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.
This is interesting because I don't think I've ever explicitly thought of gender as ideology. Ideology being the falsification of reality by an idea. Gender ideology or heteromorphism: media or advertisements or fashion telling us that gender performance is freedom and the pathway towards euphoria. But, in fact, being cemented to one's gender can not only be a kind of enforming violence (where your subjectivity is formed through a violent disciplining and sense of abjection) but may also diminish one's ability to smile and express and live in ways that are not totally crystallized by heterosexual narratives and attending roles. The democratic presentation of gender has a demonic underbelly, one's soul sap may be dried up, one's wellspring of being may become lifeless if labeled blasphemous. Society is fastidiously addicted to gender ideals. If so, that idealization is all the more violent to one's original furrows of erotic urging and calligraphy. One's sense of given beauty--if we do have that--is nihilistically consigned to the job of making performance seem authentic. Learning about the limitations of an ideology is the classic way to undo it, that is, learning about the objective conditions of ensnarement is the classic way to making revolutionary discourse possible in the face of ideology. Sexism, like genderism, alienates us all. That might be the social register with which to give a more paranoiac understanding of gender oppression or formative distortion.
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