Bodies

What is Gender?

Conversations about gender today examine the idea of gender as performance. Gender is now separable from anatomy and sex, though biological bodies are also framed culturally. The dominant notion of a gender binary means that individuals have to identify as either male or female. Our patriarchal world had, and still has, strict definitions regarding both genders that establish standards of normalcy as a method of distinguishing the socially accepted individual from the non-socially accepted individual. Power and agency are allocated differently between the genders, privileging the male and the masculine.

But aside from the cultural norm, what does it mean to be male? What does it mean to be female? These are adopted so readily as identifiers, but should we conclude that gender is an inner truth? Butler argues that "gender is not exactly what one "is" nor is it precisely what one "has."" [18] Rather, it is a mechanism and apparatus, a mode of exposing oneself to the public through which the notions of masculine and feminine are produced. After all, what would be suggestive of a male gender? Would it be heterosexuality, domination over the female, a love of sports, a proclivity for violence, a disdain for romantic comedies? To adopt male as a description of self is to use language that is already "saturated with norms." [19]

Gender might be an outer force. It carries cultural meanings that we bear on our bodies as a manner of interacting with each other. It is a performance we do not fully author. In deconstructing gender, we will be navigating outside of social norms, without structures that help enable the act of claiming a nonbinary gender, without language that can sufficiently express desire sans gender, and without complete awareness of our society's gendered fantasies. 

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