{"id":531,"date":"2015-02-25T17:20:54","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T22:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=531"},"modified":"2015-02-25T17:20:54","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T22:20:54","slug":"the-objective-unimportance-of-gender-and-sexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2015\/02\/25\/the-objective-unimportance-of-gender-and-sexuality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Objective Unimportance of Gender and Sexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

I chose to use Written on the Body<\/em> to look at The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo<\/em> through the lens of queer theory. Throughout Written on the Body<\/em>, readers call into question the narrator\u2019s gender. There are what society would call contradicting clues, clues that could potentially give the narrator\u2019s gender away\u2014if the narrator identifies with one at all\u2014but said clues are never consistent. This absence of gender also makes for an absence of sexuality. Is the narrator\u2019s relationship with Louise a heterosexual one? A same-sex one? Neither? This is what I would like to attempt to apply to Lizbeth\u2019s sexuality from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo<\/em>. Perhaps Winterson did not include the narrator\u2019s gender or sexuality to make a point about the unimportance of\u00a0them. Not in a sense that gender and sexuality aren\u2019t valuable parts of a person\u2019s identity, but that from an objective point of view, they should not matter. In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo<\/em>, we are made aware of Lizbeth\u2019s fluid\u2014and very active\u2014sexuality towards the beginning of the novel. She has had many lovers, mostly female. However, she also begins a sexual relationship with Blomkvist. The novel does not make Lizbeth\u2019s sexuality something of importance, however the audience seems to have an inherent need to analyze it.<\/span><\/p>\n

To go even further, both Winterson and Larsson could not only be making a statement about the objective unimportance of gender and sexuality, but also about society\u2019s need for labels. When a person begins to struggle\u00a0with their sexuality, they often attempt to fit it into one of the boxes society has created for queer persons (These persons are queer, why are we trying to box them again? This goes against the definition of queer.). This is because society has not only taught this person that being queer is not normal, but that this person now must name themselves so the rest of society can judge them based off of that name. We\u00a0are afraid of the unknown, the anonymous. Perhaps this could formulate\u00a0into\u00a0why other characters from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo<\/em> fear Lizbeth.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I chose to use Written on the Body to look at The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo through the lens of queer theory. Throughout Written on the Body, readers call into question the narrator\u2019s gender. There are what society would call contradicting clues, clues that could potentially give the narrator\u2019s gender away\u2014if the narrator identifies … Continue reading The Objective Unimportance of Gender and Sexuality<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2206,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}