What is “Community?”

1. Singing The Blues:Understanding the Historicizing of Queer Gender Identity as Performed By Stone Butch Lesbians 

2. What is “Community?” Can we choose our communities? Is it our family? What constitutes family? Are we born into communities? Can we share a map?

3. Diving Deeper than the Gene-pool... • “We define nongenetic inheritance as any effect on offspring phenotype brought about by the transmission of factors other than DNA sequences from parents or more remote ancestors.”-- Day & Bonduriansky

4. Understanding the Queer Community... “In a way that’s difficult to understand, we can be your family. The gay community, long left unprotected by others, has learned to protect itself. We call each other ‘family’ because that’s often how it feels, in this world. You may find yourself a mentor who feels like a mother or father. Your friends may become siblings. In a life where we can choose so little, we can at least choose to surround ourselves with support and love. This is your community, now. These are your people. Protect each other. Save each other. For some of you, each other might be all you have. The rest of us are here to tell you we will be enough.” -- Allison Subasic, Director of the LGBTA Student Resource Center at Penn State University

5. Jess Goldberg “Strange, to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home” (11) “Even when I was bundled up in the dead of winter, with only a couple of inches of my face peeking out from my snowsuit hood and scarf, adults would stop me and ask, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I’d drop my eyes in shame, never questioning their right to ask” (16). “My parents were enraged that life had cheated them” (13). “For a moment in that mirror I saw the woman I was growing up to be staring back at me. She looked scared and sad. I wondered if I was brave enough to grow up and be her” (21). “Who was I now - woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices” (222) “We’d all laugh for the sheer joy of being who we were, and being it together” (30). “Specifically, it is proposed that appropriate regulation of the vagal brake during infancy reflects an ability to selectively engage and disengage with the environment” -- Porges(106). “‘Mommy, is that a girl or a man?’ she asked, looking up at Joan. Joan flashed me an apologetic expression and turned back to Amy. ‘That’s Jess,’ she said” (226) “Although every aspect of the affective life can be influenced by depression, depression is intimately related to 1) sustained overactivity of the separation-dis- tress PANIC system that can, if prolonged, lead to a downward cascade of psychological despair (a theoretical view originally formu- lated by John Bowlby); and 2) the despair phase that follows the acute PANIC response which is characterized by abnormally low activity of the SEEKING system. In terms of animal modeling, depression reflects the behavioral agitation of separation distress followed by emotional shutdown. The initial behaviorially agitated panic state may include SEEKING arousal, followed by dramatically diminished SEEKING during the depressive “despair phase” -- Panksepp

6. Building the Bridge Why are mirror neurons so important when studying gender? As Judith Butler and others have emphasized, gender is a performance (Gender Trouble, 1990), something we “do,” rather than something we “are.” “Wittig understands gender as the workings of ‘sex,’ where ‘sex’ is an obligatory injunction for the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize itself in obedience to a historically delimited possibility, and to do this, not once or twice, but as a sustained and repeated project” -- Judith Butler “The idea is that attachment, underwritten by the painfulness of separationand the pleasure of company, and managed by intricate neural circuitry and neurochemicals, is the neural platform for morality” (Churchland). “For many gender deviants, the notion of passing is singularly unhelpful. Passing as a narrative assumes that there is a self that masquerades as another kind of self and does so successfully; at various moments, the successful pass may cohere into something akin to identity. At such a moment, the passer has become.” -- Judith Halbertstam The world shows us social roles, and our SEEKING mechanism ensures that we try to fill them. Gender becomes a performance wherein we designate ourselves fit to join the in-group. Scientists understand this through a neurological perspective.Humanists understand this through talk of marginalization, disappearance, invisibility... despite feminist theory’s resistance to the explanations of science, the two are unchangeably intertwined and inform each others’ practices immutably. -- Moroski

