Final Essay English 3215: Gender in Literature
It Takes a Village
A child is conceived. Announcements are made to friends and family, congratulations are offered, hugs from everyone. As the pregnancy progresses questions like “How are you feeling?” and “When are you due?” are among the most common until around the fifth month when the questions begin to shift toward something far more socially significant. “What is it, a girl or a boy?” is most frequently asked, as if the child can’t be fully human until has been identified as either one sex or the other. Is it a boy or a girl? Will it be male or female? These two questions, while appearing to be similar, are actually quite different because sex and gender are different. A child’s sex is an anatomical fact. The reproductive organs are, in most cases, either male or female. Gender, on the other hand, is determined by culturally and socially determined attitudes about appearance and behavior which indicate whether a person is perceived as masculine or feminine. Judith Butler, in her book Gender Trouble, states “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”. This suggests the impossibility of gender authenticity. Gender identity then, is formed entirely by a cultural conditioning into perceived masculine and feminine ideals. Once born, every person encountered will influence the child’s behavior and perceptions of the cultural expectations for his or her gender. Socialization into a gendered identity begins at birth and creates an inextricable link between gender and the performance of masculine and feminine behavior.
Profound examples of gender socialization and performatives can be found in many forms of literature but for the purposes of this paper five specific works will be utilized: Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll”, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”, Mark Gonzales’ “As with Most Men”, Patrick Higgins’ “The After Hours Crowd” and Sandra Cisneros’ “Woman Hollering Creek”. The first two poems focus on feminine performative behavior, the next two focus on masculine performative behavior, and the last is a short story containing elements of both.
The influence of gender socialization from birth to five years of age is focused mainly on appropriate clothing and toys. While clothing for very young children of both sexes is designed to be equally adorable, the influence of gender norms assures that the standard is expressed in markedly different ways for each sex. Frilly little dresses for girls and tiny athletic attire for boys draw compliments from friends, family members, and even strangers praising how adorable they look. These comments are often subconsciously perceived by the parents as praise for indoctrinating their children into the social standard of gender performative behavior.
Toys are important tools in the formation of gender identity in children. In Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll” a female child is gradually, slowly, and painfully transformed into someone not only female but also feminine. As a small child she is given “miniature GE stoves and irons” (3) as well as other toys designed to direct her play toward the practice of basic housekeeping skills and childcare. In contrast, the young boys in Mark Gonzales’s “As with Most Men” are directed toward more aggressive, physical play as they are “taught to colonize at the age of 5 through gangs like cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians” (7). While children do occasionally participate in cross-gendered play, the toys provided by parents are almost exclusively culturally approved as gender appropriate. Tarja Raag’s article titled “Preschoolers' Awareness of Social Expectations of Gender” indicates that boys tend to be more averse to playing with cross-gendered toys than girls. This may be due to concern about parental disapproval, in particular, the father’s disapproval of a son’s deviation from the gendered norm, rather than a genuine lack of interest in playing with toys stoves and dishes which have been clearly designated as “girl” toys (699). The precept that boys and girls are fundamentally different has been established and the children have adapted to it seemingly without effort. Most children, by the time they reach age five, are comfortable in their gender identities and appear unaware of being restricted in their expressions.
The majority of children begin to experience the first stirrings of puberty around age twelve. This new phase of development brings with it a far more complex set of behavioral guidelines and restrictions. Kincaid’s poem “Girl” reveals the both the complexity and rigidity of the social boundaries which enclose women. In her article “Performance and the Gendered Body” Carol Bailey explains that ““Girl” is very much an induction into the community of women and an orientation into the performance of womanhood” (107). The list of lectured instructions given to the nameless and mostly silent girl range from basic housekeeping, “this how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house”, to how to deal with the consequences of sexual relationships, “this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you” and “this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it ever becomes a child”. While the girl is warned against the hazards of living a life outside acceptable social boundaries with threats of alienation and censure such as those found in the lines “after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread” and “try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming”, the true warning appears to be the avoidance of being perceived as having crossed those boundaries. This is further supported by lines such as “this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all” and “this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming” which suggest how to construct a socially approved façade of gender performance.
