Gender is a perplexing notion to all of us and one which we struggle with in our daily lives and here on Feministing.  Recently we've been contemplating the idea of gender essentialism and how it manifests itself under the surface, circumventing our best intentions and influencing our decisions.

I think what is so particularly confounding about gender is that it is purely a construct rather than an established fact.  What is male or what is female depends on the person, depends on the context, depends on the situation, and depends on a series of free-floating variables.  What is masculine or what is feminine, I suppose, is up for debate and if surveyed, everyone would have his or her own answer.  However, we all feel compelled to act our assigned gender and are frequently the target of messages which attempt to shame or to otherwise manipulate the fluidity of gender and, for that matter, gender identity.

As I've mentioned before, I have a particularly tortured sense of gender identity as a result of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of an older man, thankfully now deceased.  My feelings towards masculinity are overwhelmingly negative and indeed, from the vantage point of several years and lots of therapy, I recognize I came to hate masculinity and hate my own gender, while simulataneously idealizing femininity and women.  In my teens, girlfriends found themselves placed up high, a position they found uncomfortable, yet they frequently kept me around even when I wasn't wanted because I could always be counted on to stroke their egos and suppliant their insecurities.  At the time, I never questioned what the practice said about whom.

The point of this anecdote is merely to illustrate how one person's conception of gender creates a highly individual view of humanity and the world itself.  Indeed, the more I analyze human perception of any sort, the more I wonder that we see anything in common at all and can manage to find any shared humanity whatsoever.  Part of Feminism is trying to make sense out of the seemingly senseless and challenging existant power structures.  Facts, data, and events move us towards a greater understanding, but personal anecdote often speaks more powerfully to me, since I personally think of gender studies as an effort to decipher a very large riddle and a frequently moving target.  It is in that spirit that I offer this musing.

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