The Gender Reveal Party
Gender as a means of social control
From the moment a woman announces a pregnancy, they are bombarded with the questions:
“Have you found out the gender?”
“Are you having a little boy or a little girl?”
Once they are told the gender of the baby, many women hold a gender reveal party, where through the cutting of a cake, the popping of a balloon, or some sort of extravagant explosion, pink or blue is revealed, and therefore the babies gender. A person is assigned a gender at birth, and the United States does not recognize the difference between gender and biological sex, when in fact gender and biological sex are not one in the same. Many Americans are focused on the gender binary, and become inspired to do so by political influence for traditional family values. The two party system and the two gender system work hand in hand. The political push to instill traditional family values has encouraged a self policing and social policing aspect of gender. These social policing practices only accept traditional gender roles, and they criticize anything that does not fit their cookie cutter image, including things that are not particularly suited to a single gender. Socially, ones life becomes a big gender reveal party.
Essentializing gender into the binary system allows for systems of oppression used as social control to police peoples gender. These self and social policing appear in multiple ways, one of the main ways being pathologizing those who do not fit into the norm for their socially assigned gender. People who do not fit the norm are viewed and labeled as somehow sick, or in a position where they need medical treatment. This has been seen throughout American history where gay conversion therapy has been an option to “fixing” people who do not fit the binary norm. Recently, the labeling of transgendered bodies as mentally ill has been used to justify the deviation from their preset norm, and to reestablish the idea that gender and sexual orientation are one in the same.
Predetermined gender, its subsequent roles, and the essentialization of gender into the binary system are used in hegemonic systems of control, and are used through self policing and social policing efforts.The acceptance of gender as socially constructed, as well as the distinction between gender and biological sex, are important to moving forward and away from essentialist arguments. Kimberle Crenshaw discusses this in her piece on intersectionality, stating “But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say the category has no significance in our world. On the contrary, a large and continuing project for subordinated people- and indeed, one of the projects for which postmodern theories have been very helpful- is thinking about the way power is clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others”.Not only do people have to accept their assigned gender, but they have to maintain the social, economic, and political roles associated with the gender. Social structures speak loudly about society as a whole, and by accepting gender as socially constructed people can move on from their institutionalized mindset of the gender binary.
