As a white, middle-class woman, I have lived my life with a privilege that allowed me to consider myself as independent from race. This privilege has also allowed me to live oblivious to the women around me and their views of me. Rarely in my life have I been forced to enter a “world” in which I am the outsider because I have had the privilege of living in the “mainstream world”. In my life, this privilege has meant never being made to feel uncomfortable. Just as I have never been forced to examine my place in the world and in the minds of the women that surround me, I have never been forced to examine my gender. I have lived completely oblivious to my gender performance and the way that I am constantly constructing and reconstructing who I am as a woman. However, my realization of my gender performance came before my realization of my privilege within the mainstream “world”. These realizations leave me with the great task of deconstructing the ways that my mainstream privilege and my gender performance have played a part in my evolution as a person. I have also been left with the responsibility of using these realizations to better myself and to change the ways that I interact with other women.
María Lugones’ essay rung disturbingly accurate with me. For the majority of my life, I have remained completely oblivious to the experiences of the women around me. When I did choose to view them, and because of my privilege, it truly was a choice, it was with what Lugones refers to as “arrogant perception”. In her words, “being taught to perceive arrogantly is part of being taught to be a woman of a certain class in both the U.S. and Argentina, it is part of being taught to be a White/ Anglo woman in the U.S., and it is part of being taught to be a woman in both places to be both the agent and the object of arrogant perception” (70). Although I have always lived with the heartfelt belief that I was not racist, or at least not racist in a way that I was consciously aware of, Lugones forces me to realize that the way that I interact with women of other races and cultures is both arrogant and destructive. Lugones puts my racism into words perfectly and forces me to be aware of it when she states that she “could be seen as a being to be used by White/ Anglo men and women without the possibility of identification, i.e., without their act of attempting to graft my substance onto theirs… They could remain untouched, without any sense of loss” (71). I have lived my life not knowing the experiences of the women around me, or the way that they view my arrogant privilege and me without any sense of a void in my life. While this may partially be the result of my conditioning as a white woman, it remains my responsibility to correct this gross error.
Thankfully, Lugones also addresses how this arrogant perception can be corrected. In Lugones’ call for women to “world”-travel, I see a real possibility for much greater understanding between women of all races and cultural backgrounds. In my life, only one real experience of “world”- traveling comes to mind, and it took place while I was, in fact, physically world traveling as well. During the summer following my junior year of high school, I went on a trip to Spain with my Spanish teacher and about 20 other students. Before taking us to Spain, she explained to us that many Spanish people would view us in a negative light, and went on to explain that much of this had to do with our countries government at the time, as well as with the stereotypes that they held about Americans. She further explained that the young women in the group would most likely receive the most prejudice, and that this was because of the way that Anglo-American women were perceived in the media. Many Spanish women view Anglo-American women as promiscuous and tricky, and because of these stereotypes, many of them assumed that white, female tourists would come into their country seeing themselves as more attractive and desirable than the native women, and that we would take advantage of that. Anglo-American women also received a great amount of unwanted sexual attention from Spanish men because of these stereotypes. For the first time in my life, I was forced to see myself through the eyes of another group of people and to take the place of the outsider within their “worlds”. While in Spain, it was very evident that there was truth behind what my maestra said was true. The women in Spain often seemed hesitant to talk to us and, at times, frustrated with our presence in bars and clubs. At the same time, Spanish men would often be overly friendly with the female members of my group, and would attempt to buy them drink after drink with what seemed to be the assumption that the young women would continue to drink until they lost their inhibitions about interacting with the men. While this experience was very brief and probably not exactly the type of experience that Lugones is speaking about, it showed me a lot about how my place within my society had allowed me to remain unaware of the ways that others viewed me.
Now that I have the theory of Lugones to explain and illuminate what it was that I was experiencing when I traveled to Spain, I hope that I will be able to employ “world”-traveling as a more active part of my understanding of other women and their experiences. I also think that this kind of exercise also gives me an opportunity to learn a lot about myself. As Lugones says, “We are fully dependent on each other for the possibility of being understood and without this understanding we are not intelligible, we do not make sense, we are not solid, visible, integrated, we are lacking” (73). Who I am as an individual means nothing if I draw that definition from my own perception of myself. The only way to truly see who I am is through the eyes of others and my relationships with them. For example, I could think of myself as a great humanitarian, but unless those around me also perceive me that way, my own opinion means nothing about who I am in reality. I find this realization to be both exciting and intimidating in its implications. This knowledge forces me to see myself through the eyes of others and to act accordingly. It sets for me a goal of being perceived as the person that I like to think of myself as. This goal will require much “world”-traveling on my part, and a great amount of trial and error, but I truly believe that the goal of losing my arrogant perception is one that is worthwhile.
Just like my ignorance of my arrogant perception, I have lived most of my life oblivious to the fact that my gender is something that has been both imposed upon me by the dualistic society in which I live, and reinforced daily by my own actions. So much of who I am as a woman can be easily called into question by the theory that Judith Butler sets out for us. In her own words, my femininity “is an identity tenuously constituted in time- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 97). While my everyday version of “woman” has rarely included things like make-up and styled hair, I never the less have continuously fed in to the image of what it is to be a woman. My love of embroidery, my passion for children, and the relaxation that I find in baking can all be seen as performative acts of my own version of femininity. Realizing the implications of gender as a social construct has led me to hours of internal debate about the authenticity of my own interests and supposedly individual choices. After all, do I love baking and caring for others because they truly appeal to my interests as an individual, or because they are ways that I can assert my gender role?
These questions have plagued me ever since I first came across the theory of gender as a social construction in a Lesbian Literature class. However, Butler causes me to look at the issue from a whole new angle. She states that, “Genders, then, can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. And yet, one is compelled to live in a world in which genders constitute univocal signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered discrete and intractable” (Butler, 105). Through this statement, Butler brought me to the realization that perhaps the authenticity of my gender or of my personal choices is not the point worth examining. Instead, she calls for a new way of viewing ourselves as individuals completely independent from gender.
However, her solution to the problem is not a clear call for actions to come. She admits the difficulty in finding a resolution to this complicated issue as, “we need to think a world in which acts, gestures, the visual body, the clothed body, the various physical attributes usually associated with gender, express nothing” (Butler, 106). Because of the complexity of the issue and the difficulty in envisioning a solution, I find it much harder to walk away from Butler’s piece with the kind of call to action that Lugones’ piece inspired. However, I like to think that my awareness of the social construction of gender will at least cause me to consider my own actions and choices much more carefully, and to always contemplate whether or not they are true to who I am as an individual independent from my gender. I also think that Butler has inspired in me a kind of rebellious attitude towards gender performance and the way that I live within my gender role. Perhaps her piece will inspire me to act a little more adventurously and with the conscious purpose of calling gender performance into question.
While both Lugones and Butler have awakened in me a new understanding of who I am in relation to the world around me and how I constantly construct and reconstruct the roles I hold in it, they have touched me in very different ways. The differences come from the complexities in the subjects and the way that the different authors approach the possibility of a solution. However, I wonder if it may also stem from my own beliefs about which form of oppression is more deeply rooted. Perhaps the reason that I struggle with a solution to the oppressive nature of socially constructed genders is because it is, in my opinion, a deeper and more complicated form of oppression than racial and cultural oppression. It may be that it seems so much harder to tackle because I often view racial and cultural oppression as stemming from sexual and gender role oppression. Either way, both articles have given me a lot to think about in terms of my own identity and the way that I see myself and my roles in the world.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Ed. Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 97-107. Print.
Lugones, María. “Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Ed. Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 69-81. Print.
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