Gender Performativity And Performative Utterances


We Can Do It Poster Parody

I'm tempted to say that Colin Kaepernick kneeling at during the anthem is a performative act, but I guess it isn't. Then again I'm also tempted to say that Kaepernick kneeling is like Tim Tebow kneeling except it isn't because I'm just looking for an easy way out. Also, they both keeled and that's as far as I got with that.

"Trump 2016 Build A Wall"One word that that stand out to me when discussing gender performativity is semantics. Though, that might not be the right word; so, I'll just explain it. In class, we discussed how in ancient Greece a man was not gay if he he penetrated a male who is considered as a "non citizen." However, this was indicative of the times. If the same thing happened today - citizen or not - if two men have sex, regardless of who is penetrated, then they are normally considered to be gay or at least bisexual. The point here is that societal norms suggest certain roles and behavior which are considered "acceptable" or "unacceptable." In ancient a man wasn't gay if he penetrated another male as long as he was not a citizen.

Not only do societal norms dictate acceptability, but indicates acceptability for certain gender roles. "Traditionally," men are breadwinners and women homemakers. However, there as been a bit of a shift in recent years with the number of women increasing in the workplace. Though the traditional gender role model still tends to be the first thought.

Often times I hear people say things like: "men and women should be equal" or "there are no such things as boy or girl colors." And when they find out the sex of their baby they will immediate buy blue or pink to indicate the babies sex. So my question here is, is it okay to use indicators to show sex but not gender? The reason I'm asking this is because it's really confusing. We have figured out as a society that pink is feminine. So, if someone wears pink they're performing femininity. So, if a man  wears pink he is feminine? That might be taking it too far, but this is certainly the case for children. Or maybe that's just how the mind of child's works because they can't comprehend complex theories like gender performativity.

My overall take on this subject would be that people perform their genders to a certain extent. As an actor, I know I've certainly made a character "manlier" or more "feminine" because it seemed like a quick fix (actually had more to do with a general archetype, but I won't get into that). But, paying on the first date is always something I thought of as a normal first date thing because I identify as man. It's just what I always saw and was told by the society I lived in. There have been a few instances where I thought we were on a date and the woman I was with asked for separate checks and my immediate thought was: "oh, I guess this isn't a date." That clearly wasn't the case because we kept seeing each other, but the point is we are so wired to "perform" certain gender roles that it is ingrained as an indicator of whether we did something right or wrong. So, the simple act of the asking for separate checks (breaking normal gender roles and/or not performing femininity/being a woman) the women disrupted some tacit agreement on how to behave. The result was nothing. They're still women and I'm still a man, but are we? Because society says one thing and we did something else......


Comments

  1. John FletcherJanuary 25, 2018 at 7:34 AM

    Just to clarify--and I should cover this more in class--to Greeks (Athenians, actually) in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, there was no "gay" or "straight" (or "bisexual"). Adult male citizens (i.e., not women, not slaves, not non-Greeks) could penetrate and still be considered honorable, respectable, normal, etc. (so long as they didn't get out of control). If they were penetrated by a man for their own pleasure, however, that was looked down on. It's not, however, that they were considered "gay." (Similarly, there's evidence of same-sex erotic behavior between women, but being a woman attracted to other women didn't slot you into some kind of identity category like "lesbian.") The idea that part of your identity depends upon the gender of the people you're attracted to (i.e., that you can be/must be gay, straight, bi, asexual, etc.) is a very new idea (~1860s and beyond). We'll talk more about this in class.

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