Inscribing Gender on the Body: We Cannot All Be a Ten

Gender Expectations Shape the Impossible

When you meet someone for the first time, several things register: the overall impression of male or female sex, specifics like hair, eyes, makeup or lack of it, clothing that reinforces male or female gender, erect confident posture, or a yielding slouch that signals submissiveness. This immediate “read” is complicated if all the elements do not fit. American culture values thin, white, young as the desirable norm. This unspoken but powerful yardstick discriminates against Blacks, Asians, Latinos, the elderly and disabled, who are compelled to remake their body image to fit in. Long hair is usually gendered feminine. However, if the person with long hair is wearing trousers and work boots and wants to use the Gents restroom, it provokes harassment.   Dan Frosch writes about Coy Mathis, born a boy but now at the heart of a challenge to anti-discrimination against transgendered people. He writes, “…gay and transgender advocates say transgender students…are vulnerable to bullying and harassment (246)”. Political decisions and institutions cater to the norm and these forms of “other” have to constantly fight for recognition and consideration.

Women in American culture feel pressured to have a larger bosom and some resort to plastic surgery implants. In Donald Trump’s world, a woman with a small bosom has a “hard time to be a 10”. This sexist labeling lies behind the insecurity many women feel that they do not measure up to an unwritten norm. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, writing in her essay Breast Buds and the ‘Training’ Bra, notes that a girl’s insecurity begins early. She says, “…in gyms and locker rooms of post-war junior high schools, girls began to look around to see who did and did not wear a bra…and this visual information was very powerful (206)”.  As mass produced clothing produced a need for standard bra sizing, it also creates the idea of measuring up to a norm that had to be reinforced in some way.  She writes, “The old idea that brassieres were frivolous or unnecessary for young girls was replaced by a national discussion about their medical and psychological benefits…. An adolescent girl needed a bra to prevent, sagging breasts…which would create problems in nursing her future children (206)”.  The bra also draws attention to the sexual possibilities of breasts, rather than their biological function of nursing.  The result is an obsession for everywoman to present as a “ten”.

A woman’s hair represents an inescapable biological connection to gendered expectations. Thinking of hair as beautiful is culturally graded by sex but can also be exploited as a way to enforce power. In the white privileged culture in the United Stated, long fine straight hair is seen as beautiful. Minh-Ha T. Pham, writing in her essay “If the Clothes Fit: A feminist Take on Fashion”, says, “Professional women of color …consciously and unconsciously fashion themselves in ways that diminish their racial difference (247)”. Asian women perm their hair; Black women straighten their hair. She continues, “If fashion has been used to introduce new ways of expressing womanhood, it has also been a tether that keeps women’s social, economic and political opportunities permanently attached to their appearances (248)”. Women in the daily eye as part of their job, find that one’s natural styling is discouraged in favor of a treatment that appeals to a media enforced norm.  Rose Weitz, writing in What We Do for Love, says, “If we ignore cultural expectations for female appearance we pay a price in lost wages, diminished marital prospects, lowered status, and so on (119)”.

One last thought: age gives one a different set of values. Seniors Rock.

 

Thoughts on Gendering in Presidential Election

How Americans view sex and gender has never been more relevant. We had a former First Lady and Secretary of State with an unparallelled executive resume on paper. However by gendered perception, the female candidate was doomed to second place. If authoritative and assertive, she was regarded as bitchy and bossy. Photos of her with her new grandchild could have softened the portrait and then she was accused of lacking “stamina”. Her opponent was filmed crowing about his voyeuristic ability to dominate the naked women competing in his beauty pageants, and it was dismissed as men’s locker room talk.  To top it off on Election Day, one woman was interviewed as saying she voted for Trump because “a woman should not be President”.   This persisting gendering of women contributed to an unexpected Republican victory.

Culture Creates Concepts of Sex and Gender

Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, in Women’s Voices and Feminist Visions, note, “…gender is constructed through intersection with other differences among women such as race, ethnicity, and class…related to other systems of inequality and privilege (116)”.   Gender assignment, identity and expression contribute to notions of sex and gender in ways peculiar to the United States. Sex is decided at birth, according to obvious genitalia, and subsequent growth and behavior is channeled into expected patterns according to this binary. If a person’s internal sense of identity does not fit expected gender patterns, sexual labels go beyond binary choices. Subsequent gender expression, which does not follow the binary view, shapes social interactions which can unsettle one’s sense of self. (119)  Countries beyond America do not challenge transgendered identity in the same way which results in varying degrees of tolerance.

Evelyn Blackwood discusses the many kinds of masculine expression among females in West Sumatra and Indonesia.  Since gender is defined by intersections with other identities, each with their own perspectives and agendas, it follows that some combinations will occur as exceptions to the norm. 

Transgender may be applied to identities or practices that intersect queer socially constructed binaries based on the usual male/female expectations. Female-bodied persons may identify and live in ways which are casually stereotyped as male gendered.  Sometimes this takes the form of transgendered females who “appropriate and manipulate cultural stereotypes of ….a hybrid form of masculinity…as possessing a male soul in a female body (150)”.

