the femmie.

i don't normally do the Vox photo hunts, mostly out of laziness. but i couldn't resist the one for today.

In honor of Canada Day, show us your favorite Canadian

jo street

i wrote this paper for my Feminist Literary Theory class. it was the last big paper of my undergraduate career. i am incredibly proud of it, as my professor said it was the best in the class. i haven't really shared it with many people though, and am incredibly curious as to outside responses. so i guess that is why i am posting it in such a public forum. also, this is the first and only draft i've done of this, it hasn't been revised since i turned it in. i'd like to keep revising it until i feel it is worthy of something i could possibly submit for grad school application.
so yeah. if you are a fan of Fight Club, or even if you aren't, tell me what you think... if you feel like reading the 12 pages of it that is.
oh, and this should go without saying, but it probably would be a good idea if you are at least somewhat familiar with the film and/or novel. because if you aren't, well, this paper will give away much of the twists and turns of the plot.

“Phallic Authority and the ‘I’ Within the Film Fight Club”

   
    The world of Fight Club is a world in which men are searching for their source of masculine identity in a society void of the great wars and great depressions that have defined masculinity in the past. The men of Fight Club are “God’s middle children” (Fight Club) who have been emasculated by a consumer driven materialistic society that “capitalizes on this sense of lack and awareness of absence” (Mendieta, 396) of masculine identity. This crisis of modern masculinity takes a corporeal form in the film in the unnamed narrator and main character played by Edward Norton, hereafter referred to as Jack. Jack is a successful young professional who is a slave to his IKEA nesting instinct and is a victim of “the feminization and domestication of men in a society driven by [consumerism]” (Giroux). Jack suffers from insomnia, which his doctor tells him is simply “the symptom of something larger” (Fight Club). He goes to support groups for those who have terminal illness in order to cry, which cures his insomnia. His groups, however, are interrupted by a woman named Marla Singer who cruises the groups because they “are cheaper than a movie and have free coffee” (Fight Club). Jack’s insomnia returns and this ‘something larger’ is shown to be his internal struggle with his lack of masculine identity, thus he inadvertently creates the hyper-masculine alter ego of Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. Tyler and Jack form an underground Fight Club, in which men can come and anonymously beat each other senseless in an attempt to regain a sense of masculinity that society does not allot them. Fight Club evolves into Project Mayhem with followers across the nation bent on destroying and recreating history through anarchy and the breakdown of mass consumerism. The twist is that Jack, along with the audience, doesn’t realize that Tyler is in fact the same person as Jack until the last twenty minutes of the film.
    In a narrative who’s characters are struggling to define themselves as men in a society that does not allow them the traditional means of doing so, the notion of phallic authority comes into question. Historically in literature, “the figure of the first-person narrator, or ‘I’, often stands in, explicitly or otherwise, for phallic possession [and contain] the phallus’s symbolic consequences: I can penetrate, control, possess, and destroy” (Brooks, 61). In a text where the figure of the first-person narrator is spliced in two, which one of them is the “I”? Furthermore, if the “I” exists in a world without a defined sense of masculine identity, does the “I” hold phallic authority in the traditional sense? More importantly, what are the implications if this proves to be false? This paper will posit that while Jack proves to be the “I” of the film, phallic authority is subverted from its historical “I” owner and relocated within the character of Marla Singer, thus suggesting that phallic authority is a performed construct and not inherently owned by the “I”.
    To get to the conclusion that the “I” of Fight Club is not the one who owns the phallic authority in the narrative, one must first discover who the “I” actually is, and why that “I” has been stripped of it’s assumed inherent power. It may then come as no surprise that Jack would be considered the “I” of the film. He is our narrator, the narrative revolves around him and his alter ego; it is through Jack that we see the world of Fight Club. Thus the question becomes, why is Tyler not the “I” in the film? This could easily be answered by the fact that “the contents of the unconscious, in their deceptive ambiguity, supply us no reality in the subject” (Lacan, 157). Tyler is imaginary and is not a real tangible person; he is purely a manifestation of Jack’s masculine ideal. In Freudian terms Tyler is Jack’s ideal-I, and as Lacan points out, “the ideal-I situates agency in a fictional direction that […] will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming” (76), and thus can never actually become the “I”, no matter how intrinsically tangled up with the “I” he becomes. But in a case such as Tyler and Jack where the ideal-I is not known to be such, and is seen as a separate person from the self of the “I”, the situation gets a bit more complicated. Once Tyler is released from Jack’s subconscious and manifests himself as the hallucination of a separate entity, it seems as if viewing the Tyler and Jack dynamic through an Oedipal lens is the only way to make sense of their relationship. Once Tyler is created, he becomes the parent, more specifically, the father, and Jack is reverted back to being the child, the son. Jack depends on Tyler after his apartment is destroyed. He immediately looks up to Tyler and admires his life philosophy, eventually emulating him, just as a son does with a father. As Waugh is careful to point out, “in the development of selfhood, the ability to conceive of oneself as separate from and mutually independent with the parent develops with the ability to accept one’s dependency and to feel secure enough to relax the boundaries between self and other without feeling one’s identity to be threatened” (210). Since Jack has created within himself a father/son dynamic, he must become an adult and claim himself as the “I”.
