Hi everyone,

Wow that year has just flown past, hasn't it?  Well we are nearly ready to hit Oxford Street for the third year and it looks like this year is going to be bigger and better than ever before.  I hope that you are all dusting off your feathers and fairy wings ready to hit the spotlight!  I will be posting more information after a meeting of officers for our float on Sunday so stay tuned.  In the meantime, the theme of this year's parade is 'Mardi Gras' History of the World' which fits nicely with the research I am doing at the moment on the Fag Hag from Dionysios to Diva so if you have any ideas for decorations or costumes please let me know before Sunday so I can present them to the committee.

Yours in fag haggery,
Janet.

Well, it's been a while since my last blog!  This is because I have been madly trying to write up the research I have done so far and hopefully finish my work by Feb 2010.  As my journey towards the finish line continues, I am finding more and more information that relates to the life  and experiences of the fag hag.  A lot of it originates in Greek mythology and the idea of the Dionysion experience is becoming more and more important.  The ancient prototype for the fag hag identity seems to be found in stories about Electra, Antigone and Artemis who were all strong women that defied the Law of the Father.  Sometimes I wish I had listened more in my Ancient History class at High School - but in those days I was more interested in looking out the window and day dreaming about the freedom that could be found outside the school gates.  Isn't it funny?  I couldn't wait to get out of school and into the real world when I was 17 but then at 42 I couldn't wait to go back to Uni - aha!  This is just and example of the irony that belongs to the fag hag's life.  Well, keep your fingers crossed that there will be no more writer's block for me and that the ideas and words flow smoothly and quickly.  I am anxious to get my work out in the real world now - just as I was anxious to get myself out there all those years ago lol lol.  Now, my aim is to finish this work so that I, too, can enjoy the sun, surf and grandkids!  Love you all, please send some good karma my way. xoxoxoxo

Hi everyone,

Well, after a wonderful weekend with the newest additions to the family I am back home to begin writing the rest of my thesis.  I am nearing the end of this work and it seems to me that the closer the due date gets, the further away I seem from finishing.  My elusive muse's  visits are few and far between and my concentration lapses as my mind wanders to thoughts of grandchildren, summer and the beach.  Why oh why didn't I put my head down six months ago and use the dull and dreary winter to my best advantage???  Why do I now have to sit in my office, hour upon hour, searching for words and theories that best describe my choice of lifestyle?   Too late now to wonder...the file is open and Chapter One is waiting to be edited.  Talk soon, people.................

 

This will be a journey of discovery that will explore the depths of a fag hag’s life from her beginnings as a woman who gives up her self and escapes from oppression, through a maze of inclusion and exclusion in a mainly nocturnal carnival existence, to her eventual return to the culture she has escaped, where she can now form a meaningful relationship and commit to it.  The story will detail the threads of shame that wind their way through the fag hag’s life to eventually lead her from her ‘withdrawal’ period in a gay community to be a stronger and more self confident member of her own culture.

 

It might look a bit like a rewrite of Alice in Wonderland, where the woman falls down a rabbit hole (metaphor for the nightlife) and here she finds all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures (metaphor for drag queens, trannies, etc) whom she accepts without question.  Of course this story would have a dark side, because the woman can’t be included in all forms of this new life and so we would read of her loneliness and longing as well as her wonder at some of the things that she sees.  The woman, at times, becomes invisible because her relationships aren’t important.  Why?  Because in this new world, she is still very much an outsider who remains unseen and whose needs and desires aren’t important.  In one sense this is an identity based on the ‘absent self’.  If someone has lost their self then what is better than the other person’s emotions becoming important?  In this way the fag hag identity is based on empathy where she invests her emotions in the emotions of her Other – the fag.

 

So the fag hag life may about oppression, escape, loss of self, withdrawal from her culture, and self attack through drugs, alcohol, and anonymous or casual sex.  These can be analyzed through the compass of shame.  The fag hag leads a life that contains many examples of shame affect – or threads of shame as I will call them – and deals with them using, in some cases, all points of the compass of shame.  So maybe I should start here:

 

Firstly, the fag hag is oppressed (discuss oppression and its meaning) in some way, either through some form of abusive relationship eg. sexual or family (discuss the five faces of oppression).  So she escapes by getting rid of the self to emerge through an Other.  She then ‘becomes’ the fag (hence the reason most of the girls say that they feel like a gay man in a woman’s body or similar comments).

