Gender Language, images, and contexts Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Gender Language, images, and contexts - Essay Example Transgender activists and gender theorists have been vocal in advocating for an abolition of gender to free the society from the bonds of arbitrary behavioural norms that define gender. The assumption of gender to be a system consisting of two exclusively opposite categories in which people are placed is simple and does not give the full definition of what encompasses gender. The difference between the art and nature of gender is transsexual and non-transsexual aspects of gender. Transsexual gender is the physical change of people’s sexuality to be who they feel they are. On its part, natural gender is the acceptance and appreciation of what the society defines us to be. Non-transsexual theorists are ignorant of the form that a transsexual person undertakes after going through the physical change. The femininity and the masculinity according to them are naturally the actual aspects of defining gender. The art of changing one’s sexuality does little in changing who one i s. They refer to the Godliness of the act and the creativity aspect of the whole process. To transsexual theorists, creativity is evident when mankind begin exercising power of creativity, the power to increase our vocabulary, power to change our environment, our clothing as well as our bodies. She acknowledges that both the art and the nature of gen der reside in an individual person. The author seeks to address the issue of gender from the inside of a person and how this affects a person’s acts and performances. By linking the soul to an individual’s performances, the politics of the body are inherent there in. The article shows that desires of the soul define exactly what gender a particular person belongs to. Analysis The author believes that gender is not naturally what the society has bestowed upon the individual, but the actions of the individual from desires of the soul. The soul is the centre of everything it generates the actions that a person is likely to fo llow subconsciously and determines the social performances that depict one to be either male or female. The biological characteristics do not have much influence on gender determinants. Raising the argument a notch higher, the article holds that acts, desires, and gestures give birth to an internal substance, which is produced on the outside surface of the body, although they never reveal but suggest the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such signs, gestures, or enactments according to the article are performative, meaning that the identity that they claim to express are not original, but rather manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs among other means. This means that what is outwardly expressed is in fact from the inside, and that the outward signs are simply fabrications of the inner expressions. The argument that the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and that the true gander is nothing but just a fantasy instituted on the surface of the body, then gend er cannot be either true or false. For instance, being feminine is not a cultural tag placed upon the individual woman, but rather, the actins seen on the surface of a person that are characterized to be feminine are actually from within the soul. The Contemporary Transgender Movement Abstract The paper aims at examining what the existing social movement literature can teach on collective identities. Traditional community has classified gender in