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Encountering Gender

Angie Niver

Intro

I am a woman. In conversation, I am referred to as she or her. Since birth, my parents have dressed me in skirts and dresses. I wear nail polish. I put on mascara. I still suck in my stomach because I saw a girl do it on TV when I was eleven, and now it’s a bad habit. I wear enough makeup in the morning to feel pretty, but not too much that boys will think I'm “not natural”. I get whistled at in cities by men who are old enough to be my father. I’ve come to consider these behaviors and realities as innate part of my womanhood. 

Truthfully, I like skirts and dresses, though I usually opt for sweatpants or pajama pants, because they expect less from me than a skirt does. I wear nail polish because slowly, meticulously applying the coats of paint gives me the smallest sense of control in a world where I seem to lack any. I’ve started to only recognize myself when I have my makeup done, but I honestly hate the way it feels on my face. Being catcalled fills me with tremendous fear because bluntly, I am terrified of the power men have over my body. This is what I’ve found to be the woman's experience. 

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Me!

I'm Angie, I'm 17, and I'm a Junior in highschool. This project is for my AP Language class, where we've been asked to create an outreach project that reshapes our experience and research from a semester of inquiry about a topic of our choosing. My initial point of inquiry was in exploring women's anger and the ways it's weaponized against us. This led me to a rage room with 4 other girls in my class, where I discovered somewhat ironically, that a space designed to be destructive felt actually very safe to me, because we were given a space to exhibit our anger without judgment.  

This lead to further examination of the implications of this, and how gender expectations and roles influence the way anger is percieved in women. I found that as a woman, to be angry is to be perceived as ugly and to be ugly is to be worthless. This sparked my interest in Gender Theory as a whole and I conducted further research, like reading Judith Butler and other various essays. All of this has accumulated in this blog, which explores gender as a concept, along with my personal relationship with my gender.

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