gender digest
contents
1. Learning Gendered Identities 2. Gendered Nonverbal Communication 3. Theoretical Approaches to Gender
editor’s note Last quarter, I posted a status on Facebook asking my social media friends which classes I should take before I graduate from UCLA. An overwhelming amount of people urged me to take a gender class, so I chose Gender and Communication with Professor Kicenski. I considered myself to know a fair amount about gender even without having taken a class, but I was interested to learn more. I created Gender Digest to share what I’ve learned, spark discussion around gender in the online community, and share the artwork I have created inspired by gender exploration. I have always considered myself to rank fairly low on the scale of regulating gender identity. I have noticed that while my verbal communication tends to be more feminine (using rapport over report), my nonverbal communication often suggests a more masculine identity. I feel comfortable taking up space and sitting with my legs stretched out in public places. As a dancer and choreographer, I was extremely intrigued by the course material revolving around nonverbal communication, and have factored what I learned into my own choreographic aesthetics and intentions. Perhaps the most interesting reading from the class was Renzetti and Curran’s Women, Men, and Society. I had previously never questioned the Man the Hunter theory, or even analytically thought about women’s place in that painting of history. Reading that chapter in the beginning of the class warmed up my mind to break down any previous constructions about gender I had held in my head as factual. Growing up, my parents did not strictly regulate my brother and my gender identities. They let my brother paint his nails and play with cooking toys, and also enrolled him in dance classes, which is typically seen as a feminine extracurricular activity. Despite this upbringing, my brother grew up to be a straight, “masculine” male, indicating that gendered activities such as nail polish, cooking toys, and dance are constructed to be so. Growing up in a predominantly Asian-American community, I have also witnessed unique and complex ways that gendered identities affect Asian American individuals. I have found that the Asianness adds a layer of ethnic identity to the issue of gender identities. Asian men have a history of being feminized, desexualized, and infantilized. Opponents of Chinese immigration barred Chinese women to discourage the growth of the Chinese population in America, then accused Chinese men of being sexual deviants because they did not embody the normative heterosexual nuclear family. The desexualization of Asian men through legislation continues to inform popular representations of Asian masculinity today. As a result, I have noticed that Asian American men often compensate by communicating hypermasculinity and homophobia. Asian American men often adopt tough guy street scenarios of African Americans to reestablish their masculinity. I attribute the widespread trend among Asian American men at UCLA and the greater California area to delve into hip hop dance to this insecurity. When I got into college, I joined ACA Hip Hop, a collegiate team founded in 1993 under UCLA’s Association of Chinese Americans. After asking a handful of my team mates about why they had started dancing, almost all of their reasons involved the idea of “cool.” I believe this stems from the fact that Asian American dance crews featured in pop culture in the 2000s (America’s Best Dance Crew, K-pop, etc.) marked the first representation of Asian American men as cool and masculine, departing from traditional television stereotypes of Asians as nerdy, fobby, and feminine. The way I see it, many Asian American men are fighting against media stereotypes by using dance as a place of subversion to prove their masculine identity. While Asian cultures typically emphasize the professional success and status of their sons, they oftentimes reduce their daughters to objects of appearance to be married off. Many Chinese parents still participate in what’s called a “marriage market,” where parents go to post personal ads for their single daughters. Chinese women who aren’t married after the age of 25 are treated shamefully, and referred as “sheng nu,” or “leftover women.” As a result, Asian American women face a lot of pressure from their parents and society, which shapes their gendered identities and perceived responsibilities to be desirable for marriage. I hope to continue working to expand the intersection of gender and Asian American studies through research and art. – Jasmine Lin
1
learning gendered identities
Gender is a socially constructed role that is learned through through experience. The brain is most pliable in the first two years of a child’s life– during this time period, they are open to learning and can be altered by their environment. When children develop a sense of gender constancy at around three years old, they try to master their gender by imitating what they see through their observations and interactions. Caretakers, games, and popular media are common ways that children acquire and construct their gender identities. As children grow older, they develop the ability to see the selfas-object, and to think about, reflect upon, and respond to themselves. People fall on two ends of a spectrum from low to high monitoring and regulation of gender identity. Caretakers Parents, teachers, and other caretakers are critical to the acquisition of children’s gendered identities. First of all, children unconsciously look to their parents and their physical appearance, duties, careers, communication styles, body consciousness, and household roles to define what and how a woman should be, versus what and how a man should be. Freud argues that boys identify having a penis with privilege and power. Because fathers tend to be the primary breadwinner who is not at home, boys often
