of them), nor to kiss the women they consider pretty (others). But I don't really begin to know how to explain to these men why it's not appropriate, without seeming to accuse them of leching, and I honestly don't think they mean any harm, they just have wrong expectations about kissing. Then we have a bunch of women in their 50s and 60s, some of whom have complained to me that they hate being expected to kiss the old men, but they're not of the same generation as the men who are the problem, and the fact that they're asking me to intervene suggests that they also don't feel comfortable being directly confrontational about it.
There's also some 50s to 60s men who kind of make jokes about how they are totally not kissing the older guys. I think they don't entirely mean that sort of comment to be homophobic, but it's making me feel a bit cringey.
I am somewhat part of the problem because I started going along with being kissed by the most egregious of the older guys because, eh, he was really leaning on me for support dealing with a bereavement and I just didn't have the heart to argue with him about kissing when we had that kind of dynamic. Which I feel really really bad about, because I am almost certain you're right, the younger women are having to handle this on top of other unwanted physical attention.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 08:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 09:21 pm (UTC)I'd worry less about mocking the Persians (especially in a community where there's likely to be little connection drawn between ancient Persia and modern Iran) than about how easily those jokes about gypsies slipped out. I think we can guess how the people who made those jokes would react to anyone, even Roma, making jokes about Jewish money-lenders.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 09:40 pm (UTC)I honestly don't think the community has unreasonable expectations of me. They are really really grateful for what I'm doing in terms of leading service and running activities. And the sorts of things I want to do but feel would meet with resistance would be more work for me, not less; I want to do some proper serious adult education, for example, and be a bit creative with services (but that would break away from the standard Orthodox format). So I'm not burning out because I'm doing too much, I'm burning out because I'm going through the same motions week after week and year after year, and I don't know if there's any way round that.
Lots of the people I'm talking about are also doing a massive amount of unpaid stuff to keep the community going; there's one guy who does all the financial stuff and handles all the correspondence, another who spends several days a week doing outreach such as visiting schools, speaking to local orgs, being the Jewish voice in all kinds of focus groups. Another, a retired electrician, does pretty much all the maintenance of the building himself, paying for materials out of his own pocket as well as volunteering his time. So it's not that they're all just sitting back and expecting me to do all the work, it's that essentially I'm the only person with the skills to lead services.
The Persian stuff sometimes shades into mockery of middle easterners in general; sure, I know that Persians aren't ethnically Arab, but there's a sort of projection going on, I think. It's not as bad as I've seen it in some communities. I think the problem is that the Persians are being mocked specifically for having insufficiently binary gender roles, and that could hurt people of any ethnicity. Plus just general Orientalism, I suppose.
The gypsy jokes did kind of upset me, and I was caught on the back foot and didn't say anything, which I'm also feeling bad about. Looking back, I know I have seen people dressing up as stereotyped "gypsies" for Purim, so I understand why they might have thought that was my costume. But I don't quite feel brave enough to make a rule saying no dressing up as ethnic stereotypes! I think maybe I'll see if I can say something in a sermon next time I'm preaching, that way it's not directed at anyone.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 02:55 pm (UTC)That's what I assumed you meant. Although there are obvious problems with criticising Iranian/Arabic people in general too, I just hoped there wasn't that much of it :)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-27 09:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 09:29 pm (UTC)Standing up against The Man and blowing off steam is one thing; it's however not a free pass -- I'm mostly thinking of the in-fighting in another minority group, GLTBTQ folks, where some of the comments and behaviour patterns from certain folks stun me.
But yeah, I'm super-sensitive regarding gender portrayals too (mostly because I genuinely believe they inform so many of the ills of our world: homophobia, sexism, and so on).
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 09:50 pm (UTC)I do definitely agree with the "not a free pass" thing. It's not acceptable for us to be racist or homophobic just because we have been persecuted historically. But purim wouldn't make sense if it were all about being terribly earnest and morally serious, that's just not what it's for!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-25 11:22 pm (UTC)I have too much burnout to engage with most things religion-related, at the moment. I'm recovering slowly, and when I've recovered a bit more, I think that having some intellectual chewies with you might be part of how I equilibriate.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 09:10 am (UTC)Here, have some sucking eggs comments.
