Philosophy and Gender: Audrey Dubauskas

Serano's Whipping Girl was a very interesting read for me because she is able to describe and contrast her experiences from before she was a female to now when she is a trans female. She argues that "there is no 'real' gender because there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive others to be. " We make assumptions about other people's gender without knowing anything about their legal sex, genitals, reproductive system, etc. This makes a lot of sense to me because I believe that gender is  a socially constructed topic and classification system; therefore, gender isn't "real" and is perception of how we view ourselves and others.  Serano then goes on to discuss oppositional sexism vs. traditional sexism. Oppositional sexism is the belief that female and male are mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and non overlapping set of attributes, abilities and desires. It attempts to punish or dismiss those...

 In an article, Performance Acts and Gender Constitution, Judith Butler discusses how gender is formed through a series of acts that are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time. She mentions Beavoir's claim that woman is a "historical situation" that the body undergoes a cultural construction through conventions that proscribe one's acts or performances. To make these theories easier to comprehend, Butler compares it to theatrical versus reality. I found this comparison helpful when analyzing her text because it was easier for me to understand how her theory fully lays out. According to Butler, in the theatre, one can claim that it is "just an act" or that they are "playing pretend", and by claiming this they separate the act from reality. However, in reality, there are no claims or conventions that delimit the act causing some to be fearful or view the reality dangerous. She gives an example of a transvestite because on a stage, a transves...

     During day to day activities, we are placed in to social constructed categories, and these categories set parameters for how others interact with us. There are many different frameworks that have been presented on how to account for social properties, who has the authority, and how do these properties come about. The best framework is the conferrals framework. According to Asta, " The conferrals schema, when filled out, is a way to articulate the idea that we have a social property because of something about other people by saying that a social property is conferred upon us." This means that, in the conferrals framework, we have social properties because others bestow the property onto us. These conferred properties can either be institutional or communal. An institutional property is a property linked to one's status in a social structure; a good example would be being a queen or president. Therefore, social categories are placed onto us by people with standing, and...