For as long as I can remember, my favorite color has been pink, my favorite article of clothing has been a dress, and I’ve loved makeup. Dressing up in my pink leotard and ballerina tutu was a regular occurrence, but not just when I had to go to dance class...often I would don the get-up to go out into the yard and play soccer with my brother. I never really thought about any of my behaviors as being decidedly “boyish” or “girlish”; I just lived.
As I grew, I kept this attitude, but then one day my sister called my attention to what she thought my “gender” really was. She told me I was a tomboy. Even though I played with Barbies, I played sports. Even though I loved to play dress up, my hair was always messily stuck up in a pony tail. Even though...well, you get the picture. Simply because my big sister had made this declaration, I believed that it was what defined me as a person. I was a tomboy; which I guess would place me on the masculine end of the gender continuum. I lived with the internal belief that I was not girly or feminine for a long while.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when one day in fifth grade I overhead a boy in my class talking about me. When one of his friends mentioned my name, the boy’s response was something to the effect of: “Oh, Julia? Yeah, she’s a girly-girl.”
Hold up, I thought. What?!
If my sister thought that I was a “tomboy” and this boy thought that I was a “girly-girl,” then what the heck did that make me? I was so confused. My ten-year-old self could not quite come to a conclusion. Sure, I was confused but that was only because I failed to realize that my gender could not be determined by a single external source. Everyone has their own preconceived notions—molded, to some degree, by society—about what actions constitute what gender association. So while my sister, a girl, may have viewed my actions as being masculine, my classmate, a boy, viewed them as feminine. In this way, the situation reinforces the idea that gender is extremely relative and subjective. At the end of the day, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to reconcile the internal war that I felt after hearing two extremely different classifications of what my gender was. All I have to go on is my singular opinion; and so even if I decide to believe that the total sum of my actions is feminine, someone else may just as easily call them masculine and, from their point of view, they may be just as right.
I think your post brings up a significant point about the role of others in determining one's own gender identity. After all, "gender", as Butler points out, is really just a set of acts that one is conditioned to perform in order to project a certain image.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I just completely missed this in the reading, but I don't believe Butler addressed how someone could be perceived as a different gender by different people--she only talked about how an individual assumes their gender identity (singular). I think in this way, your story is unique. It's not as if you were consciously performing different acts for different people (as might a man who dresses in drag on weekends but wears a suit to work during the week day), but somehow these two people in your life saw you in very different lights.
I enjoyed your focus on the impact different perspectives/viewpoints can have on a person's identity. YOUR chosen description for your identity differed greatly from the chosen description of your sister. The difference in descriptions highlights the fact that the success of a performance does not only depend on the acts of the performer, but also on the ability of the audience to understand the meaning behind the actions that are performed.
ReplyDeleteThe difference in descriptions also reflects the fact that no one person can fall into just one gender category. Attempting to categorize and label human beings is almost useless when you take into account the unique and numerous dimensions/personality traits just one person can have.