Through Strangers' Eyes

by Lauren Martin (more...)
Reprinted from Quantify #5
Posted on October 25, 2003

My style, my presentation, is wholly inconsistent, changing day to day, even hour to hour, and the reaction I get from people alternately ranges from smiles and whistles to glares and nasty comments. The "safe" Lauren: looks female, Asian or white, light-skinned, is small, quiet, non-threatening, speaks English. The "dangerous" Lauren: is ambiguously gendered, a person of color (race unknown), doesn't smile, looks like a big ol' dyke, looks like a flaming fag, talks loud when she gets excited. Which Lauren has more privilege, which gets harassed more, which worries more about getting her ass kicked, which gets taken less seriously, which gets interviewed for jobs, which gets the job? Impossible to answer, because strangers will simultaneously read me in both (or other) ways, some picking up on cues or codes (how is my hair styled, what am I wearing, what neighborhood am I in, who am I with?), others making assumptions based on stereotypes, all of them making inferences about my gender, race, class and sexuality.

The answer to "What are you?" (in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality and a host of other queries) is not so simple, so easy. Nine years ago, six years ago, three years ago, the answers sometimes terrified me, sometimes confused me, sometimes kept me up at night scribbling in my journal. But, as I've stated in other places, I am no longer in identity-crisis mode. (And just because the crisis is over, that does not necessarily mean that the process of naming is complete). I have reconciled the fact that my identity does not have to be consistent, and that it will probably never match up with people's preconceived notions as long as they are operating under a binary belief system. That is, it all started with race and my knowledge from an early age that the black/white dichotomy left no room for me, that my existence as a mixed-race Asian/Jewish person queers and totally fucks with that dichotomy. Throw in some queer and gender theory (i.e. break down those old-fashioned illusions of homosexuality versus heterosexuality, of male versus female) and everything just becomes so postmodern you can barely even handle it.

This Lauren is integrated, but she still likes to collect nicknames and alter-egos for herself. She has always had secret lives and competing personas-not just imaginary friends but imaginary identities. I grew up with the mythologies of Super Heroes and after-school cartoons, content with the knowledge that with the utterance of a few magic words, or the donning of a cape, or the alignment of the moon and stars, the body could be magically transformed, a new person could emerge, with super powers, even. These were not brand-new mythologies, of course, but rather updated versions of the changeling, the coyote trickster, Greek immortals made manifest in She-Ra, Voltron, Teen Wolf, the whole Marvel Comics crew, even bumbling Inspector Gadget always had a bag of tricks up his sleeve. The lesson I learned from these mythologies was that what you see is not always what you get, or, as the digitized theme song from Transformers went: "More than meets the eye." These beings were not either/or, Clark Kent was Superman, Autobots were both robots and automobiles at the same time. In that vein, in real life I, too, could be more than meets the eye. Not "just" Lauren, but many Laurens, different versions of who I am, not competing with one another, but all of them calmly resting inside. Chinese and Jewish, and that's not a contradiction (although even I can recognize it as one hella pomo racial i.d.), neither is having queer gender/s and sexuality/ies necessarily cause for a conflict.

All the Laurens get harassed, in every way that people read me: as girl (cute), as boy (probably gay), as dyke (all I need is a good...), as Asian (here come the fetishists), as genderqueer (what the fuck is that?), as racially ambiguous (certainly not white, or at least not WASP). And, quite often, these perceptions get mixed and matched.

Case Study Number One: I am walking with a white friend at night in Manhattan. We are both read as female and are surrounded by a group of teenage boys who proceed to harass us. Initially, their gendered comments are directed at both me and Danny, but then the harassment becomes racialized (racist) and I am clearly the one being targeted. We both make our way through the crowd of boys, but when I have finally pushed my way through I am dizzy, I feel lost, I don't see my friend anywhere. A second or two later, I see my friend a couple paces away. Danny had emerged from the throng just a few steps ahead of me. I say nothing about what just happened, I pick up our conversation where we had left off, and Danny, following my cue, says nothing about it either.

But I don't want for us only to think about power and privilege in terms of individual acts such as street harassment. Let's think about institutional power, and how that plays out among the individual acts of a person or persons representative of institutional authority. I want to complicate our ideas about passing and how that relates to (individual) privilege and (institutional) power. For example, passing in one particular subset of identity (e.g. gender) is, obviously, mediated through other subsets (e.g. race, class, ability, citizenship).

