Week 5- Blog Post

Question: Using any combination of articles/videos listed above and below answer these questions: What visual cues do we use to determine someone’s race or gender? And, what has shaped your ideas of race and gender that inform how you perceive someone’s racial or gender identity?

I remember being in high school when Bruce Jenner had made his big transition. A mix of emotions had poured out through the country; surprised, amused, disgusted, shocked, inspired. Many looked at the Vanity Fair article and saw a woman, but remembered the man. And for those who knew Bruce from his glory days, they couldn’t help but remember the star athlete with large biceps, short hair, a flat chest and impressive strength. But people were no longer looking at Bruce Jenner, they were staring at a magazine spread filled with images of a person with breasts, long hair, lipstick, and nail polish, wearing a corset.

From the moment we’re born, we begin picking up on visual cues that define our cultural norms. Eventually, we begin picking up on visuals that help us categorize people based on gender and sex. Short hair, pants, a button up shirt, broad shoulders, a deep voice, short finger nails, large hands, a flat chest; these are all visual hints that people may pick up on when evaluating a person as a man. Long hair, make-up, a skirt, high heels, long finger nails, a high pitched voice; hints that a person is a woman. But we could go even deeper than just appearances when categorizing gender. Depending how the person walks, talks, socializes, or even what activities the person participates in, can also provide clues. We obtain so many unconscious biases that help us to use environmental cues in order to categorize people as either male or female.

Using Bruce Jenner as an example again, we can see that visual cues were important to him as he transitioned into Caitlyn Jenner. In the article “What Makes a Woman”, by Elinor Burkett, she quotes Bruce Jenner’s interview with Diane Sawyer, where Bruce explained that he was most excited to get the change to wear nail polish. Also, in the beginning of that interview with Diane Sawyer, Bruce takes down his pony tail and says, “Ya why not, we’re talking about all this stuff, ya let’s take the damn pony tail out”. Later in the interview, Bruce explains how after public appearances, he would always go back and change into clothes that made him feel like a woman. It’s clear that Bruce associates being a woman with wearing nail polish, having long hair, and putting on dresses. But not all people who identify as a woman conform to those characteristics, and they don’t have to.

As a kid, my mother made me keep my hair cut short, for convenience, but I absolutely hated it. All of my other girl friends had beautiful long hair, and I didn’t. I begged and begged my mother to let me grow my hair out, and eventually she did, but it wasn’t until I was about four years old. By that time, I had already had it in my head that short hair was for boys and long hair was for girls. I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable having short hair because I identified as a girl and wanted the rest of society to see me as one.  

Visual cues in regards to appearances were not the only things that shaped my perceptions of one’s gender identity. There were also verbal messages from my family, from the media, and from my peers. I was told that since I was a girl, I was supposed to wear dresses, not to play rough sports, but to play with dolls as a kid and wear make-up as a teenager. All my girl friends looked and behaved that way, as did the women on television and in movies, as well as my mother and grandmothers. It became obvious very quickly who was a girl and who was a boy. But over time, as I had more exposure to different people, and became educated about gender versus sex, I realized that my black and white views about gender, were actually more grey. Seeing males dress in high heels, and women bandaging their chest caused me to reevaluate what it meant to be a woman or a man. And when I started to see transgender stories, like Caitlyn Jenner’s, I questioned the traditional gender norms that I was fed as a child. I realized physical/visual cues weren’t always the best indictor of gender.

References

Burkett, E. (2015, June 06). What Makes a Woman? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html

Bruce Jenner- The Interview [Interview by D. Sawyer]. (2015, April 24). Malibu, California: ABC News.

One thought on “Week 5- Blog Post

  1. I really like your first paragraph you articulated the event of Caitlyn’s transition very eloquently. I also like that you brought up Burkett’s point from the article, that being a woman doesn’t mean doing all the typically girly stuff and can mean a lot more than nail polish and long hair.

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