end up defining masculinity in negative terms by identifying with anything that is not female. This explains why they tend to repress things that might mark them as female, and are sensitive to “criticisms” such as “You sissy,” “You throw like a girl,” and “You’re so gay.” On the other hand, girls with stayat-home moms are less likely to dream and strive for success in the professional sphere, because they do not have an available role model. The second component of a caretaker’s influence on children’s gendered identities comes with overt
and covert communication. Most parents have a tendency to label and respond to their infants according to gendered stereotypes that they themselves have been acculturated to. Typically, parents vocally encourage independence, competitiveness, and aggressiveness in their sons, and emotional expressiveness and gentleness in their daughters daughters. They also subconsciously tend to be more protective of female babies, and treat them more gently. Many parents allow girls to cry when they feel sad, but discourage boys from doing the
same, commanding them to “Be a man,” and repress their emotions. This encourages boys at a young age to be self-reliant and tough. Gender policing also extends to K-12 schools, in which traditional teachers and administrators take it upon themselves to teach children how to act and dress according to their assigned gender. These gender roles are formally enforced through dress codes and school policies. Games Growing up, children enjoy playing inherently gendered games. Boys tend to play action-focused games like mercy, Indian burns, and bloody knuckles, in which they prove their strength and toughness through winning the game. Meanwhile, girls tend to play word-based games like house and patty-cake, in which they practice their communication and domestic skills in a non-competitive context. Gendered games are most especially seen in video games. It is overwhelmingly more popular for boys to play violent and competitive games like Halo and Call of Duty, and for girls to play collaborative games like Cooking Mama and Nitendogs that reinforce the idea of females as domestic
caretakers. Popular Media Pop culture proliferates normalized gender identities that are not necessarily natural or functional. On one hand, popular media often devalues femininity, as it is all too common for for strong and competent women to be referred to as “bitches” and “hoes.” Western cultures tend to frame success in a very masculine way, so that when a female is “too” independent and assertive, they are criticized for deviating from their female gender roles. This can be seen through the sexist media coverage of female politicians, which tends to treat them in traditional gender role frames and focus more on personality and appearance traits and less on issues. Because women are typically seen as objects of appearance, female politicians are forced to perform an impossible balancing act between appearing powerful and appearing feminine. Hillary Clinton has been identified with terms like “fiesty” and “grandmother,” whereas male politicians are rarely ever identified with the term “grandfather.” Instead of “fiesty,” the media tends to
use more positively-connoted words to imply authority with male politicians, such as “firm” and action verbs like “decide.” When covering female politicians, the media also emphasizes stereotypically feminine issues like education and healthcare, undermining their credibility and strength in “more important” issues like foreign policy and military affairs. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry promotes violent masculinity. Action movies teach little boys to adopt what Jackson Gatz calls a “tough guise” to prevent them from being labeled as feminine or homosexual. Films glamorize male sexual aggression, which affects the ways men treat women in real life. The 40-YearOld Virgin teaches society’s expectations for masculine men to be sexually active, to use crude verbiage, and to value sex and relationships on a physical rather than emotional level. Steve Carrell’s virgin character contradicts popular culture’s expectation, and consequentially, he is infantilized and feels guilty. This teaches boys that not having sex and treating women as more than sex objects is embarrassing, “faggish,” and “gay.”
case study: toys
For my first paper in my Gender in Communication class, I visited Westwood’s City Target to investigate how toys can aid in constructing children’s gendered identities. I hadn’t looked in toys’ sections of stores for years, and was surprised to see right off the bat that the aisle labels were clearly divisive among genders. The blue aisle was labeled “Boys’ Activity Toys” and “Action Figures”, and the pink aisle was labeled “Barbie Dolls,” “Play Sets,” and “Collectable Dolls.” The language of the blue aisle connotes a lot of activity and action, whereas the girls’ aisle seems to connote a sort of passivity with an emphasis on dolls. It is interesting to note that there are only boys’ activity toys, but no girls’ or gender neutral activity toys, discouraging girls from participating in action. Meanwhile, the girls’ aisle label is not specified to be “Girls’ Barbie Dolls,” perhaps because Barbie Dolls are so commonly linked to girls that the extra label is not needed. The boys’ toys feature words like, “battle ground,” “hero,” “build your own combat zone,” and “ambush the enemy.” These carry very violent implications, that may be reflected through adult males’ ties with overwhelmingly higher violence rates. These key words parallel themes of masculinity, especially around being aggressive and self-reliant. On the other hand, the girls’ toys feature words like “endless curls,” “color change hair,” and “color change nails.” All of these words place the woman as an object of appearance. The act of girls improving the appearance of their Barbie dolls sets them up to continue the same practices on themselves as grown women. There is more room for fantasy with the boys’ superhero action toys, whereas the Barbie dolls are more grounded to real life activities and scenarios. Barbie doll roles such as pediatrician, beach girl, and mother may keep little girls from dreaming big, and heavily influence the roles they will grow up to play.
