Quote:
Originally Posted by dreadgeek
I see a great deal of this. The construct, within gender studies, is that if a woman likes, for instance, trucks, baseball, fishing, beer and power tools that person is 'masculine of center'. If said person then goes ahead and transitions, this is supposed to be transgressive and demolishing the gender binary. How is it though since it appears to recapitulate the existing gender construction of male = trucks, sports, fishing, beer and tools?
I would argue, like you do, Cheryl that I am transgressing gender boundaries/roles because, even though my passions lie in typically 'male' things such as the physical sciences, Linux and the Free/Open Source Software movement generally, skepticism and a certain holding to living my life rationally none of that makes me 'male' or 'masculine'. The problem, in other words, does not lie in my being a woman who is a geek rather, it lies in society defining certain things which are not really gendered as having gender traits. I don't 'think like a man', I think like a scientist....
Cheers
Aj
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This is one of the most obvious contradictions of the gender theory bandwagon. I shake my head in disbelief every time I meet a young person who I would peg as butch, who I find claims a male ID and then talks about how transgressive it is to do so. The young person inevitably then goes on to try to prove how 'male' they are by enumerating all of the ways they fit into a traditionally male stereotype. I think it must be a case of the Emperor's new clothes that others fail to point out the obvious.
This is a subject near and dear to me. That said, I feel a little guilty going on an extended tear about the way male IDed people who, in another time, would likely have been lesbians and are now not making sense to me. No matter where my lesbian ID falls in the world of fashionable theorising, my ID isn't changing. We're talking about pride in that ID. Those who've eschewed the ID of which I'm proud may or may not make sense to me, but that doesn't change who I am.
The academic pendulum is probably swinging back. It always does. Those whose work was considered young and edgy are abandoned for the next hot theorizer. Needless to say, the new theory doesn't have to make any more sense than the old ones. It's like any other fashion, it just has to be fresh. Academics make their careers by coming up with something that seems new and interesting. That's cold comfort for a young person struggling with their ID, but I have no influence over those who treat human ID as a game through which they can make career splash. I'll just keep offering huge, loud support for butch lesbian women.