I have a couple bits of news/theories for the "Beyond John Wayne" category but I'll keep them brief in favor of other forthcoming TealArt posts.
First off this Beyond John Wayne category is more than a year old now. I'm looking back at this last year plus and thinking, "my god, I've learned and changed a lot." This gender studies/masculinity project thing that I'm forever enthralled with has gone from being a "what does it mean to be gay in the world today, to a what does it mean to be a man in the world today, to a combination of the two: this is the whole "Beyond John Wayne" idea, that it's possible to be a man outside of "the man box" to some sort of weird where I am now place. I think more reflection on this transition is defiantly required, but that's fairly low on my list right now.
Having given it a suitable breathing period, I'm going to go back and edit/rewrite/revise my proposal for the Affinity Story Project (I really need a better name, don't I?) and see what I can come up with. It's something concrete and something real, and it feels good to finally be working on something like this.
The third, and probably most important reason why I made this post is to express the following theoretical statement (which in typical form is a question) that I scribbled on the back of a paper in class today:
Is the claim that the differences between men and women are **natural*, oppressive because "nature" is used as a tool for justifying the non-egalitarian distribution of opportunity and resources, or because of the nature/nurture dichotomy/opposition is inherently gendered.*
Actually I wrote "is nature oppressive because it's a (tool for) justifying "different but equal" or because of the nature/nurture dichotomy/opposition." With the parenthetical written in the super-text. You be the judge of what makes more sense and is more coherent.
I'd explain more, but I'm not really in the mood for answers now.