To my Hetero Allies

This trip to NY was immersed in Queer culture, with approximately half of our expeditions to Queer based organizations or events to study how minorities represent themselves within the city. While this made my trip, allowing me explore areas of New York that I would not have gotten to see otherwise, I know that the trip left some of my allies with heterosexual guilt.

It seems strange to me that in a group majority of heterosexual people, a homosexual dominance can overtake the heteronormative assumption. Our class attended so many queer events from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Pride Rallies and Marches, LGBT centers, that the homosexual theme overtook the heterosexuality of the city of New York, allowing us to see a different view of the city than the average tourist. This perspective followed a minority in the city and even the closest heterosexual allies in the group felt uncomfortable about their privileged hetero lifestyle.

But gender identity and sexual preference is not a choice and they should not feel bad for being a majority. Does this hetero guilt prevent people in the hetero culture from exploring queer culture? In my own life I am often afraid to enter a culture I know nothing about because I am afraid of accidentally disrespecting the culture or it members out of ignorance and this would prevent people from gaining knowledge of other people’s experiences. I am glad our group was full of open minded people who embraced the events that Marie took us too, even though they would not have chosen to attend those venues on their own. Kudos to those who are so welcoming of a culture that is not entirely their own.

Masculinity in Authority

Existing in New York for three weeks I encountered cops on every corner, including a cruiser that idled outside of my residence 24 hours a day. There was a level of surveillance that put me on edge, a dominant institutional authority that loomed over the pedestrians of the space. Not a single person I discussed this authority with felt safer because of their presence and a lot of them felt a little threatened by the cops because of their perceived ethnicity or gender. The male dominated cop force asserts a strong masculinity that is used against other men and minorities in the pedestrian space. While they did not over step their authority in front of me on this trip, their constant presence asserted the Big Brother voyeurism over public space, making it feel like we were not free but constantly monitored, which was accentuated by the security cameras on a lot of the corners.

In New York the male cops were not an authority that made us feel safe. There were three incidences where male security figures asserted their masculine dominance on the women in my group. A cop watching one of them change when they forgot to close their blind in the morning, a security guard trying to pick a couple of them up while on the job, and male security guards hanging out in the lingerie section of Macy’s, on duty but presenting an intimidating relationship with the female lingerie shoppers. One incident in Times Square after we saw Memphis gave me a great understanding of the masculinity of the police force. As Sarah went to ask for directions in Times Square, a group of four or five cops began a mating ritual with playful candour, flirting with our group of five beautiful tourists, bragging about their ‘Tony Award’ and getting their pictures taken with the girls. Using their position as authority, dripping with masculinity they displayed their feathers in a way to attract us and draw us in, circling us and ignoring the public around them.

The scarcity of female cops in New York was repeated at the G20 Summit in Toronto. While there was a minor female presence and the media tended to focus on the female cops as a way to soften the harsh masculine authority that dominated the peaceful protesters in the space, the majority of videos that made it onto the news or into Youtube are of male cops asserting their strength by forcing the public to submit to their power. In New York the police force was dominantly male, creating power dynamics with other women in the space as well as asserting their male power with other men. Do the gender dynamics change how our law is being enforced? It definitely does affect how the gendered public feels about their security in public space.

The MET, MOMA and Guggenheim

Most art galleries are notorious for their gendered bias as the Guerrilla Girls pointed out in their works of art stating that 5% of artist in the modern art section of the MET are women, but 83% of the nudes are female. This seemed true in the MET, 22 years later, in the areas that focussed on modern art. There were two gallery spaces that had exhibits focussed entirely on women, but were marketed as ‘women in art’ segregating them from the modern art world. They were specialized exhibits to include women, but there were hardly any women included in the ‘non women only’ exhibits, but these artists were separated and left out of the contemporary context of art history.

The MOMA was hardly any better, focussing mostly on male made art, having a large collection of famous works that have been chosen for art history textbooks. While I was enamoured with the Picasso, Giacometti, Pollock, Degas and Mastisse, I noticed a lack of female works in the modern art exhibits. Meret Oppenheim was one (with one work alongside about 7 Joeseph Cornell’s), and recently deceased Louise Bourgeois was another. Like in the MET, there were a couple of exhibits that were solo shows by female artists including the gender neutral works of Lee Bontecou, which had a masculine feel to the three dimensional constructions because of their structure and colour. The room created gender neutrality, having me guessing the gender of the artist; I was actually surprised to learn the artist was female. I often expect art to have that ambiguity, but the gender of the artist almost always influences the appearance of the art.

