I went to see a feminist, slam poet, Andrea Gibson, tonight at Northwestern University because I'm a massive dork and I do this kind of stuff. Andrea writes a lot of powerful poems about war, bullying, sexuality, love, and spirituality, but her poems about gender really invoked a lot of questions in me.
Andrea's androgynous appearance often strikes people because, for some, it is hard to tell if she is a boy or a girl. Andrea makes it clear in her poems that she doesn't care what gender people pin on her because although she has the physical "lady parts"she believes "boy" and "girl" are just labels that differentiate between body parts.
Is gender more than that? I've never thought of gender as anything other than genitalia, but it may be more mental than anything else. For example, I would still feel like a "girl" if someone were to take my brain and put it inside a male body. But would that suddenly make me a boy? Transgendered people feel trapped in the wrong body, but yet they are tagged as freaks everyday because no one stopped to wonder if gender went above the belt.
Andrea reads a poem entitled: "Swingset" (above), and describes how her pre-school students care less about her gender than most adults around her. She loves that these 5 year olds don't care what society says she is.
As Andrea reads her poem, she describes a women telling her daughter to stop staring at Andrea, due to her androgynous appearance, because it's "rude". After explaining this line, Andrea reads: "The only rude thing I see is your paranoid parental hands pushing aside the best education on 'self' that little girl's ever gonna get". Andrea suggests she is the truest definition of "self" when she claims to be the best example of "self" that the little girl with the powder-puffed mom is ever going to see. Because Andrea doesn't dress or act much like a boy or a girl, she doesn't feel she is either of those labels, and that's why she feels so rawly herSELF.
This idea of "self" intrigues me because Americans often get hung up on labels and clear cut answers. It often seems as though there are no roads in between. A person is either a boy or a girl (a conclusion most often determined in the delivery room) But would if they're not? Gender is a label humans made up. And maybe, just maybe, the way our minds think or the people we fall in love with determine our so called "gender", and not what kind of underwear we buy.
I find your post very interesting Bridget, especially the part about labels. It seems that being identified with a certain label or certain labels is very important to a large number of Americans. Some go to extensive, time consuming and expensive lengths to be perceived to be among a certain group when they meet people. I think that it all relates back to when we talked a while ago back in class about the "masks" that we wear. You post brings up an interesting point in that while we choose how and when to wear a "mask", the fact that we want to be identified as the kind of person the "mask" is showing may be influenced by certain subconscious factors (as you say in your post about how "gender may go above the belt"), which make you want to wear that mask in the first place and identify yourself as what it is you feel like you "should" or "feel like" identifying yourself as.
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