A friend of mine was at an event yesterday morning where Tony Kushner accepted a literary award from the Chicago Tribune. She said it was great, if early, and that Kushner was both funny and serious at the event. She mentioned a specific line, though, about how Kushner feels when his work succeeds in Chicago: “As a kind of effete, foofy New Yorker, I always got a special degree of satisfaction and accomplishment when anything that I’ve done succeeds in butch Chicago.”
I just watched the season premier of 30 Rock, and it has a scene with Tracy Jordan wandering outside of NBC, trying to make friends with a “normal” person.
He wanders from person to person, being super-awkward, and finally goes up to a pedicab, saying, “Are you a pre-op trans-centaur?”
I don’t remember the last time a tv show has made me laugh outloud and, upon rewinding to make sure I got the joke, made me laugh out loud again.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I have a bit of an obsession with TV Tropes, with tropes defined as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” It’s as great a time-killer as WikiPedia, with more mass media and less actual “knowledge.” In addition to describing the trope, each page also has a list of comics/books/movies/shows/etc that demonstrate the trope (and often have snarky commentary as a nice bonus). Basically, it’s this.
Anyway, I’ve been bookmarking TV Tropes pages about gender, sexuality, and trans issues. As a culture-related site with a page about the Whateley universe, they have some good pages that seemed like they were worth sharing.
We’ll start with Transsexual. Their definition - “people who are not at all happy with the sex they were born with (more clinically, whose gender identity is out of whack with their biological sex)” – actually isn’t too bad. They also go on to differentiate between transgender, transsexual, transvestite, and so-on.
I recently came across Garfunkel and Oates and have to share them with you. They’re two actresses in LA (one of them was on the last little bit of Scrubs as Ted’s girlfriend) and they posted a bunch of songs and movies and are just amazingly hilarious (not to mention amazingly adorable!). Enjoy!
I was listening to some This American Life on my iPod today while driving and came across Living the Dream. This American Life is no stranger of stories about trans people, and the first act in Living the Dream is about trans girls in LA. (Another interesting episode, though not without its detractors, is Testosterone, which is about said hormone and has one act about a trans man and his experiences.) One of the girls in Living the Dream mentions Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, and how Ariel meant a lot to her (and other trans girls) as a metaphor for transitioning. And that got me thinking…
(Note: This post should be subtitled: “In which our blogstress proves she’s a big theatre geek!”)
A while back, right before I came out to my highschool theatre class, I was speaking with the lead teacher of the class and we were joking about posisble transitioning-related theatre games. Here’s what we came up with, but I’d love any more ideas to help the list grow!
Coming Out Tag
Spoof of: Scene Tag, where each time someone is tagged they have to go into a brief scene scene before moving on as the new person who is ‘it’
How it works: Rather than going into a random scene, every time someone is tagged the tagger has to ‘come out’ to them. To make it really accurate, the person who is ‘it’ – the tagger – always stays ‘it’ and has to come out over and over and over and over and…
MTF (or FTM) Machine
Spoof of: This requires a little explanation, and is very much an in-joke. Machine is a game where a group (usually 6-10) builds energy one at a time with a repeating sound and motion to construct, as a whole, a ‘machine.’ It can be a generic machine, or a specific type of machine (weather, popcorn, magic, etc).
How it works: Basically a normal game of Machine, but the call is to change the energy during the machine from masculine to feminine, or vice versa. (Probably would quickly become very bad stereotypes of “manly” or “womanly,” but sometimes those are fun to play with.)
Coming Out Fingers
Spoof of: Fingers is a game played by partners, where they agree on three locations or occupations. They then ‘throw’ the locations/occupations at each other randomly and, when they land on the same thing, they go into a random scene prompted by that location/occupation.
How it works: The partners choose a location, and each scene is a coming out scene at that location.
The tongue-in-cheeck website Deraililng for Dummies promises to help “[derail] awkward conversations by dismissing and trivialising your opposition’s perspective and experience.” The site promises that its instructions applies to “sexism, whorephobia, racism, transphobia, classism, homophobia, ableism, kinkphobia, and fatphobia!” It’s rather amazing.
The simple guide includes such adversarial approaches as
If You Won’t Educate Me How Can I Learn?
If You Cared About These Matters You’d Be Willing To Educate Me
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