Monnighan Crowell
Power and control are two of the biggest motivators for human interaction. Everything that operates as a binary must have a lesser of the two or things will be thrown into chaos. The way society has set up the way humans operate is solely based on trivial interactions to maintain the idea that reproduction and heteronormativity is the most important. For any binary that one can think of; one can find its foundation in the belief that anything outside of heteronormative and cisgendered interaction is a threat to it. Patriarchal societies have reinforced the power of the phallus due to the idea that masculinity equates to power. Patriarchy, in turn, induces queerphobia and misogyny by setting the standard that femininity is inherently submissive and adversarial to masculinity.
Ocean Vuong expounds on the way certain queer identities and femininity are condemned in the face of masculinity in his novel, On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous. In the novel, Little Dog and his mother, Rose demonstrate the dynamics of how misogyny affects feminine presenting individuals in general, not just women. In the story, he pens a letter to his mother, and there is a dark tone to his tale. His mother does not see him as what a man should be and this causes strain on their relationship.
Little Dog and his mother are the perfect example because they show us exactly how a hatred for girls manifests into a hatred of queer identities, too. His mother did not have the opportunity to experience parenthood in the same way he did not have the chance to be taught the rules of gender. While we are told that Rose is a monster, Vuong breaks the notion that being a monster in the way she is is necessarily bad or shameful. He says, “I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say processing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes to the body” (220). He understands the lack of safety his mother experienced in early adulthood caused her to fail to conform to standards of Western parenting and caused her to harm him. While he understands her enough to not have disdain toward her, he does not understand what put him on the receiving end of everyone else’s disdain. The answer was his lack of willingness or knowledge to perform gender in the way patriarchal societies believe it is supposed to be performed. He and his mother have both failed in terms of their gender indoctrination.
Gender indoctrination is a tool that institutions use to preserve the binaries that form the cultural standards of society in terms of gender and sex. Across the world there are social norms and traditions that code femininity as submissive and queerness as something that should be subdued. This idea has been made standard in order to maintain patriarchal rule and to challenge this makes one a failure at heteronormativity. Jack Halberstam discusses this idea in his book, The Queer Art of Failure. He expounds on how this failure can actually be a positive force in terms of dismantling patriarchal oppression. He states, “Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope. Other subordinate, queer, or counter-hegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive lifestyles, negativity, and critique” (89). These forms of failure could apply to heterosexual people as well. Rose is an example of the queer art of failure because she has not accomplished many of the things that align with heteronormative common sense. This is only reiterated to and for her when she fails to raise Little Dog to be a man that performs his gender within the bounds of their (former and current) cultural norms.
Little Dog has increased odds of failure because he is also learning the social norms of his new environment after immigration. Vuong details Little Dog’s experience of learning about masculinity by trial and error as opposed to homosocial bonding. For instance, when he rides a pink bike, he learns “how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity” (134). Children who do not want to play with the toys that were specified for their gender may or may not grow into children who do not perform the gender roles society has in place for their respective sex, but they will be chastised for their behavior. Vuong’s novel also details how much masculinity is ingrained in American children when he describes Little Dog’s encounter with a love interest, Trevor. When Little Dog and Trevor begin to learn to have sex with each other, Trevor says, “I dunno. I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t, man. I’m sorry, it’s not for me—” He paused, wiped his nose. “It’s for you. Right” (114)? Trevor is almost disgusted with himself for trying to be submissive to Little Dog. This is because he was successfully indoctrinated whilst trying to unlearn the heteronormative standard that he is supposed to be dominant at all times. In short, heterosexual children can be forced into a mold, whereas queer children can often be robbed of direction outside of concealment.
The relationship between power and cultural gender norms is by far one of the strangest human phenomena since the discovery of sex. There are people in this world who looked at a penis and said people who own these must be in power to the people who don’t and ostracized anyone who did not agree. The strange thing however is how early society implements these ideas on not only kids but also unborn babies. From the time we are conceived we are being met with the idea that our sex is the selector of the life that we will live. Society is so obsessed with gender that we even hold parties to celebrate which roles we will place on newborns. Gender reveals are a prime example of society’s indoctrination because it places importance on something that should not matter to the point where it does. Due to outdated gender roles, the world has developed a preference toward boys and it has had a detrimental effect on baby girls across the world.
