{"id":192,"date":"2012-01-28T17:16:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-28T23:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.wordpress.com\/2012\/01\/28\/nyny-glamour-and-self-love"},"modified":"2012-01-28T17:16:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-28T23:16:00","slug":"nyny-glamour-and-self-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/2012\/01\/28\/nyny-glamour-and-self-love\/","title":{"rendered":"NYNY: Glamour and Self-Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t made any serious attempt at glamourie<\/em> in years.\u00a0 I made certain uses of it in my younger days, of course: I had a damn fine Don\u2019t Look At Me \u2026 but I never really managed the opposite effect.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty difficult to tune your aura to \u201cHey Look At Me\u201d when your self esteem is as bad as mine was back in the day.<\/p>\n

These days I don\u2019t generally bother\u2014not in a strictly magical sense, anyway.\u00a0 Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the magic I do isn\u2019t, in the strictest sense, clamor.\u00a0 The volume and sort of magic I\u2019ve been doing for the past three years seems to have put a good shine on my charismatic aura.\u00a0 The work I\u2019ve been doing for the last six months has escalated that to a neon glow.<\/p>\n

Of course, it helps that I\u2019m pretty good looking.\u00a0 The caricature I use as my profile pic is just that: I am neither as buff nor as overweight as I depicted myself; my beard (sadly) not so glorious, but my hair can<\/em> be on a good day.\u00a0 I love my tattoos and my piercings: two rings in each ear, one in each nipple; tattoos on my shoulders, under my collar bones, and between my shoulder blades, and another planned for the base of my spine when next I see my tattoo guy in KC, all of which I drew myself.\u00a0 And, though I do say so myself, whether it\u2019s drawing, typing, jewelry, making masks and talismans, performing magic, or wild monkey sex: I am damn<\/em> good with my hands.\u00a0 (Why, yes, I went there.\u00a0 Did you think for a moment that I wouldn\u2019t?)<\/p>\n

I take care of myself: I pay outrageous amounts of money for high-quality, no-scary-shit shampoo and conditioner.\u00a0 I use non-toxic hippie-made (literally: I\u2019ve met the hippies) toothpaste, deodorant, and laundry detergent.\u00a0 I eat as well as I can, given that I\u2019m on the college meal plan\u2014which, sadly, means that I\u2019m eating way too many conventional and processed foods\u2014and supplement it with multivitamins.\u00a0 Until the last week or so, when the weather turned to shit, I walked everywhere, which amounted to anywhere from 3\/4 mile to 4 miles a day\u2014to and from the apartment, around campus, up and down the stairs (not to brag or anything, but I have fucking fantastic legs).\u00a0 I\u2019m taking a twice-weakly yoga class, which is doing wonders for me both physically and spiritually\u2014my arms haven\u2019t looked this good since I left Larryville and stopped doing jewelry 40 hours a week, and I walked out of class feeling more than a little godlike Tuesday and Thursday mornings.<\/p>\n

Even in a burlap sack, I stand out in a crowd.\u00a0 And the body I\u2019ve been blessed with is well-emphasized by the way I dress.\u00a0 My style has always been unique, and as a full time student, clothing and costume are \u2026 interesting.\u00a0 For the first time in my life, I\u2019ve got pretty much free reign in the way I dress: full time, all day, every day.\u00a0 I can paint my nails in outrageous colors.\u00a0 I can wear my kilt or my skirts or my robes or my Rennie gear whenever I feel like it.\u00a0 I wore skirts more often than pants until the weather turned to shit \u2026 for some reason it bothers me more to get my skirts dirty.\u00a0 The attention it gets me is overwhelmingly positive, and the people who are bothered by it are people I don\u2019t need around.<\/p>\n

This is the glamour I work in: magic to refine myself until I shine; costume which reveals my nature and draws those like me; radical authenticity to distinguish myself further.\u00a0 (Though, I will say that failure to grok on the part of some of my audience is tempting my Scorpio nature to go into full-time information management mode.)\u00a0 Pretty much the only thing I can\u2019t get away with is the sarongs, which just have too great a likelihood of flashing \u201cinnocent bystanders\u201d.\u00a0 But \u2026 I have not always been so fortunate.<\/p>\n

From here, I find I must segue away from glamour and the NYNY project into the Land of Rant.\u00a0 I enjoy costume. I enjoy costume for its own sake, and I understand it\u2019s role as a tool of communication. But there are inevitable issues of privilege tied up in discussions of costume, which I feel need to be addressed.\u00a0 And, in the grand tradition of the feminisms with which I identify, because the personal is political, I will do so in as personal a manner as possible.<\/p>\n

Working in jewelry and retail, I have always been forced to keep my appearance within certain limits: my tattoos are all under the \u201ct-shirt line\u201d; my visible piercings are relatively discreet, and my jewelry \u201ctasteful\u201d (I made all my earrings myself, so of course I think they\u2019re damn classy, but they\u2019re also not going to startle anyone who doesn\u2019t have a problem with any<\/em> dude\u2019s ear\u2019s being pierced); of necessity, I have an entire wardrobe of costumes specifically aimed at looking the part of the competent craftsman.\u00a0 I (not-quite-half) jokingly refer to these as my \u201cnormal people costume\u201d.\u00a0 Still, jewelry was a more forgiving industry than many.<\/p>\n

Living with my grandfather after my failed life in St. Louis, I was forced to live in exclusively butch costume full-time. For almost a year and a half. For the first time in my adult life, I was back in both closets. I felt like I was living a lie. In a sense, it was good for me: it taught me that I can never live that way again. It led to bitterness, rage, and no small amount of drunk driving home from the nearest gay bar.<\/p>\n

Leaving jewelry, I am moving into academia\u2014a field which will I will be allowed many indulgences, but with its own strange pruderies. I can\u2019t say for certain how well my gender variance will be understood: I don\u2019t know for certain what institution I will work for in the end, and no one can say with any certainty what the Academy will look like by the time I\u2019ve gotten my doctorate (there\u2019s some fucking changes afoot).<\/p>\n

So while Jason is right to point out that we are frequently at the mercy of others\u2019 perceptions<\/a>, the degree to which he concedes the field is deeply problematic. Not all of us can afford to tailor our clothes, for example, nor are we all at equal ease within the roles to which we have been assigned. It is not just inappropriate, but outright harmful to assume that it is a moral failing\u2014an overabundance of ego or self-image, as Jason frames it\u2014to resist the assimilation represented by mainstream costume.\u00a0 Some of us do not fit within it very well, and other simply do not fit at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t made any serious attempt at glamourie in years.\u00a0 I made certain uses of it in my younger days, of course: I had a damn fine Don\u2019t Look At Me \u2026 but I never really managed the opposite effect.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty difficult to tune your aura to \u201cHey Look At Me\u201d when your self … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[174,176],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-new-year","tag-new-you"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-36","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}