Mi presentación en Gender Week: The danger of dichotomies
- periodista2014
- Apr 27, 2015
- 8 min read
Del 7 al 12 de abril se llevó acabo el festival Gender Week en Trondheim. El 7 de abril participé mostrando mis videos y el 11 de abril participé en una mesa de debate que se llamaba Nobody passes ( algo así como nadie encaja, nadie pasa). Mi presentación se llamaba The danger of the dichotomies, (el peligro de las dicotomías), y debido al poco tiempo tuve que saltarme algunos párrafos, por eso hoy quiero compartir mi presentación entera.
Cuando me invitaron a participar en la mesa de debate no puede decir que no. Ahora que tengo cáncer pienso en hacer cosas que me hacen feliz, cosas que le den sentido a mi vida. Pienso que si el tratamiento deja de funcionar o que si el cáncer me visita nuevamente (la posibilidad está ahí, de volver a tener cáncer o de que otro se desarrolle) habré hecho cosas que quería hacer a pesar de los nervios, a pesar del miedo y el maldito qué dirán que ha influido tanto en mi vida. Ese temor de que las cosas que hago no sean lo suficientemente perfectas me ha paralizado muchas veces. Pero no esta vez. Esta vez dije que sí el mismo día que tuvimos la reunión.
Al día siguiente me salió el bulto en el pecho, pero eso no me detuvo. Solo tengo una vida y quiero vivirla. Así que en este texto quería reflexionar sobre mi proceso, sobre mi lucha contra la dicotomía enferma-sana y quería invitar a quienes me oyeran a que rompieran con esas dicotomías -cuales sean que tengan-, y que sean ellxs mismxs.
The Danger of Dichotomies
The name of my presentation is the danger of dichotomies. I took this name rephrasing the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who talks about the danger of the single story.
We live in a society that loves dichotomies: Day-Night, White-Black, Strong-Weak, Up-Down. There is a binary system that tells us that we can express ourselves in two ways: Man-Woman, Heterosexual-Homosexual, etc. The dichotomies are interconnected. I think all of us have been struggling with dichotomies (loser-successful, bad mother-good mother, good girl- bad girl, gay-straight, etc.). I have been struggling with one in particular and that let me to the others. I have breast cancer. And the dichotomy I have been struggling in is: Healthy-Sick.
After my first chemo I lost my hair, my eyebrows, eyelashes, all the hair on my body. I was working then and I wanted to keep working despite the side effects. And that is when the dilemma started. I did not want to be seen as sick. I did not want to be pitied by others or treated as a sick person. So I decided to pretend that I was not sick. I wanted to look like a healthy person. But in this society the image of a person doesn't exist. You need to be a woman or a man. The dichotomies are connected. I wanted to fit in the box of “healthy WOMAN”.
Every day that I had to go to work I had my drag queen session: Wig, fake eyelashes, painted eyebrows and a lot of make up. I wanted to have color in my cheeks, even though it was winter and everybody was pale. People who knew I was sick said to me “you look fantastic” “you look better now, who would say that you are sick?”. I did not know how to take those comments but I felt proud. People (who knew me and did not know me) didn't see me as someone sick. They saw a normal woman. I did a good job. But when I arrived home I had to remove the wig, the eyelashes, the make up. I did not have to fake it anymore. I was allowed to say I was tired, I needed to rest, I wanted to lay down. I was allowed to be myself at home.
One day I was in front of the mirror, completely bald, and I asked myself why I was pretending. Was it really for me? Was it for them? What was I concerned about? To have to explain about my sickness? (Well, I prefer to call it “my situation” and not “my sickness”, cause I was fighting against the sickness) Why was I pretending? Was I afraid that they would think I was going to die? Or Was I afraid to think that I could die? Maybe I was concerned about all of those things together.
At that time I did not realize that I had the option to say other things to people. I could have been more positive. I could say: I choose to be bald (don't use the wig) but I do not like to be bald. However my first shower without hair was amazing. The skin in my head -that has always been covered- was so happy with its first direct contact with warm water. I could say: please see me as a person, only a person, and not a person with cancer.
Saying that could have saved me a lot of time. Time that I use preparing my mask, being concerned about them finding out that I was pretending. I had many situations when I thought my wig or my eyelashes were going to fall off. Saying the truth could have saved me a lot of time.
I had a mastectomy three weeks ago. Before I had the surgery they were talking about the reconstruction. It will happen in two years but they already told me my options. Different kinds of surgeries to get a fake breast, and different implant materials. I am a woman and they offered me a breast. I do not know if I want a breast. I mean, I do not want to repeat the same process that I had with chemo. Why would I need to have a fake breast? Is it a problem to be a woman with one breast? Is it a problem for society or for me? Are people going to like me less because I have only one breast? And even if that was true, do I want to be surrounded by people who only like me because I have two breasts?
