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Genderqueer and neck deep in magic

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Unconditional Love

20:32 / 15.04.07

Perhaps it would be good to start looking at that immensity, plurality and diversity rather than clinging to convenient figure heads and closed systems as to my eye that has been the action of the past. Maybe an aspect of beginning that process is to start with the notion of selves, rather than self, a polymorphous entity.

When models have become convenient and conservative in expression even a many models approach starts to yield similar results, so expressing through our favourite models begins to normalise and confine practice, how does it then become a model that is many within many? A mutiltude of plural sentience. ?

trouser the trouserian

10:18 / 16.04.07

heteronormativity as I understand it, refers to the discourses, ideologies, representations and social norms which work together to maintain heterosexuality as natural and normal - that heterosexuality is universal and the standard against which all other forms of sexual identity are judged. It's a tricky thing to get to grips with. For example, there's the argument that oppositional sexual categories such as "lesbian" and "gay" emerge from heteronormativity because heteronormativity produces the need for such categories and the insistence that people be one or the other.

So, when Disco says that female' energy is passive, receptive and connected to the earth; 'male' energy is creative, active and connected to the sky; the two must work in harmony, etc etc... this is a good example of heteronormativity within an occult context, as these polar opposites are often presented as universal (i.e. they apply to everyone regardless of culture) and essential, and often with much associated "proof" from different mythologies & cultural frameworks.

I found this article Queering the Dragonfest which looks at how unquestioned heteronormative assumptions appear within a pagan setting - and how they are challenged within that setting.

10:33 / 16.04.07

That's the way I understand heteronormativity. My unconscious framing of the world in two categories, 'Het/normal' and 'other'. I'd like to think I am getting better at realising and preventing it but the culture I live in is so saturated with the attitude that het=norm, it's easy to slip.

trouser the trouserian

11:46 / 16.04.07

I'd like to think I am getting better at realising and preventing it but the culture I live in is so saturated with the attitude that het=norm, it's easy to slip.

That's a good point Quantum. Heteronormativity is something that very much shapes and structures our experience of the world, so some queer theorists and activists propose that what we need to do is render it visible in our lives and where necessary, critique and unpack it's manifestations.

Mako is a hungry fish

15:05 / 17.04.07

So, when Disco says that female' energy is passive, receptive and connected to the earth; 'male' energy is creative, active and connected to the sky; the two must work in harmony, etc etc... this is a good example of heteronormativity within an occult context, as these polar opposites are often presented as universal (i.e. they apply to everyone regardless of culture) and essential, and often with much associated "proof" from different mythologies & cultural frameworks.

I don't see them as being either/or categories, but elemental ones from which myriad combinations can be made, just as computer software is virtually limitless even though it's based on zeros and ones. Yes they're polar opposites, though they are on a scale without beginning or end (that I've encountered) which seems to repeat itself in fractal form; even the most 'male' energy can be divided into 'male' and 'female', not only from the perspective of one polarity being more masculine than another (e.g the lit end of a match compared to the unlit), but also due to a flux where it exhausts itself (i.e the match burns itself out).

As far as this relates to gender, I don't think anyone is purely masculine or purely feminine, though obviously we all have preferences.

15:08 / 17.04.07

A push is just a pull from the other direction.

Deciding either motion is gendered seems more than unnecessary.

I'm just glad the air is nice enough to get out of the way when I reach for a glass. And if it reached for the glass, I'd do my best to move aside, too.

Mako is a hungry fish

13:20 / 18.04.07

A push is just a pull from the other direction.

Though one force is doing the pushing/pulling and the other force is being pushed/pulled, one is active and one is passive.

13:49 / 18.04.07

What's action and passivity got to do with gender?

Unconditional Love

14:16 / 18.04.07

Polymorphous perverse, i had heard this expression in psychology but never had i actually looked at what it means, i found it intresting especially the area that describes its context within political jargon.

Polymorphous perverse

"the repression of polymorphous desire as a means of economic social control, and postulate the libratory efficacy of practicing adult polymorphous perversion."

There is something about this idea of gender as a social construct that i am beginning to think may well be spot on, because the social construction is intrinsic to society's foundation it is in almost everything that hasn't been designed from an outside perspective.

Yet a transition or addition from one social construct to another is going to create alot of chaos and conflict, you would think? How do you present gender/sexual fluidity as in some sense normal?

Unconditional Love

14:20 / 18.04.07

Yet the ideas contained there in, induce a sense of fear, because of the uncertainty of identity and role, the clarity of consciousness is no longer measured by identifiers but how open it is to just percieve and relate perhaps. That is a vast horizon of potential experience.

14:22 / 18.04.07

What's action and passivity got to do with gender?

Weell...

See there are these things called gender constructs. Traits or behaviors a culture assigns to a gender which it then assigns to people. It just so happens fairly prevelant gender constructs in our bi-polar (m/f) society plop action in one gender and passivity in another.