Case Study Number Two: I am on my way to a conference in Ohio. It is the first time I've flown since September 11, 2001. I get "randomly" searched at the first security checkpoint. "Sir, will you take off your shoes please?" the security guard asks me. Waiting to board, I write in my journal: "So far they searched my backpack and my boots. The security guy called me 'sir'-I wonder what effect that has on profiling-if I am seen as a man of color and thus a potential threat? What if a male security guard starts to pat me down, thinking I'm a dude? Well then I'd speak up and they'd apologize and have a woman do it, but what about trans people? How are these increased security measures (important and all, of course) affecting trans people, gender ambiguous people, racially ambiguous people, and POCs in general?" Before boarding the plane, I get "randomly" picked to be searched again. Off come the boots. This time the guards i.d. me as female, and I get assigned a female guard for the pat-down.

I've been obsessed with fragmentation since forever. I'm still fascinated by the idea that these truths we hold to be self-evident are not in fact static, but are tentative and subject to rupture. For those of us who may appear racially-, sexually-, and/or gender-ambiguous, there is often a juncture, a split between how we are treated before someone knows who we "really" are versus how we are treated after.

Case Study Number Three: I am at the queer women's Institute of a national domestic violence conference. One woman crosses the room and approaches the person seated right next to me. The person next to me has a common Jewish first name-Ari-and, I guess, common Jewish features. The woman who crossed the room starts a conversation with Ari, and invites her to be a part of some radical Jewish get-together. I sit there, calmly twiddling my thumbs, as I am ignored. Moments later, the Institute engages in a "Crossing the Room" exercise. The facilitator announces some identity, and those who identify cross the room. Then everyone else crosses the room to join them. "If you are a Jewish woman, cross the room," the facilitator says. I am one of the first persons to cross, and I wonder how many Institute attendees I have surprised by doing so. Later, at lunch, I am seated with the woman who had approached Ari. "You should come to the next Radical Jews dinner," she invites me. How can I express to her that her prior behavior has already made clear to me that I really would not feel welcome there?

No one can ever "tell" that I am ethnically half-Jewish, therefore I continually have to "come out" as a Jew to people. What this means is that not only do I not get invited to take part in activities with other Jews, but it also means that I am very often subject to people making anti-Semitic remarks in my presence. Would they make these same comments in front of me if they knew that my dad and grandmother are Holocaust survivors? Furthermore, does the fact that I don't "look" Jewish make it easier for people to conveniently "forget" that I am? Those of us who are not easily identified as Other are privy to information that is not readily available to those who cannot-or do not-pass. That is, we are witnesses to what "you" really think of us, whether we want to hear it or not. Harlem Renaissance writer Walter White, for example, used his white skin as a ticket to unearth details about lynchings and other white supremacist activities. And light-skinned Black conceptual artist/philosopher Adrian Piper has printed special "business cards," one to inform those who make racist remarks in her presence that they have just offended her, and another set to hand out to people who sexually harass her. In this very clever manner (which has since been endlessly copied by others) Piper addresses both overt and covert bigotry and oppression that she experiences at the hands of strangers.

Let's go back to that rupture, back to the before & after. If you know me in one way, will it be difficult for you to view me in another? Even if we both have come to the realization that the personas we have presented to each other are a mix of both conscious and sub-conscious construction? People who know me well, who know me as Lauren, who know me as girl, who know me as hapa, sometimes do not believe me when I tell them that I often pass as other than these things. "You could never pass as a guy, you're such a girl!" they say, or "You totally look Asian, I can't see you as anything else," or "I can't believe you pass," or "Really? I don't believe it." I don't think it is always so much that my friends, coworkers, family members, etc. are trying to invalidate my experiences; rather, they see me as they know me, as they have grown to know me, as the specific person I have constructed for them, and it is difficult for them to see me through strangers' eyes.

