Gender Is Not Just A Performance

By Julia Serano
Sep 24, 2010 02:19 PM

http://jezebel.com/5647120/gender-is-not-just-a-performance

If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance," I think I am going to strangle them.

Perhaps most annoying about that soundbite is the somewhat snooty "I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn't" sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, 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 all the external expectations that other people place on us.