The Guggenheim was a lot better, having a similar representation of male and female artists. Their exhibits still segregated living female artists with solo exhibitions from the historical context, but their winding exhibition space enmeshed female and male artists quite thoroughly, finally making me feel better about being a female artist in the gendered art world.

The architecture of the space felt different than the other galleries as well. While most galleries are set up into traditional architecture as rooms, and often a map is needed to make sure you don’t miss an exhibit, the Guggenheim was a spiral that wound up the building, with periphery rooms that held specialized exhibits. This efficiency of design separated from the square format of most of today’s architecture which not only attracts patrons but also seems to provide an alternative to the traditional patriarchal architecture. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is a feminine architecture, the building being one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s final masterpieces, but it separates itself from the traditional architecture of the past (that seems to be mimicked today for ‘classical beauty’) that was designed by the male dominated field of architecture.

Despite the architecture, all of the gallery spaces themselves seemed open to an audience of both genders, art viewing usually being a genderless thing. All galleries catered to art experts and beginners, allowing a wide range of participants, but the spaces were not gender neutral. In the MOMA, two friends of mine on separate occasions were hit on by a security guard in the gallery, a sexual breach of authority that caused them to feel uncomfortable in the space. The guard seemed to take the presence of women to mean that he can try and find a conquest for that night or weekend. This slight incident shows that the masculine dominance exists within even the most gender neutral space and presents its influence over women.

LGBT center and Museum of Sex

The Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Community Center was an amazing experience, from seeing a large organization dedicated to LGBT issues including a great youth oriented department that helps not only LGBT youth but issues that they face including bullying, homelessness and drug addictions. They are connected with a lot of other organizations all over America and were interesting in creating ties with Canadian LGBT centers as well.

The center was the most gender neutral place I encountered in NYC. Not only did they have the only All Gender bathroom that I encountered, but they catered to all sorts of gender expression in the way I would expect – but never see - from all areas of North American institutions. Levels of education about gender expression limit most institutions from embracing the political correctness of gender and sexuality. The LGBT center understands permutations of gender and sexuality, and it was reflected in the interactions and publications to the public.

The Museum of Sex was a very interesting institution that contradicted most of what we saw at the LGBT center. While being a place for sexual exploration and learning, the Museum of Sex based their exhibits in the history and popular culture of sex but failed to represent alternative sexuality or gender in any way. Entering the museum, we encountered the gift shop first and had a couple of minutes to browse while Marie got our tickets. The shop was my first indication of the narrow view of sex in the museum. They relied on heteronormativity and focused on heterosexual sex almost exclusively. I came across one deck of gay male Kama Sutra cards and one book that focused on lesbian sex. Upon inspection, the lesbian sex book was not a book for lesbians, it included images of heterosexual sex that changed the context from lesbian to heterosexual male fetish. The entire room of books, cards, sex toys, clothes and miscellaneous objects were directed towards the heterosexual in every way.

Entering the museum itself it mimicked the heteronormativity of the gift shop. The first room was dedicated to sex in film and only had one example of homosexuality, but based within heteronormative culture. Most of the exhibits reflected society’s bias towards the female body showing videos only in major mainstream culture, which often depict the female as sexual object.

The second room looked at fetishes including BDSM, sexual art (including a Picasso print), erotica and sex dolls, and the next room contained prophylactics from throughout history as well as media and art surrounding aids and other STIs. The entire floor excluded any homosexual paraphernalia including dental dams, which would be easy to include in the displays of prophylactics. Even the AIDS ads somehow managed to avoid any reference to queer culture, they chose modern ads that refer to heterosexual transmission of AIDS, rather than including some historical ads (which was done elsewhere in the room) which seemed to deny queer culture.

The final room, The Sex Lives of Animals, compared animal behaviour to human behaviour in an interesting look at varying sexuality but the language within the exhibit just seemed a little off. Subtly suggested in the grammar of the text panels, possibly an unintentional language style of the curators, making it sound like homosexuality in humans is different than how it exists in the animal kingdom. This allows the exhibit to stay within safe heterosexual boundaries to avoid offending potential customers. This is something also often seen in Art Galleries to avoid controversy, a censoring of images and material to cater to the largest demographic.