All of this made me rethink about how we live dichotomies and how we can break them. I was fighting with the dichotomy sick-healthy but also with man-woman, femininity-masculinity, because they are interconnected.
But before breaking dichotomies we need to remember where they come from. The dichotomy sex-gender is not so old. And we need to remember that this dichotomy was not created by feminism but the medical sector. In 1947, John Money used the notion of “gender” for the first time in speaking about the possibility of technologically modifying, through the use of hormones and surgery, the bodily presentation of babies born with “unclassifiable” feminine or masculine genital organs and/or chromosomes. He uses the notion of “gender” to refer to the “psychological sex”.
If in the 19th century sex was something natural, definitive, untransferable and transcendental; in the 20th century gender appears to be synthetic, malleable, variable, and susceptible to being transferred, imitated, produced and technically reproduced. Money affirmed that it is possible to change the gender of any baby up to 18 months. Money's ideas became an international protocol that says that babies with an unclear genitalia might “need” surgery to fix it. And doctors have 48 hours to intervene. (Luckily there is a country that just changed that policy and banned this surgery on intersex infants. It's Malta (1). Germany and Australia have recognized the X category)
The Spanish philosopher Beatriz Preciado in her article Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology claims that the invention of the category gender announces the arrival of the new pharmacopornographic regime of sexuality. “The objective of these pharmaco-pornographic technologies is the production of a living political prosthesis: namely, the production of a body docile enough as to put its total and abstract capacity to the task of creating pleasure in the service of capital’s production”. Capitalism needs bodies that can reproduce, therefore they need to keep a heteronormative binary system. However these two boxes do not take into consideration people who feel that they do not fit in those boxes, who do not want to fit in those boxes.
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote the danger of the single story she mentioned that “the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story”. We need to know the other stories.
In media we say “If it's not in the media it doesn't exist”. If there was not news in NRK talking about the terrorist attack against students in Kenya last week, people would think that it never happened. Another phrase that people who work with gender roles in media use: “You can't be what you can't see.” On Thursday, an article said that there are more men than women as a main characters in TV series on NRK. In the last five years, only 2 out of 15 TV-series that received support from the public sector had a woman as main characters. 2 out of 15! And this happens in Norway: a country that is the top 5 of country with more equality ratio. In Norway 34 % of the person that we see, hear and read in media are women. 3 out of 4 resources in NRK-news are men. The representation of woman in media is really bad(2). If women (who are 50,5% of the population) are still a minority in Norwegian media, how would it be for the other groups?
“Jeg tror mediene, særlig fiksjonen vi lever med, gjør noe med hva vi tror vi kan og hva vi vil. Da er det klart at kjønn spiller en stor rolle”, sier Anne Gjelsvik, professor i filmvitenskap ved NTNU.
I guess I was scared to be a bald woman in public because I haven't seen a bald woman. Neither in Tv-series or advertisements. Now I am in the same situation. I haven't seen a woman with only one breast, a mannequin with one breast, a bra for one breast. When you do not see someone in your situation you think that it doesn't exist. You start to question yourself (It's not normal a woman without hair, it's not normal a woman with one breast, it's not normal a man without a penis, it's not normal that a trans woman is lesbian, etc.) and you wonder what to do to fit in one box. And this is the risk of the dichotomies, that you need to renounce to be yourself to fit in one of the boxes, that sometimes you feel that you deny yourself only because you want to fit in the box.
Judith Butler in her article Undoing Gender talks about deconstructing and constructing gender and how this deconstruction and construction exists in relation with the others, and she called it performance. Preciado gives some example of resistance: Drag kings, hormonal self-experiments(3), Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) (an illness of misidentifying one’s real and imagined corporal integration) and the “crip” movement. But I think that being you is the most empowering. Get out of the dichotomic boxes, build as many boxes as you want, or flow between them. Forget the dichotomies (good-bad, the perfect man or the perfect woman)! Be yourself! In your uniqueness you can enjoy yourself but also be the path for those who will follow.
Thank you!
(1) The new legislation, approved last week, also allows people to change their gender identity on documents by simply filing an affidavit with a notary, which ends the requirement for surgery in order to legally identify as a gender other than the one assigned at birth. The process of changing one’s gender in the system, under the new bill, won’t take more than 30 days.
(2) I følge SSB i 1999 var det en kvinneandel blant journalister på 37%. Blant sjefene i media er kvinneandelen langt lavere. Blant aviser som kommer ut to eller flere ganger i uken, er bare en av ti sjefredaktører kvinner.
(3) Preciado in her book Testo Yonki shares her experience with testosterone.
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