GENDER*POWER!

GENDER*POWER

Years ago, when I was getting married, one of the traditional things we did as part of our marrying was exchange rings. No blood diamonds, of course, but gold--from Canada--crafted by a jeweler in Dinkytown. His casting process used fingerprints in beeswax, which he’d developed while doing a project with his daughter’s elementary school students, based on an exhibition he’d seen in the early 80s of Picasso’s work at the Walker.

On one of the visits to his studio, he decided to tell me his theory of the downfall of mankind. He gave me a full description, so full that my meter expired and the ever-vigilant U of MN traffic police slapped a fine on my window--make my wedding ring all-the-more valuable. His theory was that humans had developed language before being fully ready for it, and hence had begun to categorize the world in ways which muddled things, over-simplified them, and stunted our development. He thought that our advancements in language jumped us ahead mechanically, technically, but that maybe our sense of wisdom and understanding were not quite keeping up, and so we were actually destroying things more than building things. One Jeweler’s opinion.

As we seen in Fausto-Sterling’s book, it’s so very likely that there are more than two of us types of “man.” Seems silly when you write it like that, of COURSE there are more than two types of people. So she is saying, too, that in building a world with two genders, we are also destroying other realities. The idea of gender has such power. I feel trapped at the moment between two dueling thoughts related to gender:

1. The ideas of Fausto-Sterling are truly liberating, allowing people to manifest physically in many different ways, emotionally and socially in many different ways. Distinctions of gender can be harmful, used for prejudice and false notions of power or superiority, which lead to violence, slavery, etc. Boo gender roles!

2. The identity I hold of myself as a woman, and the connection I feel to women across the world. The notions presented by burgeoning movements such as Nicholas Kristof’s Half the Sky, which highlights the research that giving micro-loans to women leads to more good for the family and the community than giving it to men does. This is one of the things that make me feel like the idea of “woman” is also very powerful. Yay GirlPower!

I want to know, when you watch this video, how does it make you feel?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/08/20/magazine/kristof-audioss/index.html

Does it make you feel differently if you identify as a man or as a woman?

I realize the film clip is of course set up to make you cry, or maybe stand up and shout. But there is a sense of solidarity I feel with women around the world, ever since I first truly, truly began to grasp in a real way how much in the present and in the future the Women’s movement is, and NOT just back there in the 1970’s as was the impression I’d been given in my earlier years of education. This sense came when I was a 19-year-old University of Minnesota student, taking a class on images of women in the history of art. I read Betty Friedan and really felt how this whole gender thing was a spectre hanging over the heads of all of us, each and every one of us. Everywhere. Which maybe brings me pack to thought 1--two ideas of gender doesn't work so well, but I still have this nagging sense of thought 2, that I must admit leads me to feel a little sad when Women’s Studies Departments become Gender Studies Departments.

Here’s another NY Times excerpt:

(“The Daughter Deficit” NY Times Magazine, Tina Rosenberg 8/19/09)

“It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 17.3 million births — and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive.
…
To be sure, China and India are poor. But in both nations, girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas. Having more money, a better education and (in India) belonging to a higher caste all raise the probability that a family will discriminate against its daughters. The bias against girls applies in some of the wealthiest and best-educated nations in the world, including, in recent years, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It also holds among Indian immigrants in Britain and among Chinese, Indian and South Korean immigrants in the United States. In the last few years, the percentage of missing girls has been among the highest in the middle-income, high-education nations of the Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.
….
So for parents, investing in a daughter is truly, in the Hindi expression, planting a seed in the neighbor’s garden. Sons, by contrast, provide a kind of social security. A family with only daughters will also likely lose its land when the father dies: although women can legally inherit property, in areas of north India and China, they risk ostracism or even murder if they claim what is theirs. And sons are particularly important to mothers, who acquire power and authority when they have married sons. Sons, according to Chinese custom, are also needed to care for the souls of dead ancestors.”

And off to the side of this article flashed statistics, including this:

“ONE percent of the world’s landowners are women.”

One. Holy Crap.

So maybe a sense of solidarity among women is really just borne out of shared oppression, disadvantage, disregard (though of course the level varies greatly in each individual life)?

So I sit here in my robe, by the fire, (correction: in my pajamas by the space heater) and I think yes, gender categories are Oppressive, they cause trouble, they hurt people and subject them to terrible, terrible things. At the same time I feel the power of identifying as a woman. I don’t totally deny that there is such a thing as woman; it’s not only a made up construction of language. Maybe I feel this way because I was raised in a culture and a language firmly stating that there ARE women. Maybe it is because I have been with women in labor, and have seen where we all came from and its immense power and weirdness and amazingness, the labor and exhaustion and sweat and blood and smells that brought us here. I know it is essentialist, and that some women don’t WANT to have babies, and some can’t and some hermaphrodites, CAN...so maybe it is not about gender at all but there is some serious, serious power in birth and fertility that I think must play into the conversation somewhere.

I also have experiential knowledge that many “women” do organize differently than men do, a lot of the time--just as we see in Kristof’s work, women are using the aid they receive very differently. (I want to say better, but am trying to be nice.) Is this innate or a response to circumstances?

Maybe this isn’t “gender,” maybe it’s some other gene, that a lot of women, or people identifying as women, or leaning more towards identifying as women have. Maybe it is the sugar and spice gene. Maybe it is the feminine archetype and some people are more influenced by it than others. Maybe people just respond differently when they are the non-dominant party, and that has made women have to be more efficient? But then, again, I see myself splitting the world in two: dominant/ un-dominant, sugar and spice/snails and puppy dog tails, and negating the idea that there is something more complicated going on.

Is it nothing but language that divides us so?

What new ways will we find to describe ourselves? Are we able to move away from these dichotomies and towards a more Fausto-Sterling view of humanity? And when we do, what will the social and political effects be? I can’t wait to see.

My fingerprints from years ago are pressed into my wedding ring. They wear with time, on the ring and on my fingers. The jeweler said that the little kids in his daughter’s class had much clearer fingerprints when they pressed their fingers into the wax. But we all wear out, over time. We will see how our ideas follow suit.....

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