Once, after an interview with a transgender person, I was invited to a party with his friends in Novosibirsk. There were some twenty people there, about half FTMs and the others very feminine-looking women. There were a few established pairs, and we did some dancing. At one point in the party, the girls went into the kitchen to chat, and the guys were in the sitting room. I felt confused about where I should go and asked my friend Sasha. He pointed to the kitchen—the females. I felt a bit disappointed because I didn’t consider myself a traditional female—I didn’t wear makeup and heels, I dressed in a more androgynous way, and most of all I didn’t look up to men as superior. But they certainly weren’t straight women either.
The heterosexist oppression enforced by European Christianity knows no bounds. Allen, after discussing Judy Grahn’s research in Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds, writes:
Recent scholarly work reveals the universal or nearly universal presence of homosexuality and lesbianism among tribal peoples, the special respect and honor often accorded gay men and women, and the alteration in that status as a result of colonization of the [American] continent by Anglo-Europeans. These studies demonstrate the process by which external conquest and colonization become internalized among the colonized with vivid clarity. Homophobia, which was rare (perhaps even absent entirely) among tribal peoples in the Americas, has steadily grown among them as they have traded traditional tribal values for Christian industrial ones.
Traditional gender roles and crossovers of gender and sexuality exist in all cultures—Vietnam, Serbia, the Dominican Republic, and Senegal, to give only a few examples. Most people in our societies are not educated in variant identities. Queer scholars should not be the only ones to take up questions involving queer communication.
We need not a merging of feminist and queer analyses but an alliance of all sectors, an intersection, an inclusion of queer in all language and gender studies and research and vice versa. We need more feminists, more critical pedagogy scholars, more linguists and teachers to understand and adopt queer theory and be aware of the overwhelming heterosexist focus of our scholarship and education. Concerted study and understanding of our marginalized communities, integration of queer interpretations in all disciplines, and interdisciplinary research in gender and queer theory is long overdue. We can move beyond the divisions in society and refuse to be other and join forces with all marginalized sectors to create a better world.
Let us remember that our perceptions of gender and sexuality are socially based and Eurocentric in the case of the U.S. Other cultures may have their own prejudices and perceptions that are foreign and useful to learn about to broaden our perspectives. Here is another gender-variant report from an internet website on Siberian shamanism about the little known Chukchi in northern Siberia where a third gender is also embraced.
The Chukchi (and neighboring indigenous peoples including the Koryak and the Kamchadal) are a nomadic, shamanic people who embrace a third gender. Generally shamans are biologically male with some adoption of female roles and appearance, who marry men but also are not subject to the social limitations placed on women. Third gender Chukchi could accompany men on the hunt, as well as take care of family.
Great opportunities exist in classrooms, lectures, and print to address queer theory and the deconstruction of gender and sexuality, to open students’ minds to gender issues in their own cultures and to point out the presence of queers throughout time. This is not a new concept, and we can all benefit from connecting it with the control of women and other sectors while not allowing ourselves to be alienated and divided from others. The educational leadership that promotes real learning Is well expressed by Bonny Norton and Aneta Pavlenko in Gender and English Language Learners: ”Teachers need to be proactive and well-prepared to handle controversial topics, while maintaining a positive dynamic in the classroom. Furthermore they need to pay particular attention to learners who may be silenced by the dominant culture.” I would like to see a natural alliance between gender and queer theory.
Judy Grahn calls her excellent coming of age book about being a radical lesbian feminist poet and activist, A Simple Revolution. This and other similar books recover our past. In the name of compulsory heterosexuality, great artists, intellectuals, young people, and workers have lost their lives. Intolerance and homophobia and misogyny have run rampant. The fifteenth century Spanish Inquisition and Nazism alike selected homosexuals and nontraditionally gendered people as early victims. We cannot allow this to happen again. More communication among all the divided identities, more boldness in elucidating the interrelatedness of gender and queer issues in our writing and teaching, are necessary strategies. Revolution, a kind of permanent revolution, continuous change, continuous critiquing of the status quo, require queer theory.
Who Was Sophia Parnok?
Some would say Sophia Parnok was Marina Tsvetaeva’s first woman lover, others would say she was Russia’s Sappho, but many do not know her name. She has been identified as a minor lyrical poet with a particular intimate voice, born of the Silver Age of Russian culture. Only during perestroika and after did her poetry become somewhat known in Russia, a country where people are generally more aware of literary history, greater lovers of poetry, bigger readers than Americans.
Sophia Parnok wrote these lines in Soviet Russia in 1932. A Russian-Jewish poet born in 1885 in Taganrog, in the south of Russia, she made no secret of her sexual orientation in her life or her work during both the most tolerant and the most repressive times in Soviet Moscow in the early twentieth century. By the time of this poem she was already thinking of herself as writing for only a small circle of friends. Written for Nina Vedeneyeva, the last great love of her life, the poem above shockingly reveals a moment of intimacy, with a touch of humor and irony.
After having written five volumes of poetry, Sophia Parnok died in obscurity in 1933 at the age of forty eight, surrounded by her women friends. It was not until the 1990s that most of her work was published in Russia. She was a poet hidden away by censors, yet being hidden was also part of her persona. Her last book of published poems was called Vpolgolosa (In a Low Voice). It was as if she knew that it would be her new communication style—to be quiet. She wrote in a letter to a friend that her voice and her poems were not ready to be heard and she was aware of that. It was the political and historical moment she lived in, but also she was a poet of lesbian intimacy and lived a Sapphic life.
To begin her life as a poet in the exciting atmosphere of the Silver Age in Russia, a time that invited all sorts of artistic currents, including European trends, must have been inspiring. Along with the atmosphere of political change, there was an anti-bourgeois strain in artistic circles, a challenge to traditional sexuality and relationships. Poets like Esenin and Mayakovsky spoke their rebellious poetry very publicly. Cafe gatherings and smaller circles both in St. Petersburg and Moscow were popular. Mikhail Kuzmin was known for his gay cabaret performances and readings in St. Petersburg. The times blossomed in modernism—symbolism, futurism, acmeism, even a new sexual mysticism (Vasily Rozanov). At this time poet Vyacheslav Ivanov published his translations of Sappho which greatly influenced the age. Parnok saw herself as a rebellious female poet, and in this atmosphere she became known as a lesbian and accepted as such.