One of the minor entertainments that has amused me on Mudcat, right from the beginning of my visiting, has been to try and discern "identifying features" of those who post. One of the attributes easily hidden behind a nom de plume is the gender of the poster but I have often observed from various posts that the person posting is often not "identifying" their gender by the content or style of that particular post. Some use linguistic identifiers to deliberately draw attention, others just write "color" or "colour" without selfconsciousness. I just enjoy them all.

It might have been the specifics of the thread or the specifics of the posts in which I first encountered Azizi but it was always the topic that caught my interest and it was a while before any particular "identity" attributes became clear to me; in chronological order I think it was "From the US", "African-American" and "female". That might say more about me than about Azizi but I have great respect for her activities as apparent from Mudcat and the occasional PM.

It seems to me that questions of identity and self-identification are the replacements for those questions of 'class' that exercised Anglophone communities a century ago and the questions of gender that exercised them later last century. Some people, because of their own experiences, are extremely sensitive about identification, while others are casual or even dismissive of it. Some, like Dafydd "The only gay in the village" in the Little Britain series, even lampoon it and even I can do a seriously mocking ocker when I think it appropriate.

Just keep on being, Azizi.

Cheers, Rowan