#Gender performance

[questionableadvice]

~ The Inquiring Photographer, April 21, 1925 (from thamusicmike on r/100yearsago )

[dropoutcontentfortiredqueers]

Jess Ross, DropOut Deity

[bluebyrd-screaming]

Jacob drawfee: I'm not nobinary, but my gender certainly doesn't fit into the binary. Maybe I'm gender queer? Also I am comfortable with any pronouns, though he/him are my favorite

Everyone: omg look at how gender this cis man is I can't wait for this egg to Crack!!

[femmefatalevibe]

What’s your view on toxic female friendships. I think it’s such a shame betrayal seems to be more common theme in female friendships. Men seem to have life long friends without any drama at all. Of course there are women out there with good life long friends but sadly it’s rare especially in this era we live in

xx

I think the underlying themes here are patriarchy and internalized misogyny. It can appear in blatant forms like women who sabotage each other for male attention, body/appearance/slut shame other women, or overly criticize other women's behavior and choices.

But I also believe there's a more covert patriarchal dynamic to women-women friendships vs. men-men friendships that's only recently become a prominent conversation in the public sphere/social media. As women, we're taught that it's our responsibility and culturally conditioned to perform all the emotional labor for the people in our lives – mainly men, but also other women. Men are taught and socialized with the opposite mentality.

So, I believe the dilemma comes down to this:

Female friendships exist as an outlet to unload our emotional stressors from all the men and women in our lives, so along with strict standards to be the "perfect" woman, it is easy for women to get on each other's nerves/bad side when we're all constantly emotionally exhausted and unloading onto each other. We overemphasize the emotional labor we should expect out of each other because we are conditioned to do this for the men in our lives. But, because other women aren't men, we start to resent/project onto them this anger. It's a very insidious type of internalized misogyny that I think a lot of women aren't aware of and therefore do not confront.

Then, there's the other side of the coin, where men don't really have these expectations of other men. Their friendship is based more on camaraderie through mutual interests, upbringing, lifestyles, or shared experiences (like working together, attending the same university, etc.). They don't uphold this expectation of performing emotional labor for themselves or each other. That role is reversed or the women in their lives.

Of course, I believe most men are so socially conditioned by patriarchy that they don't even realize this underlying dynamic and there are plenty of exceptions of emotionally intelligent men who desire to/actively unpack this to create more emotionally nourishing and equitable relationships in their lives, but I'm speaking in generalities for comprehension's sake.

Hope this resonates with some of you and answers your question. Bisous xx

[fashionbooksmilano]

Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose

Gender Performance in Photography 

Jennifer Blessing

with contributions by Judith Halberstam, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nancy Spector, Carole-Anne Tyler, Sarah Wilson

Guggenheim Museum Publ., New York 1997, 224 pages, softcover, 27,30x33,65cm, ISBN 0-89207-185-0

euro 120,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Exhibition New York January 17- April 27, 1997

This important volume, whose title combines Gertrude Stein’s famous motto, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” with the name of Marcel Duchamp’s feminine alter ego, Rrose Selavy, features portraits, self-portraits and photomontages in which the gender of the subject is highlighted through performance for the camera or through technical manipulation of the image. In many of the works, photography’s strong aura of realism and objectivity promotes a fantasy of total gender transformation. In other pieces, the photographic representation articulates an incongruity between the posing body and its assumed costume. Features work by Cecil Beaton, Brassai, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hàch, Man Ray, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, Inez van Lamsweerde and Andy Warhol.

02/05/24

[emeldiir]

'Third, I delineate the concept of and criteria associated with “realness,” offering a theory of gender performance and performativity that both emerges from and is applicable to the Ballroom community. Because Black gender and sexual categories reflect the very complicated and often dangerous realities and conditions under which Black LGBT people live, I argue that the performance of sex, gender, and sexual categories in Ballroom should be considered a technology of the self—both individual and communal. Although this technology of the self is undertaken, in part, by individuals, the coproduction, critique, and reformulation of gender and sexual identities happens in the course of a collective process, what I refer to as communal performance labor. In this sens, performance becomes a method—a form of work—through which Ballroom members attempt to refract the violence to which Black gender and sexual minorities are subjected in Detroit. LGBT Ballroom members do not enjoy the race and class privilege that some of their White LGBT peers do, limiting their access to sex reassignment (sex change) technologies, for instance. Therefore, working and negotiating the body through gender performance becomes a viable and desirable alternative to a more conventional (and public) sex, gender, and sexual identification. These transgressive performances of the body are rehearsals and momentary acts of freedom within the liminal space and practice of the ball scene.' Excerpt Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender Performance and Ballroom Culture in Detroit by Marlon M. Bailey

