Being Gaga


              I remember as a kid I hated wearing any form of pink. My parents always tried to dress me up in pink dresses and pink hair ties. I didn’t really hate the color pink I just hated the fact that I was being forced to wear it because I was a girl. The topic of gender norms is discussed a lot. It’s the fact that young girls must wear pink and play with Barbie dolls while boys must like blue and play with trucks.

              Gender norms, according to Dean Spade creator of “Impossibility Now”, is a system that operates as social control creating roles and routines for a specific gender. It’s a system that basically decides what’s right for that gender. However, these gender roles enforced by society often leave out “the other”. Spade discusses how the people who don’t fit into these gender roles are categorized as suspects or disruptive because they are different.

              Spade makes the bold statement in his video that “gay is the new black”. What he means by this is the fact that people of color have had to fight long and hard throughout history to be treated like a human being with equal rights. Spade is saying that by identifying as a queer person means that you’re going to have to fight for your rights and fight for the right to be treated like a human being.

              In connection to this Jack Halberstam has a point when saying that we need to retrain our adults instead of trying to retrain our children. We need to stop seeing people as being different as a problem and casting them aside with the label of different. Like Halberstam says, we need to go gaga “letting go many of [our] most basic assumptions about people, bodies, and desires.”
 
-Tatiana F.
 

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 21, 2017 at 8:31 PM

    Tatiana,
    I love your commentary about when you were young and did not want to wear pink. I think that is so important to talk about because I feel like we think only the most radical people reject these norms as kids, and that is just not true. It also shows just how *bunk* our gendered society is. I like pink, but not because I am a girl. I like blue too, I'm sure you feel me. ily.

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