In her reflection on her essay “Power and Subversion,” Caitlin Mulvihill highlights an important tension: “In writing this essay, I wanted to be sure that I was meeting Aoki’s work at a place where her firsthand experience was validated. I am not trans, and it was important for me to not insert myself into a conversation so that my own voice did not overshadow those who need to be heard.” She goes on to note: “As a queer person growing up between a major U.S. city and the American South, my relationship with femininity has always been complex, and the varying double standards that I’ve been faced with forced me to confront that relationship from a young age.”
Below we have excerpted the introductions from Mulvihill’s first and final drafts. In what ways do you think Mulvihill’s final version offers a more sophisticated and balanced representation of the source material while still maintaining her own ethos or sense of presence? More specifically, note places where Mulvihill seems to be negotiating her space within this conversation while making sure not to project her opinions on to Aoki’s argument.
First Draft: Introduction
Ryka Aoki’s essay “On Living Well and Coming Free” is a part of a larger compilation titled Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Her essay, in the spirit of the compilation’s title, discusses the definition of an outlaw and what gender activism should (and shouldn’t) entail. Her idea of activism in its best form has no reading requirements or free merch. She places the utmost value in simply living the life a person wants to live as a form of activism. Not included, however, in her activism, is the complete dismantling of systems. She considers briefly the institution of the police, writing that “it is tempting to hate police indiscriminately but if two men have just attacked you with knives and you need to call the police – there had better fucking be police” (146). However, the systems she writes about are not all accessible by a phone call. Aoki also considers the system of gender itself. Aoki’s essay places the gender binary under the category of institutions that should not be torn down. She writes “but should the structures be torn down, and gender mean nothing, then nothing will protect the weak from the strong” (147).
Categorizing gender as something that protects the weak from the strong is not conducive to eliminating gender-based violence and discrimination, and is problematic in its insinuation that women are part of “the weak.” Gender has long held women back from amassing power. Can our current understanding of power reconcile itself with gender?
Final Draft: Introduction
On January 21, 2017, six days after my sixteenth birthday, I stood on the streets of Pittsburgh at the Women’s March, the first big protest I had ever attended. There was an undeniably angry, revolutionary feeling in the crowd. I looked to my right and saw a sign that said, “The System Is Broken: Here’s Proof.” The sign had a point. Of course the system was broken; millions of people would not have taken to the streets if it was not. For the next few days, news outlets were flooded with pictures of all the signs people had brought to marches around the country. One website, The Current, published an image in which a man holds a sign that reads, “The System isn’t Broken, it was Built That Way” (Perez). Both he and the person next to me in Pittsburgh had been marching for the same cause, yet they approached the same issue of systemic inequality from seemingly opposite sides. Is one of these views more productive than the other, or perhaps even more true?
Transgender activist and author Ryka Aoki’s essay “On Living Well and Coming Free” is a part of a larger compilation titled Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Her essay, in the spirit of the compilation’s title, discusses the definition of an “outlaw” and what trans activism should, and more importantly, should not entail. She rejects the notion that there must be a checklist of steps in order to be considered a real activist or “gender outlaw.” She places the utmost value in simply living the life a person wants to live as an act of defiance, writing “I am not going to stop cooking rice porridge or hoping for a comfortable house with a garden simply because . . . it’s not subversive enough” (150). Her activism also rejects the idea of completely dismantling systems, including systems that are not so concrete, like gender. “Should the structures be torn down, and gender mean nothing, then nothing will protect the weak from the strong,” Aoki writes (147). However, by insinuating that women are part of “the weak,” she perhaps inadvertently categorizes gender as something that is inherently tied to power in a way that is not conducive to eliminating gender-based violence and discrimination.
Gender discrimination has long held women back from amassing power, but is there a way that our current understanding of power can reconcile itself with gender?