Not All Women

Extract of Manifesto of a Girl Journalist in the 90s, Chapter 4.

Just so you know I’m still here…

Extract Manifesto of a Girl Music Journalist in the 90s

“Another one of Ngaire’s lesbians,” they would say in the office. It seems a female fan of music by women could only be interpreted as inherently connected to sexuality and desire, the same as female fans of male singers and bands. If I loved them, clearly then, I wanted to shag them. I wished to neither confirm nor deny, as if lesbianism was a disease.

But I am looking for something queer, queer like the carnivalesque in theatre, political liberation rather than intellectual analysis. I want everything turned upside down. I want representation that questions the categories of sex, gender, sexuality and identity.

Thirty years later, it’s easy to piece all that together in the blink of an eye, still wearing dungarees, talking to myself and the animals, but better-read, wiser and worn, like a pebble.

I’m reading for writing: David Lazar, “... queer theory defines queer as a continuing instability in gender relations that undermines the traditional binary of gender, replacing it with indeterminate, transgressive desires. The desire of the essay is to transgress genre.”

Seeking out the queer in alternative and popular music would transgress genre - tomorrow’s music today. I had the instinct, but not the knowledge or the technical words. All roads lead back to Judith Butler’s theories posed in her book Gender Trouble. It came out in 1990, but I didn’t find it till the 2000s. Gender roles are performative, learned behaviour through assumptions considered natural but which are cultural, based on someone’s upbringing; education, religion, ethics, beliefs, family, and friends. It’s bloody obvious, but someone must put it in the right language to get it on the shelf. Currently, Helen Reddington, an academic, feminist, musician, and artist (although she would place those skills backwards to my version), I reviewed her book, and Hannah McCann and Whitney, writers of Queer Theory Now (2020), and now Lazar… all go back to Butler’s original concepts as a foundation for fresh critical thinking.

Outside my square window, a grey mist hangs over suburban tiled rooftops. Nearly every house has an old apple tree from the days when this was an orchard in London’s market garden. At this time of year, I get a whiff of apple scent when I open the attic window. Amy cat loves to sit there when I work on an autumn evening. There have been five cats and two greyhounds since Frank, the music journalist’s cat. Amy cat is number four.

I’m stuck on a poem.

The woman on the bus

Wearing her despair like a thick overcoat

A face wet with tears that tumble

Like a singer giving their all to one song.

END OF EXTRACT