Gerard's blog, University of Warwick

February 23, 2012

Follow up to my 2008 entry "If there is another chance, do you want to be a girl or a boy?

Follow-up to If there is another chance, do you want to be a girl or a boy? (my reply) from Gerard's blog

2012, four years on….yes, for sure, I was far too rational and measured when I write that… now it is my heart not my head that has taken control and is hurtling me forward in some unknown direction… **
Here is the entry, exactly as it was written in 2008….

“I was very struck by a recent and very significant blog entry by Shuang about whether, given another chance, you would prefer to be a boy or a girl. In approaching this topic, one of the temptations is always to answer the question straight away – and to provide a sort of ‘ready-made’ answer. The original blog entry showed the value of meausring this over time and I have tried to do the same. My own approach to the question is, at first, to think not so much about what the answer is (for me) – although I do have an answer – but to consider why the question is actually an important one.

This question is a crucial one, not least because society is founded on profound inequalities based on accidents of birth – whether a person is male or female, whether one is disabled, whether one is of a given ethnicity, or another one, and so on. Culturally speaking, being one gender or the other may be a strong disadvantage in some cultures, but it can work both ways. The issues are local and familial, as well as institutional and socio-cultural. I have seen families in the UK where girls are strongly favoured over boys, and others where the reverse is true. Some parents ‘prefer’ to have a child of one gender to that of another for reasons that one cannot quite fully understand.

Yet there is far more to the issue than this, since the whole question touches at the root of gender identity. While sexuality is, technically speaking, described as a preference or ‘orientation’, gender is, rather undemocratically and unceremoniously, ‘assigned’ to you at birth according to how society feels you should be brought up and how you should behave. There is no level of democracy at all in the assignment of gender – it is one area that you have no choice over, and it simply presses us to conform to society’s stereotypes and to do what society ‘expects’ of us. In some cases, gender assignment can tear our lives and ourselves apart. This is why it must always be considered as a major issue potentially affecting all of us.

Those who know me well will know that I am dismissive of adopting any fixed or rigid male ‘identity’ (whatever that means). In short, I do not view myself as having a fixed gender. History bears out some of the experiences: when I was a child, I always resolutely avoided joining in the rough and tumble games that the other boys played. I strongly remember that at primary school, I wouldn’t join in with my twin brother and his friends in playing ‘boys’ games and would spend more time playing with the girls than the boys. As I grew older, I had the (dubious privilege) to attend an all boys school and I felt myself increasingly isolated from typical ‘boys’ behaviour. Their language, actions and behaviour were at odds with mine – I preferred reading Romantic poetry to experiments in the chemistry lab. I found later on that I was the only one in my year to be interested in doing A-level languages and the school ran a complete A level course just for me. In a way I was marginalised by my peers because of this but I took some kind of pleasure in what was happening. Throughout all of these formative years, I would regard myself as having a different sort of identity to that of my peers. Maybe this was the recognition of something very significant in my identity?

As for ‘wishing that I was a girl’, I am not sure if I have ever dared to go quite this far with things. In many ways, the marginalisation that we feel in life is part of us and makes us who we are, for better or worse. If I did not go through the frequent emotional highs and lows that I do, distressing though it can be, I would not be the creative person I am, and would not be the writer I am, etc.I wouldn’t be the teacher I am, and I wouldn’t be able to relate to people the way I do. We are the sum products of our past lives, both biological and environmental; we can always wish to be a slightly more perfect version of ourselves (I still wish I could get into a size 30 waist!), but then I wouldn’t be me, the person that hopefully someone out there somewhere loves. OK, although I have problems with the way my body functions and do not feel very close to a ‘male’ identity, I can say that I have never wished I was someone else and have always accepted this as my destiny. But then again, maybe I am one of those trangender people that, for some reason, choose to ‘stay as they are’. I’ve never quite put that to the ultimate test – and maybe I don’t want to think about doing so just yet?”

Jumping back to 2008…

Maybe I will have to revise this yet again…

Gerard Sharpling : 23 Feb 2012 00:28 | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

March 05, 2008

Writing gives us hope (revised)

I have been using written language in its multi-faceted forms for most of my life – as a schoolboy, a student of European literature, a teacher, a published writer, a friend, a language tester, a lover, a poetry writer, a family member, a blog writer, someone who supports others on web sites, a medical patient … the list is endless. I thought I’d like to spend some time in this entry bringing out some of my own thoughts about written language, and why I believe writing is an amazing thing.