Both Kincaid’s girl and the boys in “The After Hours Crowd” are pressured by members of their own sex to construct a gendered façade. “American boys walk in packs playing dress up” is the first line of “The After Hours Crowd” establishing from the beginning the “dressing up” or disguising of their authentic selves in a cover of gender performance. In some ways the restrictive boundaries can often be more stringent for males than for females. The differences lie primarily in the attitudes and behaviors affected while interacting with the opposite sex. Females are conditioned to attract and entice but to remain chaste or at least maintain the pretense of chastity. Even older, more experienced women will often lie about the true number of sexual partners they’ve had to create an impression of a nearly chaste sexual history. Males, on the other hand, are conditioned to wheedle, cajole, and if that fails, to manipulate and deceive in their efforts to seek as much sexual experience as possible. In “After Hours”, Higgins stresses this with the line “get drunk, get pussy” (28) and the motivation for this display of performative masculinity is the pressure of peers expressed as “Culture bound to ignoramus / brethren, fatuous” (17-18) which acknowledges the awareness of the destructiveness in the pretense while expressing the feeling of being trapped by normative power perpetuated by others who are equally trapped.
“As With Most Men” and “Barbie Doll” share a common foundational theme. On the surface both are obvious expressions of American cultural expectations of gender roles. The first appears to be about men and their issues with intimacy and the second appears to be about women and their negative body images. However, the true message in each, their common theme, is fear; specifically, the fear of being seen as less than male or female, less than masculine or feminine.
In “Barbie Doll” the fear results in the loss of identity; she loses herself to the performance of striving for the ideal feminine. In the last two lines of the first stanza the girl reaches puberty and is criticized by a classmate who says, “You have a great big nose and fat legs” (6), causing her to fixate on the perceived shortcomings of her body. The second stanza begins by establishing her physical and intellectual competence but finishes with evidence that she has now internalized the perception of physical inferiority. “She went to and fro apologizing” (10) implies a form of self-deprecation being utilized to excuse her physically superior attributes and to create a stereotypical image of a female physically inferior to males. “Everyone saw a fat nose and thick legs” (11) can be interpreted in two ways. The first is that her peers are actually judging her as inferior because of the proportions of her legs and nose. The second possibility is that it’s only the girl’s perception is that everyone sees her as being physically misproportioned. Either way, she’s afraid and trapped in a society that is only willing to assign her value based on her ability to conform to an unachievable ideal.
The third stanza holds little surprise when, after enduring an undetermined amount of coaching to improve her performance of affected femininity, she begins to lose herself. “Her good nature wore out/ like a fan belt (15-16) indicates how she has been reduced to an object, something common, lifeless, and empty. In this society when an object is worn out we throw it away.
In the final stanza the girl is dead. We aren’t told how she died. We aren’t told it was a suicide, but we suspect. It doesn’t really matter. Look at her, on display, on satin, with “a turned-up putty nose/ dressed in a pink and white nightie (21-22)” to show everyone how feminine she looks. Her nose, now made of putty, is finally just the right size. “Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said” (23) as if her mask is all that mattered, as if her appearance defined her, like a doll, pretty on the outside but hollow inside. At least she’s not afraid anymore.
The final line “To every woman a happy ending” (25) is a warning to those among us determined to reduce other women to disposable objects with critical comments and well-meaning advice about how to act and dress and be. It’s also a warning to those who sit in silent complicity while the self-worth and self-esteem are pressured out of others. It’s a reminder that none of us are a perfect fit for the socially constructed gender paradigm, and the unending performance wears on us all.
In “As with Most Men”, it is made clear that men are socialized into creating gender performatives designed to give the impression that they are emotionally bulletproof. The lines “Bleed but do not bleed/ Cut but do not cry/ Be a man/ Join the military/ Die for your country” (9-13) provide a few examples of how males are conditioned to repress their true emotions. By the time the changes of puberty have manifested themselves a young man has already been thoroughly conditioned to refrain from any outward show that indicates a lack of emotional control. No tears when his skateboard introduces his face to the pavement. No tears when his girlfriend breaks his heart. The exception to this emotional boycott is anger. The expression of anger is the only emotion society allows those striving to be truly masculine. Anger and its violent expressions through aggressive verbal and physical confrontations remain fundamental symbols of masculinity in our society. One angry man is capable of inflicting substantial damage. In a group, the mob mentality multiplies this effect exponentially. Christopher Strain’s echoes this basic truth in his book Reload, “It is undeniable that young men in groups can enable one another to participate in increasingly heightened levels of violence” (18). He goes on to explain that if we accept violence as a predominantly male response, as we probably should given that an overwhelming majority of violent crimes in America are perpetrated by males, we also have to accept that our society must bear the responsibility for conditioning our males to behave violently. Males may be, as a result of higher levels of testosterone, more aggressive than females but it is society’s standards for masculine performatives that pushes aggressiveness into violence.