Hunter College WGST

Hunter College was an interesting experience because we got to join a first year Women and Genders Studies class to discuss Gender performativity in everyday life, discussing our encounters with social expectations of gender and sexuality and seeing them form their opinions based on the knowledge of their professor. Many of them had never even considered how their actions were influenced by their gender, even though many claimed to feel the need to wear heels to the bar, to avoid the subway because of how people react to their dress and to walk the long way home to avoid that certain shop with the preying men.

The class itself was dominantly female which is not uncommon in a WGST course, but made me contemplate how men have been influenced by gender expression as well. Not only do a lot of them carry the same ignorance towards how gender expression is influenced by the world around them, they also avoid ‘womens’ studies classes that explain these social constructions. While some of the women in the class will progress into feminists and realize how gender constricts identities, a lot of men will continue to define women by their gender expression – catcalling to women in sexy clothing, and judging women who choose to be feminists, which continues to be a negative definition.

A lot of the participants in the class were confusing sex and gender, which made me realize that a lot of people often interchange the two. Sex is your X and Y chromosomes, which often define genitals from birth. This is often seen as the same as gender because from birth penises must be masculine and vaginas must be feminine. Men throw footballs and wear baggy pants, women wear dresses and cook Thanksgiving dinner. It is something that is drilled into us from birth, when our parents say “MY boy will not wear purple” or “She’s wearing a pink bow so people know she’s a girl.” What most people don’t understand is that genitals do not reflect who a person is, they are merely a small percentage of a body’s topography and do not define their gender expression. Gender describes how a person feels in terms of masculinity and femininity, despite their genitals. People carry a lot of fear and animosity towards people who have male genitals but feminine gender or vice versa, because they expect gender and sexuality to match.

I encourage people of any gender to express their femininity or masculinity as they would like, but the pressure to be a certain kind of feminine (or a certain kind of dyke) makes women often dress for the attention rather than for themselves, as well as for the reactions of others in the public sphere in judgement of their femininity, often causing people to restrict their true gender expression. Being aware of what you are portraying to others and why you are choosing that tiny dress are the first steps towards being comfortable with your true gender identity.

So when we speak of Women and Gender Studies, we are not speaking of women and their position below men in a struggle for power. We speak of learning what gender means to men and women, and how that influences and changes the way we view the world. A lot of Women and Gender Studies programs are dropping their long title and identifying as Gender Studies, because it is not exclusive to the male but explores gender construction outside of the patriarchal dominant lifestyle.

I hope the participants of this class will continue in WGST and begin to understand gender and sexuality differently. Continued disagreement in gender is often based in knowledge or lack of it and I encourage learning about gendered issues for everybody to embrace things they do not understand and find a greater understanding of gender identity, especially in terms of transgender individuals.

The Brooklyn Museum

In the Brooklyn Museum we saw many feminist exhibits, Judy Chicago and Kiki Smith as well as a display of historical American fashion, almost overwhelming me with a feminine perspective rather than the typical starting point of masculine culture as some museums tend to have. Most of my class were excited about seeing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. I suppose I would be too if I had studied it to the extent that my feminist peers had and as an artist I was excited to see it, but Kiki Smith’s Sojourn dominated my thoughts for the entire excursion.

The Dinner Party was as magnificent as I expected, in a large room that was built just for it; triangular to encompass it in an aesthetic way. I was amazed at the details that did not come across in publications; the tile floor depicting the names of women was beautifully constructed, unifying the sides of the triangle. While some plates are commonly depicted in reproductions, including Emily Dickenson, it was wonderful to be able to see the women Judy Chicago decided to include and who she decided to leave out. The piece celebrates the lives of women from a second wave feminist viewpoint, excluding women of colour and women of lower classes which were not embraced as part of feminism until slightly after the creation of this work. The point of this work was to be gender specific in a second wave feminist kind of manner, which excluded the male entirely. James became the only masculine identity in the room, a minority rather than a dominant gender. Chicagos intention was to accentuate the female identity rather than the male, and it was successful.

Finally being able to move onto Kiki Smith’s exhibit Sojourn, I was excited to get to see Kiki Smiths use of texture and line, her choice of subject matter that has changed greatly from her earlier work that I adore. Her work is not always about gender per se but involves identity from a female point of view including feminist viewpoints. Sojourn focussed on women artists and the milestones in their lives including images of women of all ages, her doll figures with enlarged heads as softly formed figures in feminine poses such as the cast metal doll with a bird perched on her hand, a figure caught in childhood. These works look feminine and doll like yet are made of a hard metal that ensures the viewer of its strong stability despite the soft contours that define the figure. This strength is mimicked in her soft drawings of women in defiant stances on soft wrinkled Nepal paper of different life stages from birth to death. The feminist presence was dominant in these works, but was not as obvious as in The Dinner Party.

