Days later, we finally go out to breakfast to interview Noel (left, on Magazine street), who moved to the city to meet her mom, a native New Orleanian. Noel’s mother had relocated to NOLA after her daughter's college graduation and had urged Noel to come down and do some work after Katrina. Noel worked for Common Ground for a little and established a media collective, then worked for non-profits and schools until she started doing video editing on a freelance basis. After a little while, we ask her about the dramatic recent changes in her life. “The process was slower than you think,” Noel tells us. “I kinda knew I was gay when I went abroad to Stockholm and the girls were all free to be a little bi. Then I took a look at Loren Cameron’s Body Alchemy [a book of transsexual portraits]. At first I thought, ‘Hmm, that’s kinda sexy,’ then ‘No, this is too alternative, too weird.’ But eventually I ended up dating a transmale for 9 months.”Noel describes her straight life as unnerving for years—“I don’t know why, but I felt like I had to be the girliest girl. Other girls weren’t very nice to me, and guys were just ridiculous. I felt like I wasn’t well-respected and faced the most absurd amount of harassment, I even had gender nightmares…I made drastic changes to make my experience as a woman better…being with women feels so much better for me.” Noel does connect her recent experience to feminism, but notes that she was a feminist from the start—“My mom was a huge tomboy and I had elements of that, too. When I dated guys, I always wanted to take on some masculine traits and be ‘one of the guys’ and they just weren’t into it.”
She sees straight guys, out of everyone, as the most stuck in the gender binary. “If a guy hooks up with a guy, it’s epic, but with girls, it’s more accepted. People are progressing…but so far it’s just little pockets.” To Noel, the future of feminism includes expanding definitions of gender. “I really like the fact that in the queer community, genderbending is an actual activity, like our drag show. It’s just inefficient and unintuitive to separate genders.”
--Nona
Discussion Questions:
Question 1
3 comments:
This is literally what happened to me. LITERALLY. Transmales are at first more attractive because they are most like the people you have been fucking your whole life. Then you, at least I, realize that they buy into some of the rigid concepts about gender that biological males do--like not wanting you to be TOO masculine, or a tomboy, or somehow surpass their masculinity. That is when you realize that a butch dyke is what you need. I feel that many lesbos who feel extremely masculine feel a strange type of pressure to transition--but it's an extremely serious decision, I think one that is often made because this culture generally is taught to be disgusted by dykes. Fuck that. Long live the dyke.
what i never understood about new orleans is that gay guys abound and there is almost no lesbian community. the flamboyance of this city doesn't extent to women. i guess noel found her niche, but that community is not visible.
I also wanted to say that where I am at at this
point in my life and based on my life experiences, I feel mostly attracted to the idea of androgyny, both for myself and my partners. Opposed to functioning in only one avenue of gender and only allowing one set of traits to show one puts oneself into a very narrow corner and limits ones one life experiences. I also value equality in my relationships, because I don't want either of us to have to be the girl and hold less social validity in comparison to the partner.
Because of its intangibility and difficulty with
labeling, androgyny is listed less often as a personal identity, which I thing is problematic, if not dangerous, because even if we can accept gayness and gender performance, we are still stifling the possibility for fluidity and change.
--Noel
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