Seeing Queerly
Lego has bumps and slots. That’s heteronormative AND transphobic.
Lego can be anti-LGBT, the Science Museum has said.
A self-guided museum tour on “stories of queer communities, experiences and identities” includes a display of Lego bricks alongside a guide stating the plastic blocks may reinforce the idea that heterosexuality “is the norm”.
The tour, devised by a Gender and Sexuality Network at the museum, also claims in the “Seeing Things Queerly” guide that Lego adds credence to the view that there are only two genders.
This is because people supposedly describe Lego bricks as having male or female parts that are made to “mate” with each other.
This is “heteronormative”, the guide states…
Ok so how do you connect the bricks without some kind of slot plus slot-fitting protuberance arrangement? Please inform.
Other stops on the Seeing Queerly tour, advertised on the Science Museum’s official website, include a display of the Billy Doll, a toy launched in 1992 that was intended to depict a gay man.
A Spitfire has also been included, because a pilot who flew one of the Second World War fighter planes, Roberta Cowell, born Robert Marshall Cowell, would later have transgender surgery. Cowell “was the first British trans woman to undergo gender-affirming surgery and change her birth certificate”, the guide states.
And the Spitfire proves it. Or something.
I remember when the Billy Doll, ahem, came out in the 90s. They weren’t toys in the sense of “children’s plaything” because they were very anatomically correct, and intended as novelty gifts for gay men. They were sold in gay bars and clubs as well as sex shops aimed at gay men. Always been surprised they never made a comeback in the bachelorette scene.
I think I’ve said it before, but what they’re doing here is what they do everywhere: they treat reality like it’s lit crit. If you could interpret something as a symbol or metaphor in a book, then it can be interpreted the same way in the actual, real, physical world, except that it points to reality. Since bumps and slots could be read as a sex metaphor in a book, they’re about sex when we see them in reality.
Oh dear.
Just wait ’til they go to the hardware store to look for electrical parts or plumbing fixtures.
Heterosexuality is the norm; if it wasn’t, reproduction would be reduced substantially (which might not be a bad thing).
It is possible to recognize the “normal” (or what the majority of the people are), and still recognize that there are other ways of being that are different and all right. That is what we should strive for, not forcing reality to accommodate our fantasies.
Individual Lego blocks have male and female parts (most of them, yes I know, but the original idea is that they all interlock). Nowadays the diversity of Lego pieces is enormous. Isn’t that queer enough?
Yes and those nuts and bolts don’t have a chance either (not to mention screws, I mean how vulgar).
ikn, Thanks for the reminder that “normal” is not a value judgment. I consider myself a pretty normal homosexual!
(Plumbers are in real trouble with the male and female “couplings”.)
The silly science machine should unplug everything. Those male cords get to go all over the place, and those female sockets just have to sit there and take it? Every time you plug in an electrical cord you’re metaphorically raping the wall. And what’s with the lights being on or off? Or the museum being open or closed? Sooo binary! The only truly queer museum would be one that’s indistinguishable from the space outside the museum. Tear it all down.
lol
From the Science Museum’s blog (https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/seeing-things-queerly/) :
This is very odd to say the least, but it’s not as bad as I thought. Most importantly, the Museum is apparently not accusing Lego bricks themselves of being heteronormative. I would guess that it’s a poorly thought-out attempt at illustrating heteronormativity in a way that will be interesting to children.
I’d like to know how they came up with that particular toy. I’ve never heard Lego bricks being referred to in this way.
That’s why Real Men like me love hardware stores—all those male and female couplings right there for all to see and possess!
But Lego pieces, being *both* male and female are not “heteronormative.” Sex is binary, where the sexes have division. Lego is not. It’s a shitty example.
Ah, that’s so true, isn’t it. Queer theory is indeed a branch of lit crit, and it’s being applied literally to the real world, including to children’s physical bodies.
It’s also conflating oughts with ises: if queer theory dicates that the world ought to be one big pansexual polyamorous spectrum of queernicity, then the fact that humans actually come in two distinct sexes that are fixed at conception (and that homosexuality and bisexuality are rather minor anomalies in the grand scheme of human nature) ought not to exist. The Soviets and Communist Chinese did this with genetics: they believed that since Marxism dictated that society ought to be one giant meritocracy where no one inherits any advantage by birthright, then the fact that our genes are directly inherited from our parents and are fixed at conception ought not to exist. And the state’s subsequent rejection of genetic science in the field of agriculture led to some 50 million deaths by starvation in Ukraine, Russia, and China.
But what really pisses me off about the Science Museum hosting this shit is that they’re treating homosexuality like it’s some kind of spiritual mystery that lies outside the domain of science. They wouldn’t put an astrologer in charge of an exhibit about space. They wouldn’t put a psychic in charge of an exhibit about brain science. But they’re perfectly comfortable putting a queer theory horseshitter in charge of a guide that’s ostensibly about homosexuality and gender-bending. I find that attitude highly condescending — homophobic, even.
Biological sex, sexuality, and gender expression are not some kind of fucking transcendental enigma, like the Holy Trinity. They’re natural phenomena, and they’re perfectly explorable using the same tools of science that we use everywhere else in the world.
Take Robert Marshall Cowell, the army pilot cited by the museum, who got a sex change operation after the War. They could have pointed out that it’s a well-known phenomenon that straight male middle-aged military veterans seek “sex change” operations in far greater numbers than the rest of the population. They could have offered up some of the proposed hypotheses about why that is. Hell, they could have even commissioned and funded a study to look into the matter further.
