Gender Trouble: Response

Butler’s argument that both gender and sex are culturally constructed as well as performative reminds me of our discussion of Sedgwick from last week.  In order to have one concept, it must be mirrored against another; much as heterosexuality is not possible without homosexuality, maleness is not possible without femaleness (sex), and masculinity is not possible without femininity (gender).  I am frustrated, as is Butler, with the idea that there is a male/masculine “default” setting when discussing “human” issues.  This is further compounded when bringing race into question; white is the “default” setting of queer studies, which is disappointing.  The idea that was brought up in class last week, that some consider “Queer Studies,” with a capital “Q” and “S” to signify some kind of absolute truth, is additionally stifling because, to me (based on the conversations we’ve had in class and elsewhere), queer studies is more about challenging existing power structures than assessing sexuality and gender presentation, especially because the structures being challenged are those constructed within dominant white Euro-American experiences.  These conversations are, of course, integral to queer studies discourse, but they are only one piece of the puzzle, and need to be viewed as such.  Gender should be considered as a spectrum rather than a binary, and subaltern understandings of gender, sexuality, and expression should be incorporated more often into queer studies curricula (which is one of many, many reasons I feel fortunate and grateful to be in this particular program).  

One of the things that I very much appreciated about Butler’s work is the notion that gender, as performative, is fluid and ever-changing.  This reminds me of our discussions (based on Foucault’s work) about how power is also changing, and has led me to consider the ways that an ever-changing power structure combined with an ever-evolving gender spectrum can coexist in a way that is conducive to positive social change.  That is wordy, but I mean to say that if power is always moving and changing hands, then there should be a way for subversive gender expression to wrangle that power and make positive changes.  I think that on an individual level we can, as Butler suggests, challenge gender through performance (p. xxxi).  This is something I try to do often, and is especially gratifying when I am with my partner.  On my own, I have a degree of heterosexual privilege based on my appearance (see my earlier post on bio-power), but when I go out with my fiancée our combined gender presentations paired with our evident sexual “deviance” creates an interesting array of responses.  My partner is the more “masculine” and I the more “feminine,” but our experiences challenge the roles most people associate with these identities.  Neither of us identify as lesbians, but based on appearance, my partner is assumed to be ”more queer” than I, which is in fact not the case.  If we were to place ourselves on the omnipresent Kinsey scale, I would be a 5 (primarily homosexual) and my partner a 3 (closer to heterosexual, or evenly bisexual).  

This is an important distinction from gender presentation and performance, which is equally exciting for me.  My favorite story to tell is from when we first moved into our house; I was wearing a miniskirt and using power tools to put together a table on the kitchen floor while my partner, dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt was trimming curtains to hang in the hallway closet.  At the time we laughed to each other, but it has become a lasting anecdote of the ways that we challenge preconceived notions of both gender and sexuality as a couple and as individuals.  

As we have discussed before, specifically with respect to Sedgwick, Butler’s work may seem slightly outdated but is also incredibly important.  We cannot forget that without their work we would most likely not be having these conversations, but we must also remember that theirs are steps in our journey of social justice.  We can acknowledge their importance, but also step back and consider their work within larger systems of oppression such as race, ability, language, age, and several of the other ”isms” that we continue to discuss.    

Sex as Oppression

Here is my critical response, let me know what you think. Not sure if I fully grasped Butler, so feedback and possibly clarification would be great :)

The beginning of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity caused me to think back to Foucault and Bio-Power. Butler writes, “Power seemed to be more than an exchange between subjects or a relation of constant inversion between a subject and an Other; indeed, power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame of thinking about gender,” (2). Butler goes on to discuss the relationship between men and women, questioning the “internal stability” and the “extent that they conform to a heterosexual matrix for conceptualizing gender and desire,” (2). It was her ponderings in relation to my opinions and experiences with Bio-power that caused my intrigue.

In my Bio-power presentation I discussed that my being a woman was an area where I was a member of a population that was subject to oppressive behaviors and techniques. I had viewed woman as my sex and gender, my identity; however, through Butler’s work I have developed different conclusions not only about my own self-portrayal but how I am anticipated to be portrayed by those holding power over me.

Butler discusses the meanings of gender and sex; one socially constructed the other biological. Women are biologically created different from a man but those differences have been used to stunt the abilities of women in eyes of society. Women have breasts, not for breastfeeding but for show, to be push-up and pushed out. The body shape of women is not seen as a body but an object of sex that is to be conceptualized and fantasized. The biological components of women have unintentionally generated the social construct of the female ‘gender’; the conceptualization of the biological differences between male and female are used as the techniques to oppress and restrict both the male and female populations. Women are portrayed as slender, big breasted and gorgeous; those who do not fit within those standards strive to. Men are intended to have tight and fit bodies, so they can be attractive enough to be with a slender, big-breasted and gorgeous woman.

As a thicker, curvier, and shorter woman I have often times felt the societal pressures to alter my shape in order to fit within the confines of the gender normality that society has imposed. I now see that it my conceptualized sex that has been misinterpreted and misrepresented, that allows for these gender conceptualizations to hold power over myself and other woman. I do, however think it is also important to note that the male sex has also been misinterpreted as well, causing similar gender constructs to be created. Men may not be expected to have large breasts, a flat stomach, and an apple bottom; but they are typically expected to be a man’s man, fit, attractive and packing considerably sized equipment.

