The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women

One. Gender Roles Among Women

One gender roles among women I am interested in how ideas about gender organize identity and social relationships among women. Perhaps because I am a lesbian and have noticed how women who are lesbian adopt one gender role or the other (female or male), then discard it, combine roles, and act in ways that confuse me, I feel a need to come to better terms with the use of gender roles by women. Why am I fascinated, confused, repulsed, and drawn in when a woman acts like a stereotypical man, or like a stereotypical woman, for instance? Why do I hate, at one moment, to see stereotypical gender roles among women, and then take satisfaction from seeing these same roles the next? Do I want to be a woman or a man? To be seen as a woman or a man? Do I have to be seen as one or the other? Do I have to choose; do I have a choice? Do people like me because I am a woman, or because I am a woman who is also like a man? Do I really know which gender I am? Why do I perpetuate a rigid gender system despite my wishes to the contrary, saying, with my choice of women, that gender really does de¤ne people? If gender did not matter, I might as well choose a man. I might as well be a man. Yet gender matters more than it might seem. 1 3 Even attempts to make one’s gender ambiguous or to push away conventional gender roles suggest the formative nature of those roles. By gender roles, I mean ways of de¤ning oneself that are congruent with common ideas about how a person of one’s perceived sex type behaves and feels—so that the outside world sees a woman, for instance, and so that the inner sense of self is that of a woman. Ideas about how to be of one’s gender vary with time and culture. In this essay, I wish to identify neither universals nor variations, but rather to discuss what an individual does to come to terms with the fact of her gender, however that is de¤ned. I focus on particular social settings with which I am personally familiar. I think that coming to terms with gender is a process never settled once and for all but one that is ongoing—a series of repetitive motions much like “coming out of the closet” (it is never enough to announce only once that one is a lesbian). Repeated attempts at de¤ning oneself by one’s gender are integral to de¤ning oneself as a person, in my view, although gender is often talked about as if it were secondary to a nongendered status—that of being a gender-neutral “person,” for instance —and as if one’s gender were a relatively trivial aspect of oneself, something one could easily be without. The importance of gender, in other words, is frequently denied. When I teach about gender socialization among women, or think about it in my own life, the denial of gender—that it makes no difference , is not important, or not as important as something else—is the biggest fact I have to confront and the most persistent. Students in my classes on women become disturbed when required to see gender everywhere , particularly female gender, because doing so reveals a world not congruent with ideals of equality. When looking at gender in my own life, I feel a similar discomfort. I want to believe I can be separate from my gender and that I am not a victim of it. I do not want to be reminded of my female subordination or of the gender role-playing in my life— the ways I try to be like a woman, or like a man, and the uncomfortable responses I often feel upon seeing others who act as I do, or who act in ways that are more extreme or deviant. These include both those who play the femme or the butch more strictly and those who say they follow no gender roles at all. My discomforts with gender-related behaviors are 1 4 pe r s o n a l s e t t i n g s key to the comforts of gender. They suggest reasons for the enormous hold of it in my life. discomforts...