Alex Lair

WGSS/QS 462

Both Driskill and Butler examined and critiqued the relationship between sex and gender, the fact that both of these are socially constructed concepts/identities, and both analyzed underlying factors of these constructions. Driskill engaged the concept of “intentional masculinity”, while Butler engaged and critiqued various approaches take by others involved in academia.

One point that stood out to me the most from Driskill’s reading in particular was their engagement of Alice Walker’s concept – “take what you can use and leave the rest to rot” (Driskill, p. 105). Driskill writes, “we need to look at gender, take what we need, and leave the rest to rot. If there are parts of ‘masculinity’ that we don’t need any more, that are hurtful to ourselves, our relationships, our communities, then why on earth keep them?” (p. 105). What it means to be “masculine” or “feminine” is yet another socially constructed binary of identities that are naturalized but not actually natural. The above approach engaged by Driskill challenges the essentialist constructions of masculinity and femininity – that in order to identify as one or the other, one must engage all of the socially constructed qualities that make up that “performance”. In this way, this concept relates to Butler’s discussion of claiming a cultural “gender” identity. Butler writes, “This achievement requires differentiation from the opposite gender. Hence, one is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair.” (Butler, p. 22). Here, Butler also discussions the essentialist notions surrounding these socially constructed identities due to the fact that they are binaries, and therefore the idea that one can only identify as one or the other.

I see this essentialist notion taking form in my every day life. I see it manifested in the difficulties that many people have with fitting people into boxes. In a society with such a foundation in binaries, many people have a hard time when they are unable to place an individual and each of their identities into a box – it creates this fear of the unknown because this society has made many identities that do not fit into the binaries completely invisible. As Butler writes, “this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire. The act of differentiating the two oppositional moments of the binary results in a consolidation of each term, the respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire” (p. 23).

Another primary concept that stood out to me from Butler’s reading was the discussion surrounding gender as inherent or something that a person “becomes”. This is a question that I have dabbled with over the years since taking WGSS/QS courses. Butler summarizes the conclusion I have come to when writing, “the mark of gender appears to ‘qualify’ bodies as human bodies; the moment in which an infant becomes humanized is when the question, ‘is it a boy or girl?’ is answered” (p. 111). This goes back to what I discussed above – the need for putting people into distinct boxes. In this way, by asking and answering that question, an identity is immediately prescribed to a human being through the eyes of others. Before a child is even out of the womb, people feel the need to know if it is “a boy or a girl”.