smigliori's blog

Registering to vote, setting up a myspace account, and walking into almost any public bathroom all have one thing in common: they each require the individual to declare their gender and/or sex identity.  For most people, this may not seem to be a cause for alarm; society trains everyone to express a specific gender identity (either “masculine” or “feminine” based on whether their genitals are “male” or “female”) from their birth.  These gender identities make it easy to determine whether one has male or female genitals, therefore allowing the heterosexual “norm” to easily prevail by simplifying the policing of non-heteronormative sexual configurations. 

Registering to vote, setting up a myspace account, and walking into almost any public bathroom all have one thing in common: they each require the individual to declare their gender and/or sex identity. For most people, this may not seem to be a cause for alarm; society trains everyone to express a specific gender identity (either “masculine” or “feminine” based on whether their genitals are “male” or “female”) from their birth. These gender identities make it easy to determine whether one has male or female genitals, therefore allowing the heterosexual “norm” to easily prevail by simplifying the policing of other

In 1968, Jane Elliott created what would become known as the “Blue Eye/ Brown Eye Experiment,” dividing her class based on eye color and letting first one half, then the other, oppress their fellow students merely be telling them that one group was superior to the other. The exercise is used around the country to show that racism is a socially constructed phenomenon. Just as people are not essentially different based on eye color, so they are not essentially different based on race. The implications this has for feminism quickly become obvious. Students believe in the gender binary because

            What is feminism?  Many people feel strongly about feminism, and I have often heard individuals proudly declare that they are or are not feminists. Yet, I have never had a satisfactory definition of this term.  One month into a course entitled “Critical Feminist Studies”, I still have not been given a definition of feminism which I feel is sufficient.  Google returns 19,100,000 hits in .12 seconds in a search for the term “feminism”, the first of which is a lengthy and heavily annotated Wikipedia entry. Though Wikipedia is not normally a reliable source for any paper, the