"Grow out of it"

When I was at school, I didn't date until much later than everyone else, and I remember that this caused a certain amount of tension between me and my schoolmates. By all accounts, there was something wrong with me: I was a dyke, or I was frigid, or I was a slut who had lots of sex but was too uptight to tell anyone about it, or I had issues with men, or I wanted to date guys but they didn't want to date me.

When I said I simply wasn't interested, that was assumed to be false -- something masking the real problem. If asked whether I wanted to have a relationship or sex eventually, I shrugged, and explained that I had no strong preferences either way, which only confused people more.

Eventually, I did start to have romantic relationships, and in my adulthood that included sexual ones. I resent that that fits the stereotypical narrative of "growing out of it" or "not being ready", because that suggests that becoming sexual is something people do, naturally and inevitably, all on their own. And if that's true, then why did my peers go to so much trouble to make sure I knew, from primary school onwards, that there was something completely and utterly wrong with not wanting sexual relationships? We were in primary school when I first remember being overtly told that this was something wrong with me -- most of my peers didn't even know what sex was (I got unusually good sex ed from my parents, at quite a young age, but it's clear to me in retrospect that this wasn't true of my peers), only that sex wasn't optional once you were at the highschool prom/in college/married (highschool proms, college, and marriage obviously not being optional either).

In other words, from a very young age, we are taught The Relationship Hierarchy. Which is something like: blood ties and marriage ties trump other sorts of ties. Sexual relationships trump non sexual relationships. You have only one partner, who shall be your sexual partner and your lawfully-wedded spouse, and no other partners, and they trump all other relationships. Marriages that produce children trump non-procreating relationships, but Thou Shalt Not Be A Single Parent. "Family" and "Friends" are distinctive sets of people, and "Family" trumps "Friends". "Friends" should mean only people of the same sex, but otherwise, same sex friends trump other-sex friends. You shall be emotionally intimate only with same-sex friends, unless you are a man, and then Thou Shalt Not Have Emotions. (Please note that I think these are social norms, rather than things I agree with -- in fact I strongly oppose many of these ideas).

Well fuck that. As my co-blogger Katherine blogged, important relationships can be constituted not only through blood ties or marriage ties, but also in other ways. Katherine used the example of flatmates, who might well constitute family.

The message here is that although I happen to associate certain kinds of emotional closeness with certain kinds of people and the relationships I have with them, and I also happen to associate certain kinds of (not necessarily sexual) physical intimacy with certain people, those are things I have largely been taught to associate, according to the Relationship Hierarchy. Some of those associations or non-associations are healthy and self-protective (it is not healthy to be close to certain people in certain ways), some of them are arbitrary and deeply harmful.

And that has all sorts of reprecussions. It means that from a very young age, before children really understand what sex is, we have taught them that boys and girls cannot be friends without a sexual connection (and men and men, or women and women can never have a sexual or romantic connection). It means that we teach kids that people who are not interested in sex or romance are wrong. It means we teach kids that queer families are wrong or oxymoronic. It means we teach kids that there is a primacy to sexual relationships above friendships that goes partway to legitimising posessive behaviours in abusive partners.

And in the context of a society in which things are sold by displaying a near-naked or hawt-and-sexy woman, or a society in which street harassment is part of many women's routine experience, this is also how we teach women that they must be sexually available all the time, to men who must always want sex. It starts before we even know what sex is, and it continues, more or less forever. I remember being little, thinking that eventually I would have sex because everyone did. I remember being repulsed by the idea then, which I attributed to being primary-school age, but years later, I'm still repulsed by the idea that one ought, to think that having sex is inevitable, or think that nobody says no to sex. That's not something I anticipate "growing out of".

There are interesting things to be said about how this relates to queer feminism, sex-positive feminism, and the socialisation of children, but this post is long enough already. What I will say is this: Kaz and I have talked about queer feminism having, on the whole, very little to say about asexuality. I've worried about writing about asexuality because I don't identify as asexual, and didn't want to be talking as if I knew about other people's experiences. But part of being a political ally, and part of creating a feminism that works for me, is examining my own investment in sexuality, and how we build the hierarchies that I, and indeed everyone else, is part of, and that harm the people around me. This isn't really a post about asexuality -- but it is me starting to do the investment work.

--IP

Friend, this love poem is as heartfelt as any romance...

