CR #6

It was interesting to learn more about sex versus gender in Gender Trouble because the difference is still sometimes confusing to me. I understand that they are different and gender is socially constructed but I feel that as this point everything is just a label and is still putting people into categories and it’s all engrained in language (of course, that doesn’t mean language can’t be changed for the better). I think what probably throws a lot of people off is that sex: male or female based off of genitalia and chromosomes and gender: male, female, trans male, trans female, gender fluid, etc. share some of the same words. Is the idea of someone’s biological sex an archaic idea all together and should be thrown away in terms of categorizing people? This question reminds me of Driskills quote: “we need to look at gender, take what we need, and leave the rest to rot (Driskill, p. 105).

I was kind of thrown off by some of the ideas that Butler gave just because I think a lot of the writing was almost philosophical. I have a hard time really conceptualizing abstract ideas and the ideas/theories surrounding gender were almost broken down to the point where I didn’t even know what was trying to be said. I did my best in discerning what Butler was trying to say but some word choices like “substance” just left me more confused in the end.

I think that both Driskill and Butler had important ideas and theories about gender but I think that they both came from different centers in what they believe were the biggest influences of gender. I think that Butler’s ideas/theories fall more along the lines of gender being performative whereas Driskill relates his ideas/theories about gender more to colonization. I don’t necessarily think one idea is more important or right than the other but think that they both add important ideas to the overall conversation about gender.

These readings drew me to research more about intersex folk because although we grazed over what the definition of intersex is in my Introduction to Queer Theories course, I still didn’t know much about what it meant to be intersex. I think that the very existence of intersex people proves that gender and sex and the binary as we know it, can’t be as black and white as people try to make it seem. I think that researching and learning more about intersex people, for me, backed up the ideas/theories by both Butler and Driskill. Again, I was reminded that gender is so much more complex than the binary and this linear form that some people unfortunately thinks it takes (i.e. female-feminine-likes men, male-masculine-likes women).