Rethinking the system to affect social change
“In the introduction to Sexual Politics, one of feminism’s earliest manifestos, Kate Millett complained that analyzing the patriarchy was so difficult because there was no alternative system to which it might be compared. Her comment could well apply to trying to analyze the gender system. The problem is not that we don’t know the gender system well enough but that we know it all too well and can’t envision any alternative. Thus, trying to understand gender sometimes feels like trying to take in the Empre State Building while standing only three inches away: It’s at once so big, so overwhelming, and so close that we can’t see it all at once or conceptualize it clearly.
Gender is like a lens through which we’ve not yet learned to see. Or, more accurately, like glasses worn from childhood, it’s like a lens through which we’ve always seen and can’t remember how the world looked before. And this lens is strictly bifocal. It strangely shows us only black and white in a Technicolor world so that… there may certainly be more than two genders, but two genders is all we’ve named, all we know, and all we’ll see.”
-GENDERqUEER intro by Riki Wilchins
I’m always drawn to concepts that explain the necessity of reimagining “the system” from the ground up, rather than trying to rearrange aspects of the current system. I’ll never give up on humanity, but I do agree with the mindset that everything must be demolished and built anew.
