Becoming Women

Judith Butler stipulates that Beauvoir’s theory of earning womanhood is entrenched in the distinction between sex and gender. For Butler, performing gendered acts is in reality an action in which we create and perpetuate gendered roles. “The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness” (99). The inevitability that seems to stem from such a cyclic pattern is not reassuring, especially in a generation that considers itself liberated and progressive. If Butler’s claim that gender is continued by us as women, then it follows that our present mind-set telling us we are equal and powerful as American women is not only fiction, but a fiction we write ourselves into freely. The idea that we have reinforced our own submission in a farce of supposed freedom leaves a sick taste in my mouth, because it calls into question every choice we make as women. Maybe we don’t make choices, maybe we follow paths laid for us without thinking because we assume that we had some hand in their construction. To me, this does not seem like a far-fetched idea. It seems like reality.

One day I was speaking with a friend of mine and she told me that she wasn’t a feminist and in fact she didn’t believe in feminism because in this country, women are now equal to men and have been so for a long time. This statement was so foreign to me that at the time I couldn’t even respond. To me it was clear that women and men are not equal, especially in this country. Looking back on the conversation I can spot Judith Butler’s theory. My friend and I were both performing gender. I didn’t correct my friend or even try to explain what I felt. She dismissed feminism because she had been taught that she is free. We both are victims of the way our society shapes our thoughts and how we behave. “…to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman’ (99). If we become women by inserting ourselves into this cycle of creating gender, then we are simultaneously willing and unwilling participants in our own complacent submission. For me, this theory is nauseating because it suggests a world that completely controls our individuality to the point where we have none. Becoming a woman in fact means releasing our power to control our own lives. Our obeying the pattern of gendering roles makes us no different than women a hundred years ago, and that is a haunting thought.