facetious geometries of gender
Sep. 18th, 2019 11:29 pmEarlier:
Which is how I got to, well, this:
The image is a terrible MS Paint-style sketch, showing two objects.On the left is a tetrahedron, with the top vertex is labelled A; the bottom left is labelled NB; the bottom right is labelled F; the bottom front is labelled M. On the right is a triangle, similarly labelled: top left NB, top right F, bottom M.
The context is that I explained that a ternary diagram is something I use in geochemistry, and I get quite Catholic about trinities, so clearly trinary was the way to go.
... but wait, I said, now I want to draw a diagram of a triangle with the appropriately labelled vertices!!! obviously this has the perpetual problem of reducing gender to a component-based system but I'm still really amused by it!!!
The idea being, right, that at the base of the tetrahedron you've got a plane. If we (this is facetious) categorise any given gender as some combination of female, male, and non-binary, that can be represented as a coordinate in said plane. This is similar to how we represent the chemical composition of feldspars: you make a ternary diagram, with the vertices labelled as K2O/orthoclase & microcline (top), Na2O/albite (bottom left), and CaO/anorthite (bottom right), and you get a solid solution that hugs the left-hand border of your triangle: in this band, a stable mineral of that composition (with those proportions of potassium, sodium and calcium) exist, and outside it they don't and you instead get a mixture of different minerals. For bonus points, the solid solution is temperature-dependent: at "low" temperatures (less than about 700°C), there's a gap between albite and K-spars (orthoclase and microcline) where there's no single stable mineral and you again end up with a mixture of different minerals. (They're very pretty under the microscope!)
And then sometimes you actually want a fourth vertex, so instead of sticking to a 2D representation you shift to 3D, and a tetrahedron, and this is mostly deployed for what's called CMAS in geochemistry terms, but the point is that A Single Plane might not be enough to represent what's going on; you might want vertical distance too.
ENTER THE GENDER TETRAHEDRON.
I propose (still facetiously) a model in which we've got the base plane of female-male-nonbinary, along with another component, agender. The closer to any vertex your gender experience lies, the more dominant the influence of that vertex. So, for example, you might be up near the agender vertex, with only weak influences from everything else; or you might be on the agender-female edge; or you might be on what's thought of as the "traditional gender spectrum", the male-female edge. Or if you're genderfluid but definitely experience gender you might lie somewhere on the M-F-NB face on any given day, or perhaps your gender amplitude fluctuates but you're definitely never a man, and you wander around the A-F-NB face.
Or maybe you occupy some other plane through this gendered space! Maybe your gender is temperature-dependent! We can take different slices through the tetrahedron at different heights, such that the total gender area corresponds to the total gender strength!
This is thoroughly silly and absolutely not intended to be A Complete Theory Of Anything, but it was an excuse to combine (1) geochemical representations of the world, (2) nerding about gender, and (3) dubious art, so, you know, that's been a very pleasant diversion for me this afternoon.
sebastienne: But yeah I thought v-pillows were an obscure pregnancy thing and here's one in Dunelm for £18
Which is how I got to, well, this:
The image is a terrible MS Paint-style sketch, showing two objects.On the left is a tetrahedron, with the top vertex is labelled A; the bottom left is labelled NB; the bottom right is labelled F; the bottom front is labelled M. On the right is a triangle, similarly labelled: top left NB, top right F, bottom M.
The context is that I explained that a ternary diagram is something I use in geochemistry, and I get quite Catholic about trinities, so clearly trinary was the way to go.
... but wait, I said, now I want to draw a diagram of a triangle with the appropriately labelled vertices!!! obviously this has the perpetual problem of reducing gender to a component-based system but I'm still really amused by it!!!
The idea being, right, that at the base of the tetrahedron you've got a plane. If we (this is facetious) categorise any given gender as some combination of female, male, and non-binary, that can be represented as a coordinate in said plane. This is similar to how we represent the chemical composition of feldspars: you make a ternary diagram, with the vertices labelled as K2O/orthoclase & microcline (top), Na2O/albite (bottom left), and CaO/anorthite (bottom right), and you get a solid solution that hugs the left-hand border of your triangle: in this band, a stable mineral of that composition (with those proportions of potassium, sodium and calcium) exist, and outside it they don't and you instead get a mixture of different minerals. For bonus points, the solid solution is temperature-dependent: at "low" temperatures (less than about 700°C), there's a gap between albite and K-spars (orthoclase and microcline) where there's no single stable mineral and you again end up with a mixture of different minerals. (They're very pretty under the microscope!)
And then sometimes you actually want a fourth vertex, so instead of sticking to a 2D representation you shift to 3D, and a tetrahedron, and this is mostly deployed for what's called CMAS in geochemistry terms, but the point is that A Single Plane might not be enough to represent what's going on; you might want vertical distance too.
ENTER THE GENDER TETRAHEDRON.
I propose (still facetiously) a model in which we've got the base plane of female-male-nonbinary, along with another component, agender. The closer to any vertex your gender experience lies, the more dominant the influence of that vertex. So, for example, you might be up near the agender vertex, with only weak influences from everything else; or you might be on the agender-female edge; or you might be on what's thought of as the "traditional gender spectrum", the male-female edge. Or if you're genderfluid but definitely experience gender you might lie somewhere on the M-F-NB face on any given day, or perhaps your gender amplitude fluctuates but you're definitely never a man, and you wander around the A-F-NB face.
Or maybe you occupy some other plane through this gendered space! Maybe your gender is temperature-dependent! We can take different slices through the tetrahedron at different heights, such that the total gender area corresponds to the total gender strength!
This is thoroughly silly and absolutely not intended to be A Complete Theory Of Anything, but it was an excuse to combine (1) geochemical representations of the world, (2) nerding about gender, and (3) dubious art, so, you know, that's been a very pleasant diversion for me this afternoon.