Newfest

Newfest is the New York LGBT Film Festival Sponsored by Marc Jacobs in which my group and I got the chance to see two films.

The first After the Storm was about a small film crew going out to New Orleans to help renovate the community center and put on a production with the sparse selection of teenagers left in the derelict city. The whole theme was moving, following the teenaged cast like in a reality show much like the set up of Drop Dead Gorgeous, showing the personal struggles of the teens living in a city with almost no community. This first film didn’t have any queer content behind it, as one audience member pointed out during question period, but it was an unmentioned theme behind some of the politics of filming, with a couple of young queer participants causing controversy merely by being themselves. This movie was inspiring and uplifting, giving success stories of all of the cast members after their role in resulting musical performance that was performed in New Orleans and New York shortly after.

The second film was the premiere of a bubbly independent film called Leading Ladies, a movie that mixed ballroom dancing with a lesbian love story, which could easily make waves in the heteronormative film market. Presented as typical (cheesy) chick flick, the main female character falls in love, but with a woman not a man. It presents alternative sexuality as a common occurrence rather than an anomaly in a true romantic story that young lesbians can gain role models from, rather than the often explicit content in other coming out and lesbian based love stories. I am not a chick flick kind of girl, I cannot seem to suspend my disbelief for long enough to follow the story, but this film managed to keep my attention using humour and the occasional song and dance. The queer content was tasteful and mainstream, realistic and balanced nicely with heteronormative life, rather than presenting the queer world as crawling with homosexuals as the L Word or Queer as Folk does.

While as in any chick flick, in this movie men are degraded in a joke or two, setting the balance towards the females that dominate the main roles of the film. The feminine viewpoint was refreshing, rather than the stagnant Hollywood female alongside the dynamic masculine hero of a lot of today’s movies, though it followed the norm of most chick flicks.

One issue with the gender presentation with this movie is that the two actresses playing the homosexual roles were typical Hollywood femmes. While homosexual romance is normalized, the tomboy was presented as a typical tomboy – jeans and a plaid collared shirt, pony tail and no make up, but following the typical feminine body type. So it spoke more to average tomboys rather than the queer youth, though I suppose a hairy armpit-ed or similarly alternative lead role would not have allowed the movie to fit into mainstream culture. Leading Ladies has continued on to other queer film festivals across America and I am sure it will be very successful in the future.

Women's Organizations

UNIFEM and the The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues were both strange and disorienting experience for me in New York in terms of how they framed gender. Working through the UN to help promote ‘gender issues’ both organizations had an extremely closed minded view of what gender issues actually encompass.

BOTH organizations brought us to women’s issues around the world, in countries that don’t have the same rights that we do, and seemed to do a great number of things fro these countries based on what they could see they needed. MADRE, a similar organization that excludes government funding in order to target areas that the government just condemns such as sex work, offers a less biased perspective to help those in need, though all three organizations focussed on important women’s issues. The problem I have with the two organizations based through the UN is their perspective on ‘gender’.

While both claimed to be open to gendered issues, both organizations defined gender as female. Any reference to transgender, gender dissonance, third sex, the berdache or any other permutation of identity was entirely ignored, even though Indigenous culture often accepts third genders. Not only did they exclude multiple genders from their gender issues, their language seemed archaic, stating that ‘gender’ mean women, framing the female as other to the dominant male. If gender issues pertains only to women, then non gender issues must be male issues, ignoring the fact that most issues are gender non specific. This way of thinking negates equality, even though often the goal is to erase violence and inequality against women.

Ellis Island, Immigrant NY and the Tenement Tours

This whole day focussed on the immigrants of NY, taking us back in time on a tour of Ellis Island, exploring the areas of the immigrant neighbourhood (which is now an affluent neighbourhood) and touring through a voyeuristic old Tenement apartment building, showing us the daily living conditions of a poor immigrant family.