How I appear through strangers' eyes terrifies and enrages me at the same time it daringly piques my curiosity. I hate the idea of being boxed in by petty assumptions, and I fear the violent reactions of bigoted assholes, and yet I am fascinated by what exactly people "see" when they look at me, when they hear me speak, when they catch a glance of me crossing the subway platform or strolling down the street. Furthermore, how does this match up with how I perceive myself? And how much of how I perceive myself is filtered through how other people see me? Again, I do not conceive of this as an identity crisis, but more like an experiment or a study. When I was nineteen I felt like a freak, like an alien from a forbidden planet. And, well, I do still feel like a freak sometimes, but now I can revel in it, find comfort in it, and know that there are lots of other freaks out there who've got my back. (Like my friend Brian, who is also queer and also hapa. He has been living abroad for a couple years now, but recently he was in town for just one night and we had tea with another mutual friend. Brian tells us how people react to him in France, how strangers continually think he's not only Spanish or Latin American, but also read him as female. "Gracias, senorita," they say to him. But sometimes the reaction is not so mild. Sometimes it results in harassment, staring, being followed and attacked. "Oh Brian," I want to say to him, "I forgot how much we understood each other." I give him the nod that I hope says I have been there too.)

There is a visceral something that Brian and I share, a reaction that we often unintentionally induce in others. Judith Butler used the phrase "anxiety-ridden spectacle" when I saw her speak on a panel at NYU entitled "Who Owns Gender?" That phrase is the only thing I wrote down in my notebook through the entire evening; perhaps that is why it has stayed with me for so long. What compelled me to write it down in the first place, however, still sticks. The phrase really resonated with me, it seemed to perfectly sum up ideas I've had about ambiguity, about those of us whose lives fall in between the lines, and who are then subjected to outsiders' invasive curiosity and outright violence. With earlier zines such as Forbidden Planet (1996), and terms such as "an interstitial existence" (Quantify #1, 2000) and "living your life as an enigma" (Parallel Lines, 2001), I have previously focused much on internal battles, and what I appreciate about Butler's phrase is the attention it pays to how it can play out externally.

Not that I am constantly being turned into a spectacle, nor am I always invoking anxiety wherever I make an appearance. Everyone who walks around, goes about their business, and interacts with strangers may be subjected to being scrutinized or given the once over. What I am concerned with, however, is how some of us are more vulnerable than others, and how I become more or less vulnerable depending on just how strangers interpret "what" I am. And strangers, of course, are not just random people I pass by on the street. They are police officers, potential employers, landlords, doctors, grad school admissions officers, i.e. institutions and people with institutional power. How these people and institutions recognize me can have severe implications and consequences that affect my very well-being and livelihood. And the daily reactions that I do get from those random strangers on the street are also reflective of institutions of privilege, of differences in power, of differences in perception and understanding (which is a standard feminist argument against street harassment, that it is just one rung holding up the continuum of violence and, uh, patriarchy. There-I said it, I said the p-word!). So, how strangers interpret me can mean the difference between being harassed or not, being racially-profiled or not, being invited to join an organization or not, and lots of other circumstances.

Case Study Number Four: Two men are standing on the corner outside my bank. One of them is preaching in Spanish, the other is passing out literature. The man handing out literature sees me coming. He holds out a flyer written in Chinese. "Chinese?" he asks me expectantly, and I shake my head because I can't read what's written on his flyer and besides, I don't want any religious tracts today. He looks at me again, rifles through his packets and holds out another flyer. "¿Hablas español?" I could respond, "Sí, un poquito, pero no lo quiero," but instead I smile and shake my head and keep on walking.

These situations are reenacted over and over again, and are often manufactured on and contingent upon the basis of appearance. There are some other factors, such as one's speaking voice or the context of one's surroundings or companionship, but mostly I'm talking about the spectacle here, the fact that people can look at me and have multiple and competing interpretations. Depending on who you see at this precise moment, I can be the safe Lauren, the dangerous Lauren, or some combination of the two. Not to completely erase my own agency, however, for I am allowed some measure of control, and sometimes I will deliberately try to confuse people, I will mix-and-match pieces of my identity, I will wear layers of outlandish clothing, I will embark upon a serious project of gender- and race-fuck, I will keep secrets to myself and play along.

Case Study Number Five: My brother and I are at the aikido dojo, waiting to watch our dad test for his black belt. One of his coworkers, also there to watch my dad test, comes over to us. "Are you Andy's sons?" he asks me and Ez, stretching out his hand. I hear Ez chuckling beside me. Later, when Ez is recounting the story, my dad asks me, "What did you say?" "I didn't say anything," I tell him. "I just smiled and shook his hand."

Who was that masked super-hero, anyway? Maybe I know, but I'm not telling. She is more than meets the eye.