Connective Cube

I pulled an article out of a binder from my graduate school days. When I lived in Atlanta, I purchased binders and a three-hole punch and crunched a few thousand pages and assembled them. Knowing I couldn’t access many of these articles that, in retrospect, shifted my consciousness, I decided it was necessary to archive them.

After I completed my thesis, I wanted to burn the articles. There was this distinct pleasure of knowing that I did not have to read a bunch of scholarly articles on gender, sexuality, and the environment on a schedule. However, I also knew that I would have to go to graduate school again and remember everything I read, authors and all. Or have access to expensive databases to pull everything. Given that I have a hard time remembering the names of people who produce art and culture, I decided to take the time.

Now, I want to re-read the articles and re-contextualize them to the present in some manner.

***

Over the years, I stopped thinking of gender as consciously performance, or performative. The idea of disrupting gender, for me, started when I was six years old ripping heads off of Barbie dolls.

I still loved my ice cream dress, one that had a simple ice cream cone in the middle of my chest. It got lost in a move. My desk was intensely messy, the one with papers falling out and unknown gooey food grime.

It was always in me to stomp on the trope that being pretty is what I had to offer. Of course, my sixth birthday party yielded 20 new Barbie dolls to draw on and one pair of jelly slippers.

There was always something in me, at a young age, something not desiring to perform, but desiring to exist.

***

The first article I pulled was Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s ‘Doing Gender’.  My first semester of graduate school, I thought I might want to research public education, so I enrolled in a Developmental Psychology course with a Russian trained psychologist. The questions we explored in-depth was undoing the binary between nature and nurture. I knew right away that I didn’t agree with the Eriksonian approach that personality remains relatively static over time; if anything, I feel like something inside me dies when another adult says ‘people never really change.’

Part of undoing the binary came from reading material that I have yet to re-read. The popular term in developmental psychology was ‘ecological approach’, which is rooted more in a social constructionist understanding of human relations. That is, the environment plays a larger role in the development of our consciousness rather than inborn qualities.

The individual human is at the center of ecological systems theory, and the following systems impinge on development over the life cycle:

Microsystems – Family, friends, social institutions (arts, religion, neighborhood associations, etc.), school.
Mesosystems – The intersection of micro and exosystems.
Exosystems – Medical providers, media, cultural institutions, workplaces
Macrosystems – The larger culture at the moment.

Gender, according to West and Zimmerman, negotiates all points on the ecological scale. The present the case of Agnes, a transwoman who negotiates passing as a woman with ascribed behavior.