Just a little realization to share.
People think feminists are gender-obsessed. Why do you look at everything as though it were about gender or about women? Why do you overthink everything? Your obsession with gender is delusional! You see sexism everywhere, just because you’re looking for it. Or even just because you’re a woman and oversensitive. (This line of reasoning comes up in comments on feminist posts/articles near-constantly, as Margot Magowan illustrates/mentions here.)
But the truth is that we’re appalled at how gender-obsessed our culture is. We really just want to point that out and work away at it. We–as in feminists–would like to make visible how much gender policing is happening (and being ignored as ‘natural,’ unavoidable, normal, unremarkable). We’d like to articulate the degree to which assumptions based on gender shape people’s experiences and opportunities–often in harmful and limiting ways.
My feminism, at least, is about wanting gender to become a hell of a lot less central in our culture and in conversations we need to have about it. But that can’t happen in a real way by everybody just going LALALA while living in a pink-and-blue world.
So: feminists. Not so much gender-obsessed as upset by our culture’s gender obsession. *jazz hands*
3 Comments
Well put! \o/
I’ve been going through a period of being really sad/angry/depressed/irritable about the amount of gender and sex policing and judgyness that exists in our culture. For some reason, I’ve read a whole spate of books in a row talking about how anti-non-straight-sexuality sentiment so often comes down to panic over gender presentation and non-normative gender performance, rather than the specifics of who’s doing what sexual act with whom. Depending on the time and place this can also matter, but in 20th and 21st century America, at least, gender presentation almost always ends up being at the root of peoples’ anxieties about sexual desires.
For example, ex-gay movement literature is primarily concerned with gay men and lesbians performing gender roles “correctly,” rather than actually altering sexual desires (or sometimes even sexual behavior). What matters, primarily, is that you perform “heteronormative male” or “heternormative female” socially — sometimes even including marriage and children, etc. Who you are sexually attracted to is of secondary concern.
Another example would be children referred to psychiatric specialists for gender identity disorder treatment. Parents are identifying children’s behavior as problematic only because the child is behaving in ways the parents find at odd with their perceptions of what boys and girls should be doing. Obviously, some children will be trans* and some children will be queer. But with the pre-pubertal set, the behavior adults find alarming is about body dysphoria or sexual desires — it’s about gender presentation.
It drives me nuts.
Yes!
I whole-heartedly agree.