The Gift Economy and Everyday Interactions

                                                  So, y’all know about the gift economy, right? (The wiki article can give you a decent idea, just in case you don’t.) I’d like to talk about it in sort of casual terms here. Like, how it happens casually whenever we’re just hanging out with one another, and how that can be fine or escalate badly. Here are some examples.

                                                  In platonic friendships, we take each other’s feelings into consideration, right? I mean, unless you’re just a terrible friend or something, you do. You try to make your friend laugh. You try to make your friend smile. In exchange, they do the same. This solidifies and strengthens the friendship over time. Doesn’t that count as a gift exchange? I mean, the most default reason we form friendships because it’s mutually beneficial for us to do so, even if that benefit is just a laugh together here and there. But I’m not at all saying that this should cheapen friendship. I’m not even saying that it’s bad. I’m just saying that that’s the way it is. Although, it can be bad sometimes. For example, if your friend were to do something nice for you, and then use that to push you into a position of helping them with something you don’t feel comfortable helping with/something that’s much more difficult than what they did for you, that’s an example of a toxic friendship.

                                                  As you can probably guess, this also applies to romantic relationships. I mean, all of the exchanges in genuinely platonic friendship can apply here as well, but there are some extra ones in romantic relationships. Or at the very least, the platonic ones can be pushed in different directions here. Like, you know, toxic partners trying to guilt you do things you don’t feel comfortable doing. Because they did A for you, so shouldn’t you give them B? Yeah, that’s the gift economy all right, and it’s a super toxic form of it. Again, it’s not always terrible like that though. A healthy relationship-based gift economy is sincere mutual enjoyment of one another’s company.

                                                  Expanding on that, you know nice guys? If not, you may just want to leave here and now. Turn back while you still can, it’s better the way you have it. They embody the worst parts of both platonic and romantic gift economies. (And before anyone says it, yes, I know that anyone of any gender can be a “nice guy.”) They will typically act like a friend, but then start demanding that, rather than receiving mutual friendship in exchange, you’re obligated to date them. And of course, if you don’t see this as a reasonable exchange (as any sane person wouldn’t), they insist that you’ve abused the gift economy. They gave you their gift and received “nothing” in exchange.

                                                  Can I stop here for a moment and talk about a personal experience? I think it might aid the discussion if I can offer a more specific example. I was homeschooled for basically all of my pre-college education. For my last couple years of high school, I took math at a (very religious) co-op in a neighboring town. If you, like most people, were not homeschooled, a co-op is a place where homeschoolers gather to take select classes together on certain days. My math class, for example, only met twice a week, and we’d have daily work to do at home. And, as anyone who knows me at all will tell you, I’m lesbian and femme-aligned nonbinary or a demigirl or whatever. There’s a point here, I promise. I had trouble making friends there, and maybe that’s because the other people there were more “gross, that scientist’s name is pronounced ‘gay,’ ha-ha,” type of students. But as time went on, I did, eventually make a friend. Let’s call him Derek. He was the only other nerd in our tiny class at the time, and it was great to find someone who I could discuss my geeky interests with. Our friendship formed around the exchange of us both wanting to talk about our interests and having one another to discuss it with. Even when it was an interest that we didn’t both share, I’d get to talk about mine for a while, then he’d get to talk about his for a while. The gift exchange was pretty clear-cut, and we seemed to be getting along really well. But then, we hit the second in-class day of my senior year. My first in-class day had been kind of rough, and I was kind of dreading that second one. With my mom assuring me it would be fine, I went back to class. But let’s pause there for a second. Remember how I mentioned that anyone who really knows me knows I’m queer as a three-dollar bill? Well, longish story short, it came up in text-conversation, and I mentioned that I had a girlfriend. Back to that second in-class day, Derek confronted me on the way to my classroom. I don’t want to get into the specifics, because that’s personal, and I don’t feel comfortable talking about it on the internet. Let it suffice to say that I managed to keep the situation calm with nauseating amounts of politeness and praise, but he kept saying how it was unfair to him that I “chose” to be a lesbian, because he wanted to be with me.

                                                  I wanted to share that particular story because it offers specific real-life examples of a seemingly healthy platonic friendship exchange, how that morphed into a more toxic one-sided-romantic relationship, and how one can easily become the other. I encourage anyone reading this to think about how their own relationship-based gift exchanges morph over time.

                                                  All in all, I think that gift economics can help us better understand the way that relationships operate, and the way that we interact with each other. Maybe think over some instances of this from your own life and ask yourself if it was an equivalent exchange. You can use it to evaluate which relationships in your life are healthy or unhealthy, if you look at it right.

