Em duas linguas: B. Trayner

I was just reading Beverly Trayner's blog, and realized she links to one of my dusty old blogs ( a little embarrassing) where I was keeping my working notes for a project on bilingual poetry. She's talking about some great stuff - being in two languages, being a blog chick, and getting round the rules with one half your mind while following the rules with the other.

So on the one hand I am Beverly the duh-sent who goes through the motions, never upsets the status quo and talks of Bolonha, internationalisation, insucesso escolar and always cumprirs as regras.

At the same time I am also Beverly the Blog Chick who dabbles in being international, entrepreneurial and pedagogic and who knows how to get round all the rules just like any other Chica Esperta. It's the Chica Esperta who does and who makes things happen.

So far I've not been very adept either at keeping the rules, nor at getting round them. But organising my identity between Duh-sent and Chica Esperta Blog Chick is proving to be an empowering experience.

I love that, what she says about organizing her identity. It IS empowering. That's just what I've been trying to do. And it's also what Doris Lessing was writing about in The Golden Notebook, and Joanna Russ in The Female Man. We end up with "different selves" because of our multiple roles as women, and maybe because of the pressures of ... well, a certain impossibility of integration, or suspicion that integration of our selves would mean the erasure of part of the self that is loved and valued.

As I continue doing huge amounts of poking-around and researching and blog-reading and note-taking, for the new BlogHer site -- I'm writing about Latin American women's blogs -- I keep noticing women popping up in multiple identities, newly linked in the last year or so, just like me and my web presence... Gabby of La lesbiana argentina, hooking herself up with her other self at Pont des Arts; Dr. Kleine with a wild and woolly blog at En nombre del BLOG and then her polished essays at Olganza; Iria Puyosa with Rulemanes and Reste@dos. There's so many more, but those are the ones I've read the most of.

It seems to happen as a fragmentation over time and then a re-linking or coming-out (or outing) process.

I wonder if it will become more normal to have the ability to dig into the personal lives and personal blogs of people who have professional status in nearly any field? You don't necessarily want to know about your dentist's sex life, but you might like to know about their opinions and experiences as a dentist. You might want to only know their professional front. But... if we consider the possibility that we are not bigoted, and people have a lot of personal freedom, and we assume as human beings that everyone around us has a rich, strange interior life, why NOT have their personal voice, their intimate thoughts they'd like to reveal on a friendly level, why NOT have them be knowable. That voluntary openness, and deliberate fragmentation and organization, is very powerful. Of course it's not always comfortable.