Blogging Desires

back in malaysia, and after several failed attempts at blogging while in delhi, giving it another go at the comforts of my home.

it’s a little hard to blog about an event after it has happened. one lesson i suppose, is to ensure that there is connectivity that can support multiple logins for participants who would like to blog as they go along. but eitherway, i’ll give it a go.

one of the sessions that really struck me during the event was the plenary on interrogating heterosexuality. i got quite excited when one of the speakers mentioned at the introduction that “heterosexuality is not let off the hook” brilliant! a lot of times, sexuality seems synonymous with (straight) female (lack/lascivious) sexual agency, or lgbtiq and the rest of the/us ‘queers’. it seems promising to start looking at heterosexuality with lots of questions.

so different ‘models’ of heterosexualities was presented. i wish i can remember all of them. but primarily, it offered a glimpse of heterosexual arrangements that didn’t confirm to patriarchal power relations, or even monogamy. in this way, heterosexuality is seen as a little more unstable than the usual fairytale of one and only happily ever after. that there are multiple lived experiences that are not just about one husband one wife and 2.2 kids (preferably male) . but i suppose what disturbed me also, was that they were not normative.

for example, the Musuo community in China was given as a demonstration of how women headed families, and men remained as replaceable companions. in the second presentation, a matrilineal society in Kerala was presented, and how it became legislated out of existence as a kind of prostituion. i’m oversimplifying this, but i was hoping for a discussion around how this became ‘queered’ in imagination and reality of matrimony.

as in, there is a value in examining heterosexual marriage through diachronic lenses. but if the re-telling does not shift the albeit real, but marginalised experiences as part of the normative, but instead, through the representation, becomes a ‘curiosity’, a ‘dead/missing/mysterious’ past, then how does this interrogate heterosexuality?

i’m thinking out loud, so maybe i have missed the point. but at the end of the session, i was a little dissatisfied. feeling that there is a crack somewhere that i’ve not plonked a question mark in. why should heterosexuality mean monogamy mean marriage? there are ample examples in reality that shows this is not the case. legalised polygymy in Malaysia for example. and acceptable ‘adultery’ and visits to sex workers. in both of the very real, and very ‘now’ instances, it’s really about the assumption of the passivity and lack of female sexual agency leaning on the active and penetrative male sexual agency. i wonder where we managed to trouble sexuality and its adherence to gender in this session.

i’ve been watching queer as folk (bad tv, i know), but even in pop representations of gay culture, it kinda shouts the same things about what it means to be a man, and sexually active. and though the last season attempts to disrupt things like straights = marriage; gay = lots of sleeping around and different ideas of commitment, but at the end of the day, the anxiety and propulsion of desire for the audience is toward a neat closure of romantic couplehood.

and then what?

Knowledge & Rights with Young People through Safer Spaces (KRYSS) did a workshop with young/emerging artists on sexuality. at one of the sessions, when participants were making bodies and markers of sexual and gender identities, the group that made the straight woman ended up marking her through her gendered roles instead. she strangely became an asexual being wearing an apron, make-up and reading self-help books on how to get a man.

is it ever possible to interrogate heterosexuality without interrogating the gendered binary they lean on to become legible? and at what points does it start to become incomprehensible, nonsensical and hilarious, while at the same time, rupturing the fairytale of heterosexuality?