A phenomenological world

The task of overcoming binaries, the curse of Western heteronormative standards, is not easy to begin with, and by asking us to take a step further and look past them entirely, we are inevitably lost – in a good way. With the recent advancements that the gay and lesbian community has made in breaking the tradition of “viewing gender and sexuality as continuous and collapsible categories”, Sedgwick still points to the danger in promoting “one’s basal sense of being male or female” by upholding Core Gender Identity. It is the same problem that Joon Oluchi Lee confronted when he saw that gender identification as a female or male was not synonymous with one’s sexual object-choice of desiring a female or male physiological body. The disconnect highlights the “huge blank space” that proto-gay children confront in the realization that the enforcement of gender identifications does not necessarily do much to curb the hostility towards gay people. In this way, these children may feel compelled them to “lie” for acceptance and self-esteem, just as Lee embarked on his “career as a boy”, denying the truth in what he believed was a “mistake” – that he was a “male, not yet a woman”. Distinguishing the feminine boy as a “queer” and different then, establishes feelings of inadequacy as both a female and male and goes far enough to alienate the “straight” boy from believing that queerness can be natural, liberating even. The association of homosexuality with deficiency combined with the sense of rejection would likely cause individuals, especially proto-gay children, to withhold their natural desires. As Lee recounts his glory days of long, doll-like hair, we cannot deny the surge of liberation when his mother states that she does not know whether he Lee is “a son or a daughter”. It is not the ambiguity of his identification but his mother’s “easy carelessness” – this acceptance, or at least the acknowledgment of the “seemingly natural trajectory from identifying a place of cultural malleability” that Sedgwick suggests, that should rightfully have been given to Lee and all people as children in our phenomenological world of desires.