Summary:

• Today in class we reviewed a power point about codes of gender and gender performance.

Highlights:

• Gender Performativity: Judith Butler (2004) explains that even though “gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing” that does not mean it is “automatic or mechanical.”
• Implication: Gender performs you. Your body is a vehicle of a performance of gender.
• Guerrilla Girls: A group of women artists fighting discrimination in politics, art, film and pop culture.
•  Revaluing the body: “HIV Positive” tattoos accepting AIDS, claiming the identity and reevaluating it.
•  Ways people refuse command performance: raising children gender neutral (ex. Storm), obtaining facial piercing or tattoos.
• Overtly challenging norms: 1968 New York radical women protested Miss America beauty pageant.
• During the protests, signs depicted pin-up models sectioned off like meat with a title reading: “welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction”.
• “Freedom Trash Can”, a repository for bras, girdles, curlers, playboy, and cosmopolitan magazine, high-heeled shoes, and other “instruments of torture”
• The Freedom Trash Can is the origin of the myth of bra burning- a total fabrication.  It was portrayed that women burned bras to parallel men who burned military draft cards, which fed into the myth.
• Micro + Macro= institutional discrimination
• Social Institutions; Family, Church, School, Government, Media, Work Place. All of these institutions come from us; values+people+communication+organizations+practices. Both mutually influence each other, intersecting.

Vocabulary:

-Transgressive: Exceeding a limit or boundary, especially of social acceptability.

-Micro politics: The use of formal and informal power by individuals and groups to achieve their goals within organizations, as opposed to macro politics.

• An example of this; males generally take up more personal space and spread their legs, to show their masculinity.

Questions, that were discused:

• Can we resist or refuse the command performance? (ex. transgender, physicality, being transgressive)
•  If gender is constituted through specific corporeal acts- can it be transformed the same way?
• How does one refuse the command performance?
• What are the other ways in which people “refused the command performance”?
• Do we need to teach gender education at an earlier age?

Further Reading:

The Origin of the Guerrilla Girls-

The group originated in 1985 when the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition called “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture”.  Of the 169 featured artists, a meager 16 were women.  To further the prejudice, the curator Kynaston McShine, stated that any artist who was not selected for his showing should rethink “his” career.  Many women protested but something else was needed to draw attention to the cause.  This gave rise to the Guerrilla Girls.

Links:

-Four States Adopt “No-Smiles”: An article detailing how four states are ordering people to wipe the grins off their faces in their license photos.

-Guerrilla Girls: re-inventing the f-word…feminism

-No More Miss America: An article that describes the women’s liberation demonstrations staged in 1968 and 1969 at the annual Miss America Beauty pageant held in Atlantic City, NJ.

-www.Adipostivity.com: The Adipositivity Project aims to promote size acceptance, not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that’s normally unseen.

-Very Inspiring Video!: Zach Wahls, a 19-year-old University of Iowa student spoke about the strength of his family during a public forum on House Joint Resolution 6 in the Iowa House of Representatives. Wahls has two mothers, and came to oppose House Joint Resolution 6, which would end civil unions in Iowa.