Critical Response 6

Loretta Gunder

5-10-16

Critical Response 6

The masculine and feminine identity can be said to have a complete made up structure from societal expectations. “the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is socially constructed” (Butler, 9).  Going to the Makeup of our Identity session, on campus at OSU, was interesting in learning the gender binaries from a makeup drag performance perspective. Masculine features include a bold chin, thick brows, and strong chiseled features. While to make a face more feminine you round, soften, add color and lights. Throughout history the popular desired characteristics of beauty have changed. Small waist, pale skin for European upper crust, big curvy women reigned in Samoa, and tanned flawless Brazilians all are held up as a standard of image for beauty. Just as America has gone from fetishizing pale skin, to tan, to pale again for health over time, so too has the issue of inclusion and diversity gone between extremes in society. I found myself sucked into questioning societal structure of gender while reading Gender Trouble, what if these features were flipped and men were more soft and round? “The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken” (Butler 195).

This argument supposes that one first need to understand and define an individual before we could ever make legislation to protect them. I say this viewpoint is too narrow in scope as all people can be free from violence without having to specify characteristics of that individual. Society is caught up in categories, boxes, labels and identifying before fixing a problem. Even in academic circles we are moving around specific terms to label ourselves. “Feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion” (Foreword 1990, Viii). The movement itself along with women’s studies are struggling to find space to fit these gender fluid identities. One must now label self with pronouns of he, she, or they to communicate what space the body prefers to occupy. “A humanist feminist position might understand gender as an attribute of a person who it characterized essentially a pregendered substance or ‘core’” (14). Whether attribute or characteristic of self-identity, the terminology does not matter. What matters is the violence perpetuated at an increasing rate towards the non-conforming identities is extremely alarming.

We can argue spectrums all day but Butler said it best “the aim was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized” (Viii). Of course looking back there has always been a supposed agreement of the normal identity. “The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ where these are understood as expressive attributes of ‘male’ and ‘female’’’(24). It is a type of universal structure of relationships. The unspoken normality is that between a man and a woman, supposedly based on biology. Biology does not answer for the unspoken identity of self, nor can it explain the emotional manifestation of choosing ones’ gender. Feminism used to decry the lack of equality for women, how the structures of societal institutions guaranteed ladies a second class place. “ In order to ‘be’ the Phallus,… women must become, must ‘be’ precisely what men are not and in their very lack, establish the essential functions of men…. On the other hand, men are said to ‘have’ the Phallus, yet never to ‘be’ it” (61). These made up structures placing men and women where they are supposedly meant to be, within a gender or a sexual identity spectrum is that of an unexamined identity structure. We will never advance as a nation or as individuals if we lead the unexamined life of refusing to question what we are told makes us who we are. In so doing, it can open up channels of communication and one will find how very similar we are despite how we choose to self-identify.