Final Question #1
Normativity: Passing as Straight and Privilege
Growing up, I consistently faced a conflict between who I was and who I was allowed to be, a conflict which was steeped in enactments of concepts relating to gender and society. My parents are both deeply committee to gender roles, both for themselves and their children, and my brother and sister are near perfect portrayals of societal expectations of their respective genders. I, however, am not.
When I was ten years old, I wore basketball shorts and polos almost daily. I liked baseball and screamed at the TV with my father and brother during football games. I was not the perfect daughter that my mother wanted, and her frustration showed. As a gay woman who does not fit perfectly within the gender binary, I have experienced significant pressure within the space of my family to conform to gendered norms, but I have also benefitted from my normative femininity to some degree in spaces like high school.
Within my family, I was the outlier in regards to gender expression. I spent more time with my brother and father than my mother and sister, and I was consistently more comfortable in traditionally male spaces than most of my female peers. I was subjected to actions meant to help me conform to the gender binary, or the normalized dichotomous spaces and actions that are acceptable for either men or women, but not both, mostly by my mother, who would chastise me for acting “unladylike” and put me in feminine spaces. For example, I played baseball longer than any girls in my town’s league, and remained able to compete with the boys until I was 11, when my mother made me switch to softball so that I played a female sport, in order to match the expectations of society as a whole.
I also faced norming of my behavior to better align with the standards of emphasized femininity, or the exaggerated portrayal of womanhood which is seen as most desirable in American culture. My older sister, who largely embodied emphasized femininity, would bring dresses home from the mall or put makeup on me, solely to serve the goal of me becoming more traditionally feminine. I was also taught to make my voice higher, simply to fit in more easily, which is a habit I still unconsciously enact. My mother wanted me to spend more time in feminine spaces, away from the masculine space of athletics. These decisions, like many actions taken to normalize kids, still have real effects on how I present myself and how I feel about many of my passions and choices.
However, in other spaces, like high school, and by extension, family, I benefitted from my ability to pass as fitting within the gender binary. I was, and am, not visibly gay. Because of this, I rarely faced penalty for breaking from the expected heterosexuality of emphasized femininity. Likewise, the girls that I went out with were all similarly able to pass as straight so when we were out together we didn’t face harassment as a visibly gay couple.
My experience in high school was also affected by the power dynamics between me and my peers as the president of my high school’s student government. Because I accessed and embodied this power, I served to normalize homosexuality within our community. Without my dominance in the traditionally male space of leadership, my existence outside of the standards of emphasized femininity would likely have been more noticeable and penalized further.
While I faced penalties for breaking the societal standards that my family expected me to uphold, I also rebelled in subtle ways. Though I changed as I got older, as a child I was adamant about dressing in specific ways that were traditionally masculine, embodying the tomboy controlling image. I also subtly rebelled by dedicating my time to athletics, particularly softball, a sport that is stereotypically known as attracting lesbians. Playing what was thought of as a “gay” sport gave me significant cover in expressing my sexuality, because lesbianism fit in with the expectations of the softball community as a whole. My time spent on core athletics over artistic forms of physical expression also led me away from emphasized femininity in that I had to develop masculine looking motions and the sport encouraged masculine forms of movement. With the cover of fitting within a specific group, I was able to rebel against the larger societal standards put on me by my family.