FINAL PAPER!!!!! DONE FINALLY!!!!

Jeffrey Zide

Hon. English 313

Steven Wexler

December 16, 2009

Final Paper: Gender Identity and its Creation and Enforcement through Schooling

What is Gender? Is it determined by birth or is it a choice or simply just another social construction imposed by our society? All these questions pose just another question: How is gender created? The answer is through institutions of broad authority like the education system because parents can always choose they treat or identify their children where as the education system is streamlined and uniform. I will explain in depth the extent to which the education creates gender identity and to what extent is gender identity a combination of other innate factors and instituted through other institutions. I will use a variety of texts to support my thesis. These texts will include Rules of Attractions by Bret Easton Ellis and articles and essays by Chris Barker and Judith Barker. It will also include an internet article involving a recent case where a boy in Texas was suspended from Pre-Kindergarten because the school district determined that his hair was to long. With these articles I will explain all the factors that lead education to create gender identity.

Throughout Rules of Attraction, there is a constant struggle between the identities that the main characters create when they are by themselves and those identities that are created and reinforced by their need to be accepted by their peers and teachers. One character in particular, Paul who happens to be Bisexual, is said to have a passion that “masks a shrewd pragmatism” on the back cover of this book. Thus from the very beginning, Paul has created separate identity, one that is real and one that is an artificial identity to gain acceptance among his peers but also to manipulate situations to get what he wants. His identity is essentially what gibbons from the barker book would call a postmodern identity that is composed of many fractured and often contradictory identities. With that said, because the book takes place at a small liberal arts college, characters like Paul necessarily have a certain amount of freedom with their gender identity considering that college students are considered adults and not children. However, identity is reinforced or imposed on the students by their peers in the form of acceptance or rejection. Paul is rejected in his own sexuality and his attraction to females as well as males when he decides not to have sex with Katrina, a girl he found at one of the Thirsty Thursday Parties. After Katrina “tells everyone I (Paul) couldn’t get it up, anyway.”(pg. 19-20), Paul turns his sexual energy towards and especially towards another main character, Sean.

Similarly, Lauren has her confidence strengthened by her poetry teacher, Vittorio. It is unclear if Lauren is indeed having sex with the teacher while in a relationship with Sean Bateman. However, it is clear, at least in my opinion, that this teacher makes her feel poetic and stereotypical fashion, ladylike. Her beauty or womanliness is definitely determined not by relationships with her friends like Judy, but her Romantic relationships with males: Victor, Sean and Vittorio. Interestingly, enough Vittorio only seems to be an active player in her problems with her identity when instead of offering rational and academic advice, he is more interested in getting her in between the sheets with him. Lauren’s identity is determined outside her home and is a postmodern fractured identity of multiple and often contradictory traits similar to Paul and his practical Bisexuality. ‘

It is quite obvious that while education in a small liberal arts college does create some type of gender identity, that identity will be more postmodern, fragmented and anti-essentialist that gender identities at a private elementary school. In this case, Paul and Lauren’s identities are projects of language and are used as practical ways of achieving their goals. When a child is much younger, their gender identity will mostly be an essentialist identity where they think of their identity as just they are and have always been.

In a recent event pulled from the news headlines a 4 year old boy was suspended from a pre-elementary school in Balch Springs, Texas. His name is Taylor Pugh. He was suspended from his school because he likes to grow his hair a little on the long side. The school took issue with it and promptly suspended him when he and his parents decided not to cut his hair to a buzz-cut like the school district would have preferred. Similarly, this shows how education has a large but seemingly erroneous role in shaping gender norms for students. Now, the boy prefers the name “Tater Tot” which in general is neither male nor female or masculine or feminine. In general, though school plays discursive and what Michel Foucault call an “a problem of agency” in how schools and education use political tactics to shape its policy for its students. While the principle claims that he suspended the boy because of the dress code his parents insist that many other children where their hair the same or violate the strict prep-school like dress code but never get sent home or suspended. So what is really going on here is also related to Giddens’ Structuralist theory of identity and Willis’s book Learning to Labor which defines how school masters instill in both British and American education models a sense of firm masculinity that if deviated has severe consequences for male students. I similarly did a project in eleventh grade where I took certain selections from Pink Floyd’s The Wall and explained that the wall is a reference to “a wall of masculinity” that is enforced by patriarchy and punished when the wall is brought down as time goes on. Still, the boy is suspended for something that has more to do with gender politics than to do with a basic pre-school education. The boy is four is old and he’s already expected to have hair like a Marine.

Similarly, school can also have an opposite effect reinforcing and encouraging kids to challenge notions of gender identity. According to a recent Nytimes.com article aptly titled “Can a boy where a skirt” There is something called a Mix ‘n’ match day at Ramapo High School in Spring Valley, N.Y. where students instead of “wearing polka dots with stripes, about 50 kids as cross dressers” in association with the school’s GSA. Again this is High School and not an elementary school where dress code rules are much less strict at some schools and to add teenagers’ tendency to not like rules. However, some high schools aren’t so lax even when dealing with something as inconsequential as a High School Senior Portrait

In the same a Nytimes.com article, there is a report about a girl at a Mississippi public high school who could not have her senior portrait published because she wore a tuxedo instead of the traditional black drape. The girl, Ceara Sturgis just happens to be gay and openly since 10^th grade and felt much more comfortable in a tux and felt it looked more normal than the drape. Her yearbook picture still has not been published because of the dress code.

It is quite obvious that the education system has a large effect on children’s gender identity and changing or conforming to certain mores. Similarly, transgender students have some problems adapting to strict dress codes that must “keep within their gender” Some kids are lucky though. One transgender student at a Columbus, Ohio High School named Jack who prefers to be referred with a female pronoun and who has long straight hair was mistaken for a girl in the boys’ restroom but nonetheless is relatively popular at the school.

Much of Gender is what Judith Butler would call an “imitation for which their origin.” But society in any case treats gender as if there is innate original orientation and that transgenderism and that homosexuality is just a failed imitation of heterosexuality. Yet it is clear that our generation is changing that and that Butler line of thinking may in fact be common place in a few years. The education system sets up the imitation process for gender that is reproduced or reinforced or rejected by peers and teachers. In general, I agree that gender in general in fact a sort of inverted mimesis that is flexible and entirely arbitrary.

Gender insubordination through the education system is also not uniquely western. It is clear through analysis of the Chinese Movie Summer Palace how much a university like Beijing University in China has an effect on Gender Identity of students. In the very beginning, the main character a girl named Yu (sorry professor forgot the first name) is thought by her peers to be a lesbian because of her unwavering and somewhat cold personality. Yet she befriends a woman named Li Ti who helps her on her way. Yu also helps one female student to discover her sexual desires by teaching her to masturbate. Similarly, when Li Ti has an affair with Zhou Wei, Yu is notified by campus police through another student. The police are angry and watching out for relationships because the Chinese Government discourages any romantic relationships and focus on studying and work for the government in some way. In this both peers and adults use their participation in the education system to enforce a particular set of gender identities for males and females.

Within the sex scenes it also scene that the characters bodies are discursive and subject to institutional forces that either sexualize or desexualize the female body while emphasizing strength and muscularity in male bodies. Education does this very well in terms of Physical Education and other classes. Similarly, throughout Summer Palace both male and female bodies are somewhat sexualized which is radical in that the female body is not sexualized because she is child bearing but to show Yu’s emptiness when with men other than Zhou Wei.

Body image is discursive and is a product of society just as the body itself is an image created through society. Through dress code at schools male and female gender identities are sought, imitated and re-created. As with the case of the girl who were a tux for her senior prom and the pre-school that suspended a boy for a floppy hair cut, there seems to both a want and a need for schools to determine a binary gender identity system of strictly feminine for girls and masculine for boys no matter how silly it is. In the nytimes.com article, dress code in many ways sexualizes young children’s bodies by making them the target of what is deemed to be acceptable expression and that which is “distracting”.

All these factors contribute to what Barker calls “politics of identity”. These include feminism and queer theory all of which seek to change traditional social norms in terms of how people think about gender and how people make their choices when it comes to social situations.

Michel Foucault in his historical critique of gender and of the problems posed by the idea of agency, he focuses more on identity through what he calls “techniques of the self.” In this sense he gives hope to people with issues in choosing their identities because it opens up the possibility and change and resistance to discursive gender identities imposed on children through societal institutions like schools. The knowledge of identity he argues leads to power and allows subjects “to focus attention on themselves, recognize and acknowledge themselves as subjects of identity. Thus identity has practical implications on how people live their everyday life but agency and structure also enable and limit choices to be made by school children. I’ve noticed throughout the year; the phrase “ignorance” is bliss and although Foucault argues that “knowledge=powers” that knowledge can create great confusion and distress for children how try to experiment with their gender identity.

Judith Butler makes an interesting argument about how identity is created in one of her essays “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In her view the self or the identity only becomes that self through some sort of loss. Identity is forthright created by others who have been loved and loss and the gender identity is a desire and a refusal of loss. This can explain some of my unhappiness and other gender-queer kids issues of identity when desire, loss and identification are all part of a three-sided coin. Thus identity in itself is a mimesis of others in the Freudian sense of the word that I want to be like “mommy” or “daddy”. In essence gender can be an illusory physic need for identification that sets up an approximate estimate of an illusory ideal of “man” and “women” but always ends up failing which creates a gendered identity on the surface but at it’s core is tied to the loss of a very earlier other at an earlier age in a child’s development. Seemingly that explains the sexualization of gender identity in that is quite possible that gender is actually expressed through sexual orientation of an imitation of what Butler calls “compulsory heterosexism” but that the sex is then expressed through the gender traits of masculine or feminine.

School does not want the sexualization of children but by deemphasizing any differences and imposing a uniform dress code, personal expression is necessarily limited but also confuses many children who seek to naturally express their sex through their orientation first and then their gender but by having it reversed are left to beg the question of what they really identify as in response to the loss or refusal of loss of innocence but also of earlier lovers or loved ones. Thus the binary system that is created through gender creates a fragmented self-identity that cannot figure out where they should be since in fact it is an ideal and not innate reality like common sense says that gender and sex are innate traits rather than what Butler would call “psychic excess.” Thus in reality the effects of a performance create the gender instead of the gender creating the performance.

All this can be explained by two references to the British Prep school system for boys: One by Giddens’ explanation of Learning to Labour and his theory on the duality of structure and structuration theory and a less intellectualized analysis of the lyrics and music of Pink Floyd’s the Wall. In the first example it is explained that the young resist school because they view that is irrelevant to their future because they assume the will take working class jobs (which are what they value) and since they fail it school they are necessarily restricted to those working class jobs. Thus the act of resistance to forced identity will always end in a failure since there is no innate original and just an approximation of different ideals that are constructed though language and change because of the instability of language which causes much stress and confusion for a person’s identity and mental health. Similarly, Pink Floyd’s the Wall is about how a wall of masculinity to “protect” them from harmful influence of emotion is instilled through a rigid and brutal school system or rules. Thus throughout the recording and through the loss of Pink’s (the main character) loss of his father and his struggles with education his identity is created through the effects of the loss others and the performance he puts on to deal with the losses. Thus once pink gets older and starts to resist what was once taught to him and he starts to get in touch with his “feminine” emotions the wall is brought down and he humiliated in front of his peers. In “the Trial”, the third to last track in the record the lyrics explain situation quite well: “He was caught red-handed showing feelings…feelings of an almost human nature…tear down the wall”. Thus schooling tries to limit self-expression as much as possible to build a brick and cold but functional member of society that will serve and enforce the British Patriarchy. Thus once pinks resists he is only limited to failure and cannot survive the breakdown as the wall is the only thing that kept safe from loss and that gave him a stable identity that could be used to achieve his goals.

In conclusion, gender identity is created through the loss of an other and a want to identify with that other and it is reinforced through school by limiting self-expression and challenges to authority which then in performance and craving for attention acceptance always fails in its attempt to create an “original” and is in fact a psychic mimesis of an imitation of no origin, otherwise known as a copy of another copy that failed to meet the ideal “compulsory heterosexual” identity or essential “male or female” identity.

For this problem I suggest that schools if they have a dress code have means of enforcement that do not abandon the student and their need for the expression of an identity which does not infringe on their mental health because of imposed binary gender systems that are social constructs and innate or natural to humans but are in fact a means to create a functional society of laborers.

Works Cited:

1. Ellis, Brent Easton. The Rules of Attractions.

New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1987.

2. Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies.

Chapter 9: Issues of Subjectivity and Identity. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2000.

3. Summer Palace. Dir. Lou We. N/A. N/A, 2005.
4. Butler, Judith. Chapter 7: Imitation and Gender Insubordination. N/A. N/A.
5. Carlton, Jeff. “Parents, Schools Tangle Over Boy’s Long Locks.”

Sphere 15 Dec. 2009. 16 Dec. 2009. http://www.sphere.com

6. Hoffman, Jan. “Can a boy where a skirt to school?”

New York Times 6 Nov. 2009. 18 Dec. 2009. http://www.nytimes.com

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