Effects of Gendered Identities – Gender stereotypes are seen as “natural” and “normal,” and any behavior that deviates from these stereotypes is discouraged as unnatural and undesirable. – Boys have lower emotional literacy, the ability to read and understand one’s own emotions and the emotions of other people. – Boys adopt a fear of homosexuality and feminity on their quest to be masculine. – Boys have higher rates of depression and suicide because of their social isolation. – Boys develop difficulties in romantic relationships. – Both girls and boys are confined to traditional gender roles in both the domestic and work sphere. – Boys develop what William Pollack calls a “mask of masculinity.” Because they invest so much energy into disguising their vulnerability, they have little energy to focus on schoolwork, resulting in a gender gap in academic performance.
14-year-old student punished for wearing makeup to school
Gender policing headlines pop up almost everyday in the United States. In 2013, eighth grader Chris Martin wore eyeliner, eye shadow, and lipstick to his last day of school. Administrators demanded that he wash the makeup off because it would “distract other students.” Reactions like this show that schools often enforce a “right” way to do gender and punish the “wrong” way. This proliferates normative gender identities, and quickly puts down threats to these established norms.
Deconstructing Gendered Identities – Offer alternate ideas of gender in media. Good examples of this include Amy Poehler and Rob Lowe’s characters in the NBC show, Parks and Recreation, in which Amy Poehler adopts more masculine communication styles and interests and Rob Lowe adopts more feminine communication styles and interests. – Reduce gender policing in schools. School policies should recognize gender fluidity and move past gender binaries. – Younger couples should be more open to moving past the traditional nuclear family model to start blended families with more diverse models of gender. – Parents should encourage boys to have emotions. William Pollock advocates for the “potency of connection,” in which the way parents cuddle, kiss, comfort, and treat young boys can have a permanent effect on their biologies, brains, and social behavior. – Address the needs of gender fluid individuals through garments. Stop judging people who deviate from gender norms in terms of clothing choices. Clothing brands should move away from binaries and introduce more gender neutral lines.
Lady Gaga’s “You and I”
Lady Gaga uses her rock ballad “You and I” as a powerful refusal to conform to traditional gender roles. She dresses in drag and plays her own male alter ego named Jo Calderone. By performing male stereotypes, Gaga highlights the ways in which our society condemns cross-dressing by enforcing gender binaries. Gaga performs her male alter ego with stunning execution, showing her effortless in embodying gender fluidity.
2
gendered nonverbal communication
“A Smile is Something Special”
I was inspired by a video I watched in my Gender and Communication course on gendered poses in advertising to further explore the perfect feminine poise and construct. I studied the rigid and choreographed molds of women starring 1950s infomercials. Through the choreography, I discovered a deep resonance with my female identity– one where I’m expected to acquiesce as an inferior, and smile because I’m a “pretty girl.” Inspired by Pina Bauch’s work, this choreography creates violence and fatigue through repetition.
My beginning pose features a beveled leg and bashful knee bend. According to the video we watched in class, this may take away from being upright. Because females are often portrayed in htis pose in advertisement, this may subconsciously indicate that women are less grounded, teetering, and less prepared to react quickly and firmly to their surroundings.
I repeatedly assumed poses with my chin tilted up, which is a sign of submission.
Throughout the video, I play with the expectation that women have to be constantly smiling, whether or not they genuinely feel happy. As the repetition of feminine poise continues, it gets harder to constantly fake the smile– indicating that the smile and feminine poise are not biologically predestined, and are instead, heavily performed.
