It's not a mouse, it's a rat!

I spend a surprisingly large amount of my life refuting the labels people place on me. Those labels emerge from conclusions they make based on what they see, sometimes they are tantalisingly close to the truth, sometimes I laugh at how utterly I have been misrepresented.

I have made an academic career out of challenging the labels that have been placed on me.  In doing so I found myself becoming more obsessed with them - more bound by them.

I was a queer person on a queer course, with queer folks.  We talked about queer and queers' place in society exclusively from a queer point of view, whilst living in Britain's number one queer city.  I did an interview for a psychological study at Sussex Uni, they were researching sexuality and social habits.  I had a lovely long chat with the researcher who ended up confessing to me she was horrified at the sexist 'traditional' views of most students she interviewed (questions included "how much do man drink compared to girls" "what do you think of girls who drink as much as men?" etc etc) I concluded "...but I do live in a little queer universe".  And that is true, there is an aspect of living outside the world of labels that hurt which allows me to develop an identity based only on the words I want to use.

But there are a lot of questions which spring from my queer universe.  Living in a 'queer universe' is a label in itself, it exists in contrast to a hetro universe.  Developing an identity which is assured and reinforced by that which it contradicts is a strange identity to posses indeed.

I am, depending on who I talk to, bisexual or pansexual.  I'm a feminist sometimes and a queer activist at other times.  I am extremely femme on occasion and at other times desirous to be entirely without gender.  I'm kinky and vanilla. Straight edge and a junkie.

I pursue academic defences of my choices and compulsions and find many.  I delight in deconstructing society whilst it quietly oppresses us [see the Daily Mail] I reject labels but indulge in them when amongst sympathetic/queer persons.  I propose radical reformations of the basics structures of society [see my M.A. dissertation] but live a life which, whilst verging on the edges of acceptability, is hardly radical.

It often feels as though all my radical politics, all my political affiliation, all my belief actually boil down to is shouting impotently at the world "it's not gay, it's queer! it's not stupid, it's new! it's not bloody women, it's challenging feminists! it's not a mouse, it's a rat!"

The problem, inevitability, is not that I'm wrong, it's that the difference between a rat and a mouse is incidental to most people.