 

Secondly, the fag hag is two conflicting identities that work together.  First, it is the self that is accepted by gay friends (the act) then it is the self that can’t exist (the ‘imperfect’ self that has been damaged, the one she denies).   The fag hag identity is an unconscious choice that is made long before we have the language to describe it and in this way, ‘the fag hag experience is one of felt essentialism’ (Thompson, 2004:44).  For many of us this is true (see the girls’ stories where they say that they didn’t know that they were fag hags at first).  But, on the other hand, the fag hag identity is also a conscious choice we make as an act of political resistance and ‘gender dissent’ (Maddison, 2000:20) or as a result of some other type of oppression – a woman gives her self up and says, ‘I don’t want my identity right now’, but there are degrees.  This contradiction creates tensions that are ‘crucial to an effective – and affective - fag hag politics (Thompson, 2004:44).

 

Thirdly, the fag hag escapes into a certain type of gay community – mostly the party life.  This woman that I write about found her niche in a particular type of gay community that was focused on clubbing and fun (but also alcohol and drug abuse) which relates to Carnival and ritual.  This chapter will discuss Mardi Gras and the nightclub scene through Bakhtin’s Carnival using stories from myself as well as the participants. 

 

This particular community is about the exclusion and inclusion of the fag hag and stories of shame here will revolve around events like being refused entry into gay nightclubs, not being taken into gay saunas and bath houses, sitting in the car and waiting at the beat, being left in a bar, homophobia.  It is important to not the difference between people who are gay and actually affected by concrete discrimination and the fag hag who has assumed that identity for a particular reason but is NOT oppressed in that particular sense.  She may be oppressed in marriage etc. but NOT in the sense of being homosexual although there is empathy or a type of transference.

 

 

OK so we know that the earliest evidence of the fag hag identity appeared in the days of Ancient Greece but what happened to her after that? Well this is what I have found so far....

In much the same way as Dionysus, Jesus was a God in human form, born of a mortal mother by a divine father, who was resurrected after his death and similarly, both were seen as miraculous gods associated with the immortality of the soul. Dionysios and Jesus were both represented as asexual, had large followings of women and travelled extensively to spread their teachings. Texts written about early Christianity provide many examples of women who gathered in groups and followed Jesus on his pilgrimages, one such example is the Bible (Sayers, 2005). In early Roman culture, women had no authority, were considered inferior to men and were not allowed to venture outside the home but although the Bible refers mainly to Jesus’ 12 apostles, there are still many stories about the women who followed him. One of these, Mary Magdalene, continues to be at the centre of Christian debate because, although she seemed to play an important role in the life of Christ, for centuries the Catholic Church has regarded her as a woman of questionable social and moral standing. But, in the late 60’s the Church retracted this claim and described Mary as one of the key players in Christ’s life. Jesus treated women as equals and valued their opinions in times when they had no voice in a patriarchal society.

In the 15th Century, a text called the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) justified the deaths of many thousands of women whose only crime was to seek a voice in a patriarchal society. The Malleus was also known as the ‘Witches Hammer’ and was written by two Inquisitors of the Catholic Church, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger in order to eliminate witchcraft which was believed to be the work of the devil. Most of the women accused as witches had strong personalities and were known to defy convention by overstepping the lines of proper female performance (Bailey, 2003). Witchcraft was also referred to as the supernatural or uncanny (Purkiss, 1969) and associated with Pagan religion. Those who identified as witches were mostly women who participated in ritual and worship of the Great goddesses Artemis and Hecate and today’s descendants of the ancient practices refer to their beliefs as WICCA.

Today, many women look to the story of the witch as a reaffirmation of their own identity (Purkiss, 1996). According to Diane Purkiss, the myth of the medieval witch hunts depicts the witch as ‘a figure of all that women want to be’ (1996:22). Purkiss says that the witch has been constructed as herbalist, midwife and healer – reclaiming the female body and knowledge of it from an otherwise male dominated profession. The witch is believed to be an outspoken woman who defies authority and many women view the witch as the ultimate threat to patriarchy (1996). In other words, the witch is the prototype of today’s feminists.

In October 1900 Freud began treating a beautiful eighteen year old Jewish girl with a previous history of hysteria whom he named Dora. Dora’s father took her to see Freud after she developed symptoms of hysteria. Freud believed that these symptoms were a result of the repression of female sexual desire and published Dora’s story in 1905 in order to defend his theory that hysteria originated in sexual, infantile data. In recent times, Freud’s case study of Dora has attracted renewed interest, particularly among feminists who believe that Dora was ‘feminist before her time’ and ‘a paradigm case for catching patriarchy with its pants down’

Shakespeare enjoyed playing with the lighter side of sexuality and in the 17th Century he introduced his unruly and untamed women in plays such as As you Like it, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew and 12th Night. In the play Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Shakespeare blurs the boundaries of gender performance with Viola/Sebastian showing that one need not become either male or female. In the play, As You Like It, the courtship between Rosalind and Orlando questions the construction of gender; and in the Taming of the Shrew, Kate plays a woman who, although unruly in the beginning, bends to patriarchal rule. Lady Macbeth is an ambitious woman who lusts after power and goads her husband to kill the future King of Scotland, after reading a letter in which Macbeth describes his meeting with three witches whose predictions prompt Macbeth into believing in his own immortality. Shakespeare refers to the witches as servants of Hecate, the Three Weird Sisters, and characterizes them as dangerous characters of tremendous power.