Multiply and Divide (MAD) Manifesto As we continue to challenge gender roles in the home and in the workplace, it is important for clothing to keep up with these trends. For this piece, I partnered up with Caroline Park, a UCLA Design and Media Arts major, to shoot a video for a made-up gender neutral clothing line called Multiply and Divide (MAD). The video serves to reinforce branding and activate the narrative in real life. In order to convey gender fluidity through the brand and my choreography, I noted the types and cues of non-verbal communication I learned through Wood’s Gendered Lives. My goal was to emphasize that gendered nonverbal behaviors are not natural– instead, they are social agreements created and maintained through communication. By embodying both masculine and feminine body language, MAD encourages more cross-over and flexibility in nonverbal communication. Brand Positioning/Narrative: Every individual, every man and every woman, contains the duality of male and female. These express themselves in different, often contradictory, personal characteristics. Every attempt at approach, union, connection, is an expression of the passionate urge to re-establish this lost Oneness. What you feel you are missing in yourself you see in select others. Becoming whole, total individuals demands the direct experience of all dualities, all opposites. Multiply and Divide (MAD), is a call from the unknown for individuals to embrace duality in every aspect of existence. MAD is an invitation to play and experiment with masculinity and femininity in all their forms. Brand Visual Identity: The usage of primary colors Red, Yellow, and Blue represent a theme of adolescence and suggests the importance of play. The abundant, possible combinations with these three primary colors allow flexibility in creating elements within the brand. The name Multiply and Divide is intended to be both instructional and a statement. Originally the project began as an attempt to address the needs of gender fluid individuals through a collection of garments. Eventually, the creative direction embraced an attitude of both anarchy and unity. Multiply and Divide commands not only for individuals to play with characteristics of masculinity and femininity, but also encourages people unite together as a whole regardless of individuality. Artifacts Clothing plays a big role in non-verbal communication. As an artifact, it is a personal object that communicates to others how we see ourselves. It also influences our own self-concept. Although clothing has become less sex-distinctive than in previous eras, there are still many gendered aspects. Women’s clothes are generally brighter and more colorful, whereas men’s clothing are looser to enable more activity. Women’s clothing is often designed to make women’s bodies more attractive through form-fitting styles and provocative cuts. MAD incorporates both a wide color spectrum, loose fit, and covering cut– the performance piece emphasizes the active voice of the brand. The wide pants and Doc Marten boots also defy conventional expectations of my female body. MAD is an artifact that is used to challenge existing perceptions of masculinity and feminity. Proxemics and personal space Space often correlates with power and status. Through my movement, I try to take up more space, and assert terrioriality (scaling the walls, stomping on the floor), playing along with the brand’s theme to reclaim Los Angeles.
Gendered poses in advertising Females are typically not shown as assertive or controlling; rather they let the environment control them. To dispute this feminine communication in the advertisement, I tried to actively and boldly manipulate my environment to match the powerful voice of the brand. Kinesics In the performance piece, I oscillate between feminine and masculine movements and facial expressions. Although most of the time I keep a straight forward gaze, I occasionally give a coy, feminine smile. In terms of movement, I alternate between aggressive, hard-hitting masculine movements and fluid, soft feminine movements. I incorporate both hypersexualized feminine movement (twerking, splits), and hypersexualized masculine movement (pelvic thrusts).
3
theoretical approaches to gender
For my first two years at UCLA, I resented the institution’s theoretical approach to education. As a Communications Studies major, I looked to USC’s practical approach, and saw my counterparts learning how to write press releases and meet industry professionals– I thought that I was slipping behind only learning communication theory, believing that it left me with nothing practical to use in the real world. During my third year, I began to appreciate theory for broadening my mind in ways I did not consciously realize– I realized that while the “practical” stuff can be learned on the job, theory is much harder to acquire. Professor Kicenski said something that really helped clarify for me the value of theory. She quoted social scientist Kurt Lewin, “There is nothing so practical as good theory.” Theory does much more than provide an explanation for phenomenon– it takes one step further to affect our thoughts and behaviors both consciously and unconsciously. In the context of gender studies, theories allows us to reflect on our expectations and perceptions of people based on gender. These theories influence how we undertsand, explain, and predict what happens in our everyday lives. The following theories on gender development work together to explain gendered identties, and how we see ourselves and each other as men and women. Personally, I was able to apply all of these theories to my upbringing and experiences with gender. After learning about these theories, I was able to recognize my own approaches to gender, and utilize these theories consciously. Biological Theory According to the biological theory, biological characteristics such as physiology, anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes are the basis of gender differences. This theory represents the “nature” aspect of the nature versus nurture argument. The biological theory works especially with interpersonal theories to form a transformative account of gender. While I do agree with the importance of biology when it comes to gendered identities, this theory fails to account for an entire half of reality. Social Learning Theory The Social Learning Theory is a psychological theory that is based on rewards and punishments. It says that people tend to reproduce behaviors that are rewarded and drop off behaviors that are punished. After learning this theory, I realized that I experience and witness it in action everyday. For example, my parents have scolded me since I was little to “close my legs” because spreading them apart was “un-lady-like.” After being scolded again and again, I eventually began to sit with my legs crossed instead of wide open. I find that this theory is especially effective on children, who are learning how to form their gendered identities based on which behaviors they are rewarded for and which they are scolded for. In the present-day, I have discovered that there are certain outfits to wear to the club that are rewarded with male attention, and certain outfits that are punished with lack of male attention. This influences the way I choose to dress before I go out.
