His conservative masculinity is not, I think, a matter of chance. What I am really imagining is a context in which it is normal to be supported in the formation of a gay identity or - to put it more bluntly - in which I am able to consider myself as a normal person (which is certainly not how it was in 1987). That's the thing about apprenticeship, no? It is an induction into a status quo. It is a becoming like the older people. So there is a trickiness to this vision. On the one hand, it arises from a sense that in my youth I was alone and directionless - no map, no route, no obvious way ahead. On the other, it is conformist and limited in its ambitions - a picture of acceptance by someone who is himself unimpeachably acceptable.
--o0o--
Better, maybe, to follow a holy fool (although the question then is how you are going to find one...)
As ever I read this and tried to empathise and thought well it isn't that normal to be anything - I like this quote from de Certeau the practise of everyday life
ReplyDelete"the fact remains that we areforeigners on the inside—but there is no outside."
But then I thought that my personal white heterosexual 3 kids monogamy does conform and I have a few generations of conformers before me - or at least people who appear to conform . I remember doing that pub thing a few years ago when you had to decide who in the media you would like to have a one night stand with and who you would choose for your life partner. I think I went for Cameron Diaz for my one night stand and both me and Kin went for Alan Bennet as our life partners - I think he would make a good tutor and companion.
No need to lead no need to follow ? I think that the Master and apprentise is more to do with the construction of the imagined other - a positioning to allow exchnage that may require a suspension of disbelief to be effective -
I find it restful when people think it is OK to have a transgender ex partner but not many do. Yesterday the artist I was with did think that - she said it was brilliant to split up and brilliant altogether, how exciting and wonderful. I do really wish the maps we had for our lives were more diverse and think that there is a scary normative discourse around. The RA's on Imagine wrote an article called 'Co Production: Processes and practices of research without a map'. They put up a map of the situationists wandering around Paris. I think now we are all wandering around.
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