     This can be seen during the last scene in the film in which the audience returns to the beginning to find Jack sitting with a gun in his mouth that is held by Tyler. By this time, Jack knows that he and Tyler are in reality the same person, but doesn’t yet grasp that he is the one in control of Tyler and not vice versa, and still treats him as if he is a separate entity. Herein lies the clue as to why Jack is the “I” and Tyler is, and will remain, only the ideal-I. When Tyler is speaking to Jack, he uses the pronouns “we” and “us” and doesn’t refer to himself in the singular. However, when Jack is speaking to Tyler, he uses “I” and “you”, refusing to internalize Tyler as a part of him. Jack’s specific pronoun use eventually leads to his aha! moment when he realizes that “if the other is not defined in his actual reality, there is only an other me, not real others: the other may be more or less than I am, might have more or less of me” (Irigaray, 310), thus realizing that because he and Tyler are the same person, Tyler is a part of him that he has control over. Which means he is in control of the situation, and more specifically, the gun: “That gun isn’t in your hand, it’s in my hand. […] Not my head, Tyler, our head” (Fight Club). By stating that he is not holding the gun to his own head, but to “our head”, Jack is able to relax the boundaries between self and other, internalize Tyler, and thus banish him back to his own subconscious. Since Tyler is not a literal father being metaphorically murdered, but a metaphorical father that resides in Jack literally being murdered, Jack becomes “a personality that achieves self-realization only in suicide” (Lacan, 80). Irigaray describes this action in Oedipal terms in that “inverting something exterior to oneself […] approximates the murder of the father, the overthrow of the ancestor by a son wishing to become an adult” (310). If we are to continue with Tyler as the father and Jack as the son, it is by murdering Tyler that Jack is able to gain control over all of himself and assert his claim as the “I”. With the destruction of Tyler, “the imaginary is eliminated [and] the conjunction of the symbolic with the real [is] finalized in his[Jack’s] self-identity [and] he is named […] the being of the wholly conscious self” (Lacan 285). However, within a society of emasculated men, the fact that Jack claims the position of the “I” does not mean an automatic transfer of the associated power, for a historical assumption does not hold true if the current society is not operating within the same historical context in which that assumption was made.
    In order to ascertain how phallic authority in the film is relocated to Marla, it is first important to understand what exactly phallic authority is. The idea of phallic authority has its foundations in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud suggests that all small children posses a phallus which generates sexual pleasure (which is translated into a sense of power) in the form of the clitoris for the girl, and the penis for the boy. Once the recognition of the anatomical differences between their mothers and fathers take place, the boy realizes his anatomical similarities with his father, and equates the power his father holds over the mother with the penis the mother lacks. Simultaneously the girl realizes that, relative to the penis, her clitoris is an inferior organ void of the power that is held in the superior organ of her male counterpart (Gallahan, 34). Thus the girl relinquishes any sense of power in her own phallus, and submits to the power of the male phallus. This leaves the girl to grow up with a sense of lacking while the boy grows up feeling he has been endowed with the power his father holds through their shared superior phallus. A pragmatic approach to phallic power is to view it “as the representation of the power that seems to be available to men in social and political terms in a male-dominated culture” (Gardiner, 355).
    To make the claim that Marla is the one who has phallic authority, it is first necessary to understand why Tyler and Jack do not. It is not such an arduous task to discover why Jack has no phallic authority. He lets other people and forces control his life; his job and his material items define him – “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” (Fight Club). The only time Jack has any control over his life is when he has control over his insomnia, which is only found through the support groups he goes to every night which “rely upon the ‘feminine’ qualities of support and empathy rather than ‘masculine’ attributes of strength and virility” (Giroux), most specifically the ‘feminine’ characteristic of crying.  While the support groups provide asylum from his insomnia, they do not provide him with any power of his own, because he is completely dependent on them. Not only is he dependent on them, he is dependent on something that is entirely culturally viewed as feminine and thus void of phallic authority. 
