Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

chapter 8
Identity Construct #3: Gender
“I get race, I can do class, nation is fi ne, but please don’t take gender away
from me!” This exclamation rang out as we entered our classroom one
March afternoon. Indeed, gender may be one of the most challenging of all
identity categories. We have found that while most students are willing to
accept that race, class, and nation are discursively constructed, they resist
the idea that gender, too, is a construct. Students are attached to their gender,
more than to any other category, as crucial in defi ning their identity.
Why does gender create such strong reactions and why is it such a core element
of our modernist identities?
Almost all societies categorize their members fundamentally according
to gender. Regardless of where we are from, we learn from an early age the
appropriate behavior for our gender category. Indeed, the possibility that
an infant’s gender category might be mistaken has given rise to piercing at
birth the ears of babies with female genitalia and making sure that babies
with male genitalia never get near any color resembling pink. You may recall
from our general introduction that, from an essentialist perspective,
femininity and masculinity are intrinsic qualities that emanate from the
gendered core of women and men. Essentialists believe that gender, like all
of our other identity categories, is ontological, existing in and of itself prior
to human interpretation and objectively observable as such. Many contemporary
ideas about gender derive from this ontological stance.
We have used the way people cross their legs to illustrate that, to essentialists
who believe that gender exists as a core trait of every human being,
human behavior refl ects an inner masculine or feminine soul. For this
reason, when a man crosses his legs “like a lady,” the degree of his so-called
masculine essence can be questioned.