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Two last random things...
Dec. 27th, 2009 07:23 amAnd then I'll go to bed. Really. I mean it this time.
A friend asked me about my thing for bears (after I mentioned ursa74 being a straightforward bear reference):
It's multifold; a real fondness for the actual animals, a sense that if I were religious in a way that an animal totem would be appropriate, it would most definitely be mine. I identify with bears' energy level, and their playfulness, their strength, their love of water, their usual mellowness, and their fierceness under relatively limited and generally appropriate circumstances... I admire octopodes, and am fascinated by them (another association I'm known for). I identify with bears.
...and also a really strong fondness/wistful identification with the queer bear community.
I'm hugely attracted to bears, in the queer community sense, and if there's a heaven, there's a bi bear leatherdaddy waiting for me. Even aside from my lecherous side, I find the bear community to be one of the subsets of GLBT culture that feels most socially comfortable to me, and most like "family". It's a great overlap of queer community and body-positive community (although the dyke community is often great for that, too, and butch women make me weak in the knees -- I'm still not entirely over the fear of bi-induced rejection in that community, though). It's a community that manages to tease apart masculinity and homophobia from the tangled knot our culture's created out of them. And I basically identify as a female bear in that sense of the word. I know I'm not the only queergirl who does, although it's not all that common in my experience.
And the other thing floating through my mind, in the context of creating the exhibitionism filter. My tattoo is an oddly exhibitionist piece in its own right. With Baubo mythology being a central element of my research, that's practically unavoidable. I hadn't really thought too much about it in the context of my own exhibitionism, though. Something to ponder and get thinky about. In day to day life, I often flat-out forget that I'm kind of covered with naked ladies with graphic genitalia. But when I do remember, it certainly amuses me, and it hits something else for me, too. A chance to push the world's boundaries, maybe. The tattoo's somewhat different from impinging my own sexuality into other people's realities, but it's also a constant instigation of conversations about those sorts of things in a more general sense, and I very much like that about it.
A friend asked me about my thing for bears (after I mentioned ursa74 being a straightforward bear reference):
It's multifold; a real fondness for the actual animals, a sense that if I were religious in a way that an animal totem would be appropriate, it would most definitely be mine. I identify with bears' energy level, and their playfulness, their strength, their love of water, their usual mellowness, and their fierceness under relatively limited and generally appropriate circumstances... I admire octopodes, and am fascinated by them (another association I'm known for). I identify with bears.
...and also a really strong fondness/wistful identification with the queer bear community.
I'm hugely attracted to bears, in the queer community sense, and if there's a heaven, there's a bi bear leatherdaddy waiting for me. Even aside from my lecherous side, I find the bear community to be one of the subsets of GLBT culture that feels most socially comfortable to me, and most like "family". It's a great overlap of queer community and body-positive community (although the dyke community is often great for that, too, and butch women make me weak in the knees -- I'm still not entirely over the fear of bi-induced rejection in that community, though). It's a community that manages to tease apart masculinity and homophobia from the tangled knot our culture's created out of them. And I basically identify as a female bear in that sense of the word. I know I'm not the only queergirl who does, although it's not all that common in my experience.
And the other thing floating through my mind, in the context of creating the exhibitionism filter. My tattoo is an oddly exhibitionist piece in its own right. With Baubo mythology being a central element of my research, that's practically unavoidable. I hadn't really thought too much about it in the context of my own exhibitionism, though. Something to ponder and get thinky about. In day to day life, I often flat-out forget that I'm kind of covered with naked ladies with graphic genitalia. But when I do remember, it certainly amuses me, and it hits something else for me, too. A chance to push the world's boundaries, maybe. The tattoo's somewhat different from impinging my own sexuality into other people's realities, but it's also a constant instigation of conversations about those sorts of things in a more general sense, and I very much like that about it.
