Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

What is Gender? - Coggle Diagram

- - - - You see, my Sisyphean experience in Iowa is a continuation of troubles that began while I was growing up in Chicago, in the late 1970s and ’80s, in the notorious Governor Henry Horner Homes, the same site that Alex Kotlowitz writes about in his journalistic ethnography, There Are No Children Here. In fact, as Kotlowitz was gathering material for his book, I was still living there. But unlike his subjects, Lafeyette and Pharoah, who are portrayed as boys who must fight the criminalizing lure of the ghetto in order to succeed in school, I was seen as an anomaly. Kotlowitz sees Lafeyette and Pharoah as having identities compatible with the ghetto even as he describes their striving to get out. My identity, however, was atypical, alienating me from my neighbors and hood and excluding me from representations of “authentic” ghetto life. Thus I didn’t have to fight to get out of the ghetto. I was kicked out
      - Literacy habits, like reading novels of a certain kind and speaking what might appear to be standard English, have always made me seem more queer, more white identified, and more middle class than I am. When I fail to meet the class, gender, and racial notions that others ascribe to me, I’m punished. In some ways, living in a mostly white town and being an assistant professor at a Big Ten school heightens—not lessens, as I had hoped—the conflict that stems from the sometimes converging, but oftentimes diverging, racial and gender expectations that are held out for black men and that we hold for each other.
      - Perhaps some black men in that barbershop are also trying to avoid racial and cultural punishment. Instead of negotiating two worlds, maybe they have chosen to live in only one—a microcosm, a subculture of white society that accepts and mandates a certain sociolinguistic performance of masculinity. Because they have chosen and are accepted by a community, perhaps they have no need to envy me as I do them. But then what do they lose when they don’t try to imitate what I represent? It’s my desire to reconcile my ghetto past with my middle class aspirations and possibly be of assistance to others in the process
- - - - Mills describes Eric as “one of the regulars in the shop.” But unlike other patrons, “his identity is shrouded in suspicion and innuendo,” because “the barbers and many customers assume that Eric is gay.” As a result, unlike other regulars who become key players in the discourse community, Mills writes that Eric “is silenced as an agenda setter....... When [he] would initiate conversations, the men would turn away, ignore him, or patronize him for a short while only to move quickly to other topics.” Instead of engaging Eric, they would “act annoyed by his mannerisms and voice.”
      - Mills doesn’t describe the particulars of Eric’s voice and manner, but it’s conclusive that for the others his masculine performance is insufficiently heterosexual. What’s interesting about the other men’s perception of Eric’s sexuality is that it’s not based on facts but on how he acts. On this Mills is clear: “Eric never came out to me” or to the other men, he says. “There was no confirmation of his sexual identity in the months I spent at the shop.” Eric’s insufficient heterosexual performance cast him “outside the boundaries of blackness because his demeanor and speech,” Mills writes, “are beyond the narrow definitions of masculinity.”
      - I recognize the problem, and I’m working so that it doesn’t consume me. “Hell,” I say to encourage myself, “I’m an English professor; that justifies my reading a novel in a barbershop. And what’s this nonsense of trying to fit in, to avoid alienation, to avoid name calling: ‘Sissy!’ ‘Faggot!’” But I wonder: What does not fitting in cost me? This issue of trying to fit in but never succeeding, of being perpetually on the margins of various communities and never finding a way into any one of them, is the trope of my life, making me something of a black Sisyphus. Academic literacy is my heavy rock.
- - - - I can’t neatly explain why my visit to the barbershop brings all this to mind and spurs my unease. I mean, the barbers are only courteous. They take me ahead of clients who come less frequently. They even call me sir, although I’m not much older than they are and tell them to use my first name. Still, I can’t shake the way I feel. For although I know that some of my discomfort is self-induced,
      - To embrace my blackness, my heritage, my manliness, I identify with men who represent the ghetto. I no longer want to deny my class background or the racial experience associated with it. I identify to belong. I disidentify to escape racism, to avoid the structures that oppress black men. But I also disidentify to retaliate against black men—to punish them for what I perceive as their efforts to disown me. This ambivalence provokes me to imitate and just as often to dissociate from the black men I envy. Both efforts fail. Neither alleviates my racial anxiety. Instead, they heighten the angst I experience. As a result I am hyper aware of how masculine I am (not) and how black I (don’t) act.
      - “While sitting in the only black barbershop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on the morning of writing this prelude, trying to think of the best way to acquaint you with what this book is about and who I am as the author behind it, I was struck with just how different I am from a lot of other black men”