From The Brown Daily Herald: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/03/13/poet-examines-sexism-transphobia-in-talk/
In a lecture and spoken word pieces, author Julia Serano dug into overlapping ‘-isms’
By Kate DeSimone
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
“If one more person tells me that ‘all gender is performance,’ I think I am going to strangle them,” proclaimed Julia Serano, author and spoken word performer, in the opening of her spoken word piece “Performance Piece.”
The piece was one of two Serano performed after her lecture about the intersections of different types of marginalization, including racism, sexism and transphobia. The event, held in Metcalf Auditorium Tuesday night, was hosted by the Pride Series and Queer Alliance as part of Women’s History Month. It concluded with a question-and-answer session.
In her talk, entitled “The Intersection of Feminism, Queer and Trans Politics,” Serano discussed the problems with characterizing marginalization as “unilateral” and argued that the issue is much more complex than “oppressors, oppressed, end of story.” As an example, Serano said sexism does not always entail men oppressing women. Leaders of “second-wave” feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, such as Betty Friedan, fought against traditional sexism but excluded lesbians from their movement, she said.
In fact, Serano said, different forms of “-isms” can overlap, exacerbating each other’s effects. It is not the case that “racism happens over here, sexism happens over here” — these forms of oppression cannot be confined to particular areas of a person’s life, Serano said.
Serano spoke of her own experiences with trans-misogyny, a form of sexism specifically targeting people on the “trans female/feminine spectrum,” as she wrote in one of her lecture slides.
Sexism and stereotypes target transgender men and women in different ways, she said. While transgender men are often assumed to have transitioned in order to benefit from “male privilege,” transgender women are often perceived to have transitioned for sexual reasons, leading to their hypersexualization in media portrayals, she added.
Serano earned snaps from the audience when her presentation moved to what she called “the obligatory explaining ‘cis’ slide.” Before the term ‘cisgender’ was coined, there was no specific term to describe someone who was not transgender, Serano said, so people might have said a woman was a “normal” or “biological woman” in contrast to a “trans woman.”
“I am not inorganic or not biological in any form,” Serano said, prompting laughter from the audience. She described how naming people with a label such as “bisexual” or “transgender” marks them as abnormal, especially when there is no commonly used label for people outside those groups.
Continue reading at: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/03/13/poet-examines-sexism-transphobia-in-talk/
