You're only as good as your last post

...and thus I enter the blogosphere. After being inspired by my good friend and companion Rogers, who in turn was inspired by the spurious Polar, I have decided to give it a whirl, and - as Rogers suggests - harvest the heroes of the blogosphere. Or, more specifically, do some unpicking of the heroic fabric outside of said blogosphere. The heroes which I intend to target are not only physical beings, but ideas, modus operandi, ideologies, and the like. I want this to be a space for planting ideas about some of the prevailing value systems, and to this end I will ruminate over cultural icons and iconic cultures, and no doubt talk a lot about myself in the process...Not that I am either a cultural icon or an iconic culture myself, of course, but I operate (don't we all?) within and between the spaces which those things carve out, and with certain deeply embedded ideologies which they both symbolise and create.

And so to the body of the first post, at the time of writing also my last. In fact, perhaps to my own body. It is an average body, average height, about average weight, averagely attractive, I suppose. And yet it does not map averagely on to my self. My mind is not average. I am neither unaveragely stupid nor unaveragely intelligent, but my mind works in ways different from the minds of many, or at least this is my assumption. The details of my mind's workings will, I'm sure, become clearer over the life of this blog, but for now I want to discuss the mind-body relationship. The sexed appendages with which God blessed me express a body to which my mind is not committed.

Today's hero, then, is the notion that one's physical sex concurs with one's gendered experience. We already knew, of course, that the two do not entirely and always concur, and yet somehow the myth is sustained that they do and/or should. Herein lies the story of my blog alias: like Pinocchio, and since I can remember, I always wanted to be a Real Boy. I have long had an idea that such things exist. But of course, one is not born but is made a boy. In my case, I was made a boi, since I never learned how to be a woman. I now purposefully refuse to pay attention in class, and cultivate my boihood.

At the same time, since being captivated by the beautiful IQ, I have contemplated my own femininity as well. I now experience more consciously something of what she meant when she suggested that one's gender is an alteritous formation. Again, I guess we already knew that, but I feel very strongly now that I am consciously living my gender. Not forming it consciously, exactly...not cultivating some activist gender-bending identity...It is as if I am watching my gendered self from the outside.

Maybe most people have this experience. I have no vested interest in being the only one who feels like this--frankly I don't care either way. I just wish there were a bit more room for gendermorphing, and expressing one's gendermutability. In an effort to create some such space, space in which I somehow intend to operate in this blog, I hereby slay this hero.