Gender Policing

The topic my group did was gender policing and violence against gay men. I feel like this is an important topic, especially today, because of the ongoing changes that our society is seeing. The constant changing, and growing of not just gay men, but the LGBQT community as a whole. In today’s society, more and more people are coming out about being gay, or bisexual, or transgender. Unfortunately, the violence against these same people are also increasing. I also think that even though the violence against gay men and the LGBQT community is increasing, the awareness of this issue hasn’t changed very much in the past few years. According to the Center for American Progress, hate-motivated violence against transgender people rose 13% from 2014
to 2015. Also, according to the FBI’s statistics for hate crimes committed in 2013, they said that 21% of all hate motivated crimes reported are crimes against a persons’ sexuality. Even though Illinois College is a small campus, were hoping that we can at least bring awareness to the students at Illinois College.
Besides the violence, gender policing is also a huge situation that not just gay men, but everyone has to deal with.
Most people probably do some type of gender policing in their day to day life without even realizing it. I don’t want to take away the importance of awareness of the violence that is occurring, but I almost think that raising the awareness of gender policing is more important. As a society we kind of agree for the most part that violence is bad. But like I said most of society is completely unaware of gender policing, and completely unaware that they probably do it in some form almost every day. In our presentations I give three examples of gender policing going on. Each example is just in the last two to three years. And the worst part is that all of them involve little children. Which in my opinion is terrible because now children are growing up in a world where they are use to this gender policing, and in the future these types of things are just going to be the norm and no one will even think twice about it. Not that many people think about it in today’s society anyways, but the future is just going to get worse and worse if society does raise their awareness on this
issue.
Gender policing is the imposition or enforcement of normative gender expressions on an individual, either through appearance or behavior, who is perceived as not performing them. The focus of our PSA assignment is gender policing and violence on gay men. We’ve discussed in class how this gender policing happens a lot against men who seem to be performing more feminine behaviors. But I’ve found, with the same examples in the previous paragraph with the children, gender policing can also happen the other way. I learned about a boy being bullied for wearing make-up and the school actually telling him to just stop wearing the make-up. But there was another example of a girl being asked to leave her private school because she was not “girlie” enough. Then again there was an instance where a boy had a My Little Pony book bag that he liked to bring to school. And the school administration told his parents that “it was a trigger for bullying”. It’s like what we’ve talked about in class about the general idea of rape. We’re trying to teach girls how to not get raped. Instead of teaching guys not to rape. The school was doing the same thing by trying to teach the kid how to not get bullied instead of teaching the other kids how not to bully. Harper and Harris in chapter 2 say, “What men need is men’s approval.” (Harper, and Harris, 2010). The opposite of this approval is to be seen as not being manly enough, and being called a sissy or pussy. Words that our society view as means of being “feminine”. These men being called these name are seen as not living up to society’s idea of a masculine man, therefore being policed and called these names. Then in chapter 9 of their book, Harper and Harris mention that while there is no written rule policy banning gay men from joining fraternities, gay members are often reticent about revealing their sexuality to avoid harassment by other brothers. (Harper, and Harris, 2010). Gay men are more likely to have to go through humiliating and usually more painful rituals to join fraternities across the US.
For our PSA we made flyers and hung them around campus. The flyers give the same general definition of gender policing. And then it also has some of the statistics of violence on the LGBQT community. At the bottom we try and grab people’s attentions by asking them what they can do to help. And then giving them some of the stuff we believe they would be able to do to help raise awareness of gender policing and stop the violence against the LGBQT community. The first thing we say is to participate in the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. This international day is May 17th, so we’re hoping that since that is coming up in a couple of weeks that it will be fresh in everyone’s mind when that day finally comes around. And the second thing we tell them they can do is that if they see gender policing, or violence going on, to do something about it. We tell them not to be part of the culture of silence.
I think the success was that we hung enough flyers to where there weren’t just one or two around campus.
As I noticed with the flyers for the event “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes”, there were tons of flyers to grab people’s attentions. Even if you weren’t paying attention to the board of flyers, that one stood out because you had seen it so many times before. We tried to do the same thing by trying to get at least one flyer in every main building on campus. Another way that helped our PSA flyers stand out was by including the statistics of the violence that is happening. It’s one thing to just hang a flyer up around campus saying that there is a problem on this subject. But it’s another thing to say there’s a problem and then actually show how bad the problem is. It was eye opening for me when I read about how bad the violence against the LGBQT community was. Hopefully it will be eye opening for some of the students on campus
also.
However, I do think that the failure of this approach was that they are just flyers. Yeah we can hang tons of flyers around campus, but if people don’t care about them, they are going to ignore them. Even if they read it the first time they see it, and think to themselves that they don’t care about that topic. They are just going to ignore the rest of them we put up on campus. I think the best way to get peoples attentions and make them want to help with the subject would be some way to get them involved. Yeah we put ways for them to get involved on the bottom of our flyers, but I think people would be more likely to get involved if we actually talked to them or asked them what they think they could do to help. I do believe though even with the failure of using this approach, we still got our point across and I think people will take time to read our flyers and hopefully make a difference in today’s society.