In “As with Most Men” Gonzales twice used the line “What walking contradictions are we called men” (6 and 16) to reinforce the paradoxical conundrum of the masculine façade. Like the girl in “Barbie Doll”, death may be the only way to finally measure up to the standards society requires for gendered perfection. For males, facing death without showing fear is perceived as the ultimate establishment of masculinity.
In “Woman Hollering Creek” the cultural conditioning of both the man, Juan Pedro, and the woman, Cleofilas, has reached a point where both now bear the scars associated with being forced into a gender mold too small and restrictive to allow any expressions of their authentic selves. Juan Pedro is described by Cleofilas with contradictory expressions of gender performatives such as his weeping in remorse after each occurrence of beating her, and “This man who farts and belches and snores as well as laughs and kisses and holds her”(2824). While he is emotionally trapped in society’s gender expectations of him, she is restricted both physically and emotionally. The limitations of women’s traditional gender roles have her trapped in a community structured around male entitlement and she is has been silenced by the need to appear as a proper representation of femininity. Her bruises express the need for escape that she can’t verbalize. A woman she doesn’t know helps her to freedom and in the process shows her that not all women conform to the expected gender roles of society. In breaking the bonds of performative expectation, Cleofilas finds her voice and rediscovers herself. Juan Pedro is left alone with his anger and his shame. There can be no escape for him.
Most people are blissfully unaware they’re suffering from a case of gendered Stockholm Syndrome; the current societal expectations of gender have been the standard for so long that they now seem natural rather than the artificial constructs they actually are. People can’t attempt to escape if they don’t know that they can, or understand that they should, be free. Culturally based gender norms determine the extent to which the true self is repressed in an effort to conform. Since performative gender identities preclude absolute gender authenticity in both males and females, all that remains are varying degrees of gender inauthenticity. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily destructive or subversive to a person’s sense of self. The danger lies in the creation and perpetuation of unattainable or unhealthy gender paradigms. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is an apt description of society’s role in shaping and defining the behavior and attitudes of its children as they grow into their gender roles and learn the boundaries of socially acceptable expressions of gender identity. Those just entering the world have an opportunity to live a more authentic and genuine life if we open our minds and expand the boundaries of acceptable gender behavior. Dress baby girls in blue and boys in pink. Encourage children to play with whichever toys and in whatever ways seems most natural to them. We can not eliminate the connection between gender and performance but perhaps by increasing our awareness of its power we can reshape it to allow for a healthier expression of identity.
Works Cited
Bailey, Carol. "Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” and Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton
Spice." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10.2 (2010): 106-23. MLA International Bibliography. Web.
22 Apr. 2012.
Butler, Judith. "Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance." Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990. 25. Print.
Cisneros, Sandra. "Woman Hollering Creek." 1991. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 2820-827. Print.
Gonzales, Mark. "As With Most Men." Beholders.org - Body, Mind & Spirit. Beholders.org. Web. 12 Apr. 2012.
<http://www.beholders.org/mind/poetryandshortstories/132- aswithmostmen.html>.
Higgins, Patrick D. "The After Hours Crowd." Foreword. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. By
Michael S. Kimmel. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.
Kincaid, Jamaica. "Girl." The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-century American Short Story. Ed. Blanche H. Gelfant.
New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 316-18. Print
Piercy, Marge. "Barbie Doll." Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy. New York: Knopf, 1982. 92. Print.
Raag, Tarja, and Christine L. Rackliff. "Preschoolers' Awareness of Social Expectations of Gender: Relationships to Toy
Choices." Sex Roles 38.9-10 (1998): 685-700.Academic Search Premier. Web. 22 Apr. 2012.
Strain, Christopher B. "The Violence of American Masculinity." Reload: Rethinking Violence in American Life. Nashville:
Vanderbilt UP, 2010. 15-16. Print.
