cipheramnesia: The word is girls. As preamble / caveat, today we’re talking about a very binar
cipheramnesia: The word is girls. As preamble / caveat, today we’re talking about a very binary construction of gender. Just assume I understand the existence of a spectrum and the discussion of spectrum vs binary took place here. When I think about myself, some things are easier to think than others. Pronouns, like she or her, feel easy. And I have no trouble at all talking about myself as a girl. However, as a woman I’m suddenly all fumbling and awkward. As a female, I’m hesitant. I can’t think or say either word, directed at myself, without a little hitch or slur or mumble. I bring this up, because my impression is that, on the masculine to feminine spectrum of the trans community, the word “girl” is far more prevailent than “woman” or “female” or other terms. I started thinking about this seeing the #girlslikeus tag. I’m interested in this word because typically girl is a diminutive, so to speak. It refers to a child, someone inexperienced or lacking maturity. If I may be forgiven for constantly retreading old ground, the considerably more objectifying term “sissy” also has a component of this, a certain childishness or infantilization. However, the term “girl” is not only not co-opted as a term of objectification or fetishization, it appears to have been embraced as a form of empowerment. It wasn’t so long ago that feminist empowerment meant repudiating the word girl. To call a woman a girl was to diminish her, to deny her full personhood, to attempt to disempower her. We live in more interesting times, because this can still be true, yet at the same time the term girl may also be a form of empowerment. This isn’t the first time girl has been used to empower instead of diminish, such as the classic riot grrl, or virtually any punk / industrial / gothic cultural subset. These all use the idea of a girl as energetic, irrepressible, and unconstrained by society to turn the asscoiated infantilization on its head. There’s some interesting aspects in terms of the structure of language here. Woman vs Man for example, can and has been argued as deminishing women as mere suffixes to men. This is one reason why some feminists switch up the spelling of women to womyn, reclaiming the female as something intrinsic in and of itself. There’s a similar antagonism at work in Female vs Male. Again, the feminine is treated as a suffix to the masculine, not an inherent concept in and of itself. However, in Girl vs Boy each concept is distinct, as far as the construction goes. Nothing about girl implies it is constructed from boy. In this context, the word girl is arguably a more singularly feminine term than the more mature female or woman. In this sense, “girl” seems like a perfectly reasonable and empowering word. Maybe that’s why I see it more and more. Yet I still can’t say that explains why woman is so hard for me to embrace, and girl is so easy. All the same, that doesn’t make me feel any less determined to be seen as a woman, even if in my own mind I’m always a girl. -- source link
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