So I mentioned gender neutral housing a few weeks ago in class and I just wanted to follow up with it! Flexible housing at MSU passed today!

I guess the details are that it's a two year pilot program that will allow people of differing genders to live together--whether it is transgender individuals, or siblings, or whatevs! We got it! And it's going to be happening in West McDonnel and North Wonders.

If you want to read more about it, then just check out this website: http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2012/03/rha_passes_bill_to_start_flexible_campus_housing_option_in_the_fall

So in this blog, I'm going to go back to my  first essay, as it has been something I've been working on since the assignment. I started to get in to complicating Beauvoir's theory at the end, and it's something I'm really interested in. What do you guys think?

In my first essay, I spent time talking about complicity both within the world of Environmental Justice, and within the world of Feminism. However, the connection I was trying to draw between the two of them was not as firmly established as I had hoped for it to be. In the paragraph discussing EJ, I told the story of what happened to Buffalo Creek, West Virginia. In this town, there was a huge sludge pool, which erupted and killed over 100 people. This eruption was nearly predicted by town members, but the coal company sent in  an inspector who reported that everything was fine with the pool only days before it erupted. The company claimed that the eruption was “an act of God,” but the residents knew that it was an act of complicity by the inspector to cut additional regulatory corners, and resulted in the murder of their loved ones.

The reason I bring up the Buffalo Creek instance is because it helps describe the metaphysical murder women undergo when acting complicit. Simone de Beauvoir, in her introduction to her book The Second Sex, gives us a good example of what complicity means to a woman. Complicity means that you are an accomplice to something wrong. And it has become the norm of behavior in which women have accepted for centuries in order to maintain “advantages with the superior caste; the superior caste, referring of course, to men” (10). Complicity always surfaces when there is a tension of power, Beauvoir explains, and it implies sticking to the status quo of the established power.

Many women act with complicity in order to derive satisfaction from the benefits of sticking to the status quo (which comes from the drama of believing that women need men to find meaning. It is “between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes [them] as inessential” (17)). Because women have been deemed inessential, and therefore lived without meaning, they had to resort to finding their own meaning through men—through being complicit with men’s rules. However, as they allow the “man who sets the woman up as an Other”, they lose who they actually are (10). Their act of complicity is actually an act of metaphysical murder, for these women rid themselves of the possibility that they could have an essential self without having a man around, before ever giving it enough thought to realize that it was already there, it was already theirs.

But as Beauvoir stated, this has been happening for centuries, and many woman are unaware that an act of complicity is taking place. In essence, this has become so engrained within women that we don’t realize it is happening, including Beauvoir. For when she states “…and we will see the difficulties women are up against just when, trying to escape the sphere they have been assigned to until now, the seek to be a part of the human Mitsein,” we believe that she sees this as ‘out of women’s hands’ for it has been assigned to us (17). However, that excuse of ignorance holds as much merit as the excuse that claimed 100 people died in Buffalo Creek due to “an act of God.” As in Buffalo Creek, God can not be blamed as the instigator for women’s metaphysical murder, it is the conscious (or unconscious) continuance of complicity. 

I want to spend time talking about Butler's theory from the opening of her book Undoing Gender. I think I've been most fascinated by what she's had to say because hers comes across as the most complex writing  I've been exposed to thus far. When talking about what it means to 'undo' your gender, and the implications that is has--I can't help but want to have a four hour long discussion about it to make sure I'm really on the same page with what is happening. To say that your gender is not something that belongs to you necessarily, but is its own essential self that determines large parts of you, is a scary thought. And it is one of my favorite points that Butler elicits. It can determine who you are because it can take away other options for who you could be. Gender comes with a disclaimer: you will be what I (and society) tells you to be. But this disclaimer is written in invisible ink. The actual price tag written in black and bold type says something along the lines of: you can be anything/anyone you want to be!!!!!

But we all no that utopia really means no place--and the world we are all in does not actually have a place for such freedom of choice. Unless of course you break free from the boundaries assigned to you at birth by undoing your gender--by breaking stereotypes down and showing others that it is possible for them to do the same. And within this new mindset, perhaps it is possible to create the image of you that you wish to be--perhaps after this revolution of the mind is it possible to be anything/anyone you want to be(!!!!).

I'll definitely be coming back to this thought soon.