Читать книгу Like a Boy but Not a Boy - Andrea Bennett - Страница 13

deneige

DENEIGE WAS BORN IN 1990. She’s twenty-nine and uses the term “queer,” mostly. She also likes “dyke” a lot, so she uses that too. Deneige grew up in Coaldale and Chin, Alberta. She went to school in Lethbridge because that’s where the International Baccalaureate program was. Coaldale had maybe a population of 5,000 when Deneige lived there, and Chin had about 60 people. She moved to Chin when she was about ten, just for a couple years. Her mother’s second husband had a house there. She and her mother moved back to Coaldale when they split up.

Coaldale is very religious. It’s a bit of a Bible belt, with a high German Mennonite population. In the surrounding communities, there are quite a few folks who are Mormon as well. Coaldale has more than a dozen churches, which is a lot for 5,000 people. There were two elementary schools when Deneige was growing up. One school was mostly farm kids, and the other was mostly town kids. Deneige went to the one with the farm kids. The elementary school that she went to had Wednesday afternoon Bible studies with the local Mennonites, even though it was a public school. Her mom was a hairdresser. Her stepfather worked in construction. She hasn’t spoken with her father since she was twelve, so she’s not sure about him. Last she heard, he was running a cult out of his basement.

Deneige was raised non-denominationally, because her mother was raised Jehovah’s Witness, but her father was Mormon, and her father’s family was all Catholic French Canadian. Deneige isn’t a believer. But she had an acute fear of going to hell. It definitely shaped her. But she’s pretty staunchly atheist now.

Deneige felt very strongly that she didn’t belong in her hometown. Deneige’s mother was concerned about her and her sister’s potential drug use, given that they were in a small community with not a lot to do. So they cleaned the dance studio in exchange for ballet and dance classes, and Deneige trained in ballet for fourteen years. Deneige has never really been a small person, which was fine at her studio, but she’d go to dance competitions and the adjudicators would say things like, “No ballet dancer should be over ninety pounds.” She didn’t have many friends within her dance studio communities. She didn’t have a lot of friends in school, either. She was very anxious and depressed for a lot of her life. When she was in grade seven, she stopped talking to people, period. She read instead. She did her school work, went to dance class, and read a novel a day.

Growing up, Deneige had no clue she was queer. She knew one couple who were gay men. They’ve always been out, but it’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation. They didn’t really display a lot of public affection. She didn’t even realize that it was a possibility for women. Deneige came out to her family when was twenty-one or twenty-two. A lot of people in high school told her she was a lesbian, or called her a lesbian. But it wasn’t until she moved to Vancouver that she had the space to figure life out.

Queer theorist Didier Eribon wrote an entire book on insult as the making of the gay self, and how we get penned in by language that precedes us. Deneige teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and one of the essays she teaches is on heterosexual interpellation, which is an idea that comes from Louis Althusser. Althusser’s philosophy basically says that nobody is an individual or a free subject; we are all subject to ideology, and informed and made by what preceded us, as well as our cultural surroundings. Eribon takes up his ideas and extends them. For Eribon, the space of heterosexual interpellation shows that we are formed as queer subjects potentially before we even know that we are. We’re named before we name ourselves, in many ways, but this naming is often meant to be derogatory, meant as an insult. There’s a way in which one comes to know and understand oneself as queer through this language—but then Eribon also talks about the complexity of what it means to have been a child who has used this language against others, and what it means to come to realize that you inhabit that which is “ugly.” Deneige finds this really helpful. It’s been instrumental in terms of thinking about how certain ideologies function in our culture right now, and how they might be open to different modes of change.

Deneige was eighteen when she left Alberta. She graduated high school and then two months later, she was living in Vancouver. In Lethbridge, she had a great art teacher who encouraged her to apply to art school, and she ended up at Emily Carr. She was very out in Vancouver before she was out to her family. She was chairing the queer caucus of her student union at provincial meetings, and her family had no clue. Her friend almost drunkenly outed her to her sister once.

Living in Vancouver, getting to meet queer folks of all sorts of ages and experiences, and starting to understand a more embodied history, has felt wonderful to Deneige. She’s met people who were institutionalized when they were young, and has learned of the different ways they define family now. It would feel too simplistic to say that there are massive differences between different generations of queer people. We’ve actually lost some of the intergenerational connections that we used to have, in ways that can be quite detrimental in terms of not having and maintaining our own histories. If one’s life is illegal, community comes from specific underground spaces where everybody congregates. That space of younger folks getting to learn from their elders doesn’t exist in the same way. Queer people in Canada have done a fantastic amount of activism to be recognized as legal subjects under Canadian law. We’re more accepted into the culture as it exists; our cultures have pressed up against its norms to make a bit of space for us. Many things have been made possible, but it’s also shifted how we relate to each other as a community and a safety net.

The younger generation fucks with gender in ways Deneige never really saw in her own community, which feels exciting. When Deneige thinks about queerness today, she thinks about negotiating a kind of queer politics between an anti-assimilationist position versus a position of trying to make space within the system. But maybe that’s sort of a false dichotomy. Or too dialectical. There’s been so much work already done for inclusion, and a lot more that needs to be done, but the bit of space that has been opened up has allowed people to survive, to fuck around with things in exciting ways, to play around with gender as an embodiment and a construction. The conversations she sees her students having are radically different from those she used to have.

But then it’s also cultural. She still feels very different in Vancouver than in Alberta. Some of that has to do with her queerness. She goes to see her family once a year, and it’s always bad by the end. Her family are political conservatives. She doesn’t have a sense of family belonging. She was the first person in her family to go to university, let alone complete graduate school, and then teach. There’s a class schism.

Often Deneige is like, “Why hasn’t shit changed?” But last spring, she happened to have a student who was queer and grew up in Lethbridge and went to the same high school. Talking with her felt quite incredible to Deneige. There’s now a Gay–Straight Alliance in the school. Thinking about it, she’s amazed. Nobody was out in her time. There were a couple guys who were pretty flamboyantly gay, and people knew, but it was still never an explicitly spoken thing. Deneige’s student just seemed more comfortable in herself. It’s good to know that exists at the school now.

And Deneige appreciates seeing non-binary identity emerge and flourish. The younger queer people in her life often assume that she is non-binary, but she’s taken up maybe a different sort of mode, where she knows she fails at femininity, but she intentionally wants to fail at it, wants to make possible more ways of being a woman. She knows she’s always done her gender wrong, but she doesn’t not feel like a woman. That’s a different thing. It’s a rich conversation to have, to say, “No, I intentionally identify as a woman, in order to mess with that.” That’s what makes her able to not hate herself for the rest of her life. To embrace the failure.