    When his support groups no longer keep his insomnia away, and Jack is denied not only phallic power in general, but the power he gleans from a feminized process as well, he creates Tyler. When Tyler enters the picture, Jack begins to seek solace from his insomnia through the Fight Clubs he and Tyler create. While Fight Club keeps the insomnia at bay, Jack is always seen in Tyler’s shadow, watching him orchestrate Fight Club and Project Mayhem with a sense of admiration; he doesn’t see himself as playing an active part, he is only a participant. After living and fighting with Tyler for a spell, there are instances where Jack appears to have phallic power. For example the scene in which Jack goes into his boss’s office to extort money from the knowledge he has acquired through his job position is one in which he appears to have power. He goes in, makes his proposition, the whole while not taking no for an answer, even though his boss is telling him that he is insane. Jack thus resorts to self-abuse assumedly to show his boss the violence he is capable of. By beating himself senseless, he gets the “corporate sponsorship” he wanted for Fight Club. However, Jack does not actually have the power in this situation, he has manipulation, insanity, and most importantly, lucky timing with the security guards arriving at the precise moment they did. In the seconds before the security guards arrive, the camera focuses on his boss’s business cards, the dangling telephone, and his plaque that reads ‘regional manager’ and the voice over says “under and behind and inside everything this man took for granted, something horrible had been growing” (Fight Club). He merely took the power his boss held, and turned it against him, with miraculous timing.
    One could also argue that Tyler is the one who is actually ‘present’ in this encounter, for Jack starts his conversation with his boss with, “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise” and later as he is beating himself up, his voiceover claims that he is “Jack’s smirking revenge” (Fight Club). Thus it becomes clear that any sense Jack has of phallic authority he gets from Tyler. However it isn’t real because Jack doesn’t acknowledge it as real, because he acknowledges Tyler as a separate entity that has a power that he doesn’t- “Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth” (Fight Club). Jack doesn’t credit himself for his own actions or words that stem from Tyler for “he doesn’t know what he is saying, or even that he is speaking” (Lacan, 287), thus they hold no weight and Jack never has any phallic authority of his own. 
    If the semblances of phallic authority that are seen in Jack are stemming from Tyler, one could assume that it is Tyler that holds the phallic authority. Tyler gives orders, he does not take them, he has influence and control over an unnumbered amount of men, and always gets what he wants—“he is the angry, murderous reverse of the innocuous pencil pusher” (Kavadlo, 14). In the scene in the hotel room where Jack comes to the realization that he and Tyler are the same person, Tyler explains himself by saying, “all the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look how you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck. I am smart, capable, and most importantly I am free in all the ways you are not” (Fight Club). Here is where Tyler gives himself away, because the way in which he is free is that he is not real. He is the manifestation of Jack’s interpretation of real masculinity and phallic authority, because he himself doesn’t have any. Viewing this process with a Lacanian lens, we see this creation in terms of the all-important ‘mirror stage’ of development in which an infant sees himself in a mirror and recognizes this reflection as himself and not another infant, and bases his identity on the image he sees (Lacan, 75). However, “if, in the mirror stage, the image of the whole body is a fantasy [of how Jack wishes to be], then the symbolic version of this misrecognition of coherence occurs [and] the phallic body stands in for social order” (Gardiner, 356).  If Tyler is Jack’s imagined phallic authority, Tyler cannot have actual phallic authority himself because he is the fantasy product of a powerless man who does not recognize that part as integral to his sense of self.
    However, one might argue that because Tyler and Jack are the same person, and Jack's body and mind essentially do the actions Tyler does that imply phallic authority, that it makes that implied phallic authority a reality. What one has to remember here is that since Tyler is the imagined phallic authority that Jack desires, his identity was created by an ideal of masculinity that “is an imitation without an origin [and that] when ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, [it is] an ideal that no on can embody” (Butler, 138-9). Even still, one might argue that even though Tyler was Jack’s manifestation of imagined phallic power based on an ideal, when he internalized Tyler at the end it would make Tyler a reality within Jack’s sense of self, thus actualizing the imagined ideal phallic power into a reality. This might have the possibility of being true if it weren’t for the fact that Jack attempts to undo everything that Tyler has done before he subsequently negates Tyler’s entire existence when he shoots himself/selves in the mouth, thus negating the imagined phallic authority from being transferred.
    So if Jack has no real power of his own, and Tyler is an imagined ideal of phallic authority, one might jump to the conclusion that no one in this film has any actual phallic authority and that the film does away with it completely as an imaginary construct. As lovely a thought as that is, it has already been asserted within this paper that Marla is the one who actually has the phallic power. Jack himself admits to this in the very beginning of the film when he states that, “all of this, the gun, the bombs, the revolution, has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer” (Fight Club). She “signifies both the antithesis of domestic security, comfort and sexual passivity” (Giroux)—in short, she embodies a sort of female masculinity. Halberstam tells us that “female masculinity is not simply the opposite of female femininity, nor is it a female version of male masculinity, [but rather] very often the unholy union of femaleness and masculinity can produce wildly unpredictable results” (28), and Marla is one such result. Marla is the root of everything that happens in the film, because she has the phallic authority that Jack craves. By Marla’s presence at the support groups, she renders Jack incapable of crying, thus incapable of sleep, because she exposes Jack’s dependence on feminine forms of coping, making his lack of phallic authority apparent to him. Essentially, it is because of Marla that Jack creates Tyler in the first place because when men are “unable to access the power they feel has been reserved for them, [they] tend to project their own misrecognition of the relationship between penises and male power onto the world around them” (Gardiner, 357), and it can be inferred Tyler’s imaginary phallic authority is seen as a way to combat and subdue Marla’s actual phallic power.
