Parallels

I just got out of a lecture on feminist theory 15 minutes ago and am currently sitting in a study hall at the university I attend. The class is every Thursday, and it's the one class I'm really looking forward to each week. Feminist theory and gender research is not a major obsession, but a long-lasting one and I'm happy the university is finally offering at least something like "this", small as it is.

We've been dealing with feminists like de Beauvoir, Firestone, Irigaray, Butler and Wittig (and probably a few more as well so far), having a look at their ideologies, theories and opinions. Of course, they all assume the position that females are oppressed by males, but there is more than that. How is gender made? What mattes when it comes to your individual representation of yourself as a male or a female? We're also writing a paper on this, which has to be handed in tonight (don't remind me).

Today we had a good hard look at our own prejudice. We were faced with several photos and had to classify whether or not the subject was female or male. Why did we think either way? We had to make lists as to why we had these assumptions about the people; characteristics as we saw them as well as the feelings the picture evokes. At the end, the lecture was about Wittig and Butler and how their theories deal with how we made ourselves known as genders. This struck a somewhat familiar chord.

Butler says that gender is biologically conditioned, but you adapt to the cultural (sociological) classification for the sex you are born with (biological sex). To these sociological gender, there are certain "expectations" you have to live up to. let's say you're a woman. You are expected to dress as "we" think women should dress and hold "feminine" qualities as be a good cook (even though the best chefs in the world are men), want and desire children and to become a mother. Of course, Butler goes even further and says that lesbian women are unable to live up to the expectations met in society and that one should, in some way, resolve sex as it's actually culturally defines after all - how we perceive sex depends on our culture. Maybe that isn't as relevant here... Or is it?

Can't a parallel be drawn to aspies in the NT world here? You see - as aspie as though we may be, we are still "expected" to act NT, to be NT. We as humans are seen as the same as NTs. We are to be the same. But, some of us (be it aspie, HFA or "low-functioning") can't live up to how NT-society works. There you go. That's the parallel. That puny paragraph. That's all I have to say after you've read all this.

I'm soooo tempted to write such a comparison in my paper, and thus out myself as an autistic.