Ellis Island was presented to us as very masculine; we had a pretty obviously ex-military tour guide who presented the island as a patriarchal structure, which it was, limiting the allowance of female immigrants, requiring them the have an escort, judging them on their family dynamics and motherhood. The space even felt like it was dominated by an institutional patriarchy, its architecture beautiful but intimidating, an obvious space for judgement of those attempting to immigrate.

The tenement tours did not seem as dominated by masculinity, our tour guide was female, and the stories we heard of the apartment spaces were related to a single mother and her children and another family a couple of decades later. The hardships of the family we voyeuristically preyed upon were based on the dominantly masculine political power, which didn’t offer any support to a single mother in a time where a woman could not manage to support her own family.

Both tours were immersed in history, which is not exactly what I am trying to explore in this blog, but because of the construction of ‘taking us back into history’ the dominating male institutional power came forward, touching upon what it was like as a woman during immigration in the early 1900s. Because of the storybook nature of the tours, the dominany masculinity only came across as a story, and other than the pig headed tour guide at Ellis Island, I was removed from any gender discrepancies in the spaces themselves.

Bluestocking Books

Some of my queer friends will be jealous that my professor asked Bluestocking Books to hold an event for us, which turned into a public event with Ivan Velez Jr., Jennifer Camper and Howard Cruse in a talk about their comics and graphic novels with queer content, some of the first in comic history. The bookstore began as a women’s book store that transitioned into a queer bookstore. With the transition, they moved from second wave feminism that supported privileged women to third wave feminism that is in more support of all gender identities.


Ivan Velez Jr. is the first mainstream writer who introduced gay, lesbian and trans characters into comics that were published through both DC comics and Marvel Comics and had some hilarious stories about his childhood and his entrance into the queer community.

Jennifer Camper is famous for her comics on the lesbian lifestyle, refuting heteronormativity and the nuclear family. Her comics are strong and opinionated, bringing the lesbian lifestyle to the attention of the reader, whether homo or heterosexual.

Finally, Howard Cruse described to us his coming out process during his comic career, from hiding his sexuality, to exploring it in underground comics, to finally coming out and recording his adventures on the night of the Stonewall Riots in the Village.

This event was extremely equally gendered exploring male and female experiences in an equally gendered audience, but the sexuality is a different story. The room held allies of the queer community and queer subject matter dominated the room, not only in the presentations and participants but also in the content of the book store. There were large sections of gay and lesbian focussed books, feminism and gender studies, art, and small sections of everything else as well as T-shirts, patches and buttons that focus towards freedom of identity. Yet the sexuality in the room was by content only. In comparison to public spaces there was no blatant sexuality and despite some adult subject matter, the sexuality did not ooze from people like you see in bars or even public parks.

To most people in the queer community, sexuality is something that is discussed like eating and sleeping are; its development has formed who we are through our explorations of our sexual identity. To heteronormative people sexuality can be a given, something so obvious like bodily functions it is not explored so closely. So in situations of queer content, sexuality is discussed frankly and in depth but not necessarily flaunted. This was a situation where the topic was about sexuality, but was not necessarily sexual, so while the room was mainly homosexual or allied, there was little sexuality in the group.

Lesbian Herstory Archives

The Lesbian Herstory Archives was a place that collected anything lesbian from anywhere in the world. They admitted that their mandate was a little broad and after a few years of collecting they have become overloaded with artefacts and books from floor to ceiling but continue to collect anyways. The need for lesbian culture to have a space for its history became apparent to me after seeing the past culture that has already disappeared and has held hardly any space within history, in a shadow behind gay culture.

Their purpose was to begin to collect and hold a reference for Lesbian culture which was something that was being left out of collections of public libraries and museums. Their collections have served as archives of magazines and queer oriented books but have also served to save journals and personal belongings of Lesbians’ estate that is threatened by their heteronormative (and homophobic) families. This space is the first I have seen dedicated to gay culture as well as female culture, an opportunity to accept lesbian history rather than gay history.

The gender of the space was definitely feminine, with an all female staff and a feminine aesthetic with lace curtains and a purple/pink interior. The content itself didn’t appear feminine; it reminded me of the packed shelves at the NYPL yet upon closer inspection the content was extremely sexual, from academic sexual study, to lesbian fiction to romance novels. Yet the space didn’t feel sexual at all with a tame elderly lesbian couple and one young Masters of Library Studies intern amidst an organized heap of literature.