A child is conceived. Announcements are made to friends and family, congratulations are offered, hugs from everyone. As the pregnancy progresses questions like “How are you feeling?” and “When are you due?” are among the most common until around the fifth month when the questions begin to shift toward something far more socially significant. “What is it, a girl or a boy?” is most frequently asked, as if the child can’t be fully human until has been identified as either one sex or the other. Is it a boy or a girl? Will it be male or female? These two questions, while appearing to be similar, are actually quite different because sex and gender are different. A child’s sex is an anatomical fact. The reproductive organs are, in most cases, either male or female. Gender, on the other hand, is determined by culturally and socially determined attitudes about appearance and behavior which indicate whether a person is perceived as masculine or feminine. Judith Butler, in her book Gender Trouble, states “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”. This suggests the impossibility of gender authenticity. Gender identity then, is formed entirely by a cultural conditioning into perceived masculine and feminine ideals. Once born, every person encountered will influence the child’s behavior and perceptions of the cultural expectations for his or her gender. Socialization into a gendered identity begins at birth and creates an inextricable link between gender and the performance of masculine and feminine behavior.
Profound examples of gender socialization and performatives can be found in many forms of literature but for the purposes of this paper five specific works will be utilized: Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll”, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”, Mark Gonzales’ “As with Most Men”, Patrick Higgins’ “The After Hours Crowd” and Sandra Cisneros’ “Woman Hollering Creek”. The first two poems focus on feminine performative behavior, the next two focus on masculine performative behavior, and the last is a short story containing elements of both.
The influence of gender socialization from birth to five years of age is focused mainly on appropriate clothing and toys. While clothing for very young children of both sexes is designed to be equally adorable, the influence of gender norms assures that the standard is expressed in markedly different ways for each sex. Frilly little dresses for girls and tiny athletic attire for boys draw compliments from friends, family members, and even strangers praising how adorable they look. These comments are often subconsciously perceived by the parents as praise for indoctrinating their children into the social standard of gender performative behavior.
Toys are important tools in the formation of gender identity in children. In Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll” a female child is gradually, slowly, and painfully transformed into someone not only female but also feminine. As a small child she is given “miniature GE stoves and irons” (3) as well as other toys designed to direct her play toward the practice of basic housekeeping skills and childcare. In contrast, the young boys in Mark Gonzales’s “As with Most Men” are directed toward more aggressive, physical play as they are “taught to colonize at the age of 5 through gangs like cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians” (7). While children do occasionally participate in cross-gendered play, the toys provided by parents are almost exclusively culturally approved as gender appropriate. Tarja Raag’s article titled “Preschoolers' Awareness of Social Expectations of Gender” indicates that boys tend to be more averse to playing with cross-gendered toys than girls. This may be due to concern about parental disapproval, in particular, the father’s disapproval of a son’s deviation from the gendered norm, rather than a genuine lack of interest in playing with toys stoves and dishes which have been clearly designated as “girl” toys (699). The precept that boys and girls are fundamentally different has been established and the children have adapted to it seemingly without effort. Most children, by the time they reach age five, are comfortable in their gender identities and appear unaware of being restricted in their expressions.
The majority of children begin to experience the first stirrings of puberty around age twelve. This new phase of development brings with it a far more complex set of behavioral guidelines and restrictions. Kincaid’s poem “Girl” reveals the both the complexity and rigidity of the social boundaries which enclose women. In her article “Performance and the Gendered Body” Carol Bailey explains that ““Girl” is very much an induction into the community of women and an orientation into the performance of womanhood” (107). The list of lectured instructions given to the nameless and mostly silent girl range from basic housekeeping, “this how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house”, to how to deal with the consequences of sexual relationships, “this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you” and “this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it ever becomes a child”. While the girl is warned against the hazards of living a life outside acceptable social boundaries with threats of alienation and censure such as those found in the lines “after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread” and “try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming”, the true warning appears to be the avoidance of being perceived as having crossed those boundaries. This is further supported by lines such as “this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all” and “this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming” which suggest how to construct a socially approved façade of gender performance.
