dude, like, wouldn't it be cool if we could all be nicer to each other?

so this is an email i wrote today to a friend who challenged me to come up with a way that i might apply what i've "learned" in critical theory (especially gender theory) to real life (other than the ability to use "scare quotes" all over the place--look, i did it again!). unfortunately, it is long and ultimately i came up with nothing at all concrete above and beyond "i guess i can try to be nicer to other people". so much for my first foray out of academia and into the real world. nevertheless, i really enjoyed writing it and wanted to share it with my imaginary audience. enjoy, my imaginary electronic friends!

[my friend], i've been thinking about what you were saying. i understand your frustration with so much of the talk about feminist/gender/critical theory. i know it gets tedious, depressing and a lot of time seems ultimately futile. but i've thought of a few things that i can and will endeavor to do that spring from my ideas on gender: (i don't mean to make this super-personal by always referring to i/you, but it seems easiest to take our relationship as an example)

1. i can see you as an individual first, someone who is religious, thoughtful, caring, compassionate, passionate and eager to learn and understand. i don't know where seeing you as a woman or (doing my best at) understanding you through your experiences as such comes in, but i know that it will not be first, and possibly might not even be in the top five.
2. as such, i will not make facile assumptions about your sexual preferences based upon your gender as you present it. i know that whether you wear a skirt or pants has nothing to do with whether you like to have sex with men, women, both, neither or another category altogether (that i must admit i have difficulty in imagining--but hey, i know that i'm a product of my (necessarily) limited cultural formation).
3. because i refuse to accept the validity of any link between your (or anyone else's) anatomy and your sexual behavior, i will not recognize any combination of the two as "natural" or "normal", and thus will not judge. the creation of "sexual minorities" necessarily implies a cultural preference for those in the majority.
4. moreover, i know that your sexual behavior is only one set of behaviors out of literally thousands that you go through everyday. there is nothing necessarily more telling about what gender you prefer for sex than, say, whether or not you floss, or if you prefer tea over coffee.
   
5. if you choose to base your identity around your sexual preferences, your anatomy, your gender, etc., i will of course accept that as a valid form of self-expression and self-identification, and do my best to see you as you see yourself (though of course i will still see you as i see you, as a product of my own life experiences and understanding of the workings of the world--we are all products of our environments, and we perceive as such). i will not, however, accept it as necessarily any more or less valid than if you instead chose to base your self-expression and self-identification around your skin color, your language, where you were born/grew up, where your ancestors were born/grew up, your religion or your socioeconomic place in society (and anything else that i couldn't think of). i understand that throughout your life, hell, throughout your daily activities, you will express different identities with differing strengths based on different circumstances and situations. your identity is your own, and it is certainly a lot to ask that it remain static.

so, based on those five points (and probably others that i can't think of off the cuff), i hope to see you as an individual with varied, overlapping identities, among which are your sexual and gender identities. of course i will see you as a gendered and sexed individual, but i will do my best to keep those identities in context, and without making value judgments. i know that i can't ever see you exactly as you are, because through my upbringing i was taught to always associate certain signs with certain characteristics, but hopefully i will be able to recognize those instances and do my best to overcome them.

hopefully i can bring those ideas into my interactions with everyone, and, i hope, they will do the same for me. i know im reaching for the metaphor (and there are all sorts of problems with me evoking it now, from my specific place in history/society), but: i know the civil rights movement wasn't perfect, wasn't complete by any means, and it's certainly not over. but it was a start. it told us that hey, it's not ok to assume anything about a person based on the color of their skin. and even though we all still do it, it's a start, because hopefully now we can recognize that we do it. and slowly learn to stop doing it, over the course of generations. there are going to be setbacks and problems, this is by no means a linear progression from racist to race-less, and it will probably never get all the way there, but at least it's a goal to work towards. the same with gender.

the civil rights movement (and the preceding experience, especially in the south) also was a vivid example of the inherent inequality of separation. separate implies inequality. the same goes with gender.

gender studies (and critical theory, more broadly) seeks to understand how we very literally construct our reality. we assign names, values, normalcy, pathology and deviance to all sorts of behaviors, attributes and random little traits without even thinking it. you can't really be "ok" with homosexuality unless you think of it as completely "normal", and in order to do that you have to expand your definition of normal (and then on infinitely for every minor variation in the theme of human sexuality), or better yet, do away with your understanding of normal altogether. by defining, listing, ranking and grouping, we simplify the world so it is possible for us to understand it (which is probably completely necessary--i doubt that the human mind could make sense of anything without placing it into some sort of pattern). but in so doing, we also lose detail, and, more importantly (i think), we create hierarchies and power dynamics.

which of course is inevitable. the best we can do is seek to work within the system (which of course is a strange thing to say, since it's impossible to imagine anything that's truly outside of the system), putting our best understandings into practice, using our knowledge of power to get it closer to equal. i'm not an activist, i don't know how to get this message out to "the people". i'm not a politician, i don't know how to legislate this and thus give it the authority of law. i'm a student, the best i can do is understand, acquire knowledge and build upon it in new and creative ways. but i'm also an individual, and society is made up of millions of individuals like me: if individuals take these ideas up, so does society.

so that's about all i can tell you right now. i can take these ideas, apply them to my life and my interactions with others, and hope that in the future perhaps other people might as well. i know that that doesn't go much beyond some naive hope that "maybe we can all just get along?", but to be completely honest, that's the best i can come up with right now. we can also share our knowledge, our understandings and our experiences, and hopefully combine them in new ways to come up with the "next big thing" and put this stuff into practice in the larger society.