Writing is a ‘cure’ to an undefined illness
Derrida refers to written language as a pharmakon – which means both poison and cure at the same time. As he suggests, we are cured by the poison (or poisoned by the cure). But I prefer to see writing as a ‘cure’ – - by writing, we can talk about and cure ourselves from many of the issues that occur within our own lives. Just living is a kind of illness – an inherited condition that provides us with bodily feelings. Sometimes there are challenging issues going on in our personal lives – talking to a blog through writing can really help. There is research that suggests that many people would be much worse off health-wise if they did not participate in virtual communities, which provide an outlet to their difficulties. Sometimes the cure is made all the more complete when you receive feedback on what you write. It confirms where we are headed and what directions our lives can now take.

We write with the body not our mind
For me, writing is above all a bodily or corporal process, not a cerebral one. Many feminist theoreticians and writers have commented on precisely this, namely how women’s writing involves the role of the body, as well as the mind (see Cixous, Irigaray, etc). When I write I am usually in some kind of particular and indefinable physical situation: whether it be anxious, at an unnaturally high point, aching all over, struck down with a headache, feeling trapped in a dark tunnel, having difficulty controlling bodily functions, radiantly happy, etc. I find that my body, above all, dictates how I write, how I feel and how I am. But writing is also a way of overcoming physical weakness.

Writing helps us to know ourselves
Writing does not so much reflect a given reality, but creates a new one. By writing, we are not providing a transparent reflection of what we are already know, but we are creating new and dynamic meanings. It is so easy to see this in the experience of writing an academic paper. It is only by writing the paper that we find out what it is we really want to say. We don’t know until we are working on a piece of writing where it is going, where it is heading. That’s why it’s always best to do the introduction at the end!

Writing is just as good as speech
There is a school of thought in applied linguistics which seeks to show the pre-eminence of speaking over writing – writing, people say, is a ‘second hand’, derivative activity, and cannot do all the things that speaking can do. It’s only natural for me to try and turn this on its head, given my less than happy relationship with the spoken word! But of course, Derrida demonstrated in his critique of Rousseau that speaking does not in fact ‘predate’ or overshadow writing, but writing come before speech. We know this in the way that we tend to ‘write’ our words in our head before we say them. When we make that awkward telephone call, we do all the planning on a piece of rough paper in our head! So of course, writing does come before speech, in a way!

Writing is first and foremost about people
One dodgy practice among less sensitive scholars is to use computational statistics to indicate, for example, whether a person uses ‘the’ twenty time or thirty times in a sentence, etc. I prefer to see the person, not the statistics. Each piece of writing you read – whether it is a scrap of a poem, a few notes on the back of an envelope or a well developed essay – provides above all a window on the very real, human existence of an individual, an individual with thoughts, feelings and emotions. This is why we must always be sensitive in the feedback we give students and must treat even the least well constructed piece of writing with the utmost reverence.

Writing is life, life is writing
These days I am finding there is less and less difference between writing and living. It is not so much a case of ‘first you have an experience and then you write about it’ – what seems to happen in my case, is that the two come together and join until they are almost superimposed. We know about this, again, from our virtual network of friends on emails and in blogs. Facebook and other social networking programmes have long established a trend whereby our virtual world becomes the ‘real’ world, and the real world become sonly virtual. Our lives become topsy-turvy and we experience vertigo and a dizzy sense of the unreal as we try and control the interplay between the two. In front of our PCs we are transformed into another place, another time (or perhaps, a place where there is no time). For a writer whose writing is his life, have look at Borges – in Funes the memory man, the sickness of the character is that his memory occurs in real time, and he remembers everything he experienced as if he was living it again. Look also at Gide and many of the other French modernist writers.

Writing helps us to carry on, and gives us hope for the future
How do we carry on, knowing what we know? This question was asked in some way by many of Samuel Beckett’s characters. Life can often be filled with despair. But writing, at least, gives us some hope for the future: the hope to survive, the hope to leave something of ourselves behind, the hope that the world can be a better place, the hope to forgive and make up with a long lost friend, the hope that we can tell someone we love them before it is too late, the hope that we can find love and happiness ourselves, the hope that others will understand who we are and how we work. Small wonder, then, that many psychiatrists and counsellors advocate writing down one’s thoughts and feelings in times of distress.

