blah blah blah

Identities are strange stuff. (Duh.) If it weren't, you know, impossible, I'd want to understand how people see themselves and their identities. Even just one other person. That would be some sort of life project. Not so that I could point out how diverse visions lead to New Feminist Possibilities or New Understandings of Agency or New Methods of Subversion that would somehow make them "okay" or "acceptable" or "suitably postmodernist" for someone from my background, but really just understand, you know? I guess that's a pretty tall order though. And I'm not entirely sure what the use would be.

If I don't end up coming back to Cairo and interning next spring, chances are I'll stay at IU and get myself a gender studies minor. But isn't it weird that that's a separate thing? That anything's a separate thing? There's fundamentally no such thing as religion without gender, no such thing as either without class, ethnicity/race, (dis)ability, nationality, age, and a whole host of other variables. But the second you acknowledge that, you find yourself looking at a web of identities so thick that it's incomprehensible. The Gordian knot of this day and age. I feel like academia (or the social sciences rather) keep getting progressively hairier—like, oh wait, we forgot to deconstruct this particular aspect of the situation at hand, let's do that too!—to the point where it almost loses all meaning and just makes my brain hurt. Or it could be that I'm just not smart enough. I don't get it.

I guess the thing that got me thinking about this is the fact that being here is the first time I've ever really not felt / been treated as white. In the states, I am an upper-middle-class midwesterner and all my friends are white and I think I'm usually considered to be the same—at the very least, I consider myself to be the same, and I don't notice others doing anything differently. White is the "default," the "non-identity" (though of course it isn't really) in the same way that upper-class is and female isn't and midwestern is and androgynous isn't—in the way that I feel my gender and my gender presentation but I don't feel my class or my region or my ethnicity.

Here it's different, of course, because white is now the "other," now a marker of something that isn't the default. And I keep expecting to be singled out for it, to feel acutely white like everyone else on the program does, and it keeps not happening, and then I realize with a jolt and a sense of unease that I'm not white, not here at least. And it's really, really weird and kind of frustrating because (as I now realize) I think I was implicitly identifying for most of my life with white as an ethnicity, and when people don't recognize/respect that identity it is as disconcerting and untrue as when they don't recognize I'm an adult or an American or a lefty or what have you. And when the others keep telling me that it's a blessing to not be singled out, I want to scream that it isn't, that the fact that I'm apparently not marginalized by this thing I now am (a brown person)  doesn't mean that I like it or identify with it, in the same way that straight privilege doesn't mean everyone wants to be straight or male privilege doesn't mean that everyone wants to be male.

I keep thinking that if it's possible to be transgender it should be equally possible to be transethnic or transage or transclass or transabled—and, is it? Are those communities/identities that people have belonged to / claimed? I should do some googling, I guess. But you get the point. I'll stop now.

ohgodonlyonemoreweekleft.