Students need to break down arbitrary social categories
I enrolled to study a double Honors degree in 2010 in the hope that it would make me a more rounded intellectual.
During my first three years of university, studying both English and history has certainly come with challenges, like trying to meet the needs of both academic departments and learning how to consider and incorporate views and information from contrasting perspectives. This semester, despite having studied periods of history that are centuries apart and works of literature from authors all over the world, one lesson in particular has shone out from each and every one of my classes.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in my Renaissance class, and we were discussing Shakespeare’s comedy “Twelfth Night.” The main character, Viola, disguises herself as a young man in order to find a job. My teacher remarked that “Shakespeare was drawing attention to ingrained assumptions about gender, making us aware of the fact that gender is a performance in itself.”
With ideas about the social construction of gender brewing in the back of my mind, I thought back to my very first women’s self-defense class. My instructor told us, “You don’t have to emulate men in order to execute these moves. You can be the strong and independent women that you want to be without losing sight of your feminine side.”
But as a class of 25 young women, it took many of us a couple of times before we were able to shout “DON’T BOTHER ME” at the top of our voices, without smiling. Attending these classes has made me acutely aware of gendered expectations of behavior, and defying these expectations with uppercuts and pendulum kicks has been an eye-opening and liberating experience.
Still, it was in my literary theory class that lessons about gender performativity became especially apparent. During the week we were studying gender and sexuality, my professor opened up the floor for discussion. My classmate said something particularly important: “I feel like nowadays everyone just wants to put everyone else away in boxes and categories. Like when people become obsessed with trying to figure out if someone else is gay or straight. Can’t we just be people?”
Can’t we? Judging by the long string of disheartening personal anecdotes that were shared in class that day, sadly, the answer seems to be no.
Modern society is disturbingly preoccupied by the need to categorize, to classify and to stereotype. Gender and sexuality have become such a guessing game that the word “gaydar” has made it into the dictionary. “Legally Blonde: The Musical” even has a number called “Gay or European?”, splitting gender and sexuality into two easily identified boxes. But couldn’t he have been gay and European? Or neither?
Just the other day, I was completing an application form. Under the subheading “gender,” the form offered three categories: “male,” “female” and “prefer not to say.” Rather than properly acknowledging the existence of transgender applicants, the form chose the usual “male” and “female” boxes and lumped everything else together in one indeterminate limbo space.
In a modern world that is so strongly characterized by diversity and difference, wouldn’t the best option be to leave the boxes open so that we can write our own identities? Definitions of gender and sexuality should be set free, so that we can be who we want to be without having to conform to ideas of what is “male” and what is “female.”