I’m very grateful to @renegog for starting this topic. The original issues that motivated it – raising awareness of gender nonconformity, and above all breaking down the default assumption of cis/male in electronic music, are laudable and I’d like to contribute in any way I can.
Unfortunately, when considering what pronouns to choose for myself, I’m not only at a loss but am also seeing how this entire discussion exposes problems with my own visibility, problems which are much more serious than I’ve let on and have also been at the root of my increasing absence here. As for visibility and validation in general, I hope I can provide something of value, because I’ve felt these problems very deeply.
While it’s been acknowledged on an abstract, intellectual level that gender does not equal identity, the implicit assumption that using the correct pronouns puts paid to the problem of mischaracterization once and for all does sort of make this mistake, and is thus for me highly incorrect. That is, I don’t want the mere use of a pronoun to give the idea that there’s not something still very “off” in the very concept as it applies to me.
For there are aspects of ‘identity’ for which gender is commonly taken as a proxy – and no, I’m not talking sexuality, ethnic, or religious identity, though each in various ways ‘intersects’ – rather, there is something that always gets presupposed along with gender; while it may not be more basic than gender, it’s at the very least equiprimordial. And yet – at least in the modern West, though curiously in no other era or culture – it remains completely unquestioned.
And if all this sounds weird, guess what, it is! I am very weird and proudly so. The fact that weirdness and its deep interconnections with both wyrd and earth has been completely forgotten, and thus today it is conceived only negatively – as a privative modification of the commonplace, rather than as something that in itself has a positive content is the deepest wound of our age. Go read Mark Fisher or Erik Davis on the weird, they do the concept far more justice than I can, while each taking very different approaches. I’m not going to save you from the work, not in this post. But the knowledge is out there.
So for me-- and I speak only specifically in my case – the concepts of nonbinary, agender, fluidity, and so on – whether or not indicated properly by ‘they’ – simply serve to direct attention where it shouldn’t be. Even in the negation of gender the idea of gender gets performed. One’s sight is directed to a certain ‘axis’ or ‘plane’ and thus prevented from looking up or through to the thing that’s perhaps more fundamental, and this is what’s most harmful to me.
So why does this all matter, why are visibility and validation even concerns?
On one level – the fact this question is even asked is already appalling to some degree – I would hope that as a default others would be welcomed, listened to, and valued for who they are. That trust or respect would be a default condition until it’s violated and only then would the person be shunned. That I would need to appeal to or demand some ‘right’ to be validated especially when others are valid by default is in itself an appalling notion, and I will not legitimize it by discussing it further.
However, on another, perhaps more descriptive level, I need to address what invisibility and invalidation mean for me personally, especially in terms of personal pain, in hopes this can dissuade others from considering the issue unimportant just because it hasn’t affected them. There is, of course, a problem in the very fact this needs to be done, in that the emotional labor falls completely on the one(s) who are invisible or invalidated, rather than the ones who have made these consequences an issue for ‘debate’.
So I see an easier sort of answer, which is the one perhaps more relevant to gender, which is that invisibility in the ways it’s bound up with all sorts of privilege can have immediate material consequences.
When women are continually asked questions no man gets asked, for instance whether they actually “did the music” and so on, this line of questioning besides being degrading in its own right is often directly correlated with missed or unequal opportunities. So if the scene gets seen for what it is; i.e. not 100% cis/male (or perhaps not even 20%…) these types of questions and the actions which accompany them can hopefully vanish.
But this I actually don’t want to go into here, as @renegog already explained this well and the article they linked also went into this. I also don’t want to suggest any direct consequences for economics and privilege in my case – more to explain the difficulties with my own compliance and the pain I deal with continually, here and elsewhere.
What I’d like to draw attention to as regards “invisibility” instead are the implications of a certain kind of homelessness. [And in that my use of this term may be insensitive, I apologize but will explain its use in reference to the fact a member once referred to lines as their ‘home’. Which made me realize how inadequate this concept was for me. I mean only to negate this concept as it was thereby expressed, if I come across a better one I’ll gladly modify it.]
Often during the day, one is thrown in the midst of things, at work or otherwise in a public environment, forced to express or even conceive of oneself entirely though the eyes of others; however at home, there’s maybe some opportunity to rest and recuperate, to fall back on a more informal language or to be content with silence as the means by which one is understood, even if only to oneself, when alone.
A single day is not so bad; but what happens if this “day” never ends? What happens if there is no home to which one can retreat? Does one not see the continual distress and weariness, of always having to go through this torturous process of self-translation and forced adoption of a language which is not one’s own? That sure – it at times can be a highly productive challenge – but that being “on”, being challenged all the time with no “off” time does not take its toll?
That there is homelessness, to begin with, is easily expressed: we are invisible in the experimental music community and experimental music is invisible in our community. So neither works for me in terms of “home.”
The mechanism in this invisibility, to put it plainly, is elitism. Which is a topic in its own right, and I think it’s too often dismissed or considered by the experimental music community to have been ‘solved’ when all they’ve done is appropriate things and it’s today more of a problem than ever. And it’s often the cloak of acceptability under which dangerous prejudices may hide. I’m happy to provide paradigmatic cases implicating all the usual “idols” [Cage, for one] – while at the same time considering the problem not personal but institutional – but again I cannot hope to address the full range of this topic here.
The second and perhaps deeper consideration, and the means by which this homelessness becomes “material” is, and especially in my case, the role music itself has in my identity and the role identity plays in general throughout all forms of creative practice. And I’m hardly alone in this because the more authentically specific one lets something be the more universal it really does become. This is in any art form, painting, photography, music whatever.
For instance, I do not even record anything because what’s the point? I can’t abide the “easy way out of presenting things without accompanying themes which would simply perpetuate the lie that all this is “just music” rather than some sort of integral practice. Separating the art from the artist is most especially in this sense a dangerous lie – it’s not just for when the artist does “bad things”.
But on the other hand, I’d have to engage a lot of people in this other community to help tell my story. And I’m not certain that I wouldn’t be facing a lot of so-called “appalling questions” (to use Ilhan Omar’s term) which while factual to some degree, could apply equally to normative groups but are never asked. For instance it’s never asked of teachers why some are pedophiles, of Christians why some blow up buildings, of whites why some commit mass shootings. It’s just taken for granted that these are aberrant whereas for other groups they are normalized. And then also consider, even if an individual question is not so bad, the cumulative effect of it being asked over and over again not allowing anything else takes its toll… there is a war of attrition here which always defeats me in the end.
Lastly, in my case threats have been involved as recently as earlier this year. Not here of course but I thought I should mention this, in case anyone thinks this doesn’t happen, despite many aspects of my privilege which I acknowledge.
So in the end, because there “is” gender I might as well go with “he” or “they”, both are fine. But neither are univocal in the sense that what they mean in my case has anything to do with what they mean “normally” – if there is such a (fixed) meaning. And while I’m not ready to speak further, I do not want the problem of my invisibility to go anymore unexpressed or for people to presume that it’s resolved simply by clarifying the issue of gender. I do hope this small action can help diminish others’ pain.
