I've spent all of my nineteen years of life defending my legal name--the name that is on my birth certificate. It's amazing how people would (and still do) fight with me about what should be my full name--well, what they think it should be, partly because of the invisible force commonly known as society.
Many assume that my full name is Nicole. Teachers and friends alike call out to me with the wrong name even after I have previously introduced myself as Nikki. Of course, I do not respond, but they get very angry at me for not doing so. I've had people give me the strangest looks while saying, "my full name is really Nikki," their faces contorted with immense confusion. I've even dealt with people bluntly telling me that my name is "stupid" and "not real," as if I broke some sort of important rule that everyone must follow. As Barker put it, all of these occurrences can be defined as identity, which is "not a thing but a description in language." I wasn't following the linguistics of the English language to the majority of people in which I interacted here in the United States, apparently.
But it doesn't end with just my name. It gets even more personal than that. My identity is pushed even further by more and more speculating people, wondering why I dress a certain way, why my hair is so short, etcetera. But why does this happen? According to Giddens, my identity is essentially comprised of "the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography." Therefore, why should it matter to others? Why does everything have to be questioned and severely critiqued by people that I have just met or even people who just see me passing by on the sidewalk?
All of this can easily sound irrelevant to many. Who cares what other people think, right? They don't matter to you. But it does matter. It matters because it is our entire society that thinks this way, whether we realize it or not. The reason why my name cannot be Nikki is because Nikki is genderqueer. Yes, there are different spellings of it based around the ideas of femininity and masculinity, but one would not know that if I were talking outloud to him/her. My name bothers people because it does not belongs to either gender category; therefore, people will, after assuming I'm a female, ask if my name is Nicole, which is typically a feminine name.
People also assume sexual orientation by the way I dress and style my hair, without knowing anything about me. It's because our identities, according to Weeks, are "about sameness and difference--what you have in common with some people and what differentiates you from others." Therefore, if I look different than someone else, I'm automatically judged and categorized as the "other."
All in all, I'd say Barker's Issues of Subjectivity and Identity (Chapter 6) really hit close to home to me. Very interesting stuff.
Many assume that my full name is Nicole. Teachers and friends alike call out to me with the wrong name even after I have previously introduced myself as Nikki. Of course, I do not respond, but they get very angry at me for not doing so. I've had people give me the strangest looks while saying, "my full name is really Nikki," their faces contorted with immense confusion. I've even dealt with people bluntly telling me that my name is "stupid" and "not real," as if I broke some sort of important rule that everyone must follow. As Barker put it, all of these occurrences can be defined as identity, which is "not a thing but a description in language." I wasn't following the linguistics of the English language to the majority of people in which I interacted here in the United States, apparently.
But it doesn't end with just my name. It gets even more personal than that. My identity is pushed even further by more and more speculating people, wondering why I dress a certain way, why my hair is so short, etcetera. But why does this happen? According to Giddens, my identity is essentially comprised of "the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography." Therefore, why should it matter to others? Why does everything have to be questioned and severely critiqued by people that I have just met or even people who just see me passing by on the sidewalk?
All of this can easily sound irrelevant to many. Who cares what other people think, right? They don't matter to you. But it does matter. It matters because it is our entire society that thinks this way, whether we realize it or not. The reason why my name cannot be Nikki is because Nikki is genderqueer. Yes, there are different spellings of it based around the ideas of femininity and masculinity, but one would not know that if I were talking outloud to him/her. My name bothers people because it does not belongs to either gender category; therefore, people will, after assuming I'm a female, ask if my name is Nicole, which is typically a feminine name.
People also assume sexual orientation by the way I dress and style my hair, without knowing anything about me. It's because our identities, according to Weeks, are "about sameness and difference--what you have in common with some people and what differentiates you from others." Therefore, if I look different than someone else, I'm automatically judged and categorized as the "other."
All in all, I'd say Barker's Issues of Subjectivity and Identity (Chapter 6) really hit close to home to me. Very interesting stuff.
nice reflections. nice connections.
ReplyDelete