Bounced between bits of schoolwork and doomscrolling/doomwatching Google News and YouTube. Did laundry at the Seabright laundromat from 1:30 to 4:30. It was OK, a little pricey, but I do feel my clothes were clean — and they had free Wi-Fi and very clean interior. Had some leftover beef stew for dinner and didn't really do much the rest of the night (at least not that I can remember).
These past few days (likely because our subjects in the CaT Lab's data are queer lol) I've been trying to work through some gender diffusion/moratorium between man, woman, nonbinary, agender. To make a long story short I realized while folding the rest of my laundry back at Scotts Valley... it's "just" as plastic or transient as my general identity. For example, I play up my facial expressions and speech patterns in a feminine or flamboyant way. But my base personality when I'm relaxed is more stoic and masculine/agender. What can explain this?
A two-stage representation of feminine behavior around a masc/agender "core" was a visually appealing model. Kernel and userspace. But it didn't feel right. It was too simple, and the burden of proof rests on delineating or finding that "core" aspect — even harder to find since I can and do behave in purely masc/agender ways, and I much prefer to present masc.
So I thought, what if I were a composite? Maybe my gender was a ratio or a democratic assembly of 40% masc, 45% fem, 15% neither. Further still, these ratios could change depending on my life experiences, goals and beliefs, and modeling (from friends and arts/media) up to that point.
This felt very accurate and flexible to me. Instead of trying to choose a single gender, I could build coalitions and plurality "votes" out of subcomponents that best fit my current behavior, from cooking to washing dishes to doomscrolling to doing Matlab homework. Although I would almost always describe my actions through a functionalist-pragmatic cognitive lens, critical theorists may find relief knowing all my actions are also heterogeneously engendered.
How's that for gender theory?
#computer