All of these reasons, for me, make writing into an amazing concept, and worth exploring.

Gerard Sharpling : 05 Mar 2008 11:16 | Comments (3) | Close comments | Report a problem

March 04, 2008

If there is another chance, do you want to be a girl or a boy? (my reply)

Here I am now in 2012. Brave new world. Something has happened and I am no longer the rational, measured person come over as being when I wrote that ehtry in 2008. Nowadays I realise that ‘staying as you are’ presents the major risk of inertia and cannot be reasoned away.

Here is the entry, exactly as it was written in 2008….

“I was very struck by a recent and very significant blog entry by Shuang about whether, given another chance, you would prefer to be a boy or a girl. In approaching this topic, one of the temptations is always to answer the question straight away – and to provide a sort of ‘ready-made’ answer. The original blog entry showed the value of meausring this over time and I have tried to do the same. My own approach to the question is, at first, to think not so much about what the answer is (for me) – although I do have an answer – but to consider why the question is actually an important one.

This question is a crucial one, not least because society is founded on profound inequalities based on accidents of birth – whether a person is male or female, whether one is disabled, whether one is of a given ethnicity, or another one, and so on. Culturally speaking, being one gender or the other may be a strong disadvantage in some cultures, but it can work both ways. The issues are local and familial, as well as institutional and socio-cultural. I have seen families in the UK where girls are strongly favoured over boys, and others where the reverse is true. Some parents ‘prefer’ to have a child of one gender to that of another for reasons that one cannot quite fully understand.

Yet there is far more to the issue than this, since the whole question touches at the root of gender identity. While sexuality is, technically speaking, described as a preference or ‘orientation’, gender is, rather undemocratically and unceremoniously, ‘assigned’ to you at birth according to how society feels you should be brought up and how you should behave. There is no level of democracy at all in the assignment of gender – it is one area that you have no choice over, and it simply presses us to conform to society’s stereotypes and to do what society ‘expects’ of us. In some cases, gender assignment can tear our lives and ourselves apart. This is why it must always be considered as a major issue potentially affecting all of us.

Those who know me well will know that I am dismissive of adopting any fixed or rigid male ‘identity’ (whatever that means). In short, I do not view myself as having a fixed gender. History bears out some of the experiences: when I was a child, I always resolutely avoided joining in the rough and tumble games that the other boys played. I strongly remember that at primary school, I wouldn’t join in with my twin brother and his friends in playing ‘boys’ games and would spend more time playing with the girls than the boys. As I grew older, I had the (dubious privilege) to attend an all boys school and I felt myself increasingly isolated from typical ‘boys’ behaviour. Their language, actions and behaviour were at odds with mine – I preferred reading Romantic poetry to experiments in the chemistry lab. I found later on that I was the only one in my year to be interested in doing A-level languages and the school ran a complete A level course just for me. In a way I was marginalised by my peers because of this but I took some kind of pleasure in what was happening. Throughout all of these formative years, I would regard myself as having a different sort of identity to that of my peers. Maybe this was the recognition of something very significant in my identity?

As for ‘wishing that I was a girl’, I am not sure if I have ever dared to go quite this far with things. In many ways, the marginalisation that we feel in life is part of us and makes us who we are, for better or worse. If I did not go through the frequent emotional highs and lows that I do, distressing though it can be, I would not be the creative person I am, and would not be the writer I am, etc.I wouldn’t be the teacher I am, and I wouldn’t be able to relate to people the way I do. We are the sum products of our past lives, both biological and environmental; we can always wish to be a slightly more perfect version of ourselves (I still wish I could get into a size 30 waist!), but then I wouldn’t be me, the person that hopefully someone out there somewhere loves. OK, although I have problems with the way my body functions and do not feel very close to a ‘male’ identity, I can say that I have never wished I was someone else and have always accepted this as my destiny. But then again, maybe I am one of those trangender people that, for some reason, choose to ‘stay as they are’. I’ve never quite put that to the ultimate test – and maybe I don’t want to think about doing so just yet?”

Jumping back to 2008…

Maybe I will have to revise this yet again….

Gerard Sharpling : 04 Mar 2008 00:48 | Comments (5) | Close comments | Trackbacks (1) | Report a problem