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Jul. 4th, 2010 12:35 amyuki_onna dissects Lady Gaga's bisexuality claim: If you only want relationships with men--and she's not only saying she's only had relationships with men in the past, but only looks for them with men now, and could never love a woman--well, you know, I have a hard time seeing what's so thrillingly queer about that.
You know, I tend to distrust any celebrity declaration of bisexuality. It seems to me that most of them (especially women) do it for titillation of the audience. I know it's not right to doubt and argue the self-identification of people, but the label they use, I use too, and what they do with it echoes with me. And a lot of them use this label but only date opposite sex in public, supporting the myth of bisexuals using their own gender for sex while marrying the opposite.
So when they call themselves bisexual but only have open visible long-term relationship with opposite sex like Lady Gaga, it makes my past and potential future same-sex relationship more fragile and 'unreal' in the other's eyes. When they call themselves bisexual but then take it back like David Bowie, it makes my orientation less valid in other's eyes. There are of course people who are doing it sort of right, like Angelina Jolie who doesn't dismiss her relationship with a woman as something less then real. But the more people represent bisexuality as something not real, the more I feel the need to defend it as real, and I don't know how, and don't actually want to defend what I am (especially as I'm not quite bisexual, I'm pansexual because gender isn't binary, and I prefer queer anyway). It's all kind of stupid.
Speaking of another sort of representation: there's a usual argument in the discussions about queer representation (or any minority representation, actually, but let's take queer for this one) that it's all very good to have queer representation, but you can't force the author, the creator, to write something they don't want to, because of the holy creative process and inspiration and so on. And on one hand, I get it. I write things, too, and I write whatever is in my head, and I don't stop to check for representation. But on the other hand, when I see yet another 'the author has the right to write whatever they have in mind' I want to scream: 'No they don't have the right to erase me and the likes of me from existence because they don't want me in their little pretty world so much that they can't even think about me and the likes of me! Stop making me invisible! LOOK at me, I'm here in this world, we are all around you, we're here, we're queer, didn't you get the memo to get used to it?'
...I think I have a period of being angry at discrimination and silencing and stuff. Not used to it.
You know, I tend to distrust any celebrity declaration of bisexuality. It seems to me that most of them (especially women) do it for titillation of the audience. I know it's not right to doubt and argue the self-identification of people, but the label they use, I use too, and what they do with it echoes with me. And a lot of them use this label but only date opposite sex in public, supporting the myth of bisexuals using their own gender for sex while marrying the opposite.
So when they call themselves bisexual but only have open visible long-term relationship with opposite sex like Lady Gaga, it makes my past and potential future same-sex relationship more fragile and 'unreal' in the other's eyes. When they call themselves bisexual but then take it back like David Bowie, it makes my orientation less valid in other's eyes. There are of course people who are doing it sort of right, like Angelina Jolie who doesn't dismiss her relationship with a woman as something less then real. But the more people represent bisexuality as something not real, the more I feel the need to defend it as real, and I don't know how, and don't actually want to defend what I am (especially as I'm not quite bisexual, I'm pansexual because gender isn't binary, and I prefer queer anyway). It's all kind of stupid.
Speaking of another sort of representation: there's a usual argument in the discussions about queer representation (or any minority representation, actually, but let's take queer for this one) that it's all very good to have queer representation, but you can't force the author, the creator, to write something they don't want to, because of the holy creative process and inspiration and so on. And on one hand, I get it. I write things, too, and I write whatever is in my head, and I don't stop to check for representation. But on the other hand, when I see yet another 'the author has the right to write whatever they have in mind' I want to scream: 'No they don't have the right to erase me and the likes of me from existence because they don't want me in their little pretty world so much that they can't even think about me and the likes of me! Stop making me invisible! LOOK at me, I'm here in this world, we are all around you, we're here, we're queer, didn't you get the memo to get used to it?'
...I think I have a period of being angry at discrimination and silencing and stuff. Not used to it.