There was reference to heterosexuals and gay men in the room as well; they were incidentally present in books with lesbian content as well. Their presence in the space reminded me of queer content in a heterosexual space, or lesbian content in a homosexual space, almost non existent but inadvertently present. The space was dominantly female and while it didn’t exclude men from its ranks, I could see them being discouraged from participating with the Archives because of the interior decorating and dominantly female subject matter.

Pride Parade and Trans March

I was surprised at how little sexuality was apparent at the Pride Parade. While there were some great outfits from drag to nearly nude, there was a lot less than I assumed there would be. Pride was very refreshing in terms of gender and sexual representation. The event included all denominations and expressions of gender and sexuality, which made a diverse amalgamation of people.

What surprised me about the parade was the lack of sexuality apparent in the appearance of the people. The parade was very modest and many kids were included in the crowd. The level of sexuality was there and was obviously present through the shared homosexuality of the group, but while there was no lack of sexual expression in gay couples and expression of pride, the sexuality was no where near the level of sexuality that I felt in the more heterosexual area of the city like Central Park on a hot day.

After the parade the sexuality came out a little more, Ginger’s bar was body to body of only women and the mating ritual became more obvious once the sun set. There was the odd person or two dressed scantily, one famous woman walking around topless despite the cops on each corner, but the attitudes and expressions were still no where near as sexual as a typical heterosexual club. Ginger’s is a lesbian bar, so the male representatives were at another location, a separation based on sexual preference rather than segregation.

Similarly the Transmarch held a wide variety of gender and sexual representation. The individuals were of all gender expressions you could imagine but the sexuality was held at bay by a group of people looking for their human rights rather than sexual freedom. Their occupation of space asserted the amount of people looking for equality in gender dissonances and their sexually neutral presence didn’t make the authorities any more comfortable with the situation. While the Pride parade was directed and tolerated nicely by the authorities, it is hard to feel safe under police protection during the Trans rally while they were rolling their eyes and avoiding our gaze as they direct the march. A lot of them visibly disagreed with the transgender presence and were there merely because they were assigned to be. The animosity was reflected back at the authorities in the participants during the speeches, pointing out obvious police prejudices in cases of crime and violence towards trans identities. The rift was obvious and presented a strange tension between heteronormative authority and trans identity.

The message at the Transmarch was much more political than the message and mood of the Pride Parade. The parade was about exposure and pride of culture which has become accepted, shown in the hetero representation in the crowd. The Transmarch however focussed on the fact that gay marriage is a privileged right compared to proper police protection and access to shelter and medical care that many transidentities do not have. Gender continues to be an area that is not understood or accepted by the heteronormative public as sexuality has and this results in experiences of prejudice that strip them of their human rights.

Harlem tour and South Bronx community gardens

Entering into Harlem for our tour of the history of the architecture of the area, we didn’t really find gender and sexual discrepancies, but were subject to a race and class differences that were apparent through our interactions wit the locals. I cannot blame them for being offended by our presence, with our white skin and upper class clothes we represented gentrification, especially in a time where buildings are being boarded up and deserted due to the difficulties of the recession. We entered their space and inspected the place as if we were shopping, tourists looking at the beauty of the buildings and the history of the space.

The South Bronx made a very different experience, as we entered the community gardens in the spaces that were deserted of buildings and had the chance to meet four men who help run the gardens, self identified anarchists. My favourite of these men had a feminist power tattoo on the side of his neck and a skirt; he was quick to mention that there is a strong representation of women at the gardens as well, only they were busy that afternoon. The gender of the space did not seem masculine despite it being four men running the tour; the green spaces of the yard seemed neutral to gender, more about the connection of the body to the land rather than the social construction of gender. The only indication of gender I encountered in these spaces was the division of food gardens, which were mostly controlled by the men, and the flower gardens which tended to have female gardeners. This was by no means a trend that I would allow me to divide the gardens into gender as many women also grew food, but I was unaware of any male gardeners with a purely flower garden.

They were dedicated to bringing healthy food and teaching gardening skills to the locals of the community after realizing their own health issues due to the lack of availability of fresh food during their childhood. The gardens represented a community movement that took their health into their own lives despite the lack of help from their government. The gardens could be used for decoration, if you were looking for a meditative experience in the garden, but generally food was being grown, eaten and shared with others in a way that defied gender and sexual distinction.

