Faggot = Loser

I found this reading particularly interesting, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint on the word and it's connotations relative to a given context.  Ken Corbett proposes that the word "Faggot" doesn't necessarily associate with homosexuality at all, but rather a symbolic removal of manliness and manhood.  According to Corbett, to be small and to lose is to embody "faggot", and it is this internal/external motivation to be "big and winning" that drives aggression and competition between boys and men.  Corbett's analysis of his patient Josh's use of the word during a session struck me as a very well thought out, well structured response to the unconscious initiation of competition from the young boy with the older man, as a result of his brother seeming bigger, stronger, and more in control.  I found it interesting as well that the boy was able to acknowledge that he wanted to be big and to win, that his brother was big and won often, and yet he refused to admit to wanting to be like his brother.  This breakdown in the thought process and connection formation is fascinating to me, as it seems from an objective, removed viewpoint to be the immediate next logical conclusion that Josh wants to be like his older brother.  Finally, Corbett states that male competition and dominance are highly unstable, as loss and failure are inevitable in every scenario pertaining to masculine competition.  Making "Faggots of us all", the guarantee of eventual loss remains ever present in the male mind.

Uncle

Winston James' "Uncle" is an interesting exploration of sexuality in a child, with race and class both as active factors.  James raises questions about how a child processes desire, and whether the child actually processes it at all, or is rather experiencing a cathartic attachment.  Does the boy, Jake, manifest his experiences with his older brother "shaving his face" in his emotional and physical reactions to his Uncle's presence?  Jake's exposure to male sexuality and power through the organs so early on in his mental development initiates a jumbled, frantic search for stability and answers in the young boy's head.  James does a uniquely good job of exploring the inner workings of the human mind when processing desire for the first time.

Response to Daily Trojan Article

I'm finding this article a little difficult to respond to, as the author jumped between topics so frequently and nonsensically that it's nearly impossible to extract an overall point to the piece.  I'm not sure if Salama intended to publish a piece championing the rights of the more intolerant among us, or to complain about over regulation and government presence in public matters, or even to raise issue with lack of attention to other social issues in need of legislation.  Near the beginning of the article, the author seems to take issue with creating "a law to expedite that transition" from one gender identity to another, but fails to discuss any further why the creation of the law is unnecessary.  Instead, Salama proceeds to list off generalized statements about political tendencies in metropolitan areas, and that people tend to be more accepting in these locations.  The article leaps back and forth between statements about supporting "people who aren’t as comfortable with working with people who identify as transgender", and comparisons of changing gender to changing one's name.  On the whole, the article leads me to believe Salama is a very confused individual who hasn't put much time into developing a clear line of thought and accidentally wrote an article that tells more about the author than about the intended subject(s).  

My Thanksgiving

In recent years, my experiences with thanksgiving have yielded an interesting recurring theme.  Issues of classic gender assignment during holidays that revolve around food (women cooking, men otherwise occupied) have become less important to me with time.  My family gathers in the very small, very homogenous town of Barstow, California.  Every major holiday of my conscious life has been set to a backdrop of death valley during the "extreme weather" months of the year.  Starting in about seventh grade, I decided to keep my hair longer than shoulder length because I had very little life experience at that point in time.  A rather feminine adolescent boy, I was often mistaken for a girl, and couldn't seem to figure out where all the confusion was coming from.  My extended family had known for some time that I was actually a boy, but had a difficult time reconciling common gender stereotypes with my behavior.  I wasn't great at sports like my other cousins, who were all either state champion wrestlers, star baseball and football players, and gifted athletes on the whole.  I was (still am) a gangly, awkwardly built, relatively uncoordinated person who found a home in music rather than on a sports team.  Most concerning of all, however, was that I didn't seem to be as socially confident and outgoing around family gatherings as the other kids in my generation.  After nineteen years of gathering for holidays, I'm just now beginning to find a voice among my relatives that doesn't immediately retreat from the louder conversations that take place.  I'm a fairly shy person by nature, so this allowed for quite a bit of miscommunication to fly way over my head.  I really started picking up on the subtle hints and questions at my sexual preference in the past two years, but I'm realizing that they go much farther back than that.  Questions about my girlfriend of four years that they've never met have become less interested in how we're doing and more interested in proving that she exists at all, since girls tend to come and go frequently in my male cousins' lives.  I've learned to view the confused inquiries as funny, and food for an interesting discussion.  Without a direct statement or affirmation of gender identity, my family needed to place me for themselves to know how to interact with me.  All this aside, I love my family and I realize that they were trying to go about this as cautiously and thoughtfully as they could, which allowed for more frequent incidents of hilariously apparent attempts at subtlety.

From the streets of New York City to the townships of South Africa, the LGBT rights movement and its opposition are engaged in an unprecedented international battle.

Obama administration pushes global LGBT rights into the limelight

A major US foreign aid initiative could tip the scales further toward equality.

The US took a groundbreaking step on global LGBT rights Tuesday, joining the UK in tying foreign aid to governments’ protection of sexual minorities, raising the stakes in the increasingly globalized battle over gay rights. 
It is important to analyze why this initiative is taking place and under which conditions and which might be the reasons. I just wanted to let you know about it as I believed it was interesting and it might help to have such an important event in our knowledge for the final.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/politics/aid/111206/obama-clinton-us-aid-global-lgbt-rights