"Love's an excuse to get hurt. And to hurt. Do you like to hurt? I do. I do. Then hurt me."

The author Jacob Hale draws a lot from another scholar that I have read in this course, Gayle Rubin, when defining these many different forms of gender identity in the SM community. I found the portion where the author talks about exploring SM, from meeting someone at a Ron Athey performance to when the author begins to call zeself Jake, to be particularly interesting. Hale says, "For me, SM as gender technology allowed me to experiment with masculinities as part of a process of self-construction in which I became more masculine, in embodiment, in self-presentation, and in identification" (229). I am new to the idea that performing a role in sexual activity can aid in constructing one's identity. But like Hale says, the identification process is different for everyone. Hale goes on further to make a point to those asking if a leatherdyke boy is a woman or a man, "These questions, I think, are badly misguided: they presuppose overly simplistic understandings of how gender categories work, and in so doing they reinscribe the hegemonic stranglehold of the dominant sex/gender/sexuality system" (231). I find that this reinforces the main themes that this course presents. We live in a heteronormative society. A lot of the times when society forces people to fit into identity categories that are used to determine "diversity," those identities really just force us into boxes and re-establish the heteronormative worldviews.