Quite Unusually Interesting Literary Taxonomy, Bestiary And Glossary, or, what's in a name

Posted by kaberett

Names have power (warning: TVTropes). So do categories.

And that, boys and girls and everyone else, summarises what I want to talk with you about today.

Let's start with a little personal background: I use my chosen names in all walks of life. Online and on stage I'm kaberett; elsewhere, neither my forename nor my surname are the ones I was given. These are my choices and in them lie power - but not all of it is mine: among the ways family, and family friends, can assert their power over me is to continue using my given name.

Here's another thing: I'm queer. That's queer as in fuck you I don't want your assumptions about the gender binary; I don't want your assumptions about my attractions; I don't want your assumptions about what my relationships look like; and I don't want your assumptions about what I do with my body. I am tired of having to explain myself in closely-argued essays in order to be taken seriously. Sod the essays and the justifications and the "but it's just so haaaaaard to understand": I am done with that crap.

For today, anyway. Gentle reader, I apologise: you find me rather less forgiving than my usual.

... so. Labels, categories and names: they're important. Imposed on us, they box us in; chosen, they're perhaps more like a flower-pot, if you'll excuse the over-extended metaphor: good to begin with, but sooner or later we'll find we've grown and our roots are getting cramped, and either we beg people to give us more space or we break out ourselves, to find victory in terracotta shards.

On Stonewall

Posted by Sebastienne



OK, so, everyone's heard of Stonewall, right? They are the leading queer rights organisation in the UK. They're the ones who put up billboards everywhere saying "Some people are gay.. get over it!". They've been around since 1989 and have had a hand in everything from the abolition of Section 28 to the creation of Civil Partnerships.

So why, when Lashings got offered a charity gig raising money for Stonewall a few weeks ago, did we seriously consider turning it down?

On Being A Christian

Posted by Jenni

Today, I’m going to discuss something I’ve mentioned in passing before – the fact I’m a Christian. This is a very important part of my identity, and it’s also the part that gets questioned most – even more than my being asexual. You see, to many people being Christian, queer, feminist and liberal is a contradiction. I’m not going to go into lots of detail for you all, and I’ll try to keep the bible-talk to a minimum (references will be given if you want to look up the verses in question), but I’m just going to share how the Christian part of my identity fits in with everything else. And maybe give you a view of a Christian you might not have seen before.

Erasure and Identity

Posted by Jenni

This post began life as a discussion of the ‘I’m-more-oppressed-than-you’ game. There’s been a spate of posts on various sites recently discussing whether asexuals have a ‘claim’ to the queer community, and one argument is that we aren’t oppressed in the same way. Rather than argue this out, I’d much rather share with you my experiences of one particular kind of oppression, one I’m sure many of you are familiar with – erasure.