Cross-Dress This Way

The three of us met in the Jean Yawkey Center before making our way to Starbucks. Between the two places, there were a few sidelong glances, which were followed by heads that quickly turned as the people in question conferred with one another. Overall, the reactions were pretty minimal.

However, most striking to us were not other people’s responses but the change we felt in our own behavior. As females, there is a subconscious awareness of how our clothes fit, how our hair looks and how we appear to other people. Assuming the character of a man, we felt a different type of agency. When we sat down, we took up as much room as we felt necessary to be comfortable and talked about whatever we felt like talking about. Dressed in our usual “girl” clothes, we could have done the same, but assuming the character of guys made us feel unapologetic about it.

Although we eventually returned our usual garb, we were glad that, at least an afternoon, we got to experience what it feels to be the other half of the binary.

Of course the picture you se in the post is a much more realistic depiction of what we looked like, but this link is also a beautiful example of cross-dressing and the social construction of gender:
http://thebostonbazaar.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/bearded-ladies-hit-the-runway-in-berlin/

The term queer functions both as a noun or adjective and as a verb. Queer theory is more preoccupied with the noun and verb role as they are used to categorize, and interpollate certain people for the purpose of generating and continuously perpetuating heteronormativity. One definition found in an online dictionary for queer is "strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different". A definition that presumes to synthesize itself from politically correct terms cannot avoid being involved in politics as it engages in juxtaposing the conventional to the odd in a pair of the male/female, presence/absence type, impregnating a relationship of domination and repression. In Queer Theory, the term queer refers to people of a sexual orientation other from the sanctioned heteronormative one.
Its verb form remains very interesting for it is telling of the interpolative politics that perpetuates the regime of heteronormativity. In the Oxford English Dictionary to queer, the verb is defined as "To ask, inquire; to question". This verb definition is revealing of prosecutive function that "queering" somebody or something plays in an established order. Indeed a non-straight sexual orientation is questioned, analyzed as an anomaly, even pathologized rather than seen as a presence in itself. It is prosecuted. It is made to be seen by the masses as odd and strange.
Lesbian and gay gender identity has been either ignored or stereotyped in film, literature and lived experience. This has led queer studies theorists to research masculinity in women and its connection to real or perceived lesbianism.
Queer theory emphasizes the instability and fluidity of gender and sexual categories and rejects the idea that our identities are somehow fixed or determined by our gender or sexual preference. Judith Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” embraces gender and masculinity as undefined; something that is shaped by the individual, not by men or society. This is what makes one masculine or feminine exists independently of sex and gender.
In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” Butler resists identification as a lesbian. This is not because she is homophobic but because the term is made by homophobic discourse. She engages in lacanian discourse and supports her discussion on Lacan's thoughts about the paradox of identifying with one's sexuality. Sexuality is a drive, and like all drives is an expression of the death drive, an effort to escape the realm of the symbolic and experience the real. Identity on the other hand is a product of the symbolic and can only exist there. Thus a marriage between sexuality and identity would be a marriage between the real and the symbolic, an impossible marriage.
Going back to the fluidity of gender and its lack of agency in determining femininity and masculinity there are psychoanalytic approaches that assume that female masculinity mimics male masculinity. Queer theorists believe femininity exists independent of sex and gender. In fact, female masculinity disrupts traditional studies of masculinity, whereby masculinity always amounts to social, political and cultural effects. As Foucault suggests, discursive productions construct the “truth” about a person and this truth is aimed at making the person conform to the contemporary norms of heterosexuality. We can recognize that people draw lines between normal and abnormal, and these discursive formations have real affects on those deemed to belong to each group.
The boundaries of gender are continually being challenged, projecting faith in a future that holds promise for the “transcendence” of gender. Butler foretells movement beyond traditional gender roles to refashioned and more flexible gender motifs or perhaps even to the eradication of gender altogether.

Feminism: A Critical Conversation

In “Bodies that Matter,” Judith Butler argues that gender is a performance. She discusses the concept of drag and how it hyperbolizes the signifiers of gender because they depend on categories of masculine and feminine. By discussing drag, Butler brings attention to the instability of gender roles because drag is an explicit, self-conscious performance of masculinity or femininity.

Men and women perform the heterosexual “norms” expected of them. She explores the reason behind these expectations as a connection between gender and sexuality. Butler explains that sexuality is “regulated” in order to “police” and “shame” gender. There is a lack of support of sexual difference, as it is attributed as a gender difference, not sexual difference, in the form of homophobia. Gay men are called “feminine” and lesbians deemed “masculine.”

In “Sorties,” Helene Cixous explains that differences in the norms of sexuality are only tolerated if they are closeted or expressed. She believes that people repress homosexuality, but it comes out in “various signs” that relate to the individual. She explores the idea of bisexuality being recognition of plurality and the masculine and feminine in one subject.

While Butler is more concerned with the social/cultural construction of gender, Cixous is concerned with hierarchical values in regard to language. She says the binary is created by language and always have the threat of violence in them because they are based on power. Cixous’s argument compares the activity/passivity binary to the man/woman binary, and says that the woman is either passive or does not exist when it comes to roles in relationships; everything always relates back to the figure of the father.

Butler discusses the hierarchal struggle between heterosexual/homosexual, instead of man/woman. She believes that the problem is not solely due to subversion, but sees it as a “struggle.” She states that there are ways in which to deal with the imbalance of power, asking how to go about fixing the problem.

Cixous discusses Freud’s view on the difference between men and women as anatomically based. Cixous disagrees and writes that it is not the parts that matter, but the sexual desire. A woman, and others around her, does not understand where her desire exists. She writes that this is due to phallocentrism, which has no origin, but just simply has always already existed. Phallocentrism, relating to the domination of men in every discourse, is the “enemy” of all, men and women both. From it stems the subordination of women, in that if the man is privileged over the woman, he gains hierarchal power, and therefore gains control. This affects the way the system is run altogether.

In Butler's and Cixous’s writing, there exists a level of stylistic difference when regarding the writing style of each respective author. Butler, who speaks to heterosexuality as an inherent “act” performed by the individuals within hetero-normativity, displays her language as readable, conclusive and dialectic. She orchestrates her essay with an air of “performance.” It is (at times) humorous, inquisitive, and written within the constraints of common jargon. The essay itself is critical and reflexive. Butler emphasizes the role of repetition, thus also emphasizing the play on heterosexuality as a “performance.” This re-illustrates Derrida's theory of iterability (or repletion within repetition).

Cixous’s work focuses on the construct of language itself within the identity of hetero-normative/homosexual idealism. She evocates the problematic circumstances surrounding the word “feminist.” Cixous is highly inventive in her essay. Borrowing many of her ideas from Foucault, she “plays” with the language that she uses. She is intentional vague in her syntax so as to further convey the arbitrary language employed when attempting to identify sexuality.