Letter of Resignation
by Sara Pompeo
Dear Gender,
Email:
To: GENDER@gmail.com
CC:
PLATONICCONCEPTIONOFTRUTH@gmail.com
HABITUALWAYOFSEEING@gmail.com
OBJECTASITREALLYIS@GMAIL.COM
INTHENAMEOFSCIENCE@GMAIL.COM
JUSTHEWAYITIS@GMAIL.COM
Subject: LETTER OF RESIGNATION
Gender,
See below.
Sense of womanhood, femaleness, deceptive gender core, please accept this letter as notice of my resignation from my position as a female. My last day will be today, April 25th, 2022. I received an offer from Judith Butler to serve as a non-binary person, and after careful consideration and rereading “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” twenty-thousand times, I realize that this opportunity is too exciting for me to decline.
You are “in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, [you are] an identity tenuously constituted in time––an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519), so I therefore deem you as an inadequate employer, a “compelling illusion, [and] an object of belief” (520).
In my time of employment, I have been given a naturalistic explanation of sex which assumes that my sex determines the social meanings for my experience as a woman. I have been taught that my floral sundresses, neon nail polish, and mauve-pink lipstick are expressions of something inside of me, that the outside biological dimensions of my body have constructed my cultural experience. Butler has convinced me that my body is distinct from the way it has come to undergo cultural meanings. My body is a “materiality that bears meaning” (521); I am not my body, I “do” my body in accordance with “historical convention” (521).
It is important for me to clarify that this does not imply that I, the individual, do my body, but rather that the meaning of my body has been unknowingly historically prescribed, codified, and implanted within me. In my time of employment, I have not merely been a woman, I have become a woman; I have been materialized “in obedience to a historically delimited possibility” (522). Gender, you are not an expression, you are a construction. I hereby reconceive you as a historical production, an illusive employer contingent on political and cultural structures that I have regrettably enacted through my own acts.
Binary gender, I do want to note my understanding of your own duties and requirements as a function “within the confines of a heterosexually-based system of marriage which requires the reproduction of human beings” (524). You have falsely convinced me of “natural ‘attraction’ to the opposing sex/gender” (524) in order to fulfill your obligation to conventions that require heterosexual reproduction. Judith Butler has revealed to me that I have been falsely convinced of two biological sexes due to the fact that the society I live in functions in accordance with heterosexuality. By virtue of this, I decline your heterosexual contract due to its false claim of factuality. Heterosexuality is not natural, it is strategical in its compulsory attempt to politically organize society.
Indeed, there has been pleasure working with your team of humans in our feminist attempts to break away from our oppressive conditions within these social conditions. Some of the highlights of my career have been wearing tee-shirts stamped with “GIRL POWER”, screaming Shania Twain’s “I Feel Like a Woman” song during karaoke night, and praising the statistics that say “Women Are Rated Better Than Men on Key Leadership Capabilities.” However, I ask you to not only extend this goodbye to your current feminist employers, but to also ask them to consider joining me in my departure.
Although they may fault me for this, I ask them to consider “tak[ing] stock of the way in which oppression structures the ontological categories through which gender is conceived” (529). By using “the category of women as a political tool without attributing ontological integrity of the term” (529), they are only deepening the illusion of sex binary. In my departure, I ask them to stop trying to defend the status of women, and to instead begin questioning how the category of women is constituted to begin with. As a former fellow colleague, I do understand their strive to represent women, but I ask you to ask them to do so “in a way that does not distort and reify the very collectivity the theory is supposed to emancipate” (530). Regrettably, your political system is poised for continued growth if your team fails to acknowledge the error within gender identity and sexuality.
Gender, I do not thank you for your incessant cloak of restraint, anxiety, and false pleasure. I refuse to continue to mistake your act as natural and hereby redirect my interpretative choices to contest the status of gender and redefine the sex binary as an “innovative affair” (531).
If you have any further questions, you can email me at identityishistoricallyproduced@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Sara Pompeo