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Foraged Fragments

First Entry

Haigh, welcome. This is my first entry into 'Reflections', so we're all being welcomed haha!

This will be blog-entry style, but my entries will definitely be all over the place as far as topics and style go. Free-form openess is what I'm hoping for. Anything goes. Structure is only for sake of keeping things barely legible.

So! What am I reflecting on right now?

Heated Rivalry Has Us Re-Examining Sexuality and Gender

Well, I've been on a Heated Rivalry kick lately, and it's been really interesting to me to see how all of it plays out personally and socially. I've spent so much time away from the queer discourse I was previously so deeply subsumed by, and this has just thrust me back into it like I've somehow fallen into a river I didn't even realize how deeply I needed, and now I'm just laying in it, Sun glistening everywhere, Water caressing me, and I'm in some sort of messy, colourful bliss.

And it all happened so suddenly, I'm having to retroactively put the pieces together to understand how it all hit me/us/the world.

I'm absolutely kicking myself for not taking that Sports & Feminism course in school. Damn it.

I won't go into everything covered by countless folks already, but I will talk briefly about how today I've been thinking about how Heated Rivalry has me reviewing my relationship with gender and sexuality (and I'm absolutely not alone in this; the fandom is filled with these realizations and questioning stirred up by the show!).

Do I want to be the man in these gay relationships? Do I want to be Ilya? Or Shane? Or both? Do I want to be a woman with them? Or a man? Or neither, or both, or some combination of that? Or me - whatever I am - with them?

But therein lies a more important realization: I'd argue that pinpointing any of this isn't entirely necessary. I want all of those things. All of them can be true at once.

I've always seen my sexuality and gender as something like the 'scramble suit' in the animated movie 'A Scanner Darkly':

Image description A gif from the animated movie A Scanner Darkly. The image depicts a medium close up of a person, but their features are a scrambled mix of features of different people with different features, quickly fading in and out of each other, effectively giving relative anonymity to the actual person beneath this scramble suit because they are impossible to visually identify. End image description.

(Image description: A gif from the animated movie A Scanner Darkly. The image depicts a medium close up of a person, but their features are a scrambled mix of features of different people with different features, quickly fading in and out of each other, effectively giving relative anonymity to the actual person beneath this scramble suit because they are impossible to visually identify. End image description.)

It's not a perfect metaphor, but it illustrates the constantly flickering, changing nature of sexuality and gender, for me, at least. Every time I feel attraction to someone, it's like this: I want to be the woman, the man, the person, flickering in and out; I want to be dominated by the person I'm attracted to, but the moment they reach whatever peak of domination my brain chooses is best in that moment, I'm totally turned off and suddenly want to see their submissiveness; I want to see their masculinity, and then their femininity, and then their androgyny; and then my asexuality comes out because all of this ends quickly - I suddenly have no interest in sex at all. And all of that's only if I'm in the mood on a random blue moon in the middle of the night after hours of going down some romantic rabit hole that just so happens to fit all of the pieces into the right places. My sexuality and gender are so, so specific to me, as I exist in the world. And I imagine that's true for pretty much anyone.

I once spent half of a semester exploring what "masculinity" is. My class concluded it's entirely dependent on the individual. For one person, gender is a social construct because of xyz personal things, for another, gender isn't a social construct at all because of xyz personal things.

Again, as always - everything is deeply complicated. Everything is a massive, tangled, dense web.

I will have to make a whole section of this website (or an entirely different website) dedicated to HR, though. It's such a great jumping point for discussions like this.

A Preview of the HR Discourse to Come

Topics:

  • Why is Shane/Hudson "gorgeous"?
  • When queer media pulls back on pop capitalist energy (also see: Hollanov vs. Skip)
  • Hollanov vs. Skip (lol this will be A Never-Ending Essay)
  • Skip and the Queerness of Being 'Too Much'
  • The Dominating Russian Appeal: Slavic Ontology, Masculinity, and Heterosexuality (or: 'Why Is Ilya Like That?')
  • The Heteronormative Games: Sports and Escapism
  • Hollanov: exploring 'the chase' of a blossoming romance staying alive in a specifically queer relationship, isolated because it still exists in a largely homonormative and otherwise oppressive environment. (don't know how to summarize that right now :p )
  • Jacob Tierney's approach to queerness
  • "I Want To Exercise Now": How HR Has Us Falling Back to Desire-Based Body Dysphoria
  • Side tangent - Muscles: I don't get the appeal.
  • A Queer Subtraction: Attraction to Anyone BUT Straight Men (or: "Why we're struggling to pinpoint the identities of HR fandom")
  • Loons, Sunshine, and The Cottage: Heated Rivalry and the Anti-Anthropcentric Nature of Coming Out