Tags
opinions, philosophy, physics, politics, school, social justice
Mental exercise and challenges are just as important as physical exercise. For physical exercise, I like to challenge myself by, for example, walking the 6 kilometres from my house to UVic, or trekking up an enormous hill that separates the university from Cadboro-Gyro Park, or going on a hike. Mental exercise, however, is something that I get every day, both through my blogroll and my real-life interactions with people.
Probably the biggest challenge to that is the five-day-a-week lunch break that I take at the university. Every day at Twelve Noon, I take my tupperware with a sandwich and salad outside of my office with the advocacy groups, and join Jaime and her coworkers for an hour of lunch and conversation. The atmosphere between my time at work and my time at lunch couldn’t be more different. When I’m at work, on duty, I try my best to adhere* to the safer spaces policy set in the office. We talk a lot about feminism, queer issues, and activism, and the atmosphere is generally fairly mild and friendly, because we are, for the most part, cut from the same cloth- progressive-minded twentysomething queers who are well-versed in socio-political theory and believe strongly in leftist approaches to social justice.
When I’m at lunch, I’m with a group of people who are united only in the fact that they are graduate students in physics; their backgrounds, experiences, and opinions couldn’t be more different. The debates are often fierce, and I usually find myself seething furiously while trying to explain exactly why opinion XYZ should be revisited. A few times, I’ve had to eat in silent fury, holding back tears because I didn’t know how to respond to a particular sentiment expressed.
After the hour’s up, or whenever somebody becomes the first to initiate the return to their offices by getting up, I return to my happy queer bubble to lick my wounds and think through all the things I should have said, but was too afraid to say because it was hurtful or reactionary. In the queer bubble, I don’t need to explain why some things are hurtful to say or joke about, why some opinions are wrong, or why “heterophobia” and “reverse-racism” are purely false equivalences. I’m immediately understood and sympathized with.
Why do I do it? I ask myself sometimes. Why do I put up with giving myself such a massive headache when I could be eating my lunch with other like-minded people and spare myself the pain?
The answer’s simple: First of all, not all of them are that bad. The physicists I speak of have adapted wonderfully to Jaime’s coming out, and treat us the exact same way that they did before they found out we were queer, like a cute couple who is a bit on the oddball romantic side. Secondly, when they do express opinions contrary to mine, ranging from the mildly vexing to the outright “how do you even go around thinking that?” I consider it to be a means of strengthening myself and my mind. When I’m in the queer bubble, I’m comfortable, that’s for certain, and that’s good for many times: When you live in a heterosexist, transphobic society, it’s good to have a safe space to catch a breather where you don’t have to explain yourself or your identity ad infinitum.
But if I get too comfortable, I’ll get lazy. I know the way my mind works. I might make the mistake of thinking that my view is the mainstream one, or the only one in existence. That makes me a bad progressive and a bad advocate, because I always have to know what’s on the minds of those who have different ideas and experiences from my own, even when I virulently disagree with them. It’ll help me think through why exactly I hold the ideas and values that I do, and how I came to them, and, most importantly, whether they are something I should adhere to.
So, even though they can drive me nuts sometimes, I adore those contrary, interesting, ever-so provocative physicists. And I’m sure they’re fond of me too, in my own loud-mouthed outspoken feminist way.
* I fuck up sometimes. I’m an imperfect person. I hurt people, I slip up on terminology and pronouns. But I’m glad for being allowed the chance to move on and learn from my experiences, which I feel safer spaces policy offers
I’ve never had an environment like that … there was probably a “queer culture” at my university but I was not part of it. What I knew about sociopolitical theory, or feminism, or queer politics when I was in college could fill a thimble. (Actually, there were a couple of classes I took — Intro to Political Philosophy and an upper-level English class called The Literature of the Oppressed — that served as my introduction to these things. The first one taught me, in broad terms, what Marxism and feminism were, and how a Marxist or a feminist would interpret … whatever it was we were discussing that day in class. The second one, when we got to the writings of the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, actually made me a feminist.) So if you and I had been in college at the same time, in the same place, I might theoretically be among your group of contrarian physicists (if I studied physics and not biochemistry, that is). Certainly my friends — mostly straight, male engineering majors, with a couple of gay male math/engineering majors and a few physics graduate students of both sexes — wouldn’t have been out of place in that group.
I would totally have laughed at the idea of “heterophobia,” though, even if I could not have explained why I found it funny.
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I like this post. Really, it’s all about challenging your boundaries. (And I – like most if not ASDs, I suspect – have experienced that anger / frustration that makes us want to cry because we *can’t get out what we want to say*. So in that, I definitely understand you.) And it sounds like you’re doing an excellent job.
And yeah, recovery time is so essential.
Good for you!