    Marla shows her phallic authority when Jack confronts her about her presence at the support groups, for she is in complete control of the situation. She refuses to leave and reduces Jack to chasing after her while making compromises about splitting up the meetings. Amidst walking blindly through busy traffic and stealing jeans to sell at the consignment shop, Marla doesn’t give into Jack’s requests. She keeps the meetings she wants, and gives Jack the meetings she can do without. As if Marla’s behavior wasn’t enough to grant her phallic authority, we get tangible evidence in the scene where Jack realizes that she has complete control over him. “Marla, the big tourist. Her lie reflected my lie. Suddenly, I felt nothing” (Fight Club): this statement comes in the form of a voice over during which the sound of Marla flicking her lighter overpowers the ambient noise, and shifts to a close-up shot of her lighting her cigarette, taking a long deep drag, and exhaling every bit of smoke visibly and slowly. This scene asserts her phallic authority, for she is able to “bear the subject’s desire [phallic power] in a masculine mode through an artificial phallus in her fingers” (Halberstam, 104); the artificial phallus is the cigarette and the smoke she exhales is symbolic of the power Jack so desperately desires. While Marla may not have a literal phallus in the form of a penis, she does have the symbolic power that is attached to it, thus she creates her own symbolic phallus with her constant smoking of cigarettes. Any time Marla is exerting her authority, she is smoking: during the meetings, during sex, more or less during any interaction she has with Jack. During her and Jack’s interaction at the sink on Paper St. when she comes up behind him she is literally holding her phallus in the place where Jack should have his, as if to flaunt her power. The only time she is not smoking is when she is displaying ‘typical female behavior’ or letting herself be vulnerable. For example in the scene where she and Jack are talking in the kitchen about her and Tyler’s relationship she is smoking right up to the point of Jack saying, “what are you getting out of all this?”. She begins to let her guard down and actually talk about her relationship the second she puts her cigarette out. It is also while she is not smoking that she shows a somewhat maternal side in inquiring about Jack’s more excessive wounds, such as the chemical burn on his hand and his gunshot wound at the end of the film. Because “female masculinities are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing” (Halberstam, 1), it is expected that Marla would contain at least some stereotypical feminine features, or else there would be no debate about who holds phallic authority.
    Thus, if phallic authority is shown to be both imaginary and being held by a woman this would lead to the implication that phallic authority is not necessarily something inherent in any one sex; that it is socially constructed and it is in fact not the essence of maleness that produces social power as Freud thought. Freud was an essentialist who believed in a “true essence” of maleness and femaleness that was “irreducible, unchanging” and natural, but failed to realize that “the natural is itself posited as a construction of the social” and that “’man’ and ‘woman’ are not stable or universal categories, nor do they have the explanatory power they are routinely invested with” (Fuss, 250-2).
    Thus, since phallic authority has been proven to exist within Marla, it is proof that the penis itself does not generate its own social power, but that social power, and thus phallic authority and gender identity, are social constructs that have been repeatedly performed throughout history.  Judith Butler purposes that “the abiding gendered self will be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which, in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundless of this ‘ground’” (141). This discontinuity not only comes in the form  of Marla being the one who holds the power in the film, but in the fact that Jack’s ideal sense of masculinity is nothing but a performance as well. This can be exquisitely seen in the porch scene in which applicants for Project Mayhem are ‘screened’. The applicants are berated and told they are not good enough to join for whatever reason seems most obvious, and if they simply stand on the porch for three days taking the abuse, they are allowed access to the house. This alone shows that the process is not a test of any inherent masculine qualities one might have, but just simply a test to see if you can play the part. The film proceeds to explicitly spell out that fact when Bob first arrives and crumbles and goes to leave after the first round of abuse, but is stopped by Jack who assumedly explains the ‘process’ and Bob is eventually allowed to join. Bob is discontinuous in how the screening process is supposed to go, and his acceptance is discontinuous of the ‘rules’ that are in place, thus showing that the whole process has no ground.
    By showing how phallic authority and masculinity in general are performed social constructs, one is now able to see more clearly how Marla was able to subvert phallic authority for herself and why Jack was not automatically allotted the power that the “I” is presumed to hold; Marla was simply better at performing masculinity than the man who was so desperately seeking the essence of it.

