#the point is 'you're centering the experience of a certain category of person and either degrading or writing out the experience of others' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rollercoasterwords · 1 year

Note

I don’t have anyone else to ask, so here I am. What do you think about the term “boy lesbian” ? I just saw a TikTok where a person said they were a boy lesbian not a woman lesbian? I got the same vibe from that as when a lot of people on TikTok tried to say identifying as lesbian was excluding an it should be called non men loving non men?

well my short answer is that i think boy lesbians are cool + sexy + i wish they would all come over 2 my house so we could kiss w tongue <3 however i am sensing from ur message that this is perhaps a concept that u are a bit wary or skeptical about (? might be reading tone incorrectly but that is the vibe i'm getting lol) so i will put a longer answer under the cut:

so i feel like what you're asking when you say "what do you think about this" is essentially "do you think people should be able to call themselves 'boy lesbians'" which. is a source of online discourse that i typically try to avoid because i think discourse about who's "allowed" to identify a certain way in the queer community is basically pointless and does more harm than good. like, at the end of the day, there's really no use in policing who's "allowed" to call themselves what, because people can literally identify themselves however they want and you can't control that, because identity is an inherently personal and subjective experience. and so anytime people do start trying to strictly police identity + draw clear boundaries around who's "allowed" to use which labels, usually the result is just alienating and ostracizing other queer people who we should be in community with, as we share overlapping political struggles.

but. looking specifically at the term "boy lesbian" (and terms like it). i know a lot of people immediately get up in arms going "the whole point of lesbian is that there's NO BOYS!!!!!" but. personally i do not think that's true. every label currently used by the queer community is historically and contextually specific; most labels like 'gay' 'lesbian' and 'trans' are umbrella terms that include broad and varied communities of people who do not all share exactly the same identities or experiences. and the label 'lesbian' as an umbrella term has not always been used + conceptualized historically the way it's used today; it has also not always been 'exclusively women who aren't attracted to men' or whatever other definition people try to claim. many lesbians, especially gender nonconforming lesbians, have complex + nuanced + fraught relationships to gender + womanhood, and there has specifically always been a lot of overlap in (using today's terms) transmasculine and lesbian communities. leslie feinberg's stone butch blues comes immediately to mind as one example of lesbian experience that does not align simply or perfectly with womanhood and is much more nebulously transmasculine. at the end of the day, it's impossible to draw strict definitional boundaries around umbrella terms like "lesbian," because to do so will always inevitably fail to account for certain people who do identify with the term--and what right does anyone have to tell someone else that their personal experience of identity isn't "allowed?"

like - defining lesbianism as either centered around womanhood or positioned against manhood both inevitably devolve into gender essentialism. if you say "lesbians are women who love women," that requires you to provide a strict definition of "woman," something that is essentially impossible without resorting to gender essentialism. if you say "lesbians are nonmen who love nonmen," then you run into the same problem with defining "men." this is because both "men" and "women" are also historically + contextually specific umbrella terms used to define social categories of people, and not some sort of pre-existing inherent natural identities.

so then you might be saying--but wait a second, if all these labels are so fluid and nonspecific and personally defined, then what's the use of labeling anything!!! aren't you just saying that none of it means anything?!

no, not at all! what i'm saying here is that trying to draw strict boundaries around labels that have to do with gender + sexuality is at best pointless and at worst harmful, because gender and sexuality are inherently personal experiences and you can't police someone's own sense of self, nor should you try to. but there are three areas where labels are useful and do matter:

1 - personal value

labels are useful for individuals trying to understand themselves and how they relate to the world. people can find comfort or joy or simple understanding by labeling themselves in relation to the world around them; this sense of labeling is deeply personal and up to each individual in terms of how/to what extent they want to partake in it

2 - community

umbrella terms like "woman" "lesbian" "man" "trans" etc are all useful in socially specific contexts for identifying shared experiences + building community. if i say to someone "i'm a lesbian," and they say "oh i'm a lesbian too," i'm not going to assume that we have the exact same experiences of gender + sexuality that fit some made-up set of rules, but i am going to recognize that this person has certain experiences which overlap with my own, and we can build a community around those experiences. this is the way that basically any label works in a social context--if i say "i'm american" and someone else says "oh me too," i wouldn't just assume that we've had the exact same "american" experiences, because america is a vast country with a huge diversity of people + lifestyles + environments etc etc, y'know? social labels like these are useful for identifying broad overlap in experiences, but because they encompass such broad groups of people it's silly to try and make strict rules about who's "allowed" in the group--especially if your goal is to build community

3 - identifying + naming political struggles + oppression

this follows along the same lines as point 2 -- basically, most queer labels function as umbrella terms meant to bring together people of varied experiences + backgrounds who share common sites of oppression + common political struggles. like, historically, this has been the center of queer community-building--the fact that we are all being oppressed by the same people in overlapping ways. when i tell you "i'm a lesbian," that sentence does not tell you all that much about my own, individual, personal experience of gender. but it does tell you a lot about how i am politically positioned in the world and the kinds of political struggles i might face, and that's what makes that label so socially meaningful. like, the purpose of these labels is not to give everybody insight to the nuances of personal identity; it's to build community + identify our shared struggles with each other.

and i think one reason this discourse gets so heated in online spaces is that people get really angry about the idea of, like, "well what if someone calls themself a lesbian to infiltrate lesbian spaces!!!" which. i mean a lot of that fearmongering is rooted in transphobia quite honestly, but. at the end of the day, if someone is identifying themself as a lesbian, i'm going to assume that they have a good personal reason for doing so, and what matters to me will be knowing that we share a political struggle. i trust that if i encounter someone who's just trolling and "pretending" to be a lesbian or whatever i'll be able to recognize it and just....choose not to interact with that person. but honestly i don't even really think that actually happens--like i said, i think a lot of the fear that drives people to try and create strict definitional boundaries around the term "lesbian" is rooted in transphobia.

