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6 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ “I Can’t Lose to No Girl, Man” The Gendered Self This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair Streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently About the wreck We dive into the hold. I am she: I am he. —Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck” (1984) Gender organizes our lives on multiple levels, from the individual to the institutional, in ways that are both explicit and invisible.1 The salience of gender is so ubiquitous, it’s often unnoticeable. Not only do we quickly encode and cognitively process the gender of people we see,2 but also the landscapes of our lives are marked by gender, from public bathrooms to the shoe aisles of department stores. Gender is a powerful, organizing social category. Yet the assumption of gender as a natural binary ignores the fact that our culture’s conception of what is natural is itself a cultural construct.3 130 ❙ “I Can’t Lose to No Girl, Man” We often ignore the fact that gender is but one location on our social maps.4 I challenge our culture’s treatment of gender as a static, dichotomous category by exploring the ways in which other social positions influence our constructions of gendered identities. Gender is constructed and maintained through two interacting processes: activity and structure. The social activity within East Side allows for both re-creation of and resistance to gender norms, but only within certain social and structural constraints . As with race and class, the construction of gendered identity rests on an image of the Other. I examine the ways in which social structures determine who our Others will be and how youth actively construct gendered selves in relation to gendered Others. The East Side teens’ experiences and constructions of gendered selves are influenced not only by the dichotomous gender system but also by the larger rubric of race and class relations. The teens’ positioning within the social structure influences their relationships with gender. In some ways East Side youth are removed from the traditional gender system. Yet they re-create certain gender stereotypes in their daily activities and relationships with others. This is particularly true in the realms of sexuality and physical appearance. Youth both challenge and affirm gender norms, negotiating social structures through their activities and interactions with each other in the club. The Social Construction of Gender Gender can be thought of in three ways: (1) as activity, (2) as structure, and (3) as an interaction of activity and structure. I privilege this last view of gender, as it centralizes human action while acknowledging the power of social structures. Before turning to the East Side teens, I will discuss these three views of gender as a frame for considering their experiences. Gender as activity focuses on how individuals “do” and “perform” gender in interaction with others.5 Wearing a necklace, putting on lipstick, and crossing my legs are natural parts of my day. I don’t consciously think about them as constructing my gender. Yet it is these small acts that provide others with the markers by which to read my gender. By enacting gender, I am bringing it into existence. Our discomfort with individuals who do not enact gender in “appropriate ” or readable ways attests to gender’s power as an organizing social “I Can’t Lose to No Girl, Man” ❙ 131 category. The use of “mixed-up” or confused gender signals as a humoristic device, such as the androgynous character Pat on Saturday Night Live, and the prevalence of tropes of cross-gender acting as the basis for comedy —from Shakespeare’s As You Like It to Mrs. Doubtfire—highlights the work of gender. Yet this labor is actually done by all of us who choose to identify as male or female.6 In the classic comedy Some Like It Hot, we focus on the effort exerted by Jack Lemmon to disguise himself as a female without considering the work done by Norma Jean Baker to become Marilyn Monroe. The great pain we take to mark our gender differences suggests to some that males and females are actually more alike than we are different.7 Children learn early on to participate in and reconstruct gender.8 Young children are socialized through their interactions with the adult world, but they also construct gender in their own activities with peers.9 During adolescence, gender’s salience increases as budding breasts and sprouting hair mark our...

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