Visibility Beats Everything (Make-up blog for 11/30/11)

After reading Heywood and Dworkins work its seems as if our culture severely depends on the images of people to construct for us the parameters of the masculine and the feminine. These images have therefore allowed us to conjugate and list specific characteristics which outline what the masculine and feminine mean to us, both individually and culturally. The issue is that if there is something which visibly crosses those boundaries we instantly deem that individual as something other than the polar conjugates; masculine and feminine. This is to say that there is no ambiguity in what these two things mean, which they are in place to actually dissipate any ambiguous structures of what constitutes a male and a female.

Amongst female athletes, our conversations have mostly been about the way female athletes, depending on the sport, are portrayed in media as being more masculine than feminine or more feminine than masculine. This is to also say that heterosexuality is so closely related to the body of a female athlete. I agree with Dworkins and Heywood when they say that in our contemporary culture the images have changed our perspectives, and proposes images that appeal to the possibility of male femininity and female masculininty. The reason why there is so much controversy when perhaps a female athlete looks "too masculine" is because her body combates with the distinct gender codes which, she through her athletic body is suppose to display. Im wondering will we ever get to a point where we accept the shift or ambiguity of gender. Will this take us to reconstruct what male, female, masculine and feminine mean completely? and how would this affect our other systems which so distinctly ascribe a particular type of thing to our bodies? I think that this will certianly be a process if it is at all attainable. I also think that if we work toward creating new ways to think about gender it would help open or broaden our perspecives about other social categories which seem to be limited to the parameters that we have created.