The fight against gender stereotypes was a women's fight: difference thinking called it free signification of sexual difference.
He meant in the construction of his own life, escape the obligation to correspond to male desires and expectations, crystallised in images and roles to which the name of gender stereotypes was given. It meant, for a woman, being able to study and work or not, to be a mother or not, to say, do, behave, dress according to her vocation and desire.
It was a important move that brought freedom to all and sundry. Also a good number of men have taken advantage of this freedom. inaugurated - at least in its 'mass' form - by Second Wave feminism.
A few examples of that time: a dear friend who signified his struggle against the prison of stereotypes and his 'desertion' from the task of domination by writing a book, The Antimale. Critique of Male Unconsciousness (this was in 1977), where it says: "For the male, what a woman is is basically a mystery, but what a woman should do in the home for her husband becomes clear very quickly. All housework is not for him".. And ostentatiously knitting (performance) during political meetings. He was heterosexual, others, however, homosexuals, signified their struggle by mentioning woman in manners and clothing to say of the common oppression by the heterosexist patriarchy. This was queer, at its roots (today it is quite different).
Others participated silently and sideways in the 'meat circle' of women's meetings, listening to each other. of female wisdom. Or again, somewhere between political action and performance, they created groups such as the Household Men's Movement, who shirked the obligation of domination by citing an ideal matrilineal world in which the task of governing human coexistence fell to women.
None of these 'self-conscious' men claimed to be a woman and wanted to replace her. The movement, in fact, was the opposite: making room for women where the The inaugural move of the patriarchy from which they intended to defect was to take space away from women, pushing them to the margins, making them objects to be possessed and dominated, establishing the symbolic male order as the universal of which women were the exception. In a word, take its place.
So-called gender identity does a job in the same direction as sexist phallogocentrism: it takes its place. It even deprives women of the possibility of naming themselves women, making their bodies and maternal power insignificant, re-imposing the primacy of a new impalpable soul -identity, theinner feeling- on matter, re-suspending them on the margins, replacing them, making them the lumpenproletariat of womanhood.
E by restoring strength to those gender stereotypes that are now forcefully and disastrously re-entering the field.
I dress 'like a woman', I move 'like a woman', I intervene cosmetically, chemically and surgically on my body to make it as similar as possible to that of a woman - in function of the heterosexual male gaze and desire - and this makes me more of a woman than organic or 'cis' women precisely because I have chosen it, because it is a free gesture on my part and not a 'privilege'. that I was given without any effort to achieve it.
It is precisely on this word, 'privilege', that the most attention should be paid in order to invent new political practices of liberation. (see here).
The righteous fight against gender stereotypes and compulsory destiny according to birth sex has nothing to do with 'free' gender identity and self-id.
Gender identity reconstructs the cage of stereotypes.
These are to give back to young people and also to girls and boys, a target group bombarded by transpropaganda especially in schools and universities, a free sense of sexual difference and freedom from toxic stereotypes. It is a very difficult job, between Scylla and Charybdis, but indispensable.
The excellent series about the lives of teenagers should be shown in schools. fluid, We are who we are (opening photo) by Luca Guadagnino, a homosexual director. Who says: "I think that at 15 years old it is difficult to think in a certain way forever. We're constantly changing, imagine if it doesn't change a 15-year-old person who dreams of becoming a boy even though he is a girl. Do you really want this? Maybe, maybe not... Many of my Lgbt+ friends do not contemplate the possibility of doubt. Faced with the suffering of discrimination and marginalisation, realities that I know and have all my solidarity and compassion for, the response is often paradoxically normative, assertive and apodictic...'.
Gender dysphoria is a minority condition -unfortunately- and painful and not the paradigm of human freedom.
For most it is a matter of practising the free signification of oneself - and one's sexual orientation - in one's body as a woman or man, which is very rarely wrong. Or perhaps never at all.
Marina Terragni
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