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Conclusions

I think I've been misunderstanding what it is to be a woman. Because yes, being a woman means being subjected to the patriarchy and all that comes along with it. But womanhood is also being told by a girl in a coffee shop that she likes your style. Or having someone to hold your hair back when you’re throwing up. It's having someone who will hold you after a breakup and let you eat all their ice cream. And it’s being empowered to insight change by challenging gender expectations. The thing about shared experiences is that they’re unifying. And for me, that’s the coolest part about being a woman. It's not defined by norms, expectations, or oppression; it's defined by compassion and empowerment. 

Sometimes, I like wearing skirts. And some days I do like wearing makeup and painting my nails. But none of this makes me a woman. In fact, some days I don’t even feel like a “she” or “her”, I just feel like “me” or “Angie”. If being a woman means just being pretty and nice and docile and an incubator for men, then that’s not what I ascribe myself to. My womanhood will not be defined by the actions of, or treatment by any man. I find my place in womanhood in the drive we feel to insight change. Being a woman, to me, isn’t defined by the patriarchy, but by the empowerment to dismantle it. So yeah, I’ll still experience the repercussions of existing as a woman. But I will not stop challenging and questioning gender. 

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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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