This year, after being in the Goshen Monologues cast for two years, I decided to anonymously submit a piece and watch from the audience. Hearing my story performed with such feeling, intentionality and care was a powerful emotional experience that I was not fully expecting. By the end of the piece, sitting in between some of my favorite women, I cried. Those tears were a lovely release of emotions I didn’t even realize I still held, and an affirmation to how far I’ve come in my healing journey.
Over the past couple of years, I have watched the Monologues cast and committee grapple with how to maintain the spirit of the tradition of Monologues while acknowledging changing language and societal understandings around gender identity and expression. What was once a platform for specifically women to express themselves anonymously, broadened to feminine identifying people, and now, anyone who has at any point identified with the feminine experience.
I am grateful for the work the committee has done to ensure that Monologues is adapting alongside GC’s population. In an attempt to be more inclusive, however, I fear that we have created more obscurity and confusion.
What exactly is the “feminine experience?” Who can identify with the “feminine experience?” Do we mean femininity in the sense that it is the contrast to masculinity and has certain inherent traits? Do we mean that even people who consider themselves women but do not consider themselves “feminine” cannot relate? Or do we mean it in the sense that anybody who is/was assigned female at birth, or anybody who identifies currently as female is part of the “feminine experience?”
Monologues’ approach to this ambiguity has been to say, “If this in any way resonates with you, we welcome your voice.” While this perhaps sounds very inclusive, it notably fails to invite anyone who does not “resonate” with the “feminine experience,” creating exclusivity through a lack of common understanding of what the term “feminine experience” means. As we enlarge the scope of Monologues to be more “inclusive,” we run the risk of decentralizing gender. As much as I would love to live in a world where people are seen as human beings first and gendered bodies second, or perhaps not at all, the reality is we’re not there yet. Masculinity and traditional “masculine” traits are still privileged over femininity and “feminine” traits. People with bodies that seem to represent a societal understanding of “woman” are treated, both subtly and overtly, differently than people with bodies that represent “men.”
Hell, this country elected a blatant misogynist, the epitome of white, straight, cis-male privilege, for a second time. If that doesn’t tell us that we have a long way to go when it comes to gender then I don’t know what will.
That brings me back to Monologues. I want to talk about gender. I took a gender theory class last spring, and my classmates and I had such fruitful conversations about the ways that we’ve been shaped by our genders, whether we claim them or not.
I want to talk about Cordelia Fine’s research around the Stereotype Threat, which posits that people will perform worse in situations when a negative stereotype about their group applies.
In one of Fine’s studies, women
performed significantly worse on a math test after either being primed with gender stereotypes about math or simply just marking their gender before starting the test. Gender theorists show that gender difference is greatly exaggerated and artificially constructed. I’m continuing to parse out the ways that I behave because I have been socialized as a woman from behaviors that are just part of my nature as an individual and evaluate whether those behaviors constructively suit me or not.
Monologues has been that space for women and should continue to be that space. People who identify or have identified as female are not the only people that are entitled to a safe, anonymous space for them to share their stories and experiences.
Perhaps we are realizing that there is a demand for the stories of people that don’t identify with the language of the Goshen Monologues project, and I fully support the creation of new spaces. But I don’t think Monologues as it is should be expected to carry the weight of facilitating a platform for all gendered conversations. We are all affected by the binary, whether we’re aware of it or not, and it’s time we open up more outlets to process gender, rather than overloading the single existing one.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, and I hope we can continue to explore our understanding of the role of gender in our lives as a community.
