examples

Gender Mirror: Interpellation doesn’t stop as we grow older.

When thinking of my own genders, I hadn’t thought—or heard—of

interpellation before. Firstly, I want to explore that topic a bit and how I am

understanding the concept. Interpellation is the concept that we recognize

ourselves as subjected to systems, figures, and ideologies with powers we do

not have. Since I’m thinking about my genders, this is how I am subjected to

the constrictions of the gender binary and cissexism.

Like the interpellation video touches on, gender is taught to us as though it is

acquired ​in utero​. That is, gender is taught as if we have no choice about and

cannot change it. And I agree that gender is taught at a young age to mean

man (male) or woman (female), without variation or change. That said, I’m

still confident that I didn’t come into this world screaming “I’m a BOY and I

will not rest until I have the BLUE blanket ensuring my warmth and

survival!” Babies simply don’t give a fuck about the dye pigments for the

blankets and clothing keeping them alive.

When we don’t stay in our forced boy or girl identity (and I say this from

experience and research), the usual result is receiving punishment for

nonconformity to the decreed gender norms. On the reverse end, with

conformity, there is a whole lot of reward. By conforming violence

surrounding gender identity is more easily avoided, be it extreme acts of

violence or violence from microaggressions. No cis boy or cis girl is afraid of

being dehumanized and murdered because their cis-ness is perceived as

“good,” and “right,” and “normal” and “natural”. The dangers of violence

come from the targeted identity, a trans identity, where the lesson I and other

queer trans people are taught there is something villainous and broken with

our bodies. Yet what I think is a more interesting detail about all of this is

how focus on punishment and reward with the gender binary is dominantly in

the context of child development, as though we won’t remain interpellated

after age18 (or whatever age equates to adulthood in America). It’s as if the

independence assumedly gained from adulthood means no more being

subject to, no more interpellation. And yet, queer people are still punished at

any age for their queerness, and cis people are still unquestioningly safe

within the gender binary ​(and I know there are plenty of jokes about

disagreeing with the binary when I’m discussing punishment-reward—also

structured as a binary).

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A common idea is that enforcing conformity—via punishment and reward or

otherwise—has the effect of keeping people in the binary, or of keeping

people interpellated into gender. I think we are just as interpellated in

adulthood as we are when born, so I agree with this idea. As a persxnal​*

example, I tend to get yelled at by strangers… pretty much anywhere in

public. Specifically, it’ll be something along the lines of how disgusting I am

for being “he/she”, then “it”, and in less then 30 seconds I’m being reduced

to a pronoun for objects; for something which is not humxn in nature. Unless

I and others experiencing this situation are eternal children (though queerness

is often treated as a young persxn thing to grow out of, which insults both

children and queer folk), this is something cis adults are doing to stay with

the benefits of a gender binary that benefits their conformity. By thinking in

terms of a gender binary (and teaching it to children), there is already an

unspoken acknowledgement of being subject to gender.

I’ve thought of hegemony (in less academic terms) before, though the

hegemony video has a lot of information that I’ll try piecing together in the

way I understand it. As we talked about in class, hegemony is the

unquestioned rule of one ideology over all others—such as gender hegemony

and the accompanying hegemonic masculinity and femininity. Like I said

when thinking about interpellation, I’ve noticed points to how we pretty

much all have an unspoken acknowledgement as subjects to the gender

binary, which is a concept within gender that has a whole lot of power.

Hegemony, when applied to gender and identity, seems more about what

categories of gender are “good” (read: cis), or are “bad” (read: trans).

Without saying there’s something wrong with nonconformity to gender

norms and roles, there really wouldn’t be any purpose of rewarding

conformity. There wouldn’t be any way to reward conformity, since nothing

would exist that specifies conformity as better. I think a large part of ideology

is devoted to telling us what is “good” or “bad”, and that we must always be

“good”. That’s at least what I noticed about the video from the example of

Capitalism’s characterization as “good” and communism as “bad”. That is

what the ideology is, and if the ideology was instead centered around

communism as “good,” then capitalism would get the “bad” reputation ​(insert

your Joan Jett music reference here).

I wonder if this is an overlap between interpellation and hegemony. That is,

we are subject to the ideology with the most power. Since I’ve been focusing

on a/gender(s) and a/sexuality(ies)​**​, I wonder what a queer ideology would

be. Could it feasibly exist, when the existence of dominance in any way

already goes against what it means to queer something? Can we de-power

ideology, allowing for several ideologies to share space equitably? To let

people choose if they want to be subjects to preexisting ideologies or if there

are none we want to be subject to (or to follow their own ideologies)? In

pretentious academic vernacular, how can we resist becoming interpellated

into hegemonic ideologies? How do we move out of harmful structures when

they are so pervasive, so perfunctory, so compulsory? How would this type

of society function? Is this just a Utopian, posthuman wish-dream?

I’m still trying to figure this all out.

Additional Notes:

*​I adopt the terms humxn (instead of human), persxn (instead of person), and

persxnal (instead of personal) to remove gendered connotations typically

assigned to these words. This is also a technique I’ve picked up on from other

writers and movements as an approach for linguistic inclusion of gender

fluidity.

**​I adopt the terms a/gender(s) & a/sexuality(ies) as a technique I have read

other writers use to try acknowledging the variety in gender identity and

sexual orientation every individual can have in a more inclusive way—be it

no gender/sexuality, one gender/sexuality, or multiple genders/sexualities.

Image credit (informal and in order of appearance):

“You think astrology’s a weird superstition?” meme – Created by Jimena

Alvarado, professor of Womxn’s Studies

“Laverne Cox, on deadnaming and misgendering trans people” gifs – spoken

by Laverne Cox, a trans actor and advocate.

“We’re the kids in America” comix panel – From Persepolis, a graphic

autobiography from Marjane Satrapi while growing up through the Islamic

revolution. She sung along to American singer Joan Jett’s music a lot, and I

felt it a fitting scene to go with my own reference to Joan Jett (she also sings

a song called ​Bad Reputation​). Sorry if the reference is vague/not understood,

though at least it isn’t important for understanding the ideas in my blog post.

“The gender is fluid” poem – Creator’s twitter handle is @kimmouto.