Both Kincaid’s girl and the boys in “The After Hours Crowd” are pressured by members of their own sex to construct a gendered façade. “American boys walk in packs playing dress up” is the first line of “The After Hours Crowd” establishing from the beginning the “dressing up” or disguising of their authentic selves in a cover of gender performance. In some ways the restrictive boundaries can often be more stringent for males than for females. The differences lie primarily in the attitudes and behaviors affected while interacting with the opposite sex. Females are conditioned to attract and entice but to remain chaste or at least maintain the pretense of chastity. Even older, more experienced women will often lie about the true number of sexual partners they’ve had to create an impression of a nearly chaste sexual history. Males, on the other hand, are conditioned to wheedle, cajole, and if that fails, to manipulate and deceive in their efforts to seek as much sexual experience as possible. In “After Hours”, Higgins stresses this with the line “get drunk, get pussy” (28) and the motivation for this display of performative masculinity is the pressure of peers expressed as “Culture bound to ignoramus / brethren, fatuous” (17-18) which acknowledges the awareness of the destructiveness in the pretense while expressing the feeling of being trapped by normative power perpetuated by others who are equally trapped.
“As With Most Men” and “Barbie Doll” share a common foundational theme. On the surface both are obvious expressions of American cultural expectations of gender roles. The first appears to be about men and their issues with intimacy and the second appears to be about women and their negative body images. However, the true message in each, their common theme, is fear; specifically, the fear of being seen as less than male or female, less than masculine or feminine.
In “Barbie Doll” the fear results in the loss of identity; she loses herself to the performance of striving for the ideal feminine. In the last two lines of the first stanza the girl reaches puberty and is criticized by a classmate who says, “You have a great big nose and fat legs” (6), causing her to fixate on the perceived shortcomings of her body. The second stanza begins by establishing her physical and intellectual competence but finishes with evidence that she has now internalized the perception of physical inferiority. “She went to and fro apologizing” (10) implies a form of self-deprecation being utilized to excuse her physically superior attributes and to create a stereotypical image of a female physically inferior to males. “Everyone saw a fat nose and thick legs” (11) can be interpreted in two ways. The first is that her peers are actually judging her as inferior because of the proportions of her legs and nose. The second possibility is that it’s only the girl’s perception is that everyone sees her as being physically misproportioned. Either way, she’s afraid and trapped in a society that is only willing to assign her value based on her ability to conform to an unachievable ideal.
The third stanza holds little surprise when, after enduring an undetermined amount of coaching to improve her performance of affected femininity, she begins to lose herself. “Her good nature wore out/ like a fan belt (15-16) indicates how she has been reduced to an object, something common, lifeless, and empty. In this society when an object is worn out we throw it away.
In the final stanza the girl is dead. We aren’t told how she died. We aren’t told it was a suicide, but we suspect. It doesn’t really matter. Look at her, on display, on satin, with “a turned-up putty nose/ dressed in a pink and white nightie (21-22)” to show everyone how feminine she looks. Her nose, now made of putty, is finally just the right size. “Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said” (23) as if her mask is all that mattered, as if her appearance defined her, like a doll, pretty on the outside but hollow inside. At least she’s not afraid anymore.
The final line “To every woman a happy ending” (25) is a warning to those among us determined to reduce other women to disposable objects with critical comments and well-meaning advice about how to act and dress and be. It’s also a warning to those who sit in silent complicity while the self-worth and self-esteem are pressured out of others. It’s a reminder that none of us are a perfect fit for the socially constructed gender paradigm, and the unending performance wears on us all.
In “As with Most Men”, it is made clear that men are socialized into creating gender performatives designed to give the impression that they are emotionally bulletproof. The lines “Bleed but do not bleed/ Cut but do not cry/ Be a man/ Join the military/ Die for your country” (9-13) provide a few examples of how males are conditioned to repress their true emotions. By the time the changes of puberty have manifested themselves a young man has already been thoroughly conditioned to refrain from any outward show that indicates a lack of emotional control. No tears when his skateboard introduces his face to the pavement. No tears when his girlfriend breaks his heart. The exception to this emotional boycott is anger. The expression of anger is the only emotion society allows those striving to be truly masculine. Anger and its violent expressions through aggressive verbal and physical confrontations remain fundamental symbols of masculinity in our society. One angry man is capable of inflicting substantial damage. In a group, the mob mentality multiplies this effect exponentially. Christopher Strain’s echoes this basic truth in his book Reload, “It is undeniable that young men in groups can enable one another to participate in increasingly heightened levels of violence” (18). He goes on to explain that if we accept violence as a predominantly male response, as we probably should given that an overwhelming majority of violent crimes in America are perpetrated by males, we also have to accept that our society must bear the responsibility for conditioning our males to behave violently. Males may be, as a result of higher levels of testosterone, more aggressive than females but it is society’s standards for masculine performatives that pushes aggressiveness into violence.
