SEX: BIOLOGICAL FACILITY
GENDER: SOME PEOPLE ARE WOMEN, SOME PEOPLE ARE MEN
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory by Judith Butler introduces us to the relationship between sex and gender. To say that sex is a fact, biologically is the complete truth. I can be a woman with all the attributing qualities, there is no argument that I could be a man with them though. Yet, to say that gender is a performance is questing the very movement of life. If we all only retain a gender by construction, then does that mean we are all the same at one point, if we are just constructions of various sources of media and historical referencing?
Butler also references the claim that women are a "historical situation," meaning that woman have come to be portrayed as we are by history itself. Women are seen as gentle, soft skinned, dainty, beautiful and many other things to add but this is all a response to what we have grown up learning from one another and through art and the media. Especially for the age I have grown up in, art and media have always played a big role in my personal development, for example when I was a kid I always wanted to have shiny beautiful soft hair because of the models in magazines that looked like the ideals of beauty I dreamed of being one day.
We are performing our own visions of gender, we as people have no inherient feminity or masculinity says Jennifer Blessing author of Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. However, Judith Butler talks about the unstable nature of gender which I relate to this idea Blessing had that we don't really know where we get these ideas of what a woman is but we always refer back to it, hense it seeming "unstable." To me, gender lies in the roots of unstability, meaning we reference the social norms to construct ourselves as a woman or man following a system of evolution. Because we are ever changing, we consider this life as a woman/man as our stage to show the world who we are, it is a performance of these everyday decisions.
Everyday you get up in the morning, put on clothes that you have selected to stylize yourself, and this is one example of gender as a constructed notion. We are actors that never leave the stage, with every movement, gesture, choice we are changing and creating the ultimate performance of a simulated gender.
Some photography that I have seen that relates to gender is the series of photographs done by Andy Warhol, dressing up as different characters both men and women. This to me speaks about the availability of gender, being able to change your makeup/hair/clothing allows a photograph to explain you in a different light.
No comments:
Post a Comment