Works Cited:
Brooks, Carellin. Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text. UBC Press, 2006.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990.
Fuss, Diana. “The ‘Risk’ of Essence”. Feminisms. Eds. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1997.     250-258.
Gallahan, Linda B. "Research and Conceptual Approaches to the Understanding of Gender". Issues in the                       Psychology of Women. Eds. Maryka Biaggio and Michel Hersen. Springer: New York, 2000. 33-52.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions. Columbia University Press, 2002.
Giroux, Henry A. “Private Satisfaction and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and
     the Politics of Masculine Violence.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory. 21.1 (2001): 1-31.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998.
Irigaray, Luce. “The Other: Woman”. Feminisms. Eds. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires. Oxford,     Oxford    UP,         1997. 308-315.
Kavadlo, Jesse. “The Fiction of Self-destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist”. Stirrings Still: The    International     Journal of Existential Literature. 2.2 (2005): 3-24.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrit: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. W.W. Norton: New    York, 2007.
Eduardo Mendieta. “Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk”. Philosophy and    Literature. 29.2    (2005):         394-408.
Waugh, Patricia. “Modernism, Postmodernism, Gender: The View from Feminism”. Feminisms.    Eds.    Sandra             Kemp and Judith Squires. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1997. 206-212.

i bought myself a book of poetry. "outlaw poetry". the outlaw bible of american poetry.

