Tag: for college

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.

Knowledge vs. Ignorance : Unhappiness vs. Bliss

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Before analyzing Sollors’ own words, I read the quotation he included by Alexis de Tocqueville—one that seemed to establish a correlation between happiness and a lack of history, heritage, and national character. This reminded me of a text I read last semester, which argued in favor of moving beyond ethnicity and/or race and instead focusing on other concepts that could bring us together as a people. At first, this seemed absurd on a practical level. How could we all abandon the things that shaped us as we grew up? How could we forget the past that brought humanity to where it is today? In addition to absurd, the very idea of moving beyond race or ethnicity seemed somewhat insulting. To move beyond our roots seemed to imply an erasure of that past which, not only molded us, but also established the hierarchies that were currently in place and accounted for most, if not all, the systems of oppression that worked against people characterized as “The Other” by some dominant group. It would effectively erase the history of inequality faced by millions and silently deny and invalidate the feelings left over from their struggles because they would “no longer be an issue.” To begin completely anew while people still had their past in their minds would be impossible. It would be too silencing, too alienating, and too complicated.

Finally, on a very personal level, I just couldn’t imagine the world without ethnicity, race, or such categories for identification and differentiation. It seems too homogeneous, too boring, too…robotic. But what if it WERE somehow possible to achieve a complete and successful erasure of our routines, prejudices, memories, etc.? Would I be willing to give up these “luxuries” in exchange for happiness? After all, isn’t that what most people say they strive to have in their lives, at least to some degree? The situation is somewhat parallel to the picture presented by the saying “ignorance is bliss.” If we were ignorant of our differences, or if they were completely nonexistent to begin with, we would be blissful and happy. However, would this last? Wouldn’t we just find new ways to build coalitions, and in so doing, separate ourselves from others? Imagining that this state of blissful ignorance could be forever maintained, how would society progress? If revolution is a means to achieve progress, if difference and dissent and argumentation are the biggest ways in which we expand our minds and our points of view, how could we keep achieving these things in a society full of happy lemmings? Isn’t a balance required? Is it possible to have a lot of ying and no yang and STILL move forward?

My mind tells me that we need contrasts—that we need the sour to balance the sweet, the sad to balance the happy—but I wonder how much of this way of thinking is informed by the way I’ve been taught to analyze such things in the first place and how I could think about them differently if I had another way to frame them. Regardless of this last train of thought, would we even NEED progress to be happy? How much would progress, scientific discovery, and all these other things matter if we were blissful? Just like a fish living in an aquarium, one that can’t dream of the sea because it doesn’t know it exists, we would be content with our lives because we wouldn’t be dreaming of the possibilities; we wouldn’t know of their existence and thus couldn’t be unhappy about our inability to reach them. I guess what this all boils down to, in simplistic terms, is a choice between happiness and uniqueness…bliss and diversity, and all the things that go along with those two concepts.