Cognitive Development Theory The Cognitive Development Theory rests on the concept of gender constancy– at the age of three, children develop a sense of gender constancy, in which they know that they’ve been assigned to a certain gender that they cannot change. Once they acquire this sense of gender constancy, they try to master their gender by imitating either feminine or masculine identities. This learning is often reinforced by the Social Learning Theory through rewards and punishments. Although I do not remember the moment when I developed a sense of gender constancy, I do remember trying to imitate my mother over my father. I liked trying on her clothes and wearing makeup in order to mimic her and “master” my gender. Standpoint Theory The Standpoint Theory is a critical theory that states that gender identity is acquired through one’s position (in terms of race, class, and sexual identity) in a particular culture. People who have positions outside of the mainstream tend to see things that mainstream folks can’t see. When one is at the bottom of the social ladder, they have to be aware about their social location in the scope of the whole system. As a middle class female Asian American citizen, I believe I hold a unique minority standpoint, in which I can combine my perspectives as a female and an Asian American. I am very aware to the fact that Asian American women are often fetishized and exotified as the hypersexual Dragon Lady. This can be seen through the gross rumor that started during the Forbidden City era, that Asian women have horizontal vaginas. I see this fetish proliferated by the porn industry, and practiced everyday by white men who claim to like Asian girls because they are “cute” and “obedient.” This unique standpoint makes me very cautious when it comes to dating non-Asian men– I do not want to be desired because of my “exotic nature.” Queer/Performative Theory The Queer/Perofmative Theory reads queer performance as a means of challenging and destabilizing cultural categories and values. This theory is effective in deliberately pointing out the insufficiency of binary categories in favor of gender fluidity. One example of such a performance is gender neutral clothing. I never thought of being queer or fluid as a “performance,” but this theory helped me brand and create a performance piece for MAD (see section 2). Strangely enough, by wearing the gender neutral sweater, wide leg pants, and Doc Marten boots, I was able to feel more powerful and dominant through my performance. Even as men walked by me on the street, I felt comfortable enough to continue in my wide-stanced performance and stare them down. I am almost confident that I would not have the confidence to do the same if I were wearing a revealing dress. It was interesting to experience a different way of seeing myself simply through the way I dressed. Other instances of such performances I’ve participated in include holding hands with someone heterosexual of the same sex, and kissing someone heterosexual of the same sex. Because I am a very relationship and touchbased person, I regularly practice these activities. However, I did not realize that they can be read as performances and political tools to unsettle the structure that labels “normal” versus “abnormal.” By doing anything that is not “normal,” such as kissing someone of the same sex in a non-romantic way, I am critiquing what has been normalized by a simple construction. This theory has made me more conscious about my communicative choices, and how they construct my identity.
Thank you for reading the first issue of Gender Digest. The course material from Gender and Communication has helped make tangible a lot of the subconscious thought and ideas I had surrounding gender. Although classes like these at UCLA spark discussion on gender issues, they certainly do not give black-andwhite answers. For example, I am still trying to figure out exactly how I want to raise my children, and how much I do or do not want to instill the idea of gender. It is a complex and layered question, but the fact that we are having this discussion is progress in itself. It is important to see gender as a product of society, where what is right or wrong within each gender category is ultimately arbitrary. I hope to continue expanding on the cross-section between gender and race in the coming issues. I hope you have taken something away from issue 1 of Gender Digest, and have adopted a more open mind towards gender fluidity.