In “As with Most Men” Gonzales twice used the line “What walking contradictions are we called men” (6 and 16) to reinforce the paradoxical conundrum of the masculine façade. Like the girl in “Barbie Doll”, death may be the only way to finally measure up to the standards society requires for gendered perfection. For males, facing death without showing fear is perceived as the ultimate establishment of masculinity.
In “Woman Hollering Creek” the cultural conditioning of both the man, Juan Pedro, and the woman, Cleofilas, has reached a point where both now bear the scars associated with being forced into a gender mold too small and restrictive to allow any expressions of their authentic selves. Juan Pedro is described by Cleofilas with contradictory expressions of gender performatives such as his weeping in remorse after each occurrence of beating her, and “This man who farts and belches and snores as well as laughs and kisses and holds her”(2824). While he is emotionally trapped in society’s gender expectations of him, she is restricted both physically and emotionally. The limitations of women’s traditional gender roles have her trapped in a community structured around male entitlement and she is has been silenced by the need to appear as a proper representation of femininity. Her bruises express the need for escape that she can’t verbalize. A woman she doesn’t know helps her to freedom and in the process shows her that not all women conform to the expected gender roles of society. In breaking the bonds of performative expectation, Cleofilas finds her voice and rediscovers herself. Juan Pedro is left alone with his anger and his shame. There can be no escape for him.
Most people are blissfully unaware they’re suffering from a case of gendered Stockholm Syndrome; the current societal expectations of gender have been the standard for so long that they now seem natural rather than the artificial constructs they actually are. People can’t attempt to escape if they don’t know that they can, or understand that they should, be free. Culturally based gender norms determine the extent to which the true self is repressed in an effort to conform. Since performative gender identities preclude absolute gender authenticity in both males and females, all that remains are varying degrees of gender inauthenticity. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily destructive or subversive to a person’s sense of self. The danger lies in the creation and perpetuation of unattainable or unhealthy gender paradigms. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is an apt description of society’s role in shaping and defining the behavior and attitudes of its children as they grow into their gender roles and learn the boundaries of socially acceptable expressions of gender identity. Those just entering the world have an opportunity to live a more authentic and genuine life if we open our minds and expand the boundaries of acceptable gender behavior. Dress baby girls in blue and boys in pink. Encourage children to play with whichever toys and in whatever ways seems most natural to them. We can not eliminate the connection between gender and performance but perhaps by increasing our awareness of its power we can reshape it to allow for a healthier expression of identity.
Works Cited
Bailey, Carol. "Performance and the Gendered Body in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” and Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton
Spice." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10.2 (2010): 106-23. MLA International Bibliography. Web.
22 Apr. 2012.
Butler, Judith. "Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance." Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990. 25. Print.
Cisneros, Sandra. "Woman Hollering Creek." 1991. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 2820-827. Print.
Gonzales, Mark. "As With Most Men." Beholders.org - Body, Mind & Spirit. Beholders.org. Web. 12 Apr. 2012.
<http://www.beholders.org/mind/poetryandshortstories/132- aswithmostmen.html>.
Higgins, Patrick D. "The After Hours Crowd." Foreword. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. By
Michael S. Kimmel. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.
Kincaid, Jamaica. "Girl." The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-century American Short Story. Ed. Blanche H. Gelfant.
New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 316-18. Print
Piercy, Marge. "Barbie Doll." Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy. New York: Knopf, 1982. 92. Print.
Raag, Tarja, and Christine L. Rackliff. "Preschoolers' Awareness of Social Expectations of Gender: Relationships to Toy
Choices." Sex Roles 38.9-10 (1998): 685-700.Academic Search Premier. Web. 22 Apr. 2012.
Strain, Christopher B. "The Violence of American Masculinity." Reload: Rethinking Violence in American Life. Nashville:
Vanderbilt UP, 2010. 15-16. Print.