Lisa Blamfort Gender Identity Project Draft

My gender is constructed for my individual based on the gendered interactions that I have in my childhood and my teenager years with my family, teachers, classmates and friends, as well as, other identities or roles I may hold. Another influence of my gender identity is how I feels inside and outside and how I know myself to be when it comes to gender.

When I was born the doctor assigned me as a female to my parents like society brainwashed him to say so and according to my physical anatomy. I remember when I was 5 years old, I grew up seeing myself as a little girl wearing dresses and skirt and boys wearing pants and playing football in my neighborhood. But everything change when my mom had a full time management job in a restaurant, she didn’t have time to care of myself so she asked my uncles and my brother to do it for her because she was the oldest and the main provider of the household so everybody had to follow her rules. I was raised by 3 uncles, a brother and a step-after/father, those guys did everything in the house such as: cleaning, cooking, laundry, comb my hair, teach me how to dance, study, play chess, tic toc toe, domino, video games and play sports like soccer,  basket-ball and tennis etc.

In spite of the fact that my household was an only man one, my school was the opposite. I spent all of my childhood and teenager years in a catholic school that accepted only girl. The nuns of my school taught me how to eat, dance, sing, talk, act, walk and think like sweet gentle girl. I had only one girlfriend because the other girls said that I was insane and I acted like a boy, I was confused because this is how my uncles taught me how to talk and act, the nuns didn’t like my behavior either and they were constantly fighting with my male care givers because my uncles always dressed me like a little boy when the nuns are having schools activities and the evils nuns weren’t feeling it and they always kicked me out from those activities sometimes. I remember that I was late for school and 2 of my uncles were fixing my hair, they decided to do a high ponytails with my hair but they weren’t able to find any elastic bang or rubber bang to do it so they decided to use a electric cord to attach my hair and they did it and send me to school, and the nuns send me back to my house.

I spent my whole life trying to balance those two mutually exclusive categories of gender that society creates called binary gender, but it was unsuccessful, so I decide to blend them, and I get in return the perfect combo. This is 3 important concepts that I learn from the course that help me with my identity. The first one is the “Theorizing Lived Experiences” that disclose how inequality of race, class, gender, and sexuality drives to numerous problems to a micro, meso, and macro/global level of everyday

in connection with women that cause the feminist movement. This theory makes me realize that my childhood has a big impact in my gender identity perhaps if I was born in family includes father, mother and sisters or grew up with my aunts only I would be different and loss.

The second is Psychological theories incorporates psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic feminism that our conscious or unconscious thoughts and memories don’t have an effect to our gender identity but our emotional experience during our childhood does. I grew up in memories that men and women aren’t different at all my uncles and brother did everything and anything that a woman could did and they didn’t see as a little girl they show how repair things like cars, broken Tv and radio, grill, drink beer and alcohol, smoke marijuana like a man and even taught me how to flirt with a girl or manipulate her to have sex with me. On the other hand, I saw them being vulnerate and emotional sometimes when their partners broke up with them like the so-called feminine side society portrays us.

And the third one is a critical/Cultural theory that is someone’s customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group influence someone life and keep human beings from a full and true understanding of how the world works and understand his or her identity. I was raised in a household where gender roles were in contradiction with the society norms because my mother didn’t engage in the traditional feminine gender role would be to nurture her family and my uncles were my caretakers.

My mother who is my role model breaks gender barrier and those 3 assignments that I had in Communication and Gender about Gender roles in society that it is from us expected to act, speak, dress, groom, and conduct ourselves based upon our assigned sex in my mind. Like Subhas Chandra Bose Quote: “Freedom is not given – it is taken,” that’s the reason of that quote I took the initiations to educate myself by reading, study gender identity and train my mind to seek the truth instead of information. I decide to become in the future a activist in the feminist movement because the society and the media are hurting us and killing us by hiding from us the truth about who we are, as one of my model “Academy Award winning actor Denzel Washington:” “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed.””So, what responsibility do you all have?” he said.  “To tell the truth. Not just to be first. But to tell the truth.” I want to tell the truth to people about gender identity and help them to free themselves.