Feminist Theorist Judith Butler and Gender Transformation

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Introduction – The Transformation
The presence of gender through this the twenty-first century is no longer black and white (nor was it ever explicitly male or female at anytime). In a time of push towards acceptance of all people, no matter their social standpoint, the time of questionnaires and government documents asking whether one is male or female, has become extremely complex. “Gender” as a concept represented through the body is not simply a configuration of how the body formed. Rather, gender is performed and represented through and using the body – hence referring to Waskul and Vannini’s theory of the body being embodied when they state in their piece Body/ Embodiment: Social Interaction and the Sociology of the Body (2006),
“a person does not ‘inhabit’ a static object body but is subjectively embodied in a fluid, emergent, and negotiated process of being. In this process, body, self, and social interaction are interrelated to such an extent that distinctions between them are not only permeable and shifting but also actively manipulated and configured”
(Waskul & Vannini, 2006, p. 3)
By taking on the body of an obviously transgendered male and performing this body in the small town of Orangeville, Ontario during the profoundly eventful holiday month of December, the comparing experience of varying embodiments between myself as a young, white female versus myself as an obviously transgendered male lead to a variety of emotional and social repercussions which will be theorized and analyzed throughout this research paper.
To begin this paper off, in figure “a” below, there is a photographic transition of myself as the woman I usually embody in my day to day interactions, and how I transition from a female to the male b...

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Crossley, N. (2006). The networked body and the question of reflexivity. In D. Waskul & P. Vannini (Eds.), Body/ Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the BodyRetrieved from http://ia600800.us.archive.org/19/items/BodyembodimentSymbolicInteractionAndTheSociologyOfBody/BodyEmbodiment-WaskulVannini.pdf
Shakespeare, W. (1623). As you like it. Retrieved from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/asyoulikeit/full.html
Waskul, D., & Vannini, P. (2006). Introduction: The body in symbolic interaction. In D. Waskul & P. Vannini (Eds.), Body/ Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the BodyRetrieved from http://ia600800.us.archive.org/19/items/BodyembodimentSymbolicInteractionAndTheSociologyOfBody/BodyEmbodiment-WaskulVannini.pdf

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