One strand of conversation that has been particularly interesting to me in class is that of gender. Since coming to Carleton (the very beginning of my journey into sexuality, gender, and heteronormativity), I have just begun to recognize the impact of gender on our society: the prevalence and pervasiveness of gender roles in homes, health care systems, and even LGBT societies—and yes, I did mean to leave the T in. Although we ‘queer’ folk like to believe that we are going against the grain, and in many ways we are, gender roles still have a powerful though underlying current of power in our culture, one that was perhaps set up in the 1950’s by those rebellious “Outlaws” and culturists. The effeminate gay man, ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ roles, and the butch-femme relationship all illustrate how gender roles continue to effect us, (and yes, Juni, how in many ways we remain boxed in). However, I’m particularly interested in how gender roles continue to effect transgendered people. Although in some ways, transgendered folks were the first to really cross gender boundaries, at a very deep level they enforce gender roles almost to an extreme. Yet, as Loren Camron (an amazing trans activist photographer who came to Carleton and went out to lunch with a few us) pointed out to me, the current genderqueer movement, created by transgendered people, practically forces out all of its original inventors by claiming that there shouldn’t be any gender.
I apologize for the wordiness and lack of a clear point here, but I am still trying to wrap my mind around how exactly we can navigate gender roles. But also, I think my ultimate question goes even deeper than that, and relates back to Juni’s comment in class because just as the current gender queer movement is pushing out the original transgender people, the modern gay movement which seeks to eliminate a gay stereotype is pushing out those inspiring 50’s activists. So when does removing ‘the box’ go to far, and to what extent do we need stereotypes in order to have a community? How can we eliminate the tension between those that want a box to fit in to, and those that feel the need to transcend them?
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The tension between inside and outside of the box seems to be something that will never go away, outside of utopian ideals, I suppose. One of the reasons as to why might be in the power of ideology and hegemony to command/compel reactions from different people. Louis Althusser, a famous Marxist theorist from the 60s and 70s, used to talk about how ideology "hailed" different people. In other words, how ideology spoke to us in very personal, almost unconscious, ways.
Gender, in many ways, is one of the most powerful types of "hailing." And how some of us determine to be called and others to resist seems peculiar and idiosyncratic. One aspect of all this seems also to be that most people are not going to be able to exist outside the box, or even want to. So there will always be LGBT people who want to live as normal, no matter how complicated and dense normal might be as an ideological state. Alternatively, do genderqueer folk or those living outside the box reassert a box, just a non-normative one?
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