Gender Roles In A Girl Like Me

Following Butler’s notion of Gender and sexuality, these aspects are two of the main narrative themes in A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, they are important as a result of the main protagonist, Gwen, being a transgender women. A significant example of Butler’s distinction between sex and gender is a scene which take place at the start of the film. Gwen is a child and represented as a boy called Eddie, Eddie and his Mother and siblings arrive at a family member’s birthday party. Here the children are doing magic with their granddad, while the other adult prepare the food. When the family sit down to eat in their garden the children come out of the house holding a towel in front of Eddie so his family cannot see him. Seeing as the children …show more content…
It appears in this scene that the social constructs of gender which Butler mentions in her theory are at work. The family’s reaction to eddies action are almost offensive considering his mother covered he face in embarrassment. His sex is what causes the reaction seeing as he is viewed as male by his family. Another relation the scene has to the theory is the example Butler uses, Beauvoir’s statement on women can be applied to Eddie’s character. Eddie is becoming a women, granted he was born male the statement still applies considering that Beauvoir denounces that one is not simply born a women. It is questionable whether Butler’s notion of no internal truth being in relation to gender is apparent in Eddie’s case. He is a born male which conventionally means he should be becoming a man instead of a women, meaning if he were becoming a man, a false internal reality would be created and although he does conform to the social representations of a women i.e. wearing a dress, he makes a decision, which could be viewed as internal which leads to the assumption that Eddie’s character does have an internal …show more content…
One acts in a way which associated with being a male or a female. This appears to be the key aspect of her argument considering it is the aspect which she uses to separate the terms sex and gender. She achieves this by first suggesting that one’s actions are executed to create a chain of effects, meaning their acts portray their gender. She then argues that there is no sex, be it bisexual, gay, lesbian or heterosexual, that is not already gendered. This infers that all human beings are gendered from the beginning. From this she concludes that the repetition of gendered bodies “congeal over time” ,which masks gender into something that look natural and from one’s internal reality but it is instead part of, as Butler calls it, “the grid of cultural intelligibility” where the norms of sex, gender and desire are coherent and constant. Going back to Butler’s statement regarding the feminist theory and her suggestion to change the existing idea of the female identity, gender performativity is how this assumed idea of female identity can be changed as long as gendered bodies and gendered acts are transformed leading to a more natural identity which combats the restriction of the social norms. Butler uses drag as an example in the third chapter of her book, she acknowledges that drag is a parody of the female gender and has generated much negative criticism. Although she doesn’t use