Thoughts on Fine. A Comic About Gender

Reading the comic Fine. made me think about the visual representation of gender. While we discussed "Seeing Gender" in class, we realized that we have a tendency to attach gender to things that don't necessarily require it, such as the written word. A few people said that words like "lilac" were "feminine." This is due to our perception of gender and what it represents. If we assign gender to words, what does that say about what we assign to people? One person in Fine. talks about how they feel like they are not strictly one gender, though people assign them to one based on how they look. People have a tendency to put others in to boxes or categories based on what they perceive about that person (particularly how they look), not knowing that they could be completely inaccurate about it. This is due to people assigning gender to a certain visual representation, much like assigning it to words, even though it could be inaccurate or unnecessary.