[air--so--sweet]

I never thought I'd find something made by The Try Guys genuinely healing but here we are

(For anyone wondering, this is from the series New Guy Tries, the first episode is currently free on their youtube, the full series is on their streaming platform)

[softnwonderful]

I don't envy twinks because I want to be a man. I envy them because their performance of femininity is seen as a radical political statement, while my performance of femininity is perceived as compliance with the status quo.

[lonelyandlostintime]

Just a reminder

Women don’t owe you pretty

Women don’t owe you kindness

Women don’t owe you a smile

Women don’t owe you femininity

Women don’t owe you a response to your unsolicited d*ck pic

Women don’t owe you sex

Women don’t owe you jackshit

I never feel less connected to womanhood than when a man tries to tell me how to perform it.

[haggishlyhagging]

In most societies for which we have information, men are the warriors, hunters, and processors of raw materials related to weaponry and tools. Women have sometimes acted as full-time warriors and hunters, wielding the same weapons as men and displaying the same success (see discussion of the Dahomeans that follows). Such examples, however, are few and occur under special circumstances.

In a study of the sex assignment of 50 work activities in the 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, George P. Murdock and Caterina Provost identify 14 activities that are performed strictly by males in nearly all societies. These activities are of two general kinds: 1) hunting and butchering, and 2) processing of hard or tough raw materials (such as smelting of ores, metalworking, mining, and quarrying).

There are no technological activities that are strictly feminine, though cooking and the preparation of vegetal foods come close. Murdock and Provost explain the occurrence of the strictly masculine tasks on the basis of the greater physical strength of males and their superior capacity for mobilizing it in brief bursts of excessive energy. They also suggest that females are attached to the household by "burdens of pregnancy and infant care."

Douglas R. White, Michael L. Burton, and Lilyan A. Brudner provide a different explanation for the strictly male tasks. Although they do not deny the existence of human sexual dimorphism, they note that there is plasticity in the development of physical strength, so that cross-culturally there is considerable diversity in the degree to which males are stronger than females. In addition, they observe that many of the strictly male tasks require relatively little physical strength. Danger, long distance travel, and "economies of effort," they suggest, more than physical strength or the constraints of child care, explain the existence of strictly male activities. Other anthropologists have also commented on the importance of danger and travel. Judith K. Brown, for example, has argued that given the great importance attached to bearing children, it would be inefficient for a society to expose nursing mothers or childbearing women to danger. Ernestine Friedl points out that men are the expendable sex because they are not the bearers of new additions to the work or warrior force. White, Burton, and Brudner take the argument a step further by introducing the notion of efficiency in the utilization of learned skills: "There are economies of effort in having the same persons perform adjacent tasks in production sequences, since adjacent tasks often require similar technological skills, and are often performed in similar contexts." Thus, the performance by women of tasks that are consistent with nursing and child care (in many but not all cases) and the performance by men of tasks that are consistent with travel and danger are a consequence of efficiency considerations - not of intrinsic features of the tasks.

It is also helpful to understand that strictly male activities provide males with a means for defining and displaying the adult male gender identity. Usually people define their sense of self as male or female by what they do. The female gender identity is automatically defined, at least for tribal peoples, by childbearing and nursing. What comes to women naturally and provides them with a set of discernibly female activities comes to men more artificially. Perhaps because women have ways of signaling their womanhood, men must have ways to display their manhood.