The middle of the 19th Century heralded the age of the Suffragettes and Emmeline Pankhurst proved that for women to be heard they must show men that they meant it. Emmeline’s motto was ‘deeds not words’. The Suffragettes were women who sought a voice in patriarchal society and like many unruly woman they suffered for their outspokenness. In 1865, Millicent Garrett Fawcett led a campaign of logical argument – the suffragists - but her attempts to plead a case for women were ignored. Millicent married Henry Fawcett, an MP who supported women’s rights and joined the suffrage movement in 1867. Henry encouraged Millicent to continue her writing and she began by writing articles for journals and eventually published books such as ‘Women’s Suffrage’ (1911), ‘The Women’s Victory’ (1920)) and ‘What I Remember’ (1924). Millicent was concerned about women’s education and consequently organized many lectures for women at Cambridge University. (Simkin (1997) and it wasn’t until Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social Political Union (WSPU) in 1905 with violent protests and attacks on buildings that the suffragettes began to be heard. Their motto was ‘deeds not words’. Where Millicent Fawcett’s campaign of words had failed, Emmeline Pankhurst’s campaign of terror had at least attracted patriarchal attention.

Australian history also tells of many strong, outspoken women who fought for the right to be heard. The first pioneers of the bush had to fight not only bushfires, drought, floods and famine but they also had to raise their many children, overcome the loneliness of the bush and run the farms while their husbands were away droving. In 1894, Australia became the second country in the English speaking world to include women in the vote and in 1902 women were granted the right to stand for federal parliament. Women who led the suffrage movement in Australia included Mary Lee, Elizabeth Nicholls, Catherine Spence and Louisa Lawson, mother of the colonial poet Henry (Damousi, 1994). Louisa was also one of the main instigators behind the feminist journal, ‘Dawn: a Journal for Australian Women’, which was published between 1888 and 1905 (Lawson, 1990). During both World Wars, women successfully undertook the jobs of men who had been called to fight in the war only to be sent ‘back to the kitchen’ when the fighting was over.

The histories of these women, from Ancient Greece to colonial Australia as well as the life stories of many others who have rebelled against patriarchal rule provide examples of unruly women with characteristics that are important to the fag hag identity. They defy patriarchy by performing a feminine role that is contrary to dominant thoughts about how a woman should act and in doing so; they attract the wrath of male dominated societies. But in the process of rebellion, these women also find comfort and alliance with men whose gender performance is also seen to be outside the normal expectations of masculinity.

Then came Judy Garland and the divas and with the opening of Studio 54 the fag hag truly came out of the closet. One of the most recent examples of a fag hag is Margaret Cho. While Garland, Streisand and Cher (to name a few) are regarded as divas, Margaret Cho is held in high esteem as the 'Queen of the fag hags' whom she believes are the 'backbone of the gay community'...

The theme for the 2010 Mardi Gras is 'Mardi Gras' History of the World' and this fits really nicely with my research into the fag hag identity. It seems that there have been fag hags since the days of Ancient Greek and they figure prominantly in mythology of the Gods. In particular, the God of Wine and Pleasure, Dionysious, was worshipped by scores of women who would gather in the hills outside town late in the night in honour of their god. These ceremonies were usually held during the middle of the night in the seclusion of the mountains. The women drank wine, which released them from their oppressive lives and the wild dance and erotic language of the verse helped to release their inhibitions and create a new self awareness and knowledge. You can read more about the history of the fag hag on the website www.ozfaghags.com ...it really is interesting!

The sun was shining the morning of my birthday but the weather was turning nasty and dark clouds threatened from the horizon. We hoped that there wasn’t going to be rain that night, even though Fred Nile had prayed for it. I was so excited; the boys were taking me to Sydney in the Subaru. They were all wearing their ‘Men in Black’ sunglasses, Scott driving, Jason in the passenger seat and in the back Rob and Ben either side of me. I felt like Miss Daisy traveling with my own personal Mafia It was the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and people from all over the world made it one of the biggest night time parties in Sydney. That year, Mardi Gras was celebrating its twenty first birthday and we joined thousands of partygoers from all over the world to wish the Parade a happy birthday.

From the balcony of our fourth storey hotel room I could see small patches of gum trees, dwarfed by concrete and glass monsters that scorned those beneath them. Next door, cranes stood guarding the empty worksite – idle for the weekend. In the docks at the end of the street Navy ships waited for their next deployment. Trains rattled past carrying eager party goers and planes flew low overhead taking weary tourists to their sunny destination. Then there was me! So far from home yet so familiar in those surroundings. I was a mountain girl - born in the golden glow of autumn under the Sign of the Fish in the Year of the Monkey. I grew up on the smell of the eucalypts and the blue haze that gives the Blue Mountains National Park its name then I moved to Newcastle with a man who would eventually break my heart. The boys from Newcastle saved me from a miserable life of self hate and treated me like Snow Whiite. I loved them so much.