Mako is a hungry fish

14:36 / 18.04.07

What's action and passivity got to do with gender?

In the sense that gender is a way to distinguish between categories, a lot, though in the sense that gender is an outdated social construct (especially in the western world) than not much; womanfolk don't always stay at home while the menfolk go to work, and when they do they don't sit idly by until it's time to make dinner.

As I said earlier, I don't see them as being either/or categories, but elemental ones from which myriad combinations can be made.

Unconditional Love

14:42 / 18.04.07

Do womenfolk and menfolk also become elemental cauldrons of associations with active passivity and passive activism? Mixed together folk in motion, clustered? Like making an intresting soup, with good taste.

Mako is a hungry fish

15:04 / 18.04.07

Sure, why not? Makes for an amusing day in the life of a heteronomalist occult dictionary editor.

14:21 / 23.04.07

Ok so.

More and more I'm having to access traits and ways of being that I personally lump in the Femme box for magical work. Part of this work is putting me into intense dialogue with myself around body dysphoria. In my case discomfort with my socially constructed gender has pushed me away from anything Femme and over the last few years I've slowly been reclaiming the parts discarded in there as my own.

My physical health improvement over the last few years has also put me dead in the path of dealing with my body dysphoria. The more Femme I look the worse it gets which generates, as god_hole reminded me the other night, excellent heat for doing magical work.

I've been on the learning curve with this part of my work for the past year since I *somehow* got drafted to be the May Queen last Beltane for a community of a very wide gender spectrum. My Gods have made it very clear that part of my work is public and sometimes that will require performing certain Femme offices (as well as Butch ones which I'm already comfortable with). I would in a heartbeat hand it over to anyone who wanted it regardless of their gender kit or genitalia if I could. But as is often the case I am called to do work where I don't want to because of personal issues.

The form my current work is taking is simply inhabiting those shapes and ways of being I normally avoid when in sacred space. By allowing myself to be pulled where I need to go without too much resistance I transform. The effort I'm putting into it is confronting my discomfort and moving through it rather than just avoiding things that make me uncomfortable. Which can be incredibly difficult and challenging.

*

16:17 / 23.04.07

XK, I read you loud and clear.

16:29 / 23.04.07

Though one force is doing the pushing/pulling and the other force is being pushed/pulled, one is active and one is passive.

In the I Ching, actually, there are four categories - young yin, old yin, young yang, and old yang. I think it's the old ones that are about to change into the young versions of the opposite pole, while the young ones stay the same. When throwing the stalks/tossing the coins to get a hexagram, these old poles are how you get changing lines, which (possibly) point the ways your situation is changing, or (possibly) underline unexpected or external influences on your situation.

So it's not always a matter of being pushed or pulled by an opposite -- in some versions, the change simply happens as the natural course of things.

16:47 / 23.04.07

I guess I just see the natural course of things. Unnatural is a hypothetical, but I have yet to see it actually demonstrated.

I would suggest, however, that the sort of natural/unnatural, male/female, hot/cold dynamic binarisms, which seem to usually be directed towards making one the right, the real, or the promoted and somehow shunting the other to a failing of the first type... would it be okeh to posit that doing this rarely has anything but short-term value? And always has long-term complications, making things not fit, fit awkwardly, or otherwise making us uncomfortable when the binarism doesn't encompass well?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

17:12 / 23.04.07

...hot/cold dynamic binarisms, which seem to usually be directed towards making one the right, the real, or the promoted and somehow shunting the other to a failing of the first type... would it be okeh to posit that doing this rarely has anything but short-term value?

The "real" pole is an interesting idea, Des, and one that's never particularly stood out to me before.

But, I'm was thinking that hot/cold (as a metaphor) would be an example of a helpful polarity unlike some of the others you cite? Two states that are desirable depending on which of them you are currently engrossed in (I'm freezing and need the hot, then I'm burning and need the cold), and entirely short-term value is all you would really need for them (the only long-term being the shift back and forth) and would be a better way of looking at the other polarities -- temporary and designed to be in constant flux? Neither has to be treated as the "real" one in the greater context, just incidentally important for the moment.

Always found the natural/unnatural duality rather perplexing, because I've never met an unnatural that wasn't natural in some way (but that probably needs some unpacking).

Imaginary Mongoose Solutions

02:58 / 24.04.07

"Could you say more about Freud's association with the Golden Dawn?"

There's a really brief mention of it in (coincidentaly enough) Alex Owen's The Place of Enchantment. Everything else I've heard falls into the categories of groundless supposition or the anecdotal. Still, it's not hard to see him "in conversation" with the ideas of self (and the exploration thereof) that were bubbling up in his peer group.

"There's an interesting analysis of Crowley in this regard in Stan Cohen & Laurie Taylor's 1978 book Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life - a book I'd highly reccomend, btw."

Noted. And the 2nd time someone has mentioned that book to me, this week.

"I tend to think more in terms of the magical groups of the period articulating the social tensions & interplays within culture."

