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coffeesp00ns  ·  2732 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cultural Appropriation Is, In Fact, Indefensible

Ok. there's a lot to unpack here.

Let me start by saying that I myself am a trans woman, so this will colour my perspective.

Let's start with Drag. I personally have conflicting feeling about drag, but at the end of the day I realize that they're generally about me and not about the people performing, so i leave them to have fun.

Drag is performative, inherently. A person dresses up as a hypermasculine or hyperfeminine character for the purpose of entertainment. While in costume, they are generally treated as the gender that their "character" is, though this isn't an across the board truth. The point being from all this is that when a man dons women's clothing for the purpose of drag performance, they are being performatively feminine without having to deal with all of the real world issues of being a woman. This is why i made the comparison that I did - when people co-opt race and culture, they are able to live in that skin and then walk away from it once they are done, or once they get bored, or once they get hurt. People of colour don't get that luxury, and that's what people need to recognize and respect, and it's what they're not respecting when they use another person's culture as a costume.

Moving on to another kettle of fish altogether.

    The thing is though that myself and a trans woman do not have the same life experience. I do not envy their life experience but we can't deny they are different.

    So who is the woman's march for ? Is it wrong to discuss women's issues in the context of women who were born that way ?

You're right. you and I have vastly different life experiences. I didn't have to go through puberty in high school as a woman. I'm in the process of what you could call a second puberty now, but it's pretty different, and it's definitely not in high school.

So yes, we have different experiences. But there are also multitudes of other women who for one reason or another are unable to have children, and there are trans men who are in the process of having children, while presenting as a man. There are women who are infertile, there are women who can't have vaginal intercourse without pain, there are intersex women who don't have a fully formed vagina, and intersex women who have unclear genitalia, or even penises naturally.

What you have to recognize is that when you discuss "women's issues in the context of women who were born that way", you are excluding all of those people. All of those women are women who were born that way (and for the record, i didn't "become a woman" either. I was born the way I am, and I'm a woman). You are saying "my feminism is for people who look like me and whose bodies act exactly like mine."

That's a pretty shit way to think, in my view, but my feminism is intersectional and includes all of those people. When I talk about reproductive health it includes ALL of those people, because otherwise we're only having half of a conversation or less. There is no unified experience of being a woman.

    t's not fair to assume somebody is always mocking you.

that's true. But there are many times when people do something offensive and don't even realize that it's offensive. It doesn't have to be intentional. The problem with this is that often, as a defense mechanism, people double down on being offensive by then repeating the action KNOWING that the other person finds it offensive. Indeed, that very defense mechanism is what 90% of this conversation is about, the other 10% generally boiling down to " Well if I can't make fun of X, who can I make fun of?"

    Dressing in a kimono isn't mocking somebody, it's just enjoying a piece of clothing

Again, i feel like I should clarify, it's not always about "mocking" people. Sometimes it's a fetishization of culture. Kimonos are pretty special and specific garb. remember, we're not talking about this kind of kimono:

Go ahead and wear that thing, no one cares. We're talking about this kind of kimono.

It's heavy, It's impractical, it takes a very long time to put on (and you need help to tie it properly) and If you're not going to a tea ceremony or a wedding, you'd better have a pretty good reason to wear one or you're a lunatic (or a masochist). It's the equivalent of walking around in a wedding dress (including its current cultural use).

Like I said in my original post, if you really want to wear one of these, and you get one made for you by someone in Japan who you paid a fair wage, then go for it. I would suggest you question why exactly you want to do that, though. Is it because you love the garment, or is there a fetishization of that culture going on? Why not just buy a dress that has a Japanese influence, or has some kimono detailings? It'd be more practical, for one. If it "must" be a kimono, then I'd suggest there's something more about what the garment represents than the garment itself that you are looking for, meaning that there's a level of cultural fetishization going on.