“Why being a TA for Intro to Queer Studies rocked my socks”

 

Rock star. Actress. Writer. Psychologist. Artist. Photojournalist. Basketball player for the Lady Cats. Over the course of my life I have wanted to grow up to be all these things, but none of them ever seemed to feasibly be within my reach. I am mediocre in all these genres, not extraordinary, and didn’t believe I could build something of a life long career around any of them. While never being one of my childhood fantasies, the idea of teaching has always been lingering in my subconscious, following me around like a lost puppy. Once I hit highschool, all I heard from people was, “You’d make a great teacher”, especially from my mother. I never really understood why anybody could possibly think this: I’m shy, insecure about my own intelligence, and hate speaking in front of people with a passion. Teaching always seemed like it would be the furthest thing from a career choice that would suit me. After being in college for four years, I realized that I really needed to buckle down and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, unless I was going to be okay with waiting tables until I’m 80, which I wasn’t. I decided if I could have my way, I would be a professional student. If somebody would pay me to learn forever, I would have it made. This reminded me of all the times I was told I would make a good teacher, and the wheels started turning. Teaching would essentially allow me to be in school and get paid for it. But could I actually do it? Could I teach people? I didn’t think so until I TA’ed for Intro to Queer Studies as an independent study.

I had been a teacher’s aid in middle school, but I basically did filing work or sat and wrote notes to friends. Needless to say, being a TA for Mary Bucklin was nothing like my previous experience. I wasn’t just an aid, I was a coconspirator. I got to share my opinion, and influence how the syllabus was set up. I was also put in charge of making weekly quizzes over the reading material. This part of my ‘position’ is what really started to make me begin to believe that I might just be able to handle being a teacher. I loved making quizzes. First of all, reading a new text with the mindset of not only learning new information, but also picking out what was most important made me understand and analyze the text in a much more thorough way than I would normally (unless I was using the text for a paper).

Close reading such as that enabled me to learn and retain what I was processing. Which made me realize that were I to teach, I would be able to continue to learn new things on a constant basis just by reading texts that would be used for my class, and retain that knowledge because I would be sharing it. I would be sharing it as fact, to a room full of people. And then I realized what kind of responsibility that truly is. I would have the power to decide what these people should know is important. What they should be thinking about. Or at least memorize until a test. I would have the power to shape people’s minds. Not in a controlling type way, but in an influential way. I honestly believe that if I could have an effect on just one person’s life, leave an imprint in their memory, or change the way they see the world, even if I didn’t know about it, that it would make my life complete. It would give me a sense of purpose, something I could be proud about.

I got a small taste of that while making the quizzes. For a brief time every week while the students in that class took my quiz, I made every person in that room think about the information that I thought was the most important, interesting, or controversial. And just maybe the fact that they had to think about that, lead them to think of something else related that was also important. The thought that I could have possibly started one conversation, even if it was only self-dialogue, tickled me pink.

Another aspect of TAing that made me realize that I could actually be a teacher was when I was in charge of keeping attendance, which was based on participation. I not only had to be able to recognize everybody’s name to their face, but I actually had to listen to the students speak. I mean that in the sense that I could not have simply heard them talk and count them as present, because participation was based on things said that were significant. So I had to be able to distinguish between who was speaking to make a point of some sort, or if they were just speaking to hear themselves talk. (Which, by the way, is not always an easy task. It’s amazing the amount of people who will talk about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation happening around them.) By intently listening to each student speak, I was able to more clearly gather and process everything they were saying. Not only that, but I found myself formulating responses to their statements in my head immediately. This made me happy because one of my biggest fears about teaching is that I would not be able to do that. I am amazed on a daily basis of how quickly, articulately, and thoroughly many professors are able to respond to student’s questions or statements. I am not used to my brain operating that quickly; the reason I don’t speak up in classes often is because by the time I have my thoughts gathered well enough to verbally express them, the conversation has shifted. The realization that I am able to at least formulate a response quickly in my head was encouraging.

Even still, I began to doubt myself. True, I enjoyed making quizzes and was able to formulate complete thoughts quickly, but what does that have to do with actually teaching anybody anything? Eventually I remembered that in the past, I have taught people. In highschool there was a boy in my French class who always asked me for help. We had four years of French together, and every year, at least a few times, he would ask me to explain something that he just couldn’t completely grasp. And I would. He wrote in my senior yearbook that he wouldn’t have gotten through four years of French without me. And again, my freshman year at NKU, in my statistics class of all places (I am dreadful at math), there was a woman who sat in front of me who was having trouble. It wasn’t for a lack of trying; she was there every class, did the homework and asked questions. It just didn’t click for her. Midway through the last half of the semester, she asked me if she wanted to study together for an upcoming exam. I agreed, even though I had had a similar math class in highschool so I wasn’t having any trouble grasping the concepts. Our study session turned into me explaining lots of equations to her, and helping her figure things out. After the exam she credited me entirely for the good grade she got and we studied together after that. If it weren’t for my interest in teaching being awoken through this TA’ing experience, I wouldn’t have remembered that I am capable in helping people learn.