Society has confused gender and sex, but more than that sex has been mutated into a tool of oppression, a tool that is used to promote the inaccurate conceptualizations of both sexes. Attempting to force the male and female sexes to conform within in the limiting constructs of what is considered gender normative. 

Greetings class!  Below is my critical response to Judith Butler's, Gender Trouble. Seeing that the text is over two decades old now (and yet still very relevant to our lives), I tried to relate some of Butler's concepts to contemporary phenomenons.  I chose to use the concept of performativity to ask questions about pinterest.com and its relationship to our concepts of gender and sex, as well as how they both relate to consumption.  Enjoy!

Judith Butler begins a genealogy of gender ontology with Simone De Beauvoir’s famous assertion, “One is not born a woman, but rather one becomes a woman.”  Just how one becomes, is, or exists as a woman is the general pursuit of Butler’s inquiry, with an explicit focus on the discursive production of binary relations and the suggestion that cultural constructions of gender are produced as “real” through “self-naturalization.”  This “self-naturalization” process denotes what it is to be a woman or a man, and that gender is constructed through the naturalization of notions of biological sex.  To counter the process of naturalizing a biological sex, Butler suggests that sex is constructed in the same way as gender, and that the two are intrinsically linked.  Therefore, biological constructions of “gender identity” behind the performance of gender are linked to the outcomes of gendered performances.  Therefore, the performance of gender denotes both gendered expression and notions of biological sex.  In this brief paper, I’d like to build on this notion of performativity as process for constructing notions of biologically innate characteristics.  Specifically, I’d like to explore the ways in which our consumption practices are linked to ideologies of gender expression and biological sex.

            Building on Nietzsche’s concept of “the doer” and “the deed,” Butler builds the theoretical construct of gender performativity.  According to Butler, “There is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results;” thereby, outcome of gender expression builds notions of gender identity that are innate, rather than constructed (33).  In this sense, gender identity and gender expression cannot be separated, as the expression constructions the identity.  It is from this concept that Butler connects sex and gender, two concepts previously separated by feminist scholars as a political tool.  However, as Butler would contend, sex and gender and intrinsically linked and simultaneously constructed through the performance of gender.  It is this performance, in essence, that constructs notions of biology and expression.

            As Butler would contend, the simultaneous construction of both sex and gender is not a mere coincidence, but rather, in service of institutions of power.  In fact, Butler argues that the construction of “intelligible genders” services and maintains institutions that rely on “relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire” (23).  Both Irigaray and Butler would contend that this represents a “phallogocentric signifying economy,” or rather, political economies reliant on social, legal, and political organizations of sex and gender.  Building on this concept of “phallogocentric signifying economy,” I would like to contend here that our consumption practices both service institutions, as well as organize sex and gender.  Furthermore, an intersectional analysis of this concept would reveal that phallogocentrism organizes not only sex and gender, but also race, class, and citizenship.  And that participation in a phallogocentric economy is performative and naturalized through discursive formations of innate biological identities.

              Gendered performances are easily spotted in contemporary cultures.  While the performance of gender is both historically and socially contextual, culturally rooted analysis could unveil a variety of the ways in which normative gender practices are encouraged and performative.  For instance, I can find no better example of contemporary “feminine” gender performativity than that of the social media website, pinterest.com.  Cultural critiques of pinterest point to the ways in which it predominately encourages feminine and traditional behaviors, such as dream weddings, baking game day treats “for him,” and DIY ombre hair color.  Now, the context of this paper is not to argue whether this is a “good” or “bad” trend, but rather, I hope to point to the extent in which this supports both the performativity of gender (in the same way that Butler points to drag and hyper-performativity), as well as the way these performances are related to our consumption practices.  Further, if we follow Butler’s argument that gender and sex cannot be separated, then it must follow that performances of gender on websites such as pinterest.com also point to our understandings of an “innate gender” or sex. 

            Gender performativity, following Butler’s argument, is in service of certain institutions of power.  Further building on Foucault’s concept of bio-power, gender performativity can be understood as organized to service Capitalist projects.  Therefore, the extent to which pinterest is gendered (which I am going to make the claim that it is), then we can make the connection to pinterest’s “feminine” appeal to its Capitalist ventures.  In fact, according to recent critiques of pinterest, the website “drives more traffic to marthastewart.com and marthastewartweddings.com than Facebook and Twitter combined,” making it a powerful force for marketing to certain types of consumers (Odell).  Certainly, this is not great leap or connection to make, but what I intended to illicit here is that this Capitalist venture is not possible without a neat organization of gendered expression.  And following Butler’s claims that the expression and identity are linked, I question the message that overtly “feminine” or “masculine” marketing codes send about our “innate being” or identity.  The question then becomes, are cultural understandings of gendered biology constructed throughout purchases?  Does marketing and consumption drive our understanding of “the real,” biological, and innate? 

References:

Butler, Judith (1990, 1999).  Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.

