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| Photo: The Procrastinator Times. |
By Yamily Habib.
A lot has been said in
contemporary philosophy about politics as a gesture and as an approach to
decision-making and the responsibility of its consequences. Knowing what we
like, why we like it and how to behave accordingly to those preferences turns
out to be an identification process that involves most of our productive years
and it wears down the totality of our placid ones, even when the suggestions
made towards it prove to be premonitory and requires to have a clear idea of
what we want and how we’ll manage to achieve it since day one of our College
life.
Nobody explains to us
that, facing the wide range of possibilities, what we choose conscious or
unconsciously will identify us not only as “useful” social individuals but
against those who share the subway, the halls, the benches, even our bed. Lacan
used to define this as “mirror phase”, a mirror that Borges avoided all his
life. A mirror that insists to condemn what we are, how we show it and the
(few) benefits that could bring us along the way.
Inside the hetero-normative, the pair male-female is the “normal” standard,
miss-conceiving the adjective as a proportional to “common”, thus not all
normal is common and not all common is normal, leaving aside the options kept
in the margins of what produces immediate reproduction and collaboration to the
working mass and the cluster of automatons that over-populate the globe. And it
seems reiterative such chatter about the homosexual, lesbian, queer, trans, bi,
inter (…) vindication, but to what extent has it really been understood the
process to which we are subjected by the system in order to identify the
positive and negative poles that coordinate the human behavior? How many of
your girl friends sleep with guys but watch lesbian porn at home because it
turns them on? Where is the line? Should it really exist?
Wandering in Instagram
I found a post from a Colombian writer who I admire where she shows what we dykes have lived
and some have overcome with the firm conviction of assuming their bodies as a
political gesture that represent and reinforces everything they believe in and
everything that they’re willing to reorganize their lives around to. It seems
paradoxical having jumped the barrier of heterosexual and patriarchal, binomial
and neoliberal subjugation to end up in the promised land with adjectives like
lipstick, butch, soft-butch, fancy, girlie, tomboy, trucker, feminine,
masculine. It wasn’t until this evening’s tea that I realized that the internal
fight of every lesbian is a shared and obvious one, thus it is when we reach
the “freedom” status inside our right to choose and living our choices wide
openly that I identified the painful process of delineating our identity: that
moment when you don’t know what to wear frightened of seeming too masculine and
being called upon as a lesbian, because as Amalia Andrade says: “…it is O.K. to
be a lesbian as long as you don’t look like one”. Why? If I have been and will
always be a lesbian, why should I be submitted to the hetero-dependent
paradigms of the west and why should I let them determine what I must wear?
I remember laughing
with a friend when we saw a butch girl walking in front of us, he asked me if I
liked those kind of girls to what I firmly answered “no, I like girls”. But I
remember as well last Saturday when my crush from Instagram was having a drink
in the bar across the street. After I showed up she nervously asked her friends
if I was hot, to which they answered “she’s kinda butchy”. It’s not karma, its
politics. Its not a moral, is the lack of practical sense and an introspective
analysis of what identifies me and what I identify. 27 years had to pass so I
could understand that what I choose to communicate myself with its not a part
(at least not implicitly) of other people’s code, and that in the end what
really matters is what it means to me and what I use it for. After all, even
though I identify myself as a woman in the heterosexual canon, in front of my
mirror I’m a butch… But a flowery one.
