{"id":484,"date":"2015-02-19T02:19:54","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T07:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=484"},"modified":"2015-02-19T02:19:54","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T07:19:54","slug":"homo-thexual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2015\/02\/19\/homo-thexual\/","title":{"rendered":"Homo-thexual"},"content":{"rendered":"

“\u2026anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan<\/i> were topped with an unread issue of\u00a0Boy’s Life\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0Sports Illustrated,\u00a0<\/em>and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received.” (Sedaris, p10)<\/p>\n

This particular essay,\u00a0Go Carolina,<\/em> draws implicit\u00a0comparisons between trying to correct a lisp in speech therapy and trying to “straighten out” a “bent” sexual identity. The first part of the above quote serves the double-purpose of making the similarities clear through bringing up the subject of gender, which is closely connected to orientation, and then showing the effects this has on on the people subject to it–no correction is forthcoming, and the “patients” merely learn to better conceal their “condition”. The second part gives everyday examples of the deceit involved, and thus of the impacts big and small on their lives.<\/p>\n

I saw a strong connection between the theme of this passage and the theme in Michael Warner’s\u00a0The Trouble With Normal<\/em>. In his work, Warner discusses the incorrectness of the feeling that, “controlling the sex of others, far from being unethical, is where morality begins”. People in authority seek to prevent or limit “abnormal” sexual practices, including homosexuality, and use this suppression to amass social or political power. We see this in a smaller scale in Sedaris’s work, where the school system and Miss Chrissy Samson try to straighten out his speech impediment, while also using the therapy as self-improving status transactions. Agent Samson repeatedly condescends to and chides Sedaris, and he also notes the way his teacher repeatedly and unnecessarily brings up the subject in class. The crowning event of the narrative occurs later, when Samson guilt trips him into saying\u00a0thorry,<\/em> and then mocks him for doing so. There couldn’t be much of a better comparison for the way Warner describes authority figures using the shame of sex to bolster their own authority. And the similarities continue when Sedaris describes what results from these tactics: no actual change in beliefs, only lies as they continue like before, but in secret. The boys change their words instead of the way they say them, and hide their “girl thing” interests behind the expected boy interests that they lack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“\u2026anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of\u00a0Boy’s Life\u00a0or\u00a0Sports Illustrated,\u00a0and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received.” (Sedaris, p10) This particular essay,\u00a0Go Carolina, … Continue reading Homo-thexual<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1671,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1671"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}