Breaking Binaries: Common Confusion in Television and Movies

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Breaking Binaries: Common Confusion in Television and Movies

You are gender fluid and quite possibly gender queer, or did you not know. Of course you not. You literally don’t know the meaning of the words. When analyzing gender, society commonly thinks of two strong binary entities, male or female, but gender is an ambiguous term, and you can dismiss this label you’ve been assigned with if you do not identify as this gender. When speaking about gender as an identity, we need to recognize it as a combination of an infinite amount of experiences, preferences and styles. Gender is also a learned, incomplete prospective of how to identify ones self as either a man or woman, or as masculine or feminine. This is not the finality of gender; not to say that man and woman are incorrect. They are if anything, two plot points (common terms) on an infinite line of possible identifications. Most people have just not been informed enough to comprehend exploration past, or in-between these binaries. One of the strongest agents of social change in the media is television, but the writers and producers do not fully realize the power they hold over the viewers education of gender norms, causing an underrepresentation of many gender identities; specifically the genderqueer and gender fluid identities.

The genderqueer identity umbrellas an entire spectrum of expressions. It also serves as a bio-psycho-social interaction that results in our own unique personality. It is quite possible that through this stall of education towards progressive gender construction, adolescents will have no alternative model to associate their role preferences with. The first step to changing these gender norms is to recognize them. As Sam Killmann explains in The Soc...

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...ount of femininity or masculinity he feels his is that day. Alexander is a positive agent of change in that he wants to rattle the world into knowing that this identity exists and that there’s nothing wrong with that identity. This current powerhouse for gender fluidity proves that Tumblr is one aspect of media that allows genderqueer and gender fluid individuals to speak freely about who they are and help others shape who they want to be.

After examining the aforementioned examples of unconventional gender norms in television and movies, we see that they were only unconventional in the time and context of which they were published. We can further deduce that there was slight misrepresentation of genderqueer and gender fluid identities, but there was mostly an underrepresentation that is currently beginning to blossom into a full and positive representation.

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