It is with great joy that I announce the
beginning of a new academic quarter at my college. This is an enormous
relief; I’m afraid that last quarter’s “nothing but linguistics
courses” schedule turned my brain into a mishmash of information with
ridiculously small practical application, including why the plural of
“mouse” is “mice”, why chimps cannot speak, how to form plurals
in Mohawk (the language, not the hairstyle) and, in a high point in my
academic career, that the Indo-European word for “smite” sounds an
awful lot like the name “Gwen.” I suspect that if I wanted to be
wealthy I should’ve done pre-law.
I digress, however. My point is that it
is finally spring in New Hampshire. (All together now: Woo!) Living up
North gives you a bizarre frame of reference—my classmates and I are
wont to break out the shorts and flip flops every time the temperature
gets above, say, fifty-five degrees. This is often accompanied by
bewildered looks at visitors who insist that anything less than three
layers is an open invitation to frostbite in this sort of weather.
Wimps. This very week we have gone from sandals back to boots for that
one day that it snowed and right back to t shirts again. It’s only
Tuesday; I can’t handle this ambiguity.
This upswing in temperature (it got down
to the negative twenties here; my mother has lost the right to complain
about the weather to me) has allowed my friends and I to engage in one
of our favorite activities, sitting outside and talking. (This is
occasionally done with a slight amount of belligerence—surely we’re
not the only people who sit outdoors when it’s forty degrees because
it’s technically spring, thank you very much.) At any rate, I have of
late frequently been drinking coffee and talking about Deep Queer
Philosophy with my group of friends, the Big Queer Posse of Doom. And
no, we don’t have anything better to do than think of amusing names
for ourselves, as we are officially the largest possible group of queers
that can currently assemble on campus where nobody has dated anyone
else. (This is true, any other group of five or more and you can play
connect the dykes.)
These conversations, particularly the
three in the morning ones fueled by angst and caffeine, often turn to
discussion of theory. Contrary to an enormous amount of evidence, I
would like to think that I’m not one to excessively overanalyze
things. Be that as it may, it’s somewhat staggering to be part of a
conversation where someone says, “I don’t believe in gender, but I
only date women. Also, I believe in vaginas,” and have this statement
be taken somewhat seriously. Yes, we mocked it mercilessly, but this led
to a discussion on what it actually means to believe in gender. I try to
be radical and subversive and open minded about gender. Really, I do,
but whenever I walk into the LGBTQAXYZOMGWTFBBQ resource center and read
the sign on the wall saying “Gender Free Zone” I find myself looking
down and thinking “Nope, still a 36 C.” I’m either failing at
being a gender warrior or am far too sarcastic for my own good. (Both of
these options can be true at the same time.)
The subject of debate this evening, for
example, was about butch and femme in the lesbian community. Even though
I’m convinced that younger generations don’t put very much stock in
butch/femme anymore, it’s one of those things, like mullets, that
lesbians will forever be obsessed with and be identified with. Tonight
we managed to create a sliding scale theoretical model of butch and
femme-ness based on hair length, pant and shoe preference, knowledge of
power tools, and perkiness. Comparatively speaking it holds up to other
models that do not seem to have been created by bored college students.
From this I conclude that while I don’t hold to butch/femme ideals,
they sure are fun to bicker about. Also, I’m not sure if I should ever
hold a door open again.
Lest the gentle reader think that my gay
life consists of imbibing caffeine and arguing, one of the big upcoming
social events that I am looking forward to is the night the gay groups
are taking over the student-run bar for an evening and turning it into a
gay bar. I have no idea what the trustees will think of this—some of
them still lament the college going coed in the first place—and it’s
tempting to send them the email that advertises such bar specials as
Fruity Flamer, Ellen DeGingerale, and Siegfried and Roy Rogers.
Karaoke—which I’m convinced should be a competitive sport at the Gay
Games—is to be had, presumably after one has knocked back a few of the
evening’s special, Gayer Than Monkeys on Nitrous. One can only wonder
what postmodern queer analysis would say.
Kristen Minor, a member of the class
of 2004 at Dartmouth College, has started to drink coffee. Yikes. She is
now prone to twitching at night and can be reached at kristen@youth-guard.org.
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