The first thing I'd like to get sorted here is that I'm rubbish at starting blogs, so if anyone from class is reading this, feel free to wait for/skip forward to my later posts, as this one's likely to be primarily rambling.
That said: One of the things that's gotten me thinking from last Wednesday's class is the idea of a binary view of the sexes, as the binary itself is, by definition, a phallic construction. If woman is defined as what man is not - as man's negative - then woman becomes a pretty broad category.
Connecting this with the clip of Eddie Izzard, if "man" is comprised of a very specific set of things, and "woman" is whatever "man" is not, then wouldn't that mean that everyone who doesn't (can't, won't) identify with strictly one sex, and/or everyone whose sex can't be accurately described as one or the other, automatically falls into the category of woman? Under the phallogocentric language and culture of binary sexes, as Butler says, "women constitute the unrepresentable" (p 13 of Gender Trouble; emphasis is not my own). So what constitutes "unrepresentable"? Should transsexuals be classified as unrepresentable on the basis that they were born a particular sex yet now identify (or are) another? Is a transsexual "man" still a man despite being born a woman?
In this day and age, yes, a binary system of sex is technically out of the question (though not out of language and ideology - yet, anyway) because it is physically inadequate to describe the broadened spectrum of sex, let alone gender. But let's look at gender, then. If I'm physically male but identify as female, what changes? I'm still technically male, but I'm going to draw from Eddie Izzard again - much of the humor from the military part of his sketch comes from the audience's inability to fully accept his identity as a "man." Yet clearly he isn't a woman; it's even specified that he fancies women and doesn't consider himself one in any way. Eddie Izzard falls outside the "normal" spectrum of binary gender (obviously), but even if the system is inadequate (in that so many forms of sex and gender identity defy description under it), it's very much ingrained in our minds as a culture, and as such impossible to cast neatly aside to make room for changes in sex and identity.
Basically (and this is terribly boiled-down), if you aren't man, then you're the Other - and I can't understand the category of Other to strictly refer to woman. Quoting Butler again: "...[W]omen are the sex which is not 'one,' but multiple" (13).
So those thoughts are now, at least, out of my brain for the moment. Moving on - I'd like to revisit the terms Eddie Izzard uses in his sketch. The idea of a lesbian in a man's body in particular strikes me as a great way to get people to think about gender identity, because of course if you're a man and you fancy women, it makes you "straight" (or even "normal," depending on who you ask), but it's a clear diversion from what constitutes a male identity. I'm thinking I'll come back to this one later on.
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteNo need for caveats—blogs are supposed, I think, to be at least a little about rambling and musing and questioning and asking and answering things that you might not have asked—that’s part of the delight, right?
I like the idea you raise at the start of your post about being defined as the “not” something—the way in which this category might be expansive beyond sense. In the way that you describe, woman comes to mean not a particular sexual/biological/physiological/characteristic/affective “self” or performance of self, but rather, the leftover of what doesn’t fit into a narrowly defined category of man. This, clearly, has problems, but I wonder if this might also be a very productive way of thinking through what binaries can and can’t control—what they do and don’t categorize. What would be the problem, for instance, in defining all of these non-men as women? Is it that this doesn’t do justice to what we think of “women” as being? Or might it in fact open up the category productively? Or is its openness unproductive? I think you’ve gotten to something really great here about the ways in which language works in conjunction with bodies that deserves some more “rambling”—get after it!
Also, I really like your final statements about Izzard, about the ways in which his identificatory practices both do and don’t approach “normal”. Keep pursing these ideas. You have some great seeds here.
Keep up the great work—and bring these ideas in to class!