Category: LGBTQ

Real Women Have _______ [edited]

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Statement by Gabrielle Hennessey via Flickr.

I hate Dove’s “Real Women Have Curves” slogan with a passion. I stuffed my bra in seventh grade because of ideas like that, because of society’s undying belief that Breasts = Woman. A few days ago I walked into a store and a fellow shopper didn’t hesitate to tell her partner that my body was “gross.”

She said this while three or four feet away from me. I assume she wanted me to hear her and feel bad about my alleged eating disorder/unhealthiness/low self esteem, so that I’d go home and cry over some bonbons about my wasted life and listen to Christina Aguilera and discover my inner beauty and suddenly gain thirty pounds so I could be normal like her.

Real women have hearts and blood and bones. They have skin that breaks and nerves that feel the cold. They are made up of carbon and water and constantly renewing cells. They know who they are.

Real women may not have breasts. They may not even have vaginas. They might like girls or boys or a bit of both or neither at all. They may not always consider themselves to be women, or they might have to fight to be called such since no one else believes them.

Find a new slogan, Dove. Thousands of the people you’ve unwittingly condemned as Not Real Women are waiting.

Enjoy your profits.

Oh, labels. What makes a “woman”? What makes someone “[insert group here]”? What makes someone anything? If breasts don’t make a woman, what does? Is it the chromosomes? Is it the genital appearance? Is it the clothes? Is it other people’s perception of them as a member of a certain group? Is it a certain grouping of these aforementioned things? Is it an intangible essence, a “je ne sais quoi” of “woman-ness”? What does that even MEAN? And why is it necessary to make this distinction?

If we reduce these broad categories (e.g. woman, man, Latin@, homosexual, American, etc) to a list of “traits,” no one person will embody all of them. However, devoid of things that describe a label or devoid of things that make UP a definition, categories become meaningless. With no signified, the signifier becomes empty–just surface, with nothing beneath it. We keep using these terms in hopes that they will represent our realities somehow and allow us to communicate with one another, and ourselves.

The problem with all labels is that they ultimately define through exclusion; they purport to build a community based on, yes, shared traits or ideas or WHATEVER, but it always happens at the expense of keeping “something” out. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not going to ask for the abolition of all labels and categories because I DO find them useful (although inherently flawed). What I’m going to ask for is the fluidity and openness of thought to think outside those categories and constantly question them. What I’m going to ask for is a critical, analytical approach to definitions and life in general–one that will allow for change, multiplicity, and a degree of uncertainty about it all.

Next time you ask yourself “Oh, is that person [insert label here]?,” ask YOURSELF why you even need to know. Not because you don’t need to know the answer to your original question (maybe you do, maybe you don’t, whatever), but because I feel an integral part of understanding the world is understanding (or at least trying to understand) ourselves. Being introspective and looking at our own minds and our own actions in a way that is honest, questioning, and even slightly playful (because taking things seriously 24/7 only leads to nasties like high blood-pressure and a permanently furrowed brow) can tell us a lot about the world and why we perceive it the way we do. Asking yourself why you need to know if the person sitting next to you on the bus is “a girl or a boy” or “Mexican or Asian” will probably (eventually?) show you some of your own preconceptions, and by becoming self-aware, you can finally begin a process of growth and change. You can’t break the bars of cages you can’t see.

The Importance of BOOBIES!

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In Gayle Salamon’s “Transfeminism and the Future of Gender,” there is a section devoted to the preoccupation with the physical bodies of trans men and how those physical entities signify other processes and concepts that might not immediately be apparent. I was struck by the double standard when it comes to dealing with “women’s” bodies and “trans men’s” bodies in their relationship to their genitals and/or “obviously sexed” body parts, especially when there is a surgical intervention involved. The text presents two main positions, one of which condemns trans men’s surgical transformations and articulates them as a “mutilation,” speaking of the altered chest in terms of “removed breasts” that, in turn, symbolize a “relinquished femininity.” What’s interesting about this position is how it completely opposes the other, where “women” are seen as being defined by—not even created by, but defined by—something beyond their mere body. This idea invokes essentialist notions of being because it supposes that there is some sort of womanly essence that predates the body and is thus neither created nor informed by the physical, making women seem to transcend their physical manifestations and exist more truly and fully on another plane.

In that sense, the very arguments seem hypocritical and completely contradictory, because how can one explain that the breasts on a “woman” are not the ultimate signifiers of her femininity and her belonging to the group of “women” while at the same time, state that for a trans man, the removal of those very breasts means losing the most vital piece of womanhood? Of course, the point of getting surgery for many trans folks IS that very rejection of body parts that do not correspond to their identities, but it is not a removal of just one piece; instead, it is a removal of multiple pieces that make up a whole and create what is seen as a “male” or “female” body. The problem with the arguments presented in the article is that they assign different degrees of importance (or, actually, assign a value or a lack thereof) on the same body parts. They are contradictory and mutually exclusive ideas because there is no continuity to the valorization of the breasts; there is an opposition between the constructivism and the essentialism implicit in those very values. Thus, both points of view cannot be adopted and promoted simultaneously as true by a single individual without running the risk of being heavily criticized and called out on their hypocritical double standards.

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The funny thing is, this is the approach I take toward my hair. For me, my hair is certainly not all there is to me and it’s not the most important thing in my life. My hair doesn’t fully define me or constitute me. HOWEVER, I use my hair as a tool to define myself. I color it, cut it, put hats on it, you name it. First and foremost, in the name of personal desire and aesthetic pleasure, but secondly in the name of socially and physically constructing my identity. It simultaneously means a lot and very little. So I guess I just argued against my own actions in the previous essay and established my views about my hair as contradictory and complicated at best, and hypocritical at worst. XD But I think I can redeem myself somehow…even though the valorization of my hair is contextually contingent, it’s not the ULTIMATE marker of identity (unlike in the previous case, where the breasts were taken to be THE marker of feminine identity), so…yep.

[4/12/18: Edited to change instances of “transman” to “trans man” and the like, based on more modern forms of writing about gender.]

Identity Politics and Coalition Formation

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Judith Butler addresses the “need” for “solidarity as a prerequisite for political action” in Gender Trouble. She claims that, without a need for unity, a group would focus more on the actions instead of the articulation of identity, and therefore would be more successful in reaching the major goals at hand. Then she goes on to propose that groups should form coalitions without predefining categories such as “woman” and instead learn to “acknowledge [their] contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact.” However, I think this approach is problematic when it comes to actions that revolve around discrimination based on identity and how systems of oppression have created a need for those actions.

How is one supposed to fight a discriminatory system without establishing the definitions on which the system has been operating? I agree with Butler in saying that, for example, the category of “women” is too broad, vague, and ignorant of intragroup differences, BUT I feel that we need SOME sort of definition of what “woman” is so that we can counteract the oppression that people who have been identified and/or marked as women have experienced. SOME organizational principle must be used, even though it may act as exclusionary sometimes; I don’t believe there is any term or group that does not somehow exclude a part of the community at large. However, we must try to find the least exclusionary terms that still help reach our objectives, whatever those may be, and try to continually broaden our categories to acknowledge different systems simultaneously at work, while still keeping our original purposes in mind.