Seagulls and pigeons sat side by side on rooftops tarnished by smog; their white feathers now grey. Lovers in the park seemed oblivious to the world, cars backfiring, sirens wailing, horns sounding – there’s no escaping the noise of the city. No quiet moments free from distraction. A great place to visit, to party and to be invisible. Helicopters hovered overhead like birds of prey waiting for the parade to begin and news to unfold. The city was a beautiful place in its own, ugly way.

The sun, still warm for so late in the afternoon, gave us all hope for a dry night. I sat on the balcony of the hotel looking over the city with all its contradictions and felt a small stab of homesickness. I missed my mountain home and here in the city it didn’t look that far away. The next minute my longing had changed to excitement as the boys started to get ready for their special night. I was looking forward to the most colorful and exciting yet controversial night of the year, and the gay community didn’t let me down with dancing, music and extravagant costumes. It was a night of peace and ecstasy. I felt so much a part of the community. I felt that it was my birthday party too.

Bright pink feathers, long white satin dresses, slinky black cat suits – each float had a different message. Gay Rights! Gay Adoption! Gay Marriage! There were dykes on bikes and marching tampons; bears and femmes and leather boys, gay police. The Mardi Gras is certainly something curious. You could see that months of preparation and loads of money had gone into a great many of the costumes. They were elaborate and elegant, crazy and shocking. I wondered how many mothers had tackled miles of tulle and satin so that their sons could look like fairy princesses. After the parade people gathered at the hotels and taverns in the area, waiting for hours in a queue just to pay $50.00 entry into one of the nightclubs. By midnight, here must have been hundreds of thousands of people roaming the streets some still in costume; others seemed to have lost most of theirs. At 2 a.m. there were still thousands of people roaming the streets of Kings Cross. I loved the parade. I wanted to be a part of it. That's when my dream to have a float in Mardi Gras began.

I don't think I will ever forget that FIRST Mardi Gras night. It was the most amazing experience anyone could ever have. It has taken me a while to come back down to earth (and I don't think I have landed fully yet) but I am now back and ready to start thinking about next year. I am sorry that it's taken so long for me to write again but it's taken a while to find the words to describe our 'stroll' down Oxford Street and the connections that were forged that night. My eyes fill with tears of joy when I think of the great people I met and then I find myself wishing the days and months away until next year. You are such a special bunch and I hope that you will all be back next year. Please keep in touch and I will see you at the many functions we wil be hosting to make next year bigger and better. Love you all, MWAH xoxoxo

Mardi Gras Fair Day - What a great day! I had so much fun meeting everyone at Fair Day and talking about our inaugural fag hag float. I wish I had taken more money though, there is so much for a girl so spend her wage on here. Next year we will have our own stall - that's something to look forward to.

A big thank you to all the girls who came up and introduced themselves to us - thanks for making yourselves known and thanks for showing such great support.

I would also like to say hi to all the gorgeous guys who were dancing with us and hope to see you all in a couple of weeks at the Gras! I will post some pics soon.

Happy Mardi Gras

Mwah

What is it that makes the relationship between gay men and straight women so unique? Why is it that some women can nurture friendships with a gay man that span a lifetime, yet find it so difficult to maintain a long term relationship with a straight man? The answers lie in the life stories of the fag hag. An unruly woman who seeks respite from the judgments and expectations of masculinity in gay communities throughout Western society, the fag hag is important because she transgresses the boundaries between gay and straight cultures. In this respect, her stories can act as a window between the two cultures and therefore help to solve some important questions about identification. Until recently her relationship with her gay male friends has been a ‘love that dare not speak its name’ and therefore there are few studies that provide insight into the personal experiences of the fag hag. An analysis of a fag hag’s autobiographical stories using queer politics, affect theory and Freudian thought shows that the bonds formed between gay men and straight women are born in the affect of shame. Shame plays a positive role in the life of a fag hag and as affect theory deals with our everyday interactions it can be used to investigate the threads of shame that bind the lives of straight women and gay men creating common ground for a deep platonic relationship. By investigating a woman’s actual experiences in a gay community in Newcastle it becomes clear that gay men and straight women, not only share a space that affords some protection from patriarchy but that the bond that they share is instrumental in the development of the self.

So all you girls who love to party, go to mardi gras and enjoy the friendship of a gay friend, I want to hear your stories - the good the bad and the ugly. You can send you stories to my email address - janet_starr2002@yahoo.com.au or alternatively post your story here and I'll see you all at Mardi Gras!