A Woman | Woman: Thinking Infinitely

When you are fully immersed in your college experience, you realize that your brain is like an elastic string; except it doesn’t reach an artificial elasticity limit when stretched beyond a certain degree, because you have been molded to seek no limits in our pursuit of what is true. This is what I wrote about in my college essay: the purpose of having an infinite mind that grasps out-of-this-world concepts and frames the grand life questions; enriched by eyes that wander and ears the listen out for new truths, challenging realities, anything but the acceptance of what we hold as now, because there is always more to learn. All these ideals, I took note of- a bit too keenly, too rigidly. And so one could imagine my confusion, when I was unable to grasp certain new ideas in some of my college classes. Ideas about our humanity, especially ones about womanness. The unresting mind that sought to be stretched and challenged beyond imagination was finally put to a test, and what did it have to say for itself? That it was impossible- impossible that being woman was a choice that we reaffirm through stylicized performances.

I became acquainted with this idea of gender performativity whilst reading Judith Butler in Professor Ula’s First Year Writing course. I found it intriguing, scary and like I said simply impossible how Butler divorces the individual from their gender, and theorizes gender as a series of stylized acts that a person performs on a daily basis. Butler redefines gender as a will, a choice- a thought that seemed so foreign. It was an interesting perspective to take on in understanding the gender spectrum and the choices that people make in their ascriptions. However, I couldn’t ignore the fear and uncertainty that came with embracing this idea of gender performance in its entirety. How does this fit into the basis of my culture- a set of rigid ideals that molded me into who I am? 

My first thought was to separate what I learnt in class from what I have been told about being a woman from my childhood. But as I delved deeper into the theory, I began thinking of the differences between what my ghanaian culture had to say about being a woman and how that definition appeared to be suffocating next to the liberating one that Butler offers. Where I come from, ‘woman’ is a social situation that need not be affirmed by the individual’s performance, for she is constantly reminded of it through her interactions with the people she is surrounded by. The condescending remarks, the assumptions, the disacknowledgement of efforts - a woman’s place is shaped by her society. But isn’t always pushed to the corner, for we have recognized the power in advocating equal treatment amongst the sexes. These efforts have molded us into Amazons, but I can’t help but wonder what true freedom feels like. Not the type that grants you an equal share of the pie, but the one that cares to ask whether you want the pie anyway. Equality or freedom? Familiar or foreign? To be a woman molded by society or a self-made woman? The infinite mind becomes restless. 

And so the long journey of learning and unlearning begins. The answers are never final, for that restricts the expansion of the mind. Instead we commit to the middle ground where disparate ideas coexist. We welcome conflict and confusion, reassurances that we are human and are not perfectly-accepting beings. But above all, we chase the infinite and the new because that is who we claimed to be from the beginning of it all.