I was pretty surprised when I read Butler. She was kind of a breath of fresh air to me. I read her piece, and actually felt like I came away from it with something. I felt I grasped more of it than I questioned. This made me happy. Yay!
So what did I think was the most interesting part? It’s hard to say. There were a lot of good points. Was gender biological? Can we look at gender without looking at the biological parts of humans? There were so many questions that we could ask about this piece. But the part that I seemed to grasp the most was when she discussed drag shows. I understood when Butler said, “Discrete genders are part of what’”humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right,” (2500). From this, I took away the idea that when people do not perform the normal functions for their designated gender, they are looked down upon by society. Take a man who decides to dress up in drag for fun. It may feel right to him to wear women’s clothing instead of men’s. When this happens, society tends to look down up them because they are not performing the “norm” for their gender. They are expressing mix-gender signals.
Butler also says, “Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all,” (2500). I feel that this would mean that there would be no gender if people did not doing certain things to define it. If people were to act all the same with what gestures they did, then could we really say that there were more than one gender? Something to think about.
What I want to know, is that if you cannot look at the physical aspects of a person, or to better state it, the biological aspects of a person, then how do you determine that there are two gender?. In order to look at gender, I feel that you have to look at biological aspects of people, because if you didn’t, what’s to say that a man is not the female gender? Is that what Butler is trying to say here? Are we all just a uni-gender that takes on different roles depending on who is looking at us? This personally kind of creeps me out. I know that I am a girl. I have been raised like a girl my whole life. I was given dolls as a child, and taught how to act properly for a young lady. But what if my parents had decided that I was really a boy in a girl’s body? Would I have turned out like a boy? What would my gender be? If I displayed characteristic traits of a boy, would I then be male gendered? Or would I still be female gendered because I am a girl? I’m sorry if I’m just talking in circles. I feel like it’s an interesting thing to think about though.
I don’t know if I am correct with any of these comments, but I really enjoyed trying to figure things out.
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