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Karina's picture

we seem to live in negative space

What was most intersting to me about the Kimmel article is the way that it fleshes out the imaginary/imagined masculine paradigm to be the entity against both the masculine and feminine identities are measured. Also, both identities are negatively defined against one another. The feminine identity is primarily presented as that which is OTHER to male. Thus it's defined negatively. However the masculine identitiy, if you think about it, seems to be negatively defined in an even more complex way. It's defined  by its relationship to the masculine paradigm, but it's also defined by its OTHERNESS to femininity which, as we just pointed out, is itself only negatively defined; granted it's by its otherness to masculinity, but two negatives only indirectly make a positive - the negation of negation is not the same as an asserted positive. So here we have so loosely defined identities, framed by the things that they arent much more so than the things that they are and yet in our society, they are both capable and denied the aspect of (gender identity) fluidity. Is it perhaps because these gender identities are so tenuously (loosely, negatively) structured and kept in place/together that society insists on their regidity? Is it because we know that they are, by our own (unadmitted) definition not the paradigm conventions we want and force them to be? It must be fear of their disintegration, fear of their easy destruction that keeps them in place, rather than the so-called rigidity of their structure.

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