[Note: I promise to you this entry has a point. The “introduction” to it is me professing my love of women’s studies, but then it starts to make more sense to those of you who have never taken these kinds of courses before. Also, I was going to publish long before now. This confirms my first argument: I am a disorganized fool at best.]
I am actually horrible at staying on top of this. An organized person would have set days that they would post and update... unfortunately for myself (and sometimes for those in my life), my mind is a disorganized jumble in which I can barely complete a thought that doesn't run into 6 more ideas before the first one is finished. So this is what's up: midterms. I know I've been in university for the last 3 years, but I don't know that I've ever actually had these things people complain relentlessly about. The more sciencey courses I'm in this year have them, and I have less papers. I like papers a lot more, because I'm awful at studying. I can think of 1000 other things while I am looking at my notes or the text book, or just hate reading the exact same thing over and over again so I can prove that I understood things for the two hours it takes to write an exam.
Women's studies doesn't have exams. I've had tests, but only when they're cross listed with sociology courses. Women's studies isn't about "let's memorize this equation and theory and see how you can create a graph as it relates to the square root of the left side of your brain". I'm not even rereading that to see if it made any sense. Women's studies has theories, but they always seem more relevant to everyday life and interaction. I don't think I've ever screamed "when the fuck am I ever going to use this after I graduate?!" or "why the fuck should I care?!" at my women's studies text books or articles. Yes, I do curse at my other text books. Especially if no one else is around.
Women's studies is epic because is actually is more relevant to everyday life. We look at what can be considered the most basic structures, traditions, institutions and god knows what else, and analyze, deconstruct, examine and theorize until the science majors have long since gotten pissed off and decided to go split atoms or whatever it is that they do. Women's studies takes nothing for granted.
Last week in sex and culture class we were supposed to do a few readings about marriage within a North American context, mainly from the mid to late 19th century until present day. These readings are what make women’s studies wonderful- the authors understand nothing as being natural or normal, and they complicate notions that suggest otherwise. I want to just throw some of their ideas in the air, and see how they interact with each other.
Hunter’s article “Change and Continuity in American Marriage” discusses the privilege of heterosexual marriage. Partly because it’s been ingrained as a “tradition” for so long, and largely because our society shapes adulthood around the idea that one man and one woman will live forever in a legally binding relationship, heterosexual marriage often comes off as “natural”. Of course it’s not! Any identity or practice that offers privilege to some should not be considered “natural”. Instead, it is a construction within culturally specific times and contexts. Marriage is not a “right” when it is only offered to one man and one woman, it becomes a privilege. And when marriage is constructed only for monogamous heterosexual couples, their “rights” are honoured at the expense of others who do not have the option of marriage.
Hunter explores how marriage has changed through time in North America, stating that it is a constantly changing institution, where meanings are never inherent or stable. Once upon a time in the 18th and 19th centuries, marriage was a practice for economic growth and development of the family and societies. Men and women got married to “support the farm” and procreated to employ children. The practice served as a way to regulate gender, keeping men in the public, dominant sphere, and women in the private, passive sphere. As time wore on, individualism from the family units brought more choice to which one might marry and neither gender nor who one married was determinate of their future. Marriage, through time’s changes, is no longer a “necessity” for one to survive economically and socially.
Ingraham writes an article titled “One is not born a bride”, in which she explores the construction of weddings and heteronormative structures in our society. Heteronormativity is what makes heterosexuality the norm in our society, but it is also more than that. To be heterosexual isn’t necessarily to be heteronormative. To obtain this “status”, hetero couples should get married, with a “traditional” wedding. The bride wears a white dress, the groom throws on a suit and they begin their life of reinforced gender roles as outlined in their wedding ceremony. After the parents “give the daughter away” into her “new family”, the bride promises to be loyal and obey her husband. The groom “receives” her into his family, and she is passed from one patriarch to another in front of her closest 356 friends and family. (I hate using the term patriarch, but I think that’s a whole other blog post. The word never does all the power imbalances that occur at once, intersecting and interacting with each other at all times. That’s the incredibly short version of that. ) If a couple perhaps dares to “think outside the box” and live in defiance of gender roles, telling marriage to shove it and perform their lives away from expectation, they risk “losing” their heteronormative “status” despite their heterosexuality.
One is only a bride for a day, but arguably one might fill this role everyday if we consider Ingraham’s concept of “heterosexual imaginary”. She is quick to point out that she doesn’t mean “imaginary” as in “false” or less real, but rather as a way to describe the romanticized notions of sexuality and social institutions such as marriage and weddings. By “heterosexual imaginary”, she means that we often fail to see how marriage and sexuality regulate and control our lives, thus leading to vast inequalities. By regulating and controlling them, weddings, marriage and sexualities seem “natural”. This can be destabilized when we recognize Ingraham’s argument that “one is not born a bride”, rather we are constructed and shaped by our culture and its practices.
It’s easy to get caught up in labels when considering heteronormativity, weddings, relationships and the institutions we’ve constructed. We begin to have a long list of labels to suit the needs of the people around us. If every identity such as “single”, “married”, “common-law”, “co-habiting”, “dating”, “it’s complicated”, “we’re fucking but no one knows”, “confused”, or maybe “straight”, “gay”, “bisexual”, “asexual”, “queer”, “bored”, “polygamist”, “monogamist” gets its own label or box, have we made things less constricting? Maybe, but maybe we have to question the point of the boxes and labels at all, because by the time we’re done, everyone is going to fit in their own individual box, thus defeating the purpose of the “unifying” label. The more boxes and identities we create to go with practices, the more we are trying to force people into the boxes that we’ve constructed.
My god I wish I lived in some of these arguments, where I could actually practice a label-free existence. It would be like a “practical application of women’s studies”. And that would be fucking epic.
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