by Chloe Hansen
In the summer of 2008 I went clothes shopping with my mom. Although somewhat rare, this event was not necessarily noteworthy in and of itself. There was, however, an interesting encounter, or near encounter I should say, in a department store dressing room that made an otherwise completely forgettable trip to the mall at least somewhat significant.
The mall was extremely busy on this particular day, so my mother and I headed down to the lingerie department dressing room in the hopes of finding a shorter line. Sure enough, we got in with very little wait. I was in my little room trying on a variety of shirts and pants, when a store employee entered the dressing room and loudly proclaimed that she thought she had seen a young man enter and informed all who could hear that this particular dressing room was for women only. She paused only briefly and then re-asked if there were any males in the room. I, secure in my identity as a female, thought nothing of it and went about my business trying to visualize my wardrobe and how this particular sweater would fit in.
After several moments the store employee restated her concern over a male presence in the lingerie fitting room and it wasn’t until this third announcement that I realized she was talking about me. My head freshly shaved, I was wearing a plaid button-up shirt, long blue shorts and high-top sneakers that day; seen at a quick glance, and from behind in particular, I looked like a boy. As this awareness dawned on me I felt an incredible sense of shame. I wasn’t embarrassed to have been mistaken for the wrong gender per se, that was a fairly common occurrence at that time in my life. What bothered me was the public nature of this mistake in particular. I envisioned stepping out of my personal fitting room and being accosted by the woman, or other customers, and having to explain that despite appearances I was in fact a woman. All in front of my mom, no less, which was perhaps the most embarrassing part: the thought that she might have to defend her own daughter’s female-ness.
None of those things happened, as it turned out. The store employee eventually gave up; I finished trying on my clothes and walked out of the fitting room without issue. That was the first time in my life, though, that I had ever really been conscious of my fashion sense (or lack there of, as it were) and how it relates to the way I perform my gender. Conscious in a bad way, I should say, because to a certain extent I am conscious of it every time I shop for clothes in the men’s section. But this experience in the mall was the first time I ever felt that other people were angry, or had the potential to be angered, by my rejection of a feminine aesthetic.
In this culture, as in all cultures, gender is not necessarily biologically defined but is performed. Being a woman is not simply based upon having breasts or ovaries (do hysterectomies or mastectomies strip the individual of her gender?) or the lack of testicles (is a castrated man still male?), but is instead much more complicated than that. To be a male means something: there are expectation as to how men should act, what men should wear, who men should desire, the activities that men are expected to engage in. Sure, some communities are more accepting of deviances in this sense, but, to take a very basic example, the majority of Western men stand up to pee, even in the most liberal communities. Why? This is not a biological necessity, it’s not as if men have to be vertical in order to urinate. Most do it because that’s how they were taught to go to the bathroom. It’s what men do. It makes sense. And women sit down or squat to pee. That’s just the way it is.
All of these gendered assumptions are based upon learned cultural values. You learn from a very young age how to be male or how to be female and that definition, that category to which you now belong, regulates the way you walk down the street, the way you talk, the way you look at and interact with the world. Beyond such gendering as giving little boys action figures and girls dolls, how to be a girl or a boy is prescribed, taught and then performed. What our physical bodies do or don’t do, can or can’t do is learned: women’s hips sway when they walk, men’s balls itch / need readjustment but women’s crotches don’t need such daily, moment to moment maintenance, the female orgasm is rare or difficult to achieve, women speak and laugh in higher pitches… There are of course obvious genetic, physical differences between the sexes but the way we make sense of and interact with these differences is culturally defined and passed down from generation to generation. And those who deviate are disciplined.
In some cases there are categories for those who to a certain extent straddle these definitions, but these too prescribe what is and isn’t allowed. Little girls who act like little boys are called tomboys, for example, and as such are expected to be a certain way, to engage in certain activities and reject others, including an eventual ‘growing out of’ these behaviors. Societies learn to make sense of these ‘in betweeners’, giving them names and labels in order to normalize and make them intelligible. So when people looked at me in the summer of 2008, once recognizing me as female, they assumed I was a butch lesbian so as to make sense of my actions and speech, to fit me into a predictable category that would explain why I didn’t ‘look like a woman’ or say the things a normal, straight female would say.
Those who deviate, those who don’t easily fit into an intelligible category challenge what it means to be a man or a woman. This is the only explanation for the anger that most have felt at one time or another over those who make us uncomfortable in this way. It’s a reaction to the calling into question of the most basic assumptions on which our identities are founded. So while drag queens don’t literally affect the gendered performances of others, it does call attention to the fact that what it means to be a man is not set or actually defined in any way, that it is in fact culturally learned and performed, which is to say malleable and ripe for contestation.