Originally posted on my Friendster blog 31 August 2006.
-----
done, done, done! it wasn't fantastic, but i did my job, and i think, all things considered, it went down pretty well. so here it is, this thing i put together for this thing that i had to do early today. and, oh, it goes to the caterpillar who pulled and kept me together while i almost broke down at the bus stop this morning. (i was already 15 minutes late, it was raining like it never rained before, all the cabs were hired, and it was perhaps one of the most important things i had to do this term.)
"i know it's all very general, but i was given 10 minutes, so it was hard to deal with specifics."
-----
i think my thoughts about gender began when i was about 9 or 10. of course, at that time, i didn’t know what the concept of gender was or that my thoughts actually meant something in terms of a bigger picture. they were just thoughts, and, often, they didn’t last for very long. for instance, i’d wonder why my brother and male cousins were allowed to play outside with their toy soldiers and toy guns until late in the evening, while my female cousins and i were often asked to stay inside the house as we played with our dolls, and if we ever ventured outside, we were almost always called to get back in right away. i’d wonder, too, why i had to wear dresses to church, while my brother could wear pretty much anything he liked. and in church, i wondered about this man who was always clad in really bright dresses, often in hues of red and orange. whenever i asked my mom about why he was wearing a dress, she would say because he wasn’t right.
there were other things i noticed as i grew older: the way the men in my family would drink and smoke after dinner during family gatherings, while the women fixed up—a kind of division lost to me when i was a kid, but which became a particular concern when, at a certain age, i was called on to help fix up; or how a female friend was said to be a disgrace to her family when she got pregnant out of wedlock, when, in fact, earlier, her brother who got someone pregnant, also out of wedlock, was scolded, but wasn’t seen as a disgrace. however, as i said earlier, these were just thoughts, and they didn’t last for very long.
when i went to university, i met a girl who called herself a feminist and attended a class where the teacher said a gendered framework would be used in our reading of texts. i believe it was in the course of these interactions that my earlier thoughts about gender resurfaced, but this time, they lasted and sought explanation. so i realized that the things i thought about when i was much younger didn’t just happen in my family; they happen in a lot of families. i found out that boy and girls are socialized differently, assigned different roles and expectations, and expected to look and behave in different ways. i learned about double standards and how they manifest in laws, institutional policies, in the stories i read, even in the advertisements i see every day. i acquired a term for people who deviate from society’s gender ascriptions and the penalty they are forced to pay for doing so. much more, i began to see how all these, most unfortunately, often translate to violence—may it be physical, emotional, or sexual—committed against women, often by men.
angered by these realizations of gender discrimination and inequalities, high on this newfound awareness, and wanting so badly to make a difference, i turned to a more systematic study of gender. i enrolled in classes on gender theory and representations of women’s bodies, read on different kinds of feminism and discussed each one nonstop with whomever would care to listen, and wrote almost always with a defined gendered lens and some kind of political agenda for class projects. i had thought, once i had mastered the field, things would change. i thought by then i would have understood everything about the gender issues that confronted me and those around me. i thought by then i would have been able to offer some kind of explanation or a particular framework that would somehow resolve these issues and make things a better place for women, and perhaps for men as well. at that time, i was so ready and raring to change the world.
flashforward to today.
i’d have to say that while i did learn so much more about—and most times experienced firsthand—patriarchy, sexism, gender inequalities, and the many ways by which they manifest in the world, i can’t say that i have mastered the field, much less changed the world. while gender studies has given me frameworks, methodologies, a set of tools, to interpret, examine, and challenge the inequalities i see, it has not given me a single, definitive theory that would make things right. while gender studies has given me a nuanced awareness of the workings of gender in society and how they are used to maintain social order and various kinds of oppression, it doesn’t mean i have begun to understand everything.
i remember one gender theory class i had where a classmate and i would just get really depressed after every lecture. we were beginning to see that the more we read and got ourselves involved in all these issues, the more complex they became. first off, it’s not just gender. gender interacts with other social categories as well, such as age, ethnicity, class, socioeconomic status, so gender cannot be examined in isolation, as it is bound up with all these other things. second, the way gender oppression and sexual discrimination work is not exactly visible; they work in subtle and insidious ways, and are most times so institutionalized we don’t even see they’re there. finally, gender itself is a category that is not fixed nor constant; it is a construct, and like all constructs, it evolves. as such it demands new ways of seeing, new methodologies, new tools. in the end, i learned, and these are perhaps the most important lessons of all, that it’s all very complicated, and there are no simple answers, and it can be quite frustrating.
i think i had been this really idealistic, sorely mistaken young girl back then with my thoughts of girl power and changing the world and solving all the world’s problems. today, i’d like to think i’m still idealistic, but i hope i’m not mistaken anymore. i know now that i cannot change the world, and, really, i no longer care for that. what i care for now is just plodding through and doing the work that i have set out to do, and perhaps it will translate to some change, no matter how slight, in my own little corner of the world. what i care for now is making sure that my work is grounded in my own positionality as a filipino woman with my harsh philippine realities, on the one hand, and the academic field in which i have chosen to do my work, on the other. finally, i just take comfort in the fact that what i do is part of a bigger and stronger effort, within that broad category gender studies, which, may, years and years and years from now, just lead to the changes and reforms we’ve all been hoping for.
No comments:
Post a Comment