* It's OK to put your energy into helping the community doing things you like and are good at and not into more soul sapping stuff. If you spot a pattern of Purim always being difficult, you can do Lots of Stuff, but Not Purim.
* I sympathise a lot with being crazy-busy and not having time. Are there places that give you the textual discussion and intellectual stimulation without physically being there? I'm imagining internet discussion forums, or maybe an IRC meeting, or a skype meeting with other cool people, which you could do for 45 minutes in an evening maybe? It won't help with that painful 'these people, why don't they get this?' though.
* Even if you feel like you're biting your tongue all the time, you're probably setting a great example even with the little things you say and do. The old men may never change, but glow stick boy will be greatful for it :-)
* I think you're right, part of the reason drag is funny because of bad-gender-stuff TM. I am trying to think of an example of healthy fancy dress, but it's weird - mad scientists mock science, princesses have classism built in etc etc. I guess the answer is that fancy dress is good, because it's fun to dress up and pretend to be someone else for a bit. And fancy dress can be healthily funny, just because 'Fred dressing in a way Fred doesn't normally dress' is funny, whether that's 'in a dress' or 'as a pirate', without value judgements on dresses or pirates or Fred's normal dress.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 10:34 am (UTC)You're right, given I'm doing this community support stuff on a purely voluntary basis I can pick and choose what I do a bit. I think purim is pretty much not optional, though, because it needs my particular skills, namely reading a long chunk difficult Hebrew, combined with providing entertainment for the kids. There's two, maybe three if I stretch a point, events in the year which are really aimed at kids, and those are particularly important for getting people involved who might not otherwise feel a connection to religion.
Making time for some kind of internet-based text study thing is a really good idea. That would go a long way to fill the gap in my life, and is more plausible than anything that requires me to travel (weekday evenings would be impossible, and I don't really have enough weekends.) There are also a couple of long weekend con type things over the summer, which I should try to get to, because that'll help a lot.I'm also training
I do think I need to be setting an example more than telling people what to do, or imposing my nice liberal bubble ideas of gender on a reluctant audience, that just annoys people and makes them more entrenched. I feel as if I'm not setting as good an example as I want to be, given I'm doing things like letting potentially offensive costumes pass without comment, and continuing to fail to do anything about the unwanted kissing.
In terms of silly costumes, the point is definitely to be silly, and it's not the right approach for me to get all over-thinky with looking for potential bad connotations. I started angsting over pirate costumes being ableist once you do things like eye-patches, peg-legs and hooks, but decided I was just taking myself way too seriously and I should shut up.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 02:51 pm (UTC)Yes, very much this. Don't feel bad you can't do everything, you are almost certainly having a good effect just by having your current attitudes at all, and even if you can't drag everyone up to that standard, don't discount the benefit you already give by getting some of that across to people.
And fancy dress can be healthily funny, just because 'Fred dressing in a way Fred doesn't normally dress' is funny, whether that's 'in a dress' or 'as a pirate', without value judgements on dresses or pirates or Fred's normal dress.
Yeah. I think that's right, but it's hard to see what's funny in an affectionate way, and what's funny in a potentially nasty way, and it can be quite fluid. (Of course, there are probably non-funny costumes which are ok, but there's normally an expectation it's a little bit funny.)
One of my friends went to a "nerd party", where people ironically dressed up as nerds. Which to me was quite funny but quite surreal, since essentially everyone I know has nerd parties non-ironically :)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-27 09:50 pm (UTC)You and
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 02:23 pm (UTC)Yeah. I think that's very understandable, but it's very easy to miss when you may have started to mock people who have a serious capacity for being hurt by it (whether they're more or less marginalised by you).
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 02:43 pm (UTC)*hugs* I have no idea how to deal with things like that. I want to object, but I know I'm likely to be wading into something I don't understand if I did.
But FWIW, I think you can't ALWAYS have a good response, and it's ok to try to work out in advance what you might say to get the point raised without seeming too critical if it comes up again.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 04:53 pm (UTC)Drag is fraught, isn't it? I invited some people over the other night specifying that drag would be preferred and got responses ranging from 'I find some forms of drag actively distressing and will therefore not come' (from someone who has at least in the past identified as genderqueer) to 'yay drag!' (from their partner) and 'I am afraid to come because I don't want to be expected to wear drag or be the only one not in drag' (from a feminism-hating straight man). I thought about saying 'come in drag unless you would find it actively distressing or undermining of your gender identity' but hoped that would be read into it anyway.
