Gender as a general statement is the word by which a person is defined as a member of society. Your gender is not directly connected with your sex, but rather your sexual preference. In a society who has become more open minded to people's gender, more so than they were 100 years ago, there still is inequality, a vague hatred towards gender choice as a whole. This hatred is brought on merely by people's indifference or even unknowing and misinformation. When Judith Butler speaks of transgressive performances (drag), she states "I don't think that if we were all more dragged out gender life would become more expansive and less restrictive.". Drag is a type of performativity not performance, and that's where gender is hazy.
"Why is it pregnancy by which that body gets defined?", that is how women are differentiated by men, due to their ability to bare children, they are of female gender. What do the women who are battling with a "norm that is regulating your (their) sex" by choosing not to have babies? Are they to just be pushed to side, and left in the margin of society, because they are not conforming to a norm? If society were to do this then most of society would be left in the margin, so much so that the margin will become the society, and the people left in the first society will become the margin. The choice to not have children does not convey women's inadequacy but a lifestyle choice.
Politicians conversing about 'gays in the military', when one senator says he knows very little about homosexuality, but then continues his talk with a 'homophobic diatribe', illustrating that he in fact has an aggressive relationship "to the homosexuality that of course he knows nothing about.". Ironic, how people's warped idea of homosexuality leads them to homophobia, when one says he has nothing to so with it, he clearly has a preoccupation with it.
"I survived lesbian feminism and still desire women.",is a very bold but strong statement to make, simply because every lesbian is conceived to be a raging 'feminist', an absolute hater of the male gender, when that simply is not true. Feminism does not go hand in hand with lesbianism. Both are two different notions, their only link that being women.
Coherent gender as it may be said, is compulsory heterosexuality. To be 'appropriately gendered' in a society, you must be heterosexual, only because it is coherent with the norms of the state. Everybody else who is not a compulsory heterosexual, are incoherent and absurd. Back in the margin they all go.
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
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