and i think something else driving a lot of this online discourse surrounding queer labels is like....this emphasis on identity labels as primarily a personal identifier rather than identity labels as primarily a community-building tool. like, there seems to be an emphasis particularly in online spaces + amongst certain groups of queer people to really want to micromanage identity + create specific rules + definition for each label so that, like, you're getting as much personal information as possible about someone who tells you that label, because you know they're following these detailed rules. but like. a) you truly are not entitled to personal information about anyone's individual experience of gender and/or sexuality and b) that's not the point of these labels!!!!! like i promise you it is so much more important to just accept that these are umbrella terms with nebulous boundaries so that you can take a step back and evaluate the social context in which they're being used in order to then build community. it is okay if there aren't strict rules and definitions! what matters more is being able to look at a specific contexts + the way a broad term can be applied differently in those specific contexts.

anyway. last thing i will say to this whole point is that i personally am someone who identifies to a certain extent with terms like boy lesbian or boydyke, in that my own sense of gender is much more centered around dyke than it is womanhood and i don't necessarily experience lesbianism as something centered around women/womanhood. my lesbianism feels more closely tied to gendernonconformity, genderqueerness, and overlaps a lot with experiences i've heard transmasculine people speak about. but lesbianism is still central to my identity, as i am politically positioned in society as a lesbian and it is the best umbrella term to give people a sense of my identity at a glance, and thus generally the best term for me to position myself within queer spaces + to seek out community. so i understand on a personal level why people might identify as a 'boy lesbian,' and hopefully from this personal anecdote you can understand why someone might too! if u have any questions or anything feel free to shoot me another message; i'm trying to cover a lot of ground in this response so i didn't fully expand on like. every single point bc that would have taken forever lol

#ask #ranting and raving #also this whole response is premised on like. eschewing gender essentialism. so if u believe in gender essentialism then obviously #u will disagree lol #but i'm assuming we're on the same page abt gender being a social construct if u are following this blog xoxo

103 notes · View notes

beautifulpersonpeach · 2 years

Note

I saw the question about the fandom ignoring Jikook and I just wanted to add a point as an LGBTQ+ person there could also be another possibility - Jikook's bright, incandescent, guilt-free associations just seeming too good to be true. Maybe this puts me in category 2 ? But I just can't work out the maths of how they could be the people they are - loyal, dedicated, cautious, private, unselfish - and be so open about such a major secret that can hurt their own team. 'Hidden stories' have more appeal for me because that's what I'm familiar with, and also I guess I think there's another couple in BTS who show a lot of unexpected intimacy without being front and centre in the same way so it's further confusing. (maybe a 3.2 category which isn't really rival shippers but 'competing' shippers since the idea of two ships that can be true is hard to believe)

Idk I just see a lot of people talk about it's homophobia to not believe in Jikook and I think that is ignoring those of us who are cautious because we don't want to get hurt / were hurt and can't trust freely. And / or have alternate fantasies or truths we see in BTS!

Hi Anon,

I think I understand what you mean and I've seen this pushback, that jikook are so open and seemingly 'too good to be true', in some other spaces as well. I applaud the self awareness you're showing here too, because you admit it's likely your own personal experiences mostly influencing how you think about pairings in BTS, including jikook and other pairings you find more interesting partly because they appear clandestine. At risk of dumbing down your point, this is one central argument rival shippers, especially taekookers, hold on to.

My primary problem with the argument that jikook are too openly affectionate to be anything more, is that it is awfully reductive. Not just because it dismisses the agency of Jimin and Jungkook, but because it assumes the five other guys in their team are just play-acting roles all the time as well. It assumes jikook and BTS have no understanding of how the k-pop industry works, and have no resources at their disposal to engage in any relationships they wish to pursue.

In other words,

Why is it impossible to think queer people do not feel an impulse to freely interact with people they love and care about?

Why is it doubtful to think if given the opportunity to do so in a socially licensed environment, such as within the expectations of a k-pop idol who can freely engage in skinship with his bandmates, they would not take that opportunity?

Why do their own moments of deference and affection towards each other suddenly mean less, simply because those moments are frequent and sometimes captured on camera?

Why is it that several first-hand accounts from idols stating that relationships and queer relationships are somewhat common between idols and bandmates, are dismissed without consideration?

As I've said before, I don't really know what jikook are. They could both have partners that have nothing to do with each other. The exact nature of their relationship is not something that actually concerns me or that I put much stake into. But it is a myth that queer people are almost always clandestine and that they hardly ever openly express affection towards people they care about.

Again as I've said before, I myself am a queer person and one reason I could no longer ignore jikook despite not even biasing either of them, was because I recognized in them elements of my own queer expression as a visible minority who has lived in a conservative non-accepting country, and I noted how their actions and words have remained consistent for almost 10 years of watching them.

We all have access to the same media showing how the members interact (however certain shippers such as taekookers have made a point of not just dismissing this media, but avoiding it altogether), but the way we interpret that media ultimately boils down to how much we center our own preconceived notions in the narratives we create around the guys. Regardless of what I personally feel at the end of the day about whether or not queer people in the public sphere can openly show affection, I cannot in good conscience dismiss the consistency with which jikook have done so towards each other.

Their own words and actions, shown consistently with cameras on or off, have to count for something. To dismiss that in favour of what feels more familiar or 'right', is entirely your prerogative, but I hope you can understand why for me that view holds no weight at all.

As to the categories, yes I'd place you in a subset of Type 2 and Type 3. :)

#jikook

25 notes · View notes