Saturday, October 25, 2008

Gender, Gender, Everywhere

Does anyone else out there ever get tired of talking about gender? I'm experiencing feminist fatigue, it's sort of like chronic fatigue, only caused by having to explain basic concepts of how to treat women like people to someone over and over again.

Right now I have an especially bad case because our roommate, lets call him Viking Boy, is strangely obsessed with gender, as if women were some sort of strange aliens. He will regularly say things like "This is man food!" or "I don't want any of that girlie salad!" with little or no irony. So I feel the need to try to explain to him that everyday activities like eating or (last night) pumpkin carving are not particularly gendered.

I attended a pumpkin carving party last night and carved a very scary bat into my pumpkin. 



Then again, I feel obligated to point out to other men that gender might be affecting how people interact with them. For example, the professor and two other TAs I'm working with this quarter are all men. I get 6-12 people showing up for my office hour each week and they get 1-2. Now there might be other factors involved like the fact that I chose a time the middle of a Thursday afternoon or that I have emphasized repeatedly to my students that they should ask for help. But considering that I get some of their students too and that another grad student (also a woman) has been helping another female student from the class with her homework, I think there is a good chance that gender might be influencing who students ask for help.

So now I'm wondering if there might be a link between men who can't seem to notice when the dishes need doing and men who can't seem to notice how gender influences their lives?

Would it help if they read Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog?



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do I ever get tired of explaining my place in the current swamp of gender identities? Hell yes! It seems to me that most folks still think only in a dualistic manner. Those outside of the female/male polarity are often simply invisible. Sometimes that is a good thing, if one is willing to be a total none entity. Well, there ya go.

May we all dare to dwell in beauty, balance and delight.