NYT: Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?, by Guy Deutscher,  New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2010

“I don’t want to be doing it for three hours every night.”

Sheldon got the role of Bernadette and then the hard part began. “I’m not just playing a drag queen. I’m playing a post-operative transsexual who loves and thinks as a woman. I had to get rid of the whole man thing.”

“Terence Stamp (Bernadette in the original film) did a press conference with us where he said he wanted to concentrate on the pain of a person trapped in a body of the wrong gender.

“I thought, ‘Well that’s fine for you, love, but I don’t want to be doing it for three hours every night.’”

So he researched the grande dame of Australian drag on whom the role was based, a performer named Carlotta.

“She was very glamorous, very tits and feathers. She had it all. But she also had the dignity of an old-time Hollywood star. That’s what I clung to. Dignity.”

Priscilla Queen of the killer corset, Toronto Star, 22 August 2010

A Variation On Solitude

Lea, who says she “cannot allow [herself] the luxury of being in love”, is pessimistic about her chances of finding happiness with someone else. Those transsexuals who do enter into serious relationships, she says, often do so by keeping their past from their partners.

“They live as hypocrites; it is a variation on solitude,” she said. “We transsexuals are born and grow up alone. After the operation we are born again, but once again alone. And we die alone. It is the price we pay.”

Lea T and the loneliness of the fashion world’s first transsexual supermodel, Guardian, 1 August 2010

Going Public

My sister now has to face the challenge of self-owned lives.

She has to go public.

She spent a long time playing a role in someone else’s play, Manager #47, but now she has to not only be out there, she has to own the content.

We bought her a cheap video camera and encouraged her to post video on her studio’s blog.  I’m not stupid; I may love text, but I know that there are huge numbers on the web for whom text is more an obstacle than a engagement.  They want to see and hear, not just read to hear with their inner voice.

She hasn’t done that yet, and is feeling uncomfortable.

My mother spoke about her own orneriness and how, when she spoke out,  it would embarrass my sister.

I certainly have similar stories.

Now, though, I have to encourage her to do something she has always discouraged me from doing: being visible, standing proud, inviting gaze, and trusting her own beauty.

As I said to her, if she thinks coming out as a mature woman artist is hard, she should think about the challenges for a queer shaman, a power-femme drag-mom.

She has to do what she has always discouraged me from doing, and she knows I am not wrong.  If she wants a practice as an artist, she has to be visible.

Maybe after she makes it, she can finally support me.

Though the way my chest feels from a half an hour, 3:30 AM to 4 AM, getting my mother up from the floor when she fell, I suspect it is too late.