I suppose in short, being a TA for this class made me want to seriously consider following that path. It was the first time in my life that I could actually envision myself spending my life doing something as a career. I have wanted to be many things when I grow up, but couldn’t ever actually see myself doing them. But sitting there in class, taking attendance, I imagined myself standing in the front of the room teaching, and it made me smile. 

“Take me to the Gay Bar!”

            When asked to write about an experience going to a gay club, I laughed to myself. I can understand why this would be a very provocative and interesting assignment for a student who has never been to a gay club. However, I spent 4 years practically living in the local gay and lesbian clubs and bars in the Cincinnati area. I have lived that life for so long I didn’t think I’d be able to write about it from an objective view. That, and when I go to the bars, I am in my own world, filled with its own complicated drama and escapades. But I thought I’d give it a shot one Thursday night in Northside at Club Bronz (formally known as Jacob’s on the Avenue). I had spent much of my past in this bar so I was weary of being able to look at the experience through a virgin pair of eyes, but once I arrived, I found out it was relatively easy. Thursday being Ladies Night meant cheap drinks, which subsequently meant it was fairly crowded. Furthermore, it was crowded with a lot of people I knew, which surprisingly enough, didn’t hinder my objectivity much.

            Since it was Ladies Night, and Bronz is a queer bar, the majority of the numerous patrons were women. It was then that it hit me that this is probably not a normal aspect of every day straight bars, and was something that I had apparently gotten used to and come to expect at this particular bar on this particular night of the week. I suddenly realized just how few resources queer people have for meeting one another. Heterosexual people don’t have as much of a problem because it is expected by the majority of society that everyone is straight unless proven otherwise. There are few instances in which the reverse is true, expect in the bar scene.

           As I stood in the corners sipping my drink and watching my surroundings it jumped out at me how separated the people were, while at the same time being intermingled. There were definite groups that had been formed prior to my arrival: there were the flaming gay boys surrounded by (presumably) straight women, the “sporty” butch and femme looking lesbians in their cargo pants and ball caps, the preppy femme lesbians with their hip hugging jeans and popped collared shirts, the older gay men sitting at the bar talking amongst themselves, the “artistic/goth/alternative” crowd which had the greatest mix of genders, and those who were somewhere in between. While the space was sectioned off into what many would describe as cliques, I noticed that the groups intermingled freely. It wasn’t like highschool where different groups were forbidden to interact with one another. The young “sporty” women would stand and talk to the older gay men at the bar, the preppy women and somewhere in the middle women would dance together, and the straight women would be fawning over the occasional drag queen that walked by. I saw every different combination of groups interact with one another in a plethora of different ways. And everybody sang karaoke. It was as if regardless of the fact people were categorized by similar physical aspects of themselves, it was an unspoken feeling that everybody there shared a common bond: we are all queer, or at the very least love and respect them.

            Aside from the feeling of overall togetherness I was sensing, and the disproportionate number of women there, it seemed like any average straight bar I had been to that gets a lot of business. There was that one incredibly drunk girl who was falling over on everybody and making a general ass out of herself. There was that one really drunk guy who was loud and obnoxious. There were couples hooking up for the first time, exchanges of phone numbers, and couples that looked as if they’d been together for years. There was constant gossip happening within groups. There was that one person who was running around from group to group trying to find out all the gossip. There was that one person who was crying in the bathroom being consoled by friends because their ex was here with somebody else. There were drunken heated arguments that could have turned into a braw. Someone would sing a song on karaoke that everybody on the patio would sing along to. People danced until last call. People bought shots and took them together in big groups. It was the same stuff that you would see if you went to any area where a lot of people and alcohol was involved.

            I think out of anything, this similarity is what surprised me the most. When I used to be a barfly, I felt as if my queer bars were so incredibly different than the straight bars I would frequent with my co-workers. People were crazier, danced more, drank more, and had more drama. But looking at it from an objective stance instead of being immersed in the experience, and comparing it with my nights spent with straight friends on their turf, there really isn’t much difference in what actually takes place. Granted while the atmosphere is more accepting, and everything seems slightly more exaggerated than it should in real life, essentially I found that all people go through the same types of experiences when it comes to the club scene regardless of sexual orientation.