But of course, that’s the problem with queer theory bullshitters right there: they don’t want anyone to know the truth. Queer theory was dreamt up by autogynephilic men like Robert Marshall Cowell with the express purpose of concealing the facts behind the transgender subculture, rather than exposing them to the light of day. The fact that males cannot literally turn into females interferes with the pleasure they derive from fantasizing about inhabiting female bodies. Queer theory is a giant project to enhance sexual pleasure among men with AGP, and it uses the bodies of distressed and confused young people who don’t conform to sex stereotypes as cannon fodder to that end.
Queer theory is anti-humanist and it’s anti-science right to the core. It shouldn’t be anywhere near a sceince museum.
By ’em some Silly Putty if Lego blocks make them feel “unsafe”.
Or cuddly stuffed toys.
That much recto-cranial inversion must have created a quantum black hole.
Speaking of postmodern literary criticism, there’s also the idea that the interpretation of a work of literature intended by the author does not hold a privileged position over other possible interpretations. If, say, Orwell intended Animal Farm as an allegory for Stalinism, and someone chooses to interpret it as an expression of fatphobia (the pigs representing fat people), then the latter interpretation is no less “correct” than the former. I suspect this is the origin of the idea that intention doesn’t matter, only impact does. “Intention isn’t magic”, remember!
Speaking of Animal Farm, after I read it the first time, I tried talking about it and the Communist Pigs.
The person I was talking to said that it was actually Capitalist Pigs.
I’ve heard similar things about Nineteen Eighty-four. People think it’s about fascism, probably because we don’t get depictions of Soviet Russia or Maoist China in popular media, but we do see the Reich.
Arty: That’s something I’ve wondered for a long while now—just how much of the mystification Queer Theory employs is consciously intended to obscure perversion and thereby make it palatable?
Mind you – as a lit geek I think there’s at least some merit to the idea that authorial intention (if it’s even knowable) is not necessarily the last or only word. That’s also not necessarily an insult to the author, either, because sometimes authors say more than they’re aware of saying. I think that’s probably true of Shakespeare for instance – if you really dig into Hamlet or Lear you find you can come up with verbal connections and metaphors that mean more every time you look at them, and I kind of doubt that S. himself was conscious of all of them. He didn’t have time to be! I think lit crits shouldn’t announce they’ve found a new and exclusive meaning, but just a new one to add to the accepted/obvious/author-declared ones is not necessarily pomo bullshit.
NiV/OB @ #18/#19: I had not heard of Harrison Bergeron before reading of it in the coda to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Pinker presented it in the naive anti-radical-egalitarian reading and my immediate reaction was to think “That doesn’t sound characteristic of Kurt Vonnegut!”. When I found a link to the full text of HB I inferred from the later pages that it was intended to convey more of a “plague on both your houses” message, and have since learnt that some readers interpret it in a way which would make Pinker purely the mark of Vonnegut’s irony.
Ophelia #19 – that’s exactly the view my English master expounded c1974 when asked if Shakespeare had intended his words to be understood as we were interpreting them. Mr Rees had attended the University of Wales just after WWII and retired before PoMo trickled into classrooms. We were very fortunate to be taught by him.
Cool.
It’s kind of eerie, the amount of meaning there is in Shxpr’s best stuff. It’s similar to the eeriness of Wuthering Heights – how did she do this??
Bad writing seems to be standard for this tribe. Why ‘supposedly’? That’s the actual description. People also describe all electrical plugs and gadget connectors that way too. If you’ve used a USB connector, or electrical plug, or SATA cable, or audio jack, or thunderbolt port, or any electrical connector ever… then you’ve used a male connector and female socket.
And this is based on two widely known facts: the ‘sticky-outy’ bit resembles male anatomy, and the ‘inni-cavity’ bit resembles female anatomy. More, the are named male and female specifically for that resemblance.
___
Twiliter,
Lego pieces are hermaphroditic!
The gender speshul crowd must feel positively besieged.. Everything around them seems to threaten their worldview – even descriptions of lego shapes.
Ophelia #19
I don’t have a problem with that. Indeed, on my old homepage (R.I.P.) I once analysed Nineteen Eighty-Four as an allegory for Christianity*. On the same note, one of my favorite pieces of writing ever was (Norwegian philosopher) Peter Wessel Zappfe’s analysis of the Book of Job in which Zapffe argues that the text was meant as a work of blasphemy. Whether or not Zappfe is right about the intention of the author (and I’m not convinced that he is), I think his analysis of the text stands well enough on its own merits.
It still doesn’t mean that anything goes, that the author’s intention is irrelevant, or that the author is personally responsible for anything that others might possibly read into his/her work later.
* Ingsoc is Christianity, Big Brother (described as a being whom no one has ever seen, who is never going to die etc.) is God, Emmanuel Goldstein (also unseen and immortal) is the Devil, Thoughtcrime is disbelief, Room 101 is Hell etc. etc.)
Bjarte, that’s similar to how I read it when I first encountered it at fifteen; I still thinks it’s a good interpretation, even if not the one Orwell intended. A lot of pieces don’t necessarily stop at their author’s meaning, and the richness of a piece that can relate to so many is a wonderful thing for an author.
I remember when my husband told me that R.E.M. aficianados hated Shiny Happy People because it wasn’t like their usual stuff. I wish he’d never told me they meant it the way it is; I always read it ironically, as this depiction of people who didn’t really exist, but everyone sort of thought they did, somewhere in greener pastures. I decided, no matter what they meant by the song, I could still listen to it that way.
Author intent can be extremely important for understanding the work, and I value the intent of the author if it is known, but it isn’t unusual for other people to read it through their own lens, because they may not be able to relate to what the author does. Nonetheless, author intent should not be ignored, especially when deciding who to hate in the modern world. Ignoring author intent leads to horrors like banning Huckleberry Finn.