Which I guess boils my question down to: Why are so many of our modern magical groups apparently articulating the social tensions and interplays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries? That's not an attack on magical spaces, by the way - if anything it seems to be a comment on the social structures that surround them.

"So for example, at QPC, there are those of us who're heartily sick of the kind of polarity-based framing of gender and sexuality that Disco mentioned above and have consequently moved away from it - it's no longer valid for us as an explanatory model and certainly not as a cosmological 'truth' (which is how it tends to get presented)."

And I'm loving everything I hear about QPC. Sounds like a fantastic space.

"Which kind of left me a bit gobsmacked."

That would be my reaction, too.

07:28 / 24.04.07

hot/cold (as a metaphor) would be an example of a helpful polarity

Well, I think they're all helpful in certain ways, it's mostly a matter of situation. I mean, it helps to know where someone else puts the hot and the cold markers if you are, say, drawing a bath for them.

They're movable qualifiers, as are almost all binary qualifies. The more choices you get, or the more open one is about how artificial the measurement is... A forty-seven degree radius from Point L on a map, could be read as going forty-seven degrees above the map, beneath it, or into some hypothetical giant subterranean bunker we can't see on the map, even, but our tendency would be, I'd think, to go map and degrees (360) and end up with a territory circled out on the actual map. Or, we look at it and realize it doesn't make a whole great lot sense, and stop playing. Regardless of whether the map or the intent are real, we have no idea what the coordinates mean, and even if we're being then limited to the map.

It's like a shaggy dog story, innit? Life, and everything else. On and on in some very real and v. serious direction and you feel both elated and cheated by the witty but entirely side-attack climactic gag. But when you know it's a shaggy dog story...

18:41 / 02.05.07

I am less inclined to see hot/cold as an actual polarity, in the terms of this discussion. It is my understanding that they are each merely descriptions of how fast or less so molecules are moving, and convection eventually evens things out. Maybe the binaries are just temporary manifestations, waiting for entropy to work its will!

As far as magical and ritual context use of polarities of gender, my 'home' group is queer-centric but hetero-inclusive...and only in rare circumstances, around fertility magic, is a biological heterodyad actually required. (After all, my group meets at a farm, so sheep and goats have to be born.) Thus it is that a biologically fertile and ready&willing May Queen and Green Man are required for this weekend's Beltane ritual. However, that is pretty much it for employment of that particular binary. While it is true that men beat the woods (ahem) for the Maypole, and women put it into the hole in the center of the ritual field's labyrinth, those categories are by identification, and those who are in-between pass the Maypole from the outside of the labyrinth (directly in) to the center. In this instance, there is not just a flexibility around gender variance, but a distinct recognition of it.

Once a year I go to my brother's coven-ish group's celebration of Imbolc, and the 'traditional' male/female leadership, imagery, and liturgical language is always startling...and for me as a queer man partnered with another man, a tad uncomfortable...as welcoming as they have been in other ways. In that cosmos, the message I get is that I have no place.

01:19 / 11.05.07

T. Thorn Coyle posted a short piece on her livejournal that seems relevant to this thread, dealing with the "active/passive" binary, gender, and gender variant or transgressive behavior.

"Receptivity does not equal passivity."

Mako is a hungry fish

16:58 / 11.05.07

In the I Ching, actually, there are four categories - young yin, old yin, young yang, and old yang.

I interpret it more as new and full, though I think there are five categories where the fifth is a balance of yin and yang, hence the five elemental phases.

I think it's the old ones that are about to change into the young versions of the opposite pole, while the young ones stay the same.

I don't think the young ones stay the same, I think they continue to 'age' until they become the older version, then continue until they can age no more, at which point they 'die'; it's like breathing, where we start with an in breath and continue until our lungs are full (if we're breathing correctly), at which point there is a momment where we're neither breathing in nor out ( I love that momment), and then we breath out and continue to do so until our lungs are fully empty.

So it's not always a matter of being pushed or pulled by an opposite -- in some versions, the change simply happens as the natural course of things.

Though that change requires that something else changes in order to accomodate it; what was Yang becomes Yin, as what was Yin becomes Yang.

19:59 / 11.05.07

...those categories are by identification, and those who are in-between pass the Maypole from the outside of the labyrinth (directly in) to the center. In this instance, there is not just a flexibility around gender variance, but a distinct recognition of it.

I do like this, although it (and other comments) makes me wonder why 'male' and 'female' are seen as opposites? Unlike hot/cold, light/dark and day/night, where one is the absence of the other, 'male' and 'female' are just different categories, like 'cat' and 'dog', which often get given as opposites! I know we think of them as on a scale, as polar or binary, I tend to although I don't like it, but I do wonder about it. (male/female, not cat/dog!)

I wonder if it relates to the same pattern of seperating 'spirit' and 'matter', we categorise things, then as we've learnt to think in opposites thats what we do with categories. But that still begs the question of why we think in opposites in the first place!

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