On Thursday, November 21, Sophia R., Gaia, Chloe, Loveday and I attended a National Organization for Women New York City (NOW-NYC) Activist Night.  Activist Night is an event which NOW-NYC hosts in their offices every month, and anyone is able to attend as long as they RSVP on the website.  These meetings are meant to begin a discussion between the group of people.  These meetings are given a different theme each month; the theme in November was Feminist Philosophers.  Although feminist philosophy is not our topic for Social Justice work this year, we thought it would be a great experience and a great way to maybe meet a few people who are either from NOW-NYC or other people who would make amazing contacts

In the end of the meeting we did meet two women of interest.  One women was a fashion designer who tried to design feminist clothing, there was also another women who was a phsyciatrist, who helped women who have been sexually abused.  I was able to get both of their contact information, and now I am in the middle of getting an interview with both of them.  During the discussion, we talked about different feminist philosophers; the one who seemed to be the most eminent in the discussion was Judith Butler who has written many books on her ideas of gender.  We mainly discussed Judith Butler’s idea of “gender performativity”, which was a very complex idea at first, but then became more clear as we discussed it.    We learned that in this generation people tend to confuse sex and gender.  The sex of a person is determined by their genitalia.  If one has a penis they are biologically male, if one has a vagina they are biologically female.  Gender, on the other hand, is determined by ones actions — if a biological male acts or behaves like a “woman”, then their gender is considered to be female, and if a biological female acts or behaves like a “male”, then their gender is male. Performativity is very much connected to this. Performativity means the way one performs, acts or behaves.

Judith Butler explained that when one performs (acts, behaves) like a male they will be a male for that period of time, but if they began to perform (act, behave) like a female, then they will become a female for that period of time, and all of this has nothing to do with that person’s genetalia.  Throughout the entire meeting we discussed this idea of performativity.  We also discussed something similar, which was said by Simone de Beauvior, “One is born as a women, not made into one.”  This basically has the same definition as performativity. One might be born as female (has a vagina), but not behave as a female. In addition to this idea we discussed how gender roles might have been created and why they were assigned. Although feminist philosophy is not the group’s topic, this meeting helped me understand gender roles, power roles and gender stereotypes.  Although some of these discussions do not have to do with rape culture and sexual abuse, my group and I would like to go to the next few Activist Nights to be able to discuss different topics so we can learn about women issues and ideas, in general.  Also, even though this topic isn’t DIRECTLY connected to sexual violence and rape culture there are aspects of feminist philosophy that do connect with our topic.

The link below is a video that they showed us at Activist Night, it is a video of Judith Butler discussing her ideas on gender performativity.

YouTube LInk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc