How I Learned About My Own Internalized Misogyny from Playing Touch Football with
the Guys in Second and Third Grades and Why I Used to Hate the Color Pink because I
Thought I Was Supposed To.
I have a vivid memory of a parent-teacher meeting in the second grade wherein my teacher explained to my mom that I was distracting the little boys by flipping upside down on the monkey bars while wearing a dress. While I find it incredibly hard to believe that second grade boys actually cared enough to look, I understand this to be one of the many things that contributed to my waged war against the color pink when I was little and ultimately serious internalized misogyny. And further, the entire concept of my battle still enforced a gender dichotomy that is entirely performative, and my attempts to counter the norm were equally performative, if not more. When I was even younger, favorite princesses were basically astrological signs. Glittery pop-up books were the Bible. By the time touch football was legalized at recess, the performative aspect of gender began to surface even more as the divisions were more distinct, and we collectively decided to hate the color pink, mostly because the boys hated the color pink, and the boys were inherently more socially powerful. Unprompted, my friends and I would mercilessly insult the color, disavow any mention of “Hello Kitty,” and ridicule even the thought of glitter on any garment. To us, pink was associated with the delicate nature of femininity. I could not simultaneously play touch football with the guys and not be against the color. I couldn’t prove to the boys that I “get it” and simultaneously succumb to being a fan of what is apparently the scarlet letter of womanhood. All of this context begs the question: how do we navigate femininity in a world where gender seems a construct? Audre Lorde describes an experience in her childhood where her family traveled to
Washington D.C. and she made many notes of the whiteness surrounding her. Paralleling
Lorde’s moments of escaping childhood, a world painted in a glossy shade of pink was peeling.
She mentions many of the shockingly white things she noticed on her trip. While they were at an ice cream shop, her family was kicked out because they didn’t serve black people, which was the most notable experience in the essay. She said that “I viewed Julys through an agonizing corolla of dazzling whiteness and I always hated the Fourth of July…” hinting at her hatred for the white things, yet a sense of internalized bias towards the color white. In a world riddled by segregation and Jim Crow, as a child all she saw in D.C. were those white things and had to grow into them.
Once a child internalizes all the glorious statues of our Founders in pasty eggshell, clean white streets, and media bias towards white people, the association forms. While this comparison between white and pink is certainly flawed because of the history blatant discrimination against black people in America, it holds true that continuing to associate images of the oppressed with oppression only perpetuates the oppression, and internalized racism or misogyny then arise.
Once associations between the color pink both with femininity and weakness are formed, we began to perpetuate those associations until we believed them. I remember around the same time as the monkey bar incident, a girl in my grade told me that her favorite color was brown. I literally can not imagine a world in which anybody’s favorite color is brown. I understand why she said it, though. A natural sense of synesthesia exists in most of us; we prefer certain colors, and those colors that we prefer are indicative of some aspect of our personality. In order to counter any performance of femininity, she named the least feminine color she could think of in order to separate herself from the constraints of her gender, and the role that comes along with it. I don’t know what colors in the world she genuinely found pleasing and which colors actually brought her joy, I just know that by saying the exact opposite of what she was expected to, she proved herself to a judgmental group of little boys who could not be bothered with the sensitivity and romanticism of the color pink (and, apparently, womanhood.)
This mentality is clearly limiting, and even more proof of the ways in which performing gender is a hindrance. The documentary Paris is Burning focuses on a drag club in New York City where mostly African-American, Latinx, gay, and transgender queens come together to celebrate themselves in a safe and accepting venue. After watching this documentary I found myself having a vogue-off with a random person at my school’s matriculation party that ended up with a respectable yet decently painful death drop on my end. The entire concept of the club is performative, which is part of the fun. Many of them dress up with the goal of embodying what they feel a woman is in the most accurate way possible. Is even this perpetuating the dangerous aspect of the concept of gender? The queens are some of the most authentic people I can think of, but according to societal standards, their achievement of womanhood is asymptotic, which is suspicious considering none of us are fully woman or man according to what performing the role of women entails. José Esteban Muñoz wrote that “queerness is utopian, and there’s something queer about the utopian. ” I think this idea is quite interesting. While he was discussing a perfect society in which any type of normativity is abolished and everybody is equal, the word “utopia” is also fairly asymptotic, which he also uses in his argument. Will we ever achieve a world where the performative aspects of gender no longer exist, and would that be a good thing? The drag club is in itself a utopian society. There is no conflict based on distinguishing features, self-expression is encouraged, ecstasy is experienced, and families are formed. Muñoz’s explanations of what a utopian society consists of are brought to life. The club is proof that fundamental differences can be put aside in order for a civilization to form a bond over the personalities and the experiences of others. Petty differences certainly still exist within this civilization, but there are no wars over nationality, sexuality, race, gender, and other historically volatile topics. What seemed idealistic was attained by a community that faces a lot of adversity, which means a lot of different things. That adversity is what makes the club a utopia after all. Just because the club is a safe place for everyone, the real world certainly is not.
