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Sparkle (2)
We are living in a time when for some people, in some places, gender has become a choice.
Here in my small corner of the professional middle-class United States where Generation X has raised Generation Y to take everything the Baby Boomers thought was sacred with a grain of salt, they are happily doing it.
The Second-Wave feminists of the 1970s (my mother and her peers) were nearly certain that once women were free, that illusive line between natural womanhood and the unnatural preening required of the patriarchy would be found and never crossed again. Some sort of Natural Woman would rule, and she would be more or less androgynous, depending on whom you asked.
But in the 1980s and 1990s a revival of the Butch-Femme subculture of lesbianism (to which, in the interest of full disclosure, I belong) along with the theories of feminist scholars like Judith Butler, proved that those Second-Wave ideas were too simplistic and altogether misguided, if well-intentioned. Gender wasn’t natural at all -— there was no line -— and rather than eliminating gender, the number of genders was multiplied from two to roughly the same number of human beings on the planet. In theory, at least.
Now, in whatever wave of feminism we’re in, my partner, who teaches Women’s Studies at a Big Ten university, finds it a necessity of PC etiquette to ask her students for their “PGPs” -— Gen Y speak for “preferred gender pronoun.” Sometimes it’s “he,” sometimes it’s “she.” Sometimes it’s something else altogether.
Rather than being free from gender, a few privileged corners of the world find themselves free to play within its constructs. In academia, we’re busy asking if a young woman who becomes a young man over the summer between junior and senior years might return to finish his degree at Smith.
Meanwhile, in a part of the world about as far-removed from the professional U.S. as you can get, Afghani mothers are engaging in gender play of their own for reasons quite a bit farther down Maslow’s hierarchy than my partner’s and her colleagues’ academic ones. Today, the New York Times published an incredible story about the uncommon, but not entirely unique, practice of turning a daughter into a son in a household with too few boys to support a family’s needs for the things only boys and men are allowed to do.
Lacking a son, Azita Rafaat was under threat from her family for bearing nothing but girls (a pair of twins, followed by two more sisters) for her husband who had already taken her as a second wife when his first also failed to produce a son.
Rafaat’s solution was to make the youngest girl a boy according to a custom that is accepted, if somewhat shamefully, by Afghan culture at large. Dressing a daughter as a boy and giving her a boy’s name allows her the freedom to go out and shop, work for money, play sports (on boys’ teams), fight, curse, and everything else girls are not allowed to do in a society strictly regulated by gender differences.
The irony, of course, is that at some point a strict belief in the rigid line between male and female doubles back on itself. Although they know he was born a girl, Azita Rafaat’s husband and in-laws accept the youngest child of the family as a son. For now, Rafaat is off the hook of endless attempts to bear a boy and -- with her freedom from that pressure --
