History

I feel like my socially constructed place in society as a woman has been influenced by the elements of race, class, sex and gender, in addition to being influenced by the geographic area in which I grew up and the racial and cultural groups I have been in contact with in my life. As a blue-eyed, blonde haired white woman, I outwardly look like societys version of a typical Caucasian female, but I have always felt that there is a lot more to my identity as a woman and in terms of race and sex than can be seen at first glance or based on my initial appearance. My formation as a woman is largely due to the women in my family that helped raise me and the cultural aspects of womanhood and femininity that I have encountered in my life.

Class was a major factor in my formation as a woman from my childhood into adulthood. My family had financial difficulties when I was young, and as a result we lived in some lower-class, lower income neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were mostly populated with African Americans and Latin Americans. I was friends with children of several races and ethnicities, exposing me to cultural and musical elements outside my own race. I think having multicultural friends allowed me to understand aspects of femininity not typically associated with my own race. I incorporated some styles of dress and hair from these other ethnicities as well, so the multicultural neighbourhoods I grew up in allowed me to adopt aspects of femininity from other races and cultures to form my own personal concept of womanhood. I also developed role models of my sex that were outside my race. Instead of looking up to only white celebrities and public figures as the kind of woman I wanted to be, I also admired women of other races that were proud of their ethnicity and made the aspects of their ethnic womanhood a thing of beauty. I developed the viewpoint early on that there were elements of beauty in women of all races and ethnicities, and I found myself sometimes wishing for the voluptuous curves or big brown eyes that some of those ethnic women were blessed with instead of my own long, skinny, pale legs.

My class and social standing also forced me to be creative in the ways that I expressed my sex and gender. As with every generation, there were certain hairstyles and types of shoes and clothing that all the cool girls wore and that every girl just had to have. But with my familys financial status, our school shopping was often done at thrift stores instead of the mall and my parents didnt have the money to buy me all the clothes, shoes, jewelry and accessories that all the other girls had. They were using these items to identify themselves not only as being cool, but as being cool girls. The fashion they wore said that they were into the fashion of the moment and allowed them to identify their womanhood and their sex by what the television and radio said was in at the moment. Since I couldnt do this, I found myself creating my own style and identifying my sex according to what I wore and how I dressed with vintage styles and older clothes. I took a lot of my fashion ideas from women from the 1970s and 1980s and created my own style with it. This creativity out of necessity allowed me to forgo a lot of the short skirts and tight, bright clothes that were stylish when I was a teen and instead to forge my own identity and identify my sex and gender in a unique way that made me different, but also made me feel fearless and beautiful as a growing young woman. I didnt have to look like all the other girls. I could wear a pair of my dads old jeans and a pullover from the thrift store and feel like Audrey Hepburn, so in my eyes, even though I wasnt in style according to the trends of my generation, I was still a beautiful female.

There were a lot of social and cultural issues and events when I was growing up that affected African Americans that I felt connected to because of my early exposure to this race. Rap music exploded in popularity during my years in junior high and high school, and with it the African American female became marginalized into a heavily made up, scantily clad video girl. When Darnell Anderson of Wayne State University did a study to find out the general perception of African American women as a result of their portrayal in videos, he found, The results of this study support the position that negative stereotypic sex-role characterizations of African American women are present in Rap music video. The findings indicate that approximately 90 of the sampled rap music videos contain negative sex-role stereotypes of African American women. The public image of African American women became one of giant hoop earrings and large behinds that were only there to look pretty as some rappers arm candy.

As a white girl with lots of intelligent, free-thinking, independent, beautiful African American friends, this image infuriated me. For a while, it seemed that African American females had no role models to look up to that were representing the strong, independent aspects of their sex, so I think a lot of African American girls felt lost. At this time, the same could be said for Asian American women as well. When I was growing up, it was rare to see an Asian American woman in film that wasnt working at an Asian takeout restaurant. Asian American women were marginalized in film and on television as being tiny, quiet, shy and unobtrusive. The website Asian Nation describes the two major stereotypes faced by Asian Americans One is that all Asian Americans are the samethe second stereotype is that all Asian Americans are foreigners. My best friend during high school was a Vietnamese American who grew tired of being referred to as the Chinese girl and mocked with a fake Asian accent. She stopped identifying with her culture at all and instead immersed herself in African American music, dress and culture because she found no female figures in her own culture at the time that represented what she wanted to be as a modern Asian American woman. I witnessed her being insulted with both Asian American and African American slurs as a result. More recently, both of these ethnic groups have made strides in representing themselves more positively. Rap artists have started to treat women with more respect and less misogyny, and several female musicians and rappers have started making sure that African American women are fairly and equally represented in African American music. Also, the most recent presidential election resulting in the election of an African American as the leader of the United States was a huge step towards positively representing African American women and ending their marginalization. Barack Obamas wife has become a symbol of a strong, educated black woman that represents what African American women can accomplish while still being true to the aspects of their sex and race. Asian Americans have also made great strides in the political and entertainment fields, and Asian American girls have many more women representing the positive aspects of Asian American femininity than my friend did in high school all those years ago.
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here were also cultural changes that helped me to form a more positive social representation of my sex. Growing up, I rarely wore makeup and considered myself to pretty much be a tomboy. A lot of my friends were boys, and I was more likely to be found playing street hockey than I was to be found at the mall. It wasnt that I felt that aspects of womanhood like doing my hair, putting up makeup and shopping were bad, but I felt awkward around girls that were familiar with those things because I really wasnt. My fashion-forward older sister tried to get me involved in the things that were traditionally girly, but it was easier for me to reject those aspects and to be my own girl, a girl that could play just as tough as the boys. As I entered high school, I got heavily into the punk music scene and eventually cut off all my hair. It had been waist-length, and in a moment of impulsiveness I had it shorn down to an inch long close to my scalp and dyed it black. I knew it would make people look at me differently, but I didnt realize that it would make people assume that I was gay. I already wore unusual clothes and hardly ever wore makeup, unless it was the heavy eyeliner and blood-red lipstick I wore to the punkgothic clubs I frequented, and I had never gotten that reaction. I believe this is because in spite of all the other strange and unorthodox things I wore and did, I still had the long hair that is traditionally associated with being a woman. Once I took away that familiar badge of womanhood, people around me didnt know what to think. People began to make the assumption that I was a lesbian because short hair was one of the stereotypes commonly associated with being a woman in the gay community. I thought my short hair made me look strong, fierce and authoritative, but all anyone else saw is that I was less of a girl than I had been before.

The experience with my hair caused me to reevaluate how I view myself as a woman. I felt that I had, in a way, been marginalized into being viewed as something that I wasnt just because I adopted a look that was commonly associated with a gender group. Even though I wasnt a member of this gender group, people automatically shoved me into that category because of how I looked. I feel like this was done also because I was white, because it is less common for white women to have hair that drastically short than it is for other ethnic groups like African American women. In spite of my efforts to look different, thereby refusing to identify my sexuality by the way I looked and the way society thought I should look, I found myself still having my gender and sex identified for me because of what I chose to look like.

In the end, I feel that the women I have known from other cultures and ethnicities, along with the musical and cultural influences I have adopted from those other cultures, have helped me form a social image of myself as a woman of power that is unique to me. Im no longer afraid of looking different or being mistaken for something or someone Im not, because at the end of the day the most important part of my image as a woman is that I am comfortable. I still dont feel it necessary to conform to the images of beauty handed to me by white society, straight society or society as a whole, because what makes me beautiful is that Ive taken the parts of those images that really are me and made them uniquely my own.