Race and Gender: social constructs or socially exaggerated?.. the latter seems to trump the former
I’ve been doing some reading, and along with that, some thinking.
In her well-known book Whipping girl, Julia Serrano details her lived experiences as a transsexual woman. Perhaps more astoundingly, her book gives a vivid and striking new perspective on our society’s relationship with not just women, but femininity.
The book is excellent so far, and one of her more interesting points was one that had fascinating parallels with race.
In one chapter, Julia brilliantly argues that gender is not socially ‘constructed’, but rather exaggerated. As evidence for her claims, Serano provides both her own experience and that of other transwomen who have undergone hormone replacement therapy. As it turns out, the introduction of certain hormones into her body made Serano feel like a different person with regard to her emotions and sex drive — both characteristics thought to be related to sex/gender. Her experience is mostly mirrored by others who have undergone the same therapy, confirming the fact that hormones are (to what extent, I’m not sure) related to gender expression. Julia explained that she experienced both libido/sex and emotions in completely different ways, and in ways that we stereotypically consider to be ‘male’ or ‘female’; Her emotions became clearer and easier to express, there was no underlying urge to suppress strong feelings, and sex drive decreased but intensity during sexual encounters significantly increased. As I mentioned above, others who undergo this therapy report more or less the same result, and trans men experience the polar opposite (higher sex drive, veiled emotions). So…… what does this mean?
Fascinatingly, it means neither gender nor sex can be fully explained as ‘social constructs’. If they truly were, we would expect behaviors related to gender or sex to have no biological (in this case hormonal) aspect to them. Serano then points out that society, more specifically socialization, serves to exaggerate these gender roles rather than enforce them; I.E: most men are already biologically prone to suppress emotions to some degree, yet most men are still heavily pressured to do so. In the same vein, women already typically have lower sex drives than men, but are still shamed for taking liberty in expressing their sexuality. Societies, especially social networks like friend and family groups, pressure people across the gender spectrum into performing behaviors that person would likely already perform.
I got to thinking that race should be viewed in the same way. As Americans, we have a hard time understanding and classifying people that don’t fit into our ‘race and ethnicity’ system. People struggle and stammer to explain whether or not Italians are “white”, or something of the sort. You hear it all the time.
What most Americans fail to realize is that our classification system is intentionally rigid. Yes, some elements of ‘race’ roughly correlate with country of origin and ethnicity…. but nowhere near the full scope of possibilities. In other words, race is not a social construct… but maybe also something that we socially exaggerate. There are undeniable, biological realities to race. Due to the fact that I have West African ancestry, I’m going to look a certain way. When you add socialization into the mix, as Serano did with gender, it’s also true that people expect people of a certain race to behave a certain way. However, there is no biological reality to this expectation, which is where there is an obvious, stark contrast between race and gender and how they're expressed.
Someone may only encounter racist white people their entire life. Plenty of other of types of white people exist, sure, but imagine this could very well happen. Such a person would be safe in assuming that all white people are racist, until they live elsewhere and discover this to not be the case. My point? The role in which socialization plays in human life cannot be understated. It is so innately powerful that it legitimately shapes our reality and distorts the world, allowing us to form our own lifelong personal narrative.
Race and gender both have biological and social realities, but we are all horribly misinformed about the magnitude of each on our existence. We don’t really know what a child who isn’t relentlessly bullied into ‘gender-appropriate’ behavior by a cruel world would be like, just as we don’t know what it would be like to live in a ‘colorblind’ world. We have rough understandings of these human characteristics of race and sex, but not enough. And certainly not enough to use them as viciously and as violently as we do. We’ve gone about hacking up the world as we please without a second thought as to who we are. In her book, Serano makes excellent points that illustrate the gap between what we understand as ‘men’ and ‘women’ is not the ‘insurmountable chasm’ we assume it to be. Actually, she asserts that most of us are only ‘a few hormone treatments away’ from being mistaken for another gender.
Race can be seen the same way — a small characteristic of our human existence that shouldn’t determine as much as it does. To us, it seems like an undeniable facet of our existence… and to some extent, it is. But only insofar as other humans make it.