I questioned in the Saskatoon part of this blog whether nature was feminine or masculine, and which circumstances would define the space in either direction. This garden as contrast to the strongly urban space of the city made me realize that nature does not have a gender. Gender is a socially built construct that exists within culture, and nature is outside of social control. Spaces existing as wild nature develop independently from gendered culture, though I suppose culturally developed spaces of nature can carry gendered influence.

Alvin Ailey

Alvin Ailey is a dance company that got its start at a performance of modern dance by a group of African American dancers in 1958. Their way of dancing transformed ideas of what modern dance was, and through the choreography of Alvin Ailey, gained international acclaim.

The dances were absolutely wonderful in terms of beauty and expression, mixing a classical ballet style with interpretive movements. We saw a show that was a retrospective of sorts, seeing dances from more than one choreographer, including Revelations, the first famous piece created by Alvin Ailey in 1960. My favourite pieces by far were solo dances my male dancers, utilizing the interpretive expression through the movements of their body. The fact that there were no solo female dancers seemed strange to me, as the solo dances were extremely powerful and I would to have liked to see a female in that role. I wonder if that was a conscious choice in the choreography of the night. Group dances seemed to have a little more classic content and their timing was not quite accurate, making the dances less emotionally effective than I think they could have been.

Most of the group dances were choreographed in a way that balanced male and female dancers, creating wonderful gender equality (except in the solo dances, which were predominantly male) but this equality resulted in heteronormative pairings, using the male/female binary as a point of aesthetic balance. There was one dance that included three men and a woman which allowed a male/male partnering that broke from the traditional male/female. Despite the traditional nature of the dances, especially those in the second half titled Revelations mostly choreographed in the 1960s, there was a slight advancement in gendered pairing even if it was a small part of the entire production.

Cloak by George Stamos

This was my favourite event of the entire trip, despite not actually being something on our itinerary. George Stamos presented Cloak on three nights only, a world premiere in New York City. A few of my friends were interested in going and gave me the description of the event, which matched my current artist statements almost exactly; with a quick trip on the subway and we were there to see it.

The show itself was the same theme as this blog, looking and gendered performance and the fluidity of gendered identity, but was done in performance, video, music and interpretive dance. The three dancers were mostly dressed identically, wearing black bottoms and no top, erasing gendered dress. While at one point a dress made its way around the stage, it was donned by the male and female dancers, not being exclusive towards any gender. Stamos made use of blank masks and balloons as breasts to form the body into gendered expressions, but hid genitals that defined the body as male or female. His attempt to eliminate the perceived sex/gender connection was successful to me, though may have been lost on other audience members.

His use of media was amazing and at one point a video of his body was projected onto a screen in front of the female dancer’s body, allowing us to see her head and limbs with his body juxtaposed on top, erasing the gender that is implied by body shape. They matched their movements which meshed the bodies into each other, creating a male/female hybrid. This moment was not only technically proficient, it was able to separate body and gender, portraying identity as human rather than stuck within the binary gendered roles.

The only critique I have of this show is the expression of sexuality apparent through the dance. With two female performers, one of them more of a singer (Clara Furey), the other more of a dancer (Luciane Pinto), and one male dancer (George Stamos), the romantic pairings were always heterosexual. I feel this accentuated their gender a little more, because it was less about the romantic exchange and became about the male/female pairing. However after accentuating the genderlessness of the bodies through performance, perhaps I should not be seeing the pairing as heterosexual, but merely a human connection devoid of gender. It was not obvious of whether he had deemed this detail unimportant, or overlooked it in his composition.

Unfortunately Claudio La Rocco from the New York Times didn't have an eye for his abstraction, and praises him for being 'a handsome dancer' but misses the point completely on the theory of multiple identities "At other times, Mr. Stamos occupied the small raised screen, his torso shuttling through ghostly sequences while, below the screen, a woman manipulated her legs to make it seem as if the live-video hybrid were one person. Was such a cute gesture meant to invoke multiplicity?" This reduction of Stamos' theory into such a condescending review is exactly how I expected people to take the mixture of movements and new media that spoke of fluid identity and gender multiplicity; to be reduced back into social terms of understanding, judging Stamos on his gender and identity.

I stole these photos from Stamos' flikr, taken by Nikol Mikus.

Fuertzabruta

This event was one of the most magical events I attended in New York. The anticipation was high; watching Marie getting progressively more excited as the show came closer, we all knew we were in for a treat.

