Performing Gender Categories

Gender and Sexuality ANTH 2301 Performing Gender Categories Gender affects how people feel about themselves and other people, as well as how other people make them feel. It also affects how individuals think about themselves and other people. Sexy or romantic love maintains gendered identities by drawing on them. Aretha Franklin once sang, "You make me feel like a natural woman." Gendered identity has a certain quality that makes it seem genuine and profound. Essentialism is the belief that a certain characteristic is so deeply ingrained and significant that it forges a shared identity for all those who possess it. Many loopholes in thought stem from gender essentialism. Saying anything like, "Boys will be boys!" when a boy kicks a ball through the neighbor's window is essentialist. This tiny essentialist tidbit from Euro-American culture could be recognisable to you: Little girls are made of sugar, spice, and all things lovely. Little lads are built of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. According to this perspective, your gender is determined by your biological makeup. Nonetheless, gender distinctions are nuanced and deceptive, as demonstrated by research in biology and archaeology. What does it mean to be a natural man or woman? Cultural anthropologists discover that although some cultures emphasise the distinctions between genders, others view men and women as very similar. Every culture upholds a certain set of ideal standards for behaviour, norms, and values that it deems to be good and natural. These values are universally applicable to everyone in societies where men and women are viewed as similar. One set of values applies to men and another to women in civilizations where men and women are seen as completely distinct. In every instance, there are significant cultural differences in the content of such principles. Margaret Mead, a cultural anthropologist, studied gender in a number of New Guinean communities. She acknowledged that, at first, she had thought gendered behaviours were based on biological distinctions and would just varied marginally between cultures. She details her astonishment at finding three cultural groups with very diverse conceptions of gender in her 1935 book Sex and Temperament. Men and women were seen as having quite similar temperaments among the Arapesh and Mundugumor, with minimal recognition of emotional or behavioural distinctions. The Arapesh expected everyone to be tolerant of and supportive of the weaker and younger members of the tribe. They also valued collaboration and kindness. On the other hand, it was expected of both men and women among the Mundugumor to be violent, aggressive, and competitive. However, among the Tchambuli (or Chambri), men and women were perceived to have distinct temperaments: women were perceived as calm, content, and strong, while males were perceived as neurotic and superficial. Despite criticism of Mead's spectacular results, other anthropologists' research and analysis have essentially confirmed her key conclusions (Lipset 2003). Gender is another issue where biological distinctions are interpreted culturally, much like race. The same act of cultural interpretation modifies how those biological distinctions are experienced and perceived, further complicating matters. Stated differently, gender stems from an intricate interplay between society and environment. Because gender identities directly relate to one's body, they feel more natural than identities based on class or religion, for example. Even though people are aware that culture affects how people see their bodies, the majority of people nevertheless believe that their bodies feel "natural." Gender is thus manufactured to appear natural rather than truly natural. Many gender researchers have argued over the past three decades that gender is more of a collection of cultural identities that individuals play in their everyday lives than it is a system of naturalised categories to which people are allocated. Philosopher Judith Butler defined gender as a type of relationship between categorical rules and individual performances of those norms in her seminal book Gender Trouble (1990). People are taught how to embody the idealised categories of male and female while they are young and are exposed to these categories. Because "becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that nobody actually inhabits," gender, in Butler's words, is "an impersonation" (1992). It is important to pay particular attention to the idealised standards of gender that are produced in a given cultural context and the many ways that individuals execute those norms in practice if gender encompasses both established categories and everyday performances. Researchers that study Muslim communities in Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran look at the ideals of Muslim masculinity and femininity in various contexts and how those values are played out and rejected in daily life. Their findings are published in Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures (Ozyegin 2015). According to Salih Can Açıksôz, the Turkish government makes assisted reproductive technologies available to injured soldiers so they can become fathers. The program's goal is to restore their sense of self as "real men," normalising their masculinity within the framework of heterosexual family life. Maria Frederika Malmstroöm demonstrates how Muslim women in Cairo cook, take care of their skin, and get circumcised in an attempt to attain the cleanliness and purity associated with femininity. The premise is that gender is not at all "natural"; rather, you have to actively work at it every day to ensure that it is expressed correctly. Your family, friends, and even the government may step in to assist you if you are unable to resemble the gender standard for any reason.