I do see some of the problems with it, like the idea that masculine-looking people in feminine clothes are ludic and hypersexualised, and I would definitely like to discuss it more, but there is also a fascinating history of assigned-male people performing as unreal women and clearly finding it empowering and fun. One to add to the stack of 'topics to read up on when there is time'.
*more hugs*
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 05:48 pm (UTC)Wow, I didn't realize you'd dredged up so many issues with your drag party. It sounded like a really cool idea when you were talking about it before, and I suppose I'd assumed that your crowd would be ever so self-aware of all the possible connotations.
The thing is that drag can be fun and empowering, I really don't want to be a total killjoy about it! If I had no other reason I'd avoid forbidding drag because doing so outs gender variant and genderqueer people if you're not careful. And yes, there's lots of history there, isn't there? I don't want to be one of those whiny "but it's my cuuuuuulture (so who cares if it hurts you)" people, but it is true that comic drag for purim is a much older tradition than pomo gender theory.
I remember when I was a student, the university held its first ever Q-ball (can you imagine, the first time ever they'd held a prom where same-sex couples were officially welcome?) And the organizers made a "no drag" rule, and there was a huge controversy about it. I think basically the intent of the rule was to keep the event from being invaded by a bunch of straight guys (the stereotypical college rugby teams, for example, who certainly have their own tradition of drag-based humour) thinking it was hilarious to point and laugh at the freaks. But the butch lesbians were up in arms about it, and the trans* and gender variant crowd felt further marginalized by an LGBT society that already wasn't doing brilliantly with trans and related issues. And some incredibly annoying straight male student politics hacks tried to rules lawyer their way around the ban by starting a university-wide debate about the definition of the word "woman" which caused a lot of damage and helped nobody, and they didn't even want to turn up to the Q-ball in dresses anyway, they just wanted to be pedantic about the interpretation of the rule. And the damned JCR at my college voted to send one of their male officers to the Q-ball in drag as a horrendously misguided "punishment" because he'd said something homophobic in a debate. The consensus was that the ball committee wanted to send the message that this was an event for serious, respectable gay people and not those stereotypical screechy queens, and forgot that not every person who might want to attend a Q-ball is a cisgendered man.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 05:59 pm (UTC)It also seems like one of the times when trying to propose an official rule may be borrowing trouble. Maybe a "no large crowds of drunken homophobes" rule would have been sufficient, without trying to turn that into an "objective" rule of "no crossdressing".
Edit: (There are times when subjectivity can be very open to abuse, but there are times when an objective rule is overkill.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 06:24 pm (UTC)So, another thing about the drag party, which turned out not to be very focused on drag, was that all the people who did come in drag were women or genderqueer people usually read as women (I hope I'm not outing anyone), who seemed to really enjoy dressing up. There were a couple of excellent black tie style smart outfits in keeping with gender identity, but basically the men who attended were all reluctant to drag up whereas many of the women were keen. Probably that says more about the kind of women I know than anything else, but it is kind of interesting that putting on ties, waistcoats, fake facial hair etc was perceived as fun and not likely to result in ridicule.
I think you do have a point with the protochronism (excellent $10 word meaning 'we did it first') of purim dress-up compared to other forms of it - but from what you say, a large part of what you found difficult is the overlaying of gender essentialism by contemporary kids and their parents. I guess this is something like the ongoing war of attrition that right-on parents experience when their kids are assailed by gender binary normativity all the time? Not that I'm saying 'parents have it worse because they are dealing with this all the time', but rather, you might find some sympathetic annoyance from parents who know exactly what you mean!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 06:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-26 11:33 pm (UTC)Also, the Purim tradition of mocking the powerful is making me think of a very early version of 'Allo 'Allo.
[Edit: and the thing I originally thought of, but then forgot before posting, was the long tradition of men wearing womens' clothing as a disguise when in rebellion, like the Merched Beca in my part of Wales.]
One possible thought on potentially making the event more fun as well as organizy: would it be possible for you to plan & introduce new aspects?