Gender 101 – The queer body rupturing the social frame

As the nation states started to fully arise in early modern times, so also did a conceived need to monitor it's citizens. One example of this need to monitor was legislation on excess, where one of the first laws from 1775 states that women from the lower classes were prohibited from wearing a wide arrange of garments done in velvet. A part from functioning as a way to keep Swedish money within the country, it also functioned as a way to keep people in place. The social stratas thus become bound to a form of performance, where everyone should act ording to their class-position in their expression, rather than allowing transgressions. In my previous post, gender 101, I discussed how gender works as a performance. In this post I will however also discuss how gender is undone by people within the trans and queer-community, and how this will invoke a fear of gender-transgression. 

German picturing of ideal "people uniforms" 
in 1908. Picture from Wikipedia. 


Even though we today not regulate expressions of class and gender in law to the same extent as in the 18th century, the current regime still have a vast amount of none-codified rules on how to behave and dress in a social setting. One would not come to a fancy dinnerparty dressed in rubber boots and a worn out t-shirt when everybody else is wearing cocktail-dresses and suits. Our way to perform the social is still bound by norms, where those who deviate becomes the object of social sanctions that perhaps does not involve physical torture anymore but rather ridicule of their followers. 

Amongst todays leading philosophers is Sara Ahmed, a scholar that works at the intersection of post-colonial studies, gender studies and feminist theory whose writings from the early 2000's discussed the issue of the social room as bearing an orientation. This orientation meant that the rooms often are shaped by social norms in which some bodies are welcome and others are not. In Ahmeds own writing the issue of race is of key importance, where she academia to a large degree have becomed oriented towards the white, middle class body. Thus people who do not fit the template of being a white middle-class person do not feel welcome into the rooms of academia. In other contexts our bodies work as given acess, where one example from Ahmeds own life is air-port-traveling. Since she had a none-european name she often became stopped and only after carefull consideration allowed to bord her plane. 

If all this is done by race, a rather abstract notion in many contemporary societies, we can ask ourselves what will happened when people transgress yet another category, that of gender. Since the creation of the first societies we can see gender one of societies two mutually exclusive binaries in which society is oriented towards. In all societies women are described as having certain traits, whilst men have other. At the essence of this the notion of biological difference. Thereby, societies have become oriented towards a social setting in which people who belong to one of these binaries will always feel at home, whilst people transgressing these binaries will see social sanctions. 

A key problem within the current gender debate is that we actually lack historical knowledge on how these boundaries between genders have been upheld. There are few examples of queer or trans-people within general history writing but this does not mean that they do not exists, instead it only means that historians have been bad at looking for them. What we however can see for the past decades is - from a 20th century perspective - an increased contestation of what these categories of gender actually means as well as people transgressing them. By doing this the social frame gets a rupture where it can not fully grasp the consequences of people not fitting in. This form of contestation is also key-part in notions of performative citizenship as formulated by Isin: By demanding that society will have accept people rupturing this, they exercise their civic rights in a system not yet ready to handle due to it's orientations. 

Some people, such as leading leaders from the populist right, would say that it is something wrong with the people contesting the gender orientation. That they "do not fit in to society". What they however miss is that society is created by humanity for humanity, it is not something that was created out of an essential development. Thereby, if societies long gender regime do not fit the needs of us humans, we are free to change it. But why have this change invoked such resistance? Perhaps beacuse it questions our deep-rooted cultural assumptions on how they world actually are. 


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