Your Very Own Gender Studies Degree: Queer Theory, pt 2,
But first, how can I get my Very Own Gender Studies Degree?
“But like any language, gender’s primary effect is not repressive but productive: It produces meanings. These are created through a vast and visible top-down structure: binary birth certificates, restrooms, adoption policies, immigration laws, passports, and marriage laws. But they are also produced and maintained from the bottom up, through thousands of small, everyday acts – interactions that create and destroy gendered meaning in every moment. These microexchanges of meaning – in an elevator, over a meal, while buying a newspaper, when answering the phone – stamp us with our gender, bind us to it, and require us to answer to it in order to interact with other people. Thus not only does gender restrain us as individuals, but it is through the language of gender that we become who we are, that we come to recognize ourselves – and be recognized by others – as men and women, and only as men and women…Our belief in language is based on our naïve faith that the world is right here: finite, knowable, immediately and totally available to us. Thus what isn’t named doesn’t exist. What is named must therefore exist. “
“In the beginning was Sex, and Binary Sex was with God, and Binary Sex was from God… and Binary Sex was made flesh, and it became The One, True Thing about everyone’s body.” – The Gospel According to Us
- Excerpts from Gender Queer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary by, Riki Wilchins
Things to Think About
1. In what ways do you naturally and unnaturally fulfill societal gender expectations?
2. In what ways have you seen the gender binary as helpful or exclusionary? Do you support or refute its importance? Why?
3. What is your immediate reaction to the existence of transgendered and transsexual communities?
