Book Excerpt: Gender Is More Than Performance
Trans-bi author and activist Julia Serano decimates the often employed claim that 'all gender is performance' in this exclusive excerpt from her new book, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, now available through Seal Press.
BY Julia Serano
October 07 2013 6:00 AM ET
http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/10/07/book-excerpt-gender-more-performance#.UlgrNRQueyo.facebookIf one more person tells me that "all gender is performance" I think I am going to strangle them. What's most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty "I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn't" sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there's one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it's that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It's like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another and with the external expectations that other people place on us.
Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn't explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn't capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn't even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same — wore the same t-shirts, jeans and sneakers that I always had — yet once other people started reading me as female, they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience — with all of their expectations, prejudices and presumptions — completely off the hook.