For my course on the anthropology of kinship, I had to draw a genealogical chart of my own kinship. That's basically a family tree, with triangles for men and circles for women (and I'm not even going to go into that right now...), equals signs for marriage and lines going from parents to children. Looking at it, it seemed pretty incomplete. The assumption that those lines are what make up my life – which is still, at quite a basic level, assumed in our society – would leave me floating in a sea of temporary relationships while I wait to find a permanent sexual partner and settle down. This is not to devalue the relationships that this does map - my genealogical family are still really important to me. But what about all the other relationships in my life? What about my flatmates? I see them every day, and our lives together have meaning which doesn't fit into that scheme. What about my best friend, whose importance in my life totally defies conventional description? Why should friendship be second to variations on procreation? What about the possibility that I might not get married or have children? What about the possibility that I might love more than one person at once?

The study of kinship is a really big deal for oldschool anthropologists, and it's historically based on exactly this kind of genealogical chart. When kinship first became and area of study in its own right, genealogy – who was involved in your procreation and who you're supposed to be procreating with – were used as the basic units of kinship, regardless of what culture was being considered. It obscured everything else, despite these things simply not being that important in some places. The reason for this was because it really was a big deal for the anthropologists themselves, because that's the basis of our official kinship system in Euro-American culture, and that's what they were basing their analyses on, without quite realising it. Kinship is naturalised to the point where it seems self-evident; they did not necessarily question this official kinship in their own lives, and they did not question it in terms of talking about other cultures either.

And meanwhile, outside academia, people struggle with being outside official kinship all the time. What happens if you don't fit in? The changes of the last 50 years (readily available contraception, growing acceptance of queer relationships, later marriage, the increasing possibility of not getting married at all, the greater likelihood of divorce and remarriage) showed up genealogy as not the be-all-and-end-all that we thought it was. And yet, so many important parts of life are based on it – broadly, it still forms the basis for what is recognised as an important relationship by the rest of society. It shapes the trajectory of our lives in a way which are seriously limiting, and using it to try and understand people who do kinship in different ways is limiting too.

Lots of anthropologists have gotten over it and started looking at kinship in terms of which people are seen as important to each other, and in what ways, doing their best not to make any assumptions about “biology”. Practical kinship – that is, kinship which doesn't necessarily fit with the official rhetoric of any given culture but which is important to people's everyday lives – is gaining ground as an important area of study. The general trend in anthropology is to try not to see cultures as homogenous but to see the conflicts and disagreements over things, so the different versions of kinship within any given group also get some attention.

But we're not quite there yet. Take the point that our lecturer made in the first class: kinship is seen as boring by undergraduates, she said, because we're doing the whole leaving-home thing and haven't got a family of our own yet. Obviously, when we do that, we'll “get it”. But actually, maybe the study of kinship is like it is because of this attitude – because our everyday lives are ignored and/or devalued as some kind of filling-in until we can go on to “proper” kinship. Cut to a tutorial: (me, in full flow about some point) “... and I don't believe in marriage so -” (tutor, interrupting) “well, you say that now!”. Me: jaw drops. Why on earth would we want to study kinship when the things that we could bring to it – an understanding of our own practical kinship based on our communal flats, on our lives at university, on our formations of queer kinship, on the newish idea that we might not get married or have children at all – are seen as not really valid, because those that teach it still have this view at that genealogical kinship is what it's all about, really.

It can actually be kind of hard when there's no way of validating or confirming how important these relationships are – it's difficult to validate something that there's no word for, that's seen as trivial or a stop-gap. It makes me angry that the lines that join us are considered less important just because there's no vows or procreation involved. Gay relationships are slowly gaining ground as valid, aided by the fact that they can be approximated to straight relationships, but other relationships still loose out – polyamourous relationships, friendships, relationships based on shared ideals or activism. In that context, to tell people how much they mean to me, I have to sort of triangulate my way with words that mean something like it – often kinship words. But it's never that they're metaphorically those things, or that they are in the traditional sense of the words. It's just that, there's an approximation there, and although the rest has to be said in other ways, we only have our shared language to try to articulate it out loud.

Understanding all this is important for the acceptance and validation of all kinds of kinship for ourselves, where practical relatedness is changing quicker than the official way of talking about it (as is probably the case anywhere), and anthropology, if it is going to do its job, has to understand this too. The idea that queer kinship (in the broadest sense) as important in its own right (rather than an emulation of, y'know, “proper” kinship) is aided by the idea that traditional, official ideas about kinship are just a cultural construction rather than “natural” and inevitable. Opening up to the possibilities of kinship is not only good for the basic anthropological project of fostering understanding between cultures, but also for understanding the huge possibilities of our own kinship and expanding the horizons of our own relationships. And in the end, these things are the same ideal.