Monday, February 6, 2012
Freedom and "Faking It"
I found our class discussions last week to be both interesting and troubling. Our discussion on human freedom, to me, was quite optimistic. The idea that the human subject may is never without freedom despite the apparent lack of freedom was rather empowering. I immediately felt discouraged, however, after the realization that so many choose not to exercise their freedom, but rather allow others to dictate their actions (often failing to realize that they are doing so).
This was even more apparent to me after our discussion of Butler. Her ideas of gender appeared to be another example of failure in human freedom. The description of gender performance as largely voluntary troubled me in that left me confused about my own understanding of gender as well as my understanding of my own freedom. Am I free to ignore the gender system, or will it inevitably make itself apparent despite my greatest efforts? Will the gender system ever change if we all continue "faking it?"
The way I see it, as things stand, there is not much hope in regards to gender. There does not appear to be an escape from the gender system because it is all we know. No matter what we are taught or what we learn, it will always be, to some extent, a reflection of the norms and values set forth by the system in which we currently exist. Is this too pessimistic of a view to hold?
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Yes and No. I think feminists, myself included, often have a tendency of devaluing or simply forgetting about the progress we have made. Women aren't legally dead after marraige anymore, and I read a statistic that something like 40% of doctors are now female. The right to vote, access to reproductive care and birth control (though endangered) are all achievements that we fought for. I wouldn't even say that we have a long way to go, because that assumes that we're going somewhere, some kind of "home" or gender utopia where everything will be fine, and I'm not sure that exists. All of us, women and men of all colors, are going to have to negotiate these inequalities on a daily basis. In one form or another, sexism will always be there, it's the decisions we make on a daily basis that count. I also think we have to remember that 1. Alot of the priveleges we have as women in the West,are not universal. But we have to be careful not to stomp on other people's cultures to achieve what we believe women in other cultures should have.
ReplyDelete2. Sexism today is heavily psychological. Things that were once enforced legally are now targeted towards us via the internet, television, and Cosmo magazine. We are often buying our own oppression, or at least consuming it via various media outlets.
I think another thing to think about in terms of gender performance is this concept of "faking it." When we say that, what is the "it" we are faking? It is generally understood as the constructed societal expectations that define gender or rather the performance of gender as a tool of that constructed society. But, if we are deeming the performances that we act out in terms of our own society as "fake", then what are we defining as "real." In exploring how we define reality, I feel we are left with a lot more options about how we view our realities and how others view us in our realities. Therefore, we are maybe not faking anything afterall, because these performances that construct our society are defining a perception of reality. This is really circular and I don't know exactly where I'm going with it, but I feel like it is an important thought in terms of gender performance and awareness of said performance.
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