Odell, Amy. (2012)  “How Pinterest is Killing Feminism.”  Buzzfeed.com.  Retrieved from:  http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/how-pinterest-is-killing-feminism

More Bio-Power!

This project challenged me in ways I was not anticipating.  I sometimes forget that I have to use new technology and work outside of my paper-writing comfort zone.  My math skills definitely got some practice with this, since I had to translate my social privileges into numerical values in order to graph them.  The most difficult aspect, however, was considering my social location as able to be pinpointed and as resulting from the various “-isms” that have funneled me into different categories throughout my life.  I have always theoretically understood that I am a product of my environment and that my race, gender, and sexual orientation have definitely impacted that, but to consider the broader systemic implications of all of my identifiers was incredibly eye-opening.

  To begin “mapping” myself, I made a list of all of the “-isms,” identifiers, or oppressions that pertain to me.  I then wrote the following short piece that I had planned to turn into a word map, expecting that it would draw out my social location for me: 

My position is one of considerable privilege.  I am white from a middle-class family with a neutral, “white sounding” last name.  I am at an age where I am neither criticized for being too young and inexperienced nor too old and potentially over-qualified, and I am the most educated member of my extended family.  I am a U.S. citizen, in good physical health, and fit dominant notions of accepted physical attractiveness.  My biological sex and gender identity match and I fall within a culturally accepted gender category.  I was biologically conceived by a married mother and father and, as far as I know, am capable of bearing my own children.  The religious tradition in which I was raised is not visibly apparent and, if it were, it is widely accepted as within the norm in the U.S.  I speak American English without any noticeable accent, the fact that I am bilingual is not associated with my race, and I have been able to travel extensively.

A middle-class upbringing means that I am accustomed to home and vehicle ownership and a considerable degree of financial security.  We never bought new cars, but in our family of four we always had at least two insured cars.  We were able to travel to see family in other parts of the country, we always had gifts at birthdays and holidays, in my case Christmas.  We were able to take relatively expensive ski vacations, and went to Disney World.  I attended high quality public schools which had primarily white middle-class students.  I was able to attend college with help from my family and did not need to rely solely on loans or scholarships, and was able to study abroad and travel.

The two major “-isms” that affect me are sexism and heterosexism.  Being queer and seeing through a queer lens while not necessarily being seen as queer manifests itself in distinct ways.  When I am alone I navigate with a degree of heterosexual privilege because of my femme appearance, but this disappears when I am with my partner or other visibly queer friends.  An interesting complication happens when I become visibly queer, and that is I am less prone to be targeted with sexist or predatory advances from straight men.  My queerness is further invisibilized because of my engagement ring and the gender-neutral pronunciation of “fiancée.”  As a result, I must constantly “out” myself in order to be seen as queer.  

If only it were that simple.  The resulting word cloud was pretty, but not nearly as complex as the systems and intersections I was hoping to represent.  It wasn’t all for naught, however, because by writing it I was better able to situate myself and get a better perspective of where I have privilege.  After deciding I would try a bubble chart on infogram, I got stuck when I wasn’t able to “graph” my privilege the way that I wanted.  The suggestions and discussion in class on Tuesday were quite helpful and I was finally able to translate my qualitative understandings into quantitative representations.  I had to figure out the columns in the existing chart so that I could change the location and size of the bubbles, which took a few tries, but I finally got it.  I then assigned a value between 1,000 and 1,000,000, since the graph was already on such a large scale, to the level of privilege I experience within a give spectrum.  For example, I associated being white with the most privilege which meant I entered 1,000,000.  Giving numerical value to my social privilege felt uncomfortable, but in a profound way that definitely impacted my concept of privilege as social capital.  

Once I was able to manipulate the size of the bubbles in the chart, I wanted to spread them out so that they didn’t look uniform and linear.  I spent quite a bit of time going through different options for how to organize them, but I kept coming up with too many contradictions.  I considered assigning designations such as “primary identifiers” and “secondary identifiers” in order to rank them, but the constantly changing landscape of social interaction is such that what seems like a primary identifier, such as race, can become secondary or even tertiary in some situations.  I finally settled on making it as random as possible to demonstrate the constant shifting of privilege and bio-power.  

The most challenging part of this project, but also the most educational, was the visual representation of space.  I am able to see the space that my privilege takes as space that is taken away from others.  The places where I maneuver with ease are places where others do not, and this is an intentional systemic occurrence.  In order to make this even more visually powerful, I made a corresponding map of a queer, undocumented, illiterate, transwoman of color whose primary language is not English.  This highlighted the scope of my privilege more than my own map alone as well as the scope of systemic oppressions.  I also made a final word map with this entire reflection, which further highlighted my privilege, literally.  

This project should be a requirement for every Women Studies major, if not for every student.  It is one thing to sit in a class and discuss privilege, but to see it in a different light is instrumental in understanding and operating as a conscious human.  It is especially useful to have had the freedom to design my map however I wanted because the end result is something that makes sense to me and helps me to visualize my place in the world, which is something that I have often been afforded the privilege of not needing to do.  I plan on hanging these up in my office to continue to remind and inspire me why I do the work I do.