Stressing the importance of the male role for male gender identity, Margaret Mead says: "The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough. . . so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of childbearing have given him a glimpse." The male role is often defined as what the female role is not. If female activities are associated with the qualities of reproduction, male activities are associated with the opposite qualities. As femaleness is linked to fertility and growth, maleness is linked to infertility and death. Sometimes these sex-linked attributes are projected onto animate and inanimate objects in the environment. For example, in a New Guinea highland society, certain foods are identified with the "juicy, soft, fertile, fast-growing" qualities of women and other foods are identified with the "dry, hard, infertile" slow-growing qualities of men. Men in this society publically avoid the female foods (which they may eat in secret) in order to preserve their gender identity and, likewise, women publically avoid the male foods.

The equation between hard:soft—infertile:fertile—male:female is present in many societies. The hard:soft—male:female equation is implied by the kinds of manufacturing activities assigned to men as compared to those assigned to women. As noted before, raw materials that are hard or tough are processed strictly by males. Soft and pliable raw materials are more often (though not exclusively) processed by females. Only men work in metal, stone, bone, and wood. Women, more often than men, make baskets and mats, do loom weaving, make pottery, and spin.

-Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality

[wild-aspen]

Gender roles, gender performance, and sex stereotypes: from a transmasc perspective

I think it's not "wrong" to have things we consider "feminine" or "masculine" or "androgynous", as long as we remember that these categories are not rigid boxes, they are not inherently connected to someone's sex or their gender, and that they are highly personal, highly cultural, flexible, fluid, and blurred.

"Well at that point they're basically useless!" you may say. And it's ok if you feel that way, as long as you don't abuse someone who feels happiness when engaging in their own personal definition of femininity, masculinity, or androgyny. It is not a problem if a trans man says "I do X thing that I consider masculine and that my culture considers masculine, and it is very validating of my gender as a trans man."

It becomes a problem if you believe men must do X, or that if someone does X, they must be a man or must want to become a man. That type of thinking is the belief that certain genders have prescribed roles. Gender roles are where freedom dies. Gender roles are inseparable from sex stereotypes - because of this, gender roles are inherently transphobic. The idea that females are more nurturing, that males are more violent, etc - those sex stereotypes are what created gender roles, because for most of human history, we did not have a social separation between sex and gender. If you were female, you were a woman. So you cannot have gender roles without sex stereotypes: they are the same beast. They are sexist, misogynistic, and transphobic.

Gender identity is your internal sense of gender. It is not the same thing as gender roles, nor is it the same thing as gender performance. It is completely disconnected from all of that. Having a gender is not problematic.

Gender performance is a highly personal endeavor. This is where an individual synthesizes every part of who they are: their internal sense of gender, their internal sex, their external desire for how they want to be perceived, their cultural expectations of masculinity/femininity/androgyny, their personal definitions of those concepts, etc.

A person's gender performance does not always "match" their gender identity in ways you might expect. A person may be perfectly happy being perceived and treated as a man by strangers but as a woman by loved ones. In other cases, folks tailor their gender performance to match their gender identity. In some cases, people are multigender or gender fluid! Having your gender identity and presentation vary is completely valid. Again, this is because there aren't actually boxes; everything is changeable.

[bluebyrd-screaming]

All the world's a stage and baby I'm getting booed off for my gender performance

[brightlotusmoon]

My friend said "In this case I think I’d be gender dramaturgy"

[ineffablejaymee]

for me having a more feminine outfit/makeup is no longer gender dysphoria, its cosplaying a hot girl and i stand by it

[femmefatalevibe]

Hey there! Absolutely adore your blog. Anyways, wanted to ask how to heal myself enough to be comfortable around men? I realised I get very nervous around men and my body still doesn’t trust them recently. I thought I had made progress and was maybe open for relationships and stuff but being around a new guy automatically makes me flighty. I just don’t know how to overcome it

Hi love! Thank you so much <3

Honestly, there's probably a good reason (or a few) for you to have this unease around men, so validate that these uncomfortable emotions are coming from an informed place.

I believe the key here is to stop focusing on "men" as a monolith and focus on fine-tuning your misogyny radar. Be open to letting men show you who they are and take their words/actions seriously-–whether that be positive or negative in that specific circumstance.

Don't anticipate, evaluate.

Hope this helps xx

[mixedbag-o-beans]

gender is a performance and i’m going for the Oscar babey