ekaterinn

"Sex is what you are born with, and gender is what social context makes you."

After that quick elaboration on the difference between sex and gender in my Making of 16th Century Identity class, I got to thinking. I've always been interested in how you can change your gender in different social contexts. In retrospect, I suppose I can blame Tamora Pierce's wonderful Lioness Rampant Quartet. This set of books is about Alanna, a young girl (granted she is also rich and a noble in her own right, which gives her certain advantages) who wants to become a knight. But girls aren't allowed to become knights, so she changes her name to Alan, cuts her hair, binds her breasts, and becomes a page (which is the first step to becoming a knight). Of course, everybody thinks that she is male, so they treat her as male. She has effectively changed her gender.

Thanks to my fascination with the Quartet, I've often played (and I think play is the right word, for the prospect of having opposite sex and gender is fun and exciting as well as transgressing. In fact, the point that it is transgressing is part of what makes it exciting. Though, of course, the dressing-op part is fun too. *winks*) with certain amount of gender-changing myself. I went last year to two anime cons dressed as Miki, a male character from the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena. I really enjoyed the experience and I experimented with walking and acting as guy generally, and as Miki particularly. I also play mostly male characters in online RPGs and plan to go as Touma, a male character from Gravitation, to my next con. But through I have fun dressing up as and playing male characters, I don't want to be a guy. Nor am I especially "guyish". I like wearing long skirts and putting on makeup. But I'm not especially "girlish" either. I have really short hair and you're just as likely to see me without makeup as with. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that my desire to transgress the social boundaries of gender in certain contexts have almost nothing to do with how I act and dress in everyday life.

Yet, the examples I gave of how I ordinarily express my gender gives rise to the question: what defines gender exactly? Can there be more than two genders? A gender for each social context? By wearing a skirt but having short hair and no makeup, am I still transgressing the social boundaries of gender without dressing up as a man? When I dressed up as Miki, most people still recognized that my sex was female. Does this recognition mean that I hadn't changed genders at all, that in the open social context of an anime convention it was accepted that a girl could represent a male character (or vice versa)? In the second book of the Lioness Rampant Quartet, Alanna learns the female social skills from a friendly woman who is in on her secret, and armed with makeup and a wig, spends a couple of evenings at court as mysterious, beautiful lady. She is a girl masquerading as a male apprentice knight disguised as a lady. What is her real gender, then? And what about transgendered people? Do they count as a separate gender?

There's also an issue of power. I felt powerful in placing myself in the fantasy of the girl disguised as boy in order to gain education and privileges not associated with being female. Alanna, as Alan, has more power than she usually would have had. She also has a subtle revenge (though she doesn't see it as such) against the powerful male figures at the end of the second book when she becomes a fully-fledged knight. She's successfully transgressed the boundaries and as a reward, she has all the power the males have. But I think there is also power in simply pretending to be the opposite of what you are. My friend Hugh has told me that he had fun dressing up as girl for a party and thus the feeling of power may also partly come from stepping over the line that separates female and male.

Transgressing the boundaries also leads to questions of identity. Who am I if my gender doesn't match my sex? If I'm pretending to be male, am I just me but male? Or does maleness and femaleness define who we are? Do what extent does gender determine identity? At the end of the Quartet, Alanna has reclaimed her female gender, but is still accepted as a knight and warrior. We also find that there are a few girls openly training to be knights. In this instance, we see that Alanna has successfully changed the identities of knights from male figures to warriors of either gender. So then, are both gender and identity mutable?

I don't think I'll be able to answer any of these questions. It's kind of disquieting that I can't and even more disturbing to realise that any answers I could make just raise new questions. Who am I, really? Who are we all?