Armstrong Identity Project continued...

I’m going to keep working with the identity but taking it in a more clearly defined the direction of gender as a social construct.

This is the way in which I feel I have been stereotyped and discriminated against and called gendered names such as bitch, slut, whore, and dyke.

I feel like there have been times when I’ve been judged by males as being weak, passive, incapable, and/or dumb because the fact that I’m female. Even more so I feel like I’ve been called slut, whore, and dyke by just as many, if not more females than males.

Some famous quotes that I would like to use in the project:

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn." 
—Gloria Steinem

What I would really and honestly would say [to my teenage self] is "Have a good time, be kind to yourself, you're perfect just how you are."

Kathleen Hanna

I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically.

- Naomi Wolf 

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

Betty Friedan

Contrary to what Rush Limbaugh will lead people to believe, a woman's worth is not determined by her body or how much sex she has.

I was enraged, but hardly surprised when I heard Rush Limbaugh’s comments about a college student who testified in a hearing to make contraceptives more easily available to women. I am all too familiar with Limbaugh’s narrow-minded views of society through my parents’ avid listening to his show.

Hearing Limbaugh’s denigrating ranting about women’s sexuality made me think of this video blog I saw that was made by a thirteen-year-old girl. In the video she talks about slut shaming, why it is wrong and how it contributes to the idea of rape culture or the belief that because a person dresses a certain way means they are asking to be sexually abused.

I also thought about how much I heard that term thrown around in junior and high schools, sometimes directed at me and sometimes from my own mouth. I’m pretty sure whenever I was calling someone else a slut it was because of my own feelings of insecurity about my physical appearance and sexuality. I know now that these words are maliciously violent and conceived out of hate.

I’ve recently started working around twelve to thirteen-year-olds at my internship and I’ve begun to remember how miserable I was being in that situation, acutely aware of my own body and how myself and others perceived it. 

However, my project is not merely about how the social construction of gender affects females but males as well. Talking to my male roommates and other male friends of mine, it seemed like there was a common thread among most of them having been called “pussy” or “faggot” for not conforming to socially predefined standards of masculinity. These words, just like bitch, slut and whore, serve to objectify and dehumanize individuals who stray from the norm. My project aims to investigate the cultural implications of such gendered words and their relation to identity.

FINAL PROJECT