People in many countries still hold that boys have a better opportunity for upward mobility than girls. A study conducted by the University of Maine finds that, “With the advancement and increased availability of “safe, effective, inexpensive and accessible technologies to determine the sex of a fetus and to abort unwanted pregnancies, sex selective abortion came to play a major role in unbalanced gender ratios, with (male/female) sex ratios at birth rising in a number of countries, mostly in Asia” (Blau 1). This suggests a global preference toward boys, but what does it say about cultural perceptions of girls’ social contributions? Such gender imbalances allow for the precedent of gender oppression by way of misogyny and homophobia. When we indoctrinate people with the idea that pink bows are for people with vaginas and blue guns are for people with penises without any flexibility, we embody a dichotomy that ignores the full spectrum of sexuality and gender. In heteronormative society, there is a socially constructed belief that the people who do not embody the gender that their sex has determined must be identified and corrected or the flow of human reproduction will be disrupted.
When the process of socialization begins for girls, they will be taught the rules of gender from other children and adults through child’s play and parental socialization. Playing with games and toys is essential to a child’s social development but if we focus on what and who children are playing with we will see how the indoctrination occurs in real time. If one is to think about girls toys versus boys toys they will see they are being taught gender roles as if it is an emulation game. A quick google search of children’s toys paints a grim picture of the expectation of girls and boys. Girls’ toys were whimsical and promoted servitude while the boys promoted leisure and violence. The girls’ toys consisted of baby dolls, princess outfits, a kitchenette set, a fake apple watch/cellphone/ and travel cases. The boys toys consisted of cars, tool sets and multiple guns. Bonnie Marcus conducted this exact same study and found, “Toys marketed to girls were eighteen times more likely to be shown demonstrating nurturing or domestic skills than toys marketed to boys and Seventy-five percent of toys that were played competitively or violently were played with by boys” (Marcus). This gives us the idea that all of these things are calculated. This is troubling because it gives the idea that the little girl who is meant to play with these toys is subconsciously emulating parenthood whereas the little boy is generally being taught to emulate things associated with masculinity, including violence and militarism.
By the time these children grow into adolescents we begin to see the adverse effects of misogyny bleed into every sociocultural demographic. Those within the queer community will have a hard time with adolescence because they do not feel the biological drive to participate in the rules of engagement in the way cisgendered heterosexual people do. For instance, they may be presented with questions about their romantic interests and their preferences as tests of conformity and heteronormativity, which they inherently fail to no fault of their own. If the girls are to be socialized to value parenthood and partnership and the boys are simply taught to value masculinity as independence, the two are being socialized to be averse to one another. For girls, they are taught one gender requires the other while boys are taught they are great without the other. Simply put, when you teach children that things associated with the “opposite” gender are not meant for them, it teaches them that things that should be expected of the opposite gender should not be expected of them which is detrimental to everyone because it does not allow for fluidity or subversion.
Little Dog and Rose can each serve as examples of how gender indoctrination occurs but also of queer failure. Rose had a tumultuous childhood. Her mother was a prostitute and her father was nonexistent. She did not have any formal education due to her school being destroyed when she was a small child and she was shunned for being half-white and often taunted by the other children. This means that she had no one to play the emulation game with which means she had to define femininity for herself. The women around her all had to fend for themselves and take care of their children even if the circumstances were not conducive which is why she raises Little Dog with so much dissociation and abuse. She is not the ideal woman or mother readers might believe she should be because no one around her was that person either due to circumstance. Little Dog also did not play the emulation game. He has a predisposed preference toward things that align with femininity and, because of this, he does not have the drive to assert dominance as a way of asserting his masculinity. This is a lot of adolescent people’s induction into queerness. They simply are made aware that their own preference and way of life is other and should be subdued.
Many queer people champion love and companionship over reproduction. For this, they are viewed as a threat to reproduction and therefore a threat to society. They do not confine themselves to the bounds of physical masculinity and femininity and thus rob these gendered labels of their power. In layman’s terms, if you have a vagina, you are not supposed to have the power that people with penises do and if you have the power of the penis, you should never relinquish that power for anyone because to do so means you believe the two are equal which is inflammatory. It is inflammatory because, if the two are equal, then men are not inherently more powerful which means the basis for their rule is futile. Queer identities strip the patriarchy of its power.
While the world hates girls, queer people, and trans people in a ways alike, it should be understood that each experience begins with teaching children that femininity is weak. Queer people and women alike must find and fight for identity outside of these perceptions. This will inevitably cause friction because society feels that is not their place, but when we stand for this fight, will we see a world where people are who they really are instead of who we demand they be.
Works Cited
Blau, Francine, et al. “Is There Still Son Preference in the United States?” NBER, Sept. 2017, https://doi.org/10.3386/w23816.
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.
Marcus, Bonnie. “New Report Reveals How the Marketing of Toys Reinforces Gender Stereotypes.” Forbes Magazine, 2 Dec. 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/bonniemarcus/2023/12/01/new-report-reveals-how-the-marketing-of-toysreinforces- gender-stereotypes/?sh=2bdc2f6410e4.
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel. Penguin Books, 2021.