Brief for 9/17

In the section we read from Technologies of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis comes to three major conclusions about gender. She elaborates on these things in a deeper way in order to show how they are all visible in today’s society and have been visible for some time now. Our reading focused on three of de Lauretis’s four propositions: gender is a representation, that this representation is a result of gender’s social construction, and that this construction is expressed busily where it is expected and where it is unexpected. Before de Lauretis outlines these points, she informs us on the foundation of gender, and how its foundation and the notions surrounding it have become crucial in analyzing and elaborating on gender and gendered spaces as a portion of our society.

 

Teresa de Lauretis’s sections on gender as a representation being its construction made me think about Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and how she equated gender to drag. Butler tells us that drag is the most raw form of gender that there is. Drag is an impersonation of this all too well known “women” that is “perfectly” shaped and very fit and sings and does all of these amazing things all while wearing the largest heels that the planet has to offer. Drag is nothing short of amazing. Drag exposes gender as this physically unattainable thing that is, in this case, quite literally a performance. Gender is something that we all strive for but is ultimately impossible. When displaying the characteristics and perspectives we identify as gendered, it is clear that there has to be some overlap between the binary. Even with the performativity that is gender, we are forced to see how the system is invalid and exclusive to a certain type of woman that cannot exist. We have made sex and gender one in the same. There is an overlap between them that makes the idea of the social construction of gender even more clear to identify.

 

With that being said, it is also important to note that Teresa de Lauretis shows us that “ the term gender is, actually, the representation of a relation, that of belonging to a class, a group, a category” (4). I found that this was a clear explanation of how gender can be an identity in the performativity we have created. Gender is not only a representation, but a representation of where we stand, given these cultural standards and social constructions.

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