Bi, Butch, and Bar Dyke: Pedagogical Performances of Class, Gender, and Sexuality

The three articles were very interesting. I like how Gibson, Marinara, and Meem each talked about their own personal experience of class, gender, and sexuality performance, but for each reading you had to follow the narrative closely to tell who was telling the story. The first article examine how story telling work as a way to construct identify narratives and voices. Especially the voice of lesbian or working class. In the article she writes, “all identity, all social construction, begins with narratives.” The second article talks about how being a butch lesbian  has more advantage than being a femme lesbian because being butch is associated with both visual and non-visual characteristics. The final article talks about “speaking our memories” how writing about our personal experiences can give voices them. Although all three article were interesting and had a common theme of identity and voices, the first article seemed to stand out the most to me.  In this article Marinara discussed her position as a bi sexual and working class woman, who has “entered the academy”. In the beginning of the article I didn’t really understand the connection between the story about the little girl at the grocery store and being lesbian. With that it seemed like she jumped from one point to the next without a proper transition. Also, I couldn’t tell who the author was refereeing to because she had a general sense to her tone. Anyways, Marinara argues that we see identities primarily in terms of binaries. She writes, “This politicized voice emerges from a self –empowerment that hinges on an appeal to universalities of class and sexuality, self-empowerment that depends on binary opposition.” She basically said we can be working class or professionals, straighter, or  heterosexual or we can  create complexity in our self-construction, but the reality remain that we see things in only black and white there are no in between.  And she stated it’s because of this "dualistic system of thought" that makes it impossible for her to come out of the closet because she doesn’t fit that mold. Marinara ended her article by pointing to the fact that identity is not as simple as black and white it is by far more complex than that.