This mirage of an accepting space for everybody was diminished at the end of the documentary when it was revealed that Venus Extravaganza, one of the queens who spoke a lot about how she wants to fully physically transition, was found murdered and that she had no biological family to identify the body. The utopian family didn’t translate to the real world, and the accepting community most certainly did not either. Drag Queens and transgender women of color especially deal with violence and hatred every day. The utopia described seemed to not only be the framework for an ideal world, but an escape. And even within this utopia, there was acknowledgment of the lack of opportunity presented for black people in the U.S. when the theme of the walk was Executive Realness. During balls in the club, they hosted themed walks, some of which consisted of “banjee realness,” “realness,” “butch queens,” and “banjee boys.”
During the walk, a competitor dressed in executive wear said “You’re showing the straight world that I can be an executive–if I had the opportunity I could be one ‘cause I look like one. That is like a fulfillment.” With this I wonder how emanating gender contributes to the harmful aspects of the dichotomy, and how appearance is, in many cases, the main indicator of gender. If she looks like an executive, she’s therefore showing the world she could be one. Is that the same with gender?
A damaging side effect of the internalized misogyny is the responsibility of apologizing for performing your gender in the way you are expected. Gertrude Stein has a poem called If I Told Him where she discusses the parallels and proportions between Pablo Picasso and Napoleon. In a commentary of the piece, Ann Carson drew an analogy with a mirror, wherein
Picasso and Napoleon are basically looking at themselves and each other, and they are proportional, and they begin to fall into each other. When putting up a Stein-esque mirror that reflects conventional femininity, the femininity present within many people is almost indistinguishable. As we begin to fall into the mirror, as did Picasso and Napoleon in the poem which discussed their resemblance, we realize that though the reflection we see may resemble womanhood, it does not and could never perfectly reflect woman. My friend once told me that there was a period of time where she didn’t believe her hands were the hands of a woman, so what would the mirror say? As Stein says, “As proportions as presently./Farther and farther.”
Therefore, would my collar bones accurately perform the role of female collar bones? Would my eyes distinguish me from male eyes, emanating masculinity and the color brown? Or, would it merely be proportional?
In Paris is Burning, one of the most popular queens, Crystal Labeija, said she would never get a sex change, in fact, she would advise against it. Her reasoning was that for one, she wouldn’t want to, but also many of the queens who end up getting sex changes tend to face more violence and adversity because their performance of femininity ends up manifesting itself more seriously in the real world. Perhaps, in reflection of Muñoz, femininity is as asymptotic as a utopia. In the words of Judith Butler in her essay Undoing Gender, “If gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical… It is a practice of improvisation with a scene of constraint.” She supports the claim that gender is performative by saying that we are basically acting but restricted because of what we are told we are. Instead of a consensus on gender as a noun, we live every day with gender as a verb. Is gender as a verb more progressive because it automatically opens up the possibility of fluidity, or is it completely restrictive because it controls action and appearance? Is it restrictive because it enforces the idea that it exists? Butler also mentions a specific branch of the feminist movement that focuses on the progression of women as the starting point and focuses on the term “gender.” These aspects of feminism contribute nothing to progress, enforce the gender dichotomy, and uphold the historic definitions of gender.
The framework for womanhood is not only ambiguous, it’s nonexistent. We’re constantly caught up in the gender dichotomy, but the lines are permanently blurred. We physically enforce and restrict certain aspects of gender and sexuality, but we do it selectively. We enforce certain laws and guidelines made to restrict people from performing in the way that they want to, but the language around it is so cryptic. I am not sure what a woman actually is. I feel that I can say, however, that those who are powerful can use the socially constructed dichotomy as an excuse to create divisions, and continue to perpetuate stereotypes and negative associations. Pink is not my favorite color. I think it’s fine, but it doesn’t mean anything to me at all.