Queer Identity and Social Media

                So, remember when I touched on the whole, you know, “being queer” thing in my last post on identity? Ha, awkward, am I right? Well, actually, let’s talk about that a little bit more, just not entirely in the context of my own life.

                BUT FIRST, in case you haven’t read my previous post, let’s go over my experiences again real quick. And while I’m at it, let’s also go over the topic of Identity Work as described by Lee Humphreys in her book, The Qualified Self, chapter three. Humphreys describes identity work as these different versions of ourselves that we present to different people, and how that’s reflected through social media. If you clicked the link in the first sentence of this post, this will probably sound pretty similar to the concepts that I discussed there. But this one is a little more fleshed out and goes in some interesting directions that we’ll touch on throughout this post.

                In the context of these alternate versions of ourselves that we create, I (in my post) mentioned that sometimes people in the LGBT+ community, such as my genderqueer lesbian self, need to create substitutes to keep certain people in certain less-than-savory situations from figuring too much out. For example, I usually give my lack of time, abundance of projects, and good grades as my reasons for not having a boyfriend. I mean, not that I have a girlfriend and/or significant other right now either, so it’s less of a lie, I guess.

                But yeah, that’s just me. Let’s go over some hypothetical and not-so-hypothetical examples of other ways this applies.

                Let’s pretend (unless you actually are) that you’re gay, and/or trans, and/or ace, and/or wherever you want to be in the LGBT+ community for this example. Maybe you’ve just now realized who you are, and you’ve had social media for years, and you’re not sure how to bring your identity up there, or if you even should. The people on your social media don’t necessarily know you as queer. Do you want them to know? Does it feel like you’re keeping a shameful secret otherwise? Or maybe, you’ve known for ages, but don’t know how to bring it into your social media. Will it affect your brand? This may or may not be a hypothetical for you, reader, but it’s a reality for many of us. There are so many guides and articles about coming out on social media. Just think about the implications of that. It’s a common experience.

                Turning to a less hypothetical example… Does anyone remember Dan and Phil? I had friends who watched them when I was younger, but I never followed them that much myself for some reason. If you watch YouTube on the regular, you probably know where I’m going with this. Last year, Dan made a coming out video, and I’m pretty sure it was in everyone’s recommendations section. In it, he took viewers through a journey of self-acceptance that he’s been on for many years. And in those years, he kept his queer identity private from the internet. The same can be said for his intentionally-left-vague relationship with Phil. Dan said that he likes to keep his personal life private from the internet (understandably). So, there’s his internet self, which was impacted and updated with details from coming out. Then there’s the other, unknown from social media, self that comes out when he’s away from the prying eyes of a million 13-year old girls fetishizing him and Phil.

                Another example that we saw around the same time is the performance by Eugene Lee Yang of the popular YouTube channel, The Try Guys. His choreography focused on the struggles he’s faced through his entire life as a result of his identity, and ultimately was a dramatic and graceful leap out of the closet. (Seriously, it’s beautiful, watch it if you haven’t and watch it again if you have.) His performance, showing different aspects of himself at different times of life, represent the concept of alternate selves very well, and him going from keeping this part of himself away from the internet to coming out how he wanted to illustrates the topic of queer identity work and social media pretty well.

                A subtopic within Identity Work that Humphreys describes is “Baby Books as Identity Representations.” She explains how it’s a form of scrapbook-y record keeping that women are typically charged with, and how it’s evolved over time. However, I can’t help but think of the social maintenance of gender binaries when I go to Hobby Lobby and see stuff that’s meant for these. By the way, this isn’t “oh, special snowflake sjw hates baby books because gender.” I just think it’s a little weird how obsessed with assigned gender our culture is. Like, why is the girl book pink with little pictures of princesses in it? Why is the boy one blue with pictures of dinosaurs? If you step back, the gendered baby books, the obsession with gender reveals… It’s definitely a sort of social maintenance work, and it feels a little brainwash-y. It assigns a new person an identity and certain interests before they even know what that means. I’m not saying that gendered baby books are the end of the world, I’m just saying that we should be conscious of what we’re actually saying when we gender everything.

                That’s all a lot to unpack. To be honest, I could probably go on a while longer, but I’m going to cut myself off before anything turns into a rant. Talking about my own identity and views online is definitely something that’s a little bit out of my comfort zone. But if anyone stumbles over this and connects with it, or thinks about something in a new way, then I’m happy to have posted it. See ya later, anonymous internet humans.