 One of these identities in Indonesia is that of “tomboi”.  To deal with describing the gender-fluid woman Dedi, instead of using “him” or “her”, Blackwood creates an unusual form, “ h/er”.   She says, “Dedi was dressed in h/er typical man’s attire and appeared to be quite comfortable around h/er family (151)”.  This tomboi enjoys moving about freely and sleeping wherever she wishes. She is not concerned about sexual violence because her manner is masculine and tough.

Women are closely watched so freedom is encoded as masculine privilege.  The pressure for the female-bodied butch tomboi to marry, presents difficulties. Blackwood says, “Marriage is the most troubling challenge to their positionality as men (152)”. If married, would be forced to live in the constant role of female. This is uncomfortable so many transgendered put off the issue as long as possible. Dedi has compromised by following female gendered expectations when at her mother’s house, as long as it does not challenge her assumed masculinity. She will do repairs around the house but will not cook. She is not viewed as a sexual rival by other men, but rather as a woman with special insights. The text says, “…Dedi recalls h/er female body as part of h/erself, giving voice to a cultural expectation that female bodies produce female ways of knowing (154)”.  This shows that she has incorporated her body as part of her total identity, not merely a phase or convenient pose.

As the article h/er creates a space for Dedi in the discussion, Indonesia terms of address are much more complicated. She notes, “People tend to employ gender-marked kin terms when addressing acquaintances or close friends… (154)”.  This results in tomboi identity being expressed in public as a shield for moving freely, but gender-marked terms are dropped when she is more secure at home and her defenses are down. The transgender aspects of Didi’s persona also do not disrupt her culture because family practices still read them as female. Blackwood says, “Social relations of kinship and family connected tombois with discourses of femininity…and offered the efficacy that tombois attained as intelligibly gendered beings…that create space for themselves and their partners (155)”.

 

Seniors Rock!

 

 

Intersectionality: Walking in Another's Moccasins

Socially Constructed Differences

            If one is cisgendered, with gender identity matching the societal assigned gender, one is privileged to live in a world of normal expectations.  On the other hand, a transgendered person faces every day with challenges that change with each new situation.  Navigating the public forum is fraught with occasions that are uncomfortable, or even criminal, since gendered privilege dominates the environment. The bathroom use issues in N. Carolina come to mind. Living in a body easily recognized as either male or female does not oppose dominant ideology. Therefore, as Evin Taylor says, when one is cisgendered a person “generally needs to spend less energy to be understood by others (94)”. Culturally established hegemony drives politics and institutions.

1. Poverty: In the absence of a way to understand the structure of society based on classism, discontented people look for scapegoats. Women and the poor are especially vulnerable. Poverty has created a class of females who work more than one job and still cannot achieve the level of men who are paid more. (98) This is problematic in many organizations which may fire employees for merely sharing pay check information. Yeskel says, “…being poorer or richer than others leads to secrecy and silence (99)”.  She adds, “By definition it is impossible to have equality between classes while still having classes (99)”.

2. Disabled: Susan Wendel says, “…the biological and the social are interactive in creating disability (101)”. Standards of normality lead to social construct which excludes full participation in society. Expectations of performance give rise to the identity of being inadequate, and therefore disposable, if not one of the superior abled individuals.  Society’s failure to protect the vulnerable from wars, disease, and many other elements, creates the inequity of persons unable to physically measure up to a norm. Social factors that allow high risk working conditions, contaminated environments and poverty contribute to increasing numbers of disabled persons. Improved medical care results in partially abled survivors instead of deaths. Wendell includes the elderly, “since more people live long enough to become disabled (102)”. Disability is not merely a question of physical access but is also a construct of the mind.

3. Patricia Hill Collins, writing in “Toward a New Vision”, points out that the interlocking nature of race, class and gender is an essential element in analyzing the true nature of social relationships following the legacy of slavery in America. (p74) This intersectionality begins with understanding the overarching hegemony of white male privilege that affects women, both white and black, and the many poor who lack agency and a voice. Collins says, “Widespread, societally sanctioned ideologies used to justify relations of domination and subordination comprise the symbolic dimension of oppression (74)”. This means that dominant groups apply universal categories to those viewed in order to push them away and diminish their status. The dominant force in America is white and male. If you are a white woman, you are lesser in status to prevailing white male privileged patriarchy. If you are a black man, a black woman or poor, you rank even lower. The English language privileges the masculine form in discourse in spite of cultural changes which now see women in gender roles formerly held by men. This creates a need for gender neutral terms like “mailperson”.  Symbolic values make shortcuts that can ease everyday challenges but this perspective of stereotyping does not lend itself to analysis and objectivity. There must be equilibrium. For example: like a metaphoric seesaw, superior images of white womanhood must be balanced by lesser images of black women. (74) To correct this stereotyping, intersectionality increases awareness of privilege and prejudice and opens up multiple perspectives. Intersectionality enables an individual’s experience to connect and interact with another.  Walking in another’s moccasins has never been more applicable.