Just before leaving the area, a funny thing happened. I was told of a conversation between two middle-aged women talking about how obviously gay I was. The person who overheard this conversation & related it to me was my girlfriend.
I told a couple of my gay friends and they laughed.
Obviously, my little annecdote is universalizable, but that loses something, since it was composed of so much more than just gender expectations. There's class, of course, as well as age, suburban vs. urban culture, but also the specificty of place, that it happened in a PHILADELPHIA suburb. The same could have happened in many other places as well, but there are places it would have been far less likely.
My point: The kind of critical discourse we engage in shapes our typifications of cultural typifications. We need to be extremely self-critical in watching how we choose to systemically highlight some aspects and utterly erase others. There's a lot to be set for the density of perceptions in your classic 19th Century novel from Austen to Conrad. It's much less natural to us now, living in a far more fluid/chaotic/mass-mediated culture, yet in a sense it's all the more important, since the hold of specificity remains present, and in some sense stronger because we so easily overlook it.
The version of the anecdote I told is shorn of all the "boring details" that make it so rich and memorable to me, the kind of "boring details" that 19th Century novels are filled with. I wanted it to fit in. As the thin edge of the wedge.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"