I don’t want to ruin the entire show for anyone who will get the opportunity to experience this, but it involved props that created spectacle, engaging the audience as part of the show by having the audience watching from the same stage that the show exists, audience interaction with the actors and props, using water to spray the audience with and having one act happening above the audiences head on a clear ‘stage’ that lower down for the audience to touch, adding a tactile experience to the spectacle.

Most of the show was gender neutral, having men and women existing in most of the roles, not specifying by expected gender construction. Some areas of the show did have a little bit of a gender bias, though some members of my class didn’t agree with me. The gender bias is also what presented sexuality to the audience, for the gender construction was entirely dependant on the sexuality of the show. The women wore skirts, and during some energetic dancing the audience was treated to the exposure of their underwear, while the men remained covered, being shirtless at most (if at all?). This was entirely minor, just something to nitpick about in this blog, but as the final act came upon us I realized there was more to it than that.

The clear stage above our heads was a mini pool, and four women crawled through the water, sometimes seeming like mermaid angels, at other moments angry and dramatic, slamming their bodies down onto the surface, wearing little but underwear and slips that floated up above their heads, exposing their bare bodies. As the stage was lowered down for the audience to touch, their bodies slid past, allowing us to feel their curves, their bones, their breasts as they stared down at us through the stage.

I would not have felt uncomfortable about this display of sexuality if they were joined by men, but four women slithered past us making me feel voyeuristic, as if they were on display as women often find themselves, as sexual objects. There was no involvement of the men as sexual objects, no extreme voyeurism, nothing that could compare to how the entire audience were viewing the women in this act.

This common portrayal of sexuality does not seem any different from popular culture today, erasing a line between gender and body, the desire being for the feminine body rather than the feminine performance. A male body in that position would have lost the femininity even with the same movements and dress, which would disrupt the sexuality of the act. The female body becomes inescapable from femininity through these sexualized actions creating a moment where sex, gender and sexuality combine to create entertainment through voyeurism.

Berenice Fisher and Linda Nathan Marks

These two ladies kindly allowed us to infiltrate their New York apartment to devour Indian food and discuss life successes. Enamoured with their lifestyle, a strong loving lesbian couple devoted to the amazing projects of their careers, the entire class listened intently to their questions and advice given to us in a wise and intellectual manner.

Linda Nathan Marks is the founder of a project called The Crystal Quilt that begun in 1981 based within the women’s movement. She was looking to begin a project that was reflective of the title she chose; “crystal for clarity, light, healing, for multifaceted truth; quilt for warmth, connections between women, for making a beautiful whole out of the pieces of our lives.” (Dear Women newsletter, Spring 1997) The Crystal quilt became a non-profit organization that brought women together in a supportive environment fighting racism, homophobia, ageism and more, allowing the women of the group to grow stronger in their activist pursuits for women’s rights.

Berenice Fisher is a retired professor of Philosophy from New York University and is a published scholar on the experiences of women and other minorities in a phallocentric society. She has worked with the Crystal Quilt and has pursued similar themes in her own way through academics.

Talking to the ladies left me in a state of awe. Though I have grandparents, I have never received advice from any of them and listening to the wise words of two mid seventies feminist lesbians, I felt the generational connection that is often missing in my academic studies. I often have discussions with emerging feminists around my age and mid career feminists who often have a different focus in their interactions with me, but I am missing the wisdom of the older generation. These ladies had decided to focus on the ideas of success and what success means to us, giving us a perspective that we may never have seen before. There is something interesting about talking to someone who has lived a large percentage of their life already; as a young lady it is hard to not perceive life as a hopeful blank slate with many possibilities. These two ladies have already lived their possibilities and were very successful at it in terms of their effect on others.

In gendered exploration of the space, there was a definite feminist theme to our discussions, James being the only man in the room and many of our projects being based in Women’s Studies. The atmosphere was comfortable and feminist; no doubt a reflection of their years of work with The Crystal Quilt working with groups of women like us, which left me inspired and hopeful for my future. Though it was feminine, it didn’t feel exclusive of masculinity, only of patriarchy.

As for the sexuality of the space, the opportunity to enter their home created a wonderful outlook on lesbian life; they have been together for over 25 years and I have never met a long term couple. Seeing that homosexuality that was based in true love (you could see it in their eyes) in the same way I have been exposed to in long term heterosexual couples gave me a different view on lesbian lives. Its not that I didn’t think it possible, it just seemed like a fairy tale because I had not encountered it before.

Linda and Berenice, Thank You.