7. Are You In Or Out? “I explore how a specific class of brain cells, called mirror neurons, may have played a pivotal role in our becoming the one and only species that veritably lives and breathes culture. Culture consists of massive collections of complex skills and knowledge which are transferred from person to person through two core mediums, language and imitation. We would be nothing without our savant-like ability to imitate others. Accurate imitation, in turn, may depend on the uniquely human ability to ‘adopt another’s point of view’ -- both visually and metaphorically -- and may have required a more sophisticated deployment of these neurons . . . Mirror neurons also enable you to imitate the movements of others, thereby setting the stage for the cultural ‘inheritance’ of skills developed and honed by others” (Ramachandran, The Tell Tale Brain pg. 121) And if our bodies and minds have evolved in such a way that we feel successful mimesis is synonymous with security and advantage... “Humans are consummate imitators . . . [so] we don’t have to learn everything by trial and error” (Churchland, 1998) So if we learn by what we see around us... • By Churchland’s definition, “Morality originates in the neurobiology of attachment and bonding.” And if our understanding of what is right and good depends on the success of our social interactions within the context of an “in group”... “To Summarize: (1) The adaptive pressures in our evolutionary pasty resulted in an intelligent, social, wayfinding, knowledge-seeking, and ultimately, culture-producing species; (2) human affective ties to places and persons are interrelated, because the combination of a protective group and a fitness-promoting habitat are essential to species survival; (3) knowledge of the world, for us, is always specifically human knowledge; (4) our dominant ways of knowing, which bias our procedures for gathering, synthesizing, analyzing, reproducing, and transforming information, undergird our artistic modes and patterns.” And if this is all true... -- Easterlin (262) “Evolutionarily, this ability to observe distinct entities within larger wholes and to break down processes aids analysis and facilitates decision and action. It is more important to perceive the threatening other . . . and punch him in the nose than it is to experience oneness.” Easterlin (258) And if its more important to cast someone out than to draw someone in...

8. Then it must really hurt to “fit out.” “Although every aspect of the affective life can be influenced by depression, depression is intimately related to 1) sustained overactivity of the separation-distress PANIC system that can, if prolonged, lead to a downward cascade of psychological despair (a theoretical view originally formulated by John Bowlby); and 2) the despair phase that follows the acute PANIC response which is characterized by abnormally low activity of the SEEKING system. In terms of animal modeling, depression reflects the behavioral agitation of separation distress followed by emotional shutdown. The initial behaviorially agitated panic state may include SEEKING arousal, followed by dramatically diminished SEEKING during the depressive “despair phase.” (Panksepp) Is this starting to sound familiar yet?

9. “I knew [Jacqueline] was worried about my surviving it. I wondered if I was ready. Al’s message was: You’re not” (30) “‘But, Ed, people always act like we’re half woman, half man.’ ‘It’s true. But now they don’t know what I am and it drives them nuts. I’m telling you, Jess, if it doesn’t change soon, I can’t take it much longer. I’m doubling the shots of hormones just to try and make it work faster.’ I put my hand on her shoulder. Two men turned and looked at us I dropped my hand. ‘How’s Darlene dealing with it?’ Ed slowly turned her face toward me. The sadness in her eyes frightened me. ‘We don’t talk about it,’ Ed said (149). “I immediately loved the strength in her face. The way her jaw set. The anger in her eyes. The way she carried her body. Her body both emerged from her sports coat and was hidden. Curves and creases. Broad back, wide neck. Large breasts bound tight. Folds of white shirt and tie and jacket. Hips concealed” (28) “Her hand clamped on my arm like a claw, her face contorted with anger. ‘Don’t bring me back,’ she growled. ‘No,’ I said. I could hear the fear in my voice. I wouldn’t run from Al, I was willing to face anything. This moment was all I had with her and it would be my last. ‘Don’t bring me back,’ Al repeated. Her nails cut into the flesh of my arms. I tried to calm down. Suddenly I understood what she was saying and I felt ashamed. How had Al survived? By forgetting, going to sleep, going away! She went underground, his for safety just as I’d done” (289)

10. This Matters. Historicizing and re-examining the evolutions and expressions of gender can help us renegotiate our relationship with our personal communities’ pasts. By examining the past and its evolution, we can better contextualize our own understanding of the world those before us created. As we evolve and devolve, create in-groups and find ourselves somehow in out-groups, we repeatedly engage in a struggle to define gender that did not begin with -- and certainly will not end with -- us. By using affective neuroscience, we can come to understand why we SEEK what we seek -- whether its a community or a sense of self -- and why our ability to imitate and synthesize relies on what it is that we find along the way. We can understand, on a neurological level, why as a community queer persons have torn each other down, and rebuilt their own community again and again - the creation of communities within communities fueling our sense of imitation and belonging, coupled with a simultaneous sense of exclusion that propels a desire for restructuring the system one more time. We can even come to a better understanding of mental illness in the LGBTQQIA community. Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues provides a model for readers and scholars to examine -- an unflinching portrayal of butch women at a tumultuous period in both feminist and queer histories. With Jess as a guide, readers must revisit the history of the queer movement and attempt to historicize Jess’s story while connecting it with their own. Indeed, affective neuroscience, when combined with literature, helps art to reach its higher form: a framework through which we can view the world as whole.

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