Female Representation...or the lack thereof

                Many people believe that in order for a person or group of people to receive proper representation, they must tell their own story. Obviously it is hard for one group of people to represent another group of people properly, so it is up to individuals to tell the stories of their own people and of their selves. This is a notion I think a lot of writers we have previously studied in this class would agree with, such as Pauline Johnson, who argued for the proper representation of Native Americans, and Michel Foucault who spoke a lot about power structures and how minority groups require representation. After reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, I was left a little confused about Butler's stance on this issue, but it seemed that she did not agree that that was how representation works. It seems that she finds so many other issues in conducting a female identity in literature and media that even self representation would be flawed.

                According to Butler, "representation is the normative function of a language which is said to either reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women," (Butler, 2). I gathered this to mean that representation distorts the populace's view of the subject being represented. Thus, if only thin, white women are depicted in media (which is true to a certain extent), the popular conception of a woman would be a thin, white women, which rejects women of other races and body sizes. This kind of flawed representation can have a detrimental impact. For example, Johnson argued that Native American women such as herself often feel neglected and out of place because they never see women like them in media. On the off chance that they do see a woman who looks like them, she is often presented inaccurately and is only used as a plot device for a male lead. This leaves Native American women feeling neglected and useless. They are not the only group with this experience. The same can apply to all women of color as well as transgender women, disabled women, etc. All women feel misrepresented and underrepresented, but this lack of proper representation increases exponentially when more minority factors are applied.

                Butler argues for the development of a language that fully and adequately represents women since, as she pointed out, the English language (and most other languages for that matter) is androcentric (Butler, 2). The need for such a language system is important because women are often either misrepresented or not represented at all to such an extreme extent that even our everyday language focuses predominantly on men. In fact, even the phrase "woman" is based on the word "man. Other words like HIStory and "MANkind" prove that terms that are generalized to be about all people are designed to put men front and center and to push women off to the side.

                Where I really started to think Butler doubted the possibility of proper female representation was page eight when she said, "paradoxically, representation will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of 'women' is nowhere presumed," (Butler, 8). I took this to mean that women cannot be a subject since Butler previously stated that only those in positions of power are able to create subjects and that representation comes from subjects, (Butler, 3). She stressed that the conception of woman that people typically have is a male-created conception since men are in a stance of power and men are the ones creating subjects and this representation. Therefore, even if a woman is representing women, she is still representing the male-created conception of a woman that is not consistent with actual women, especially since this conception drastically lacks intersectionality.

                I agree that there is a need for either a gender neutral or female dominated language, but it seems that Butler doubts such a language can be brought to fruition even though there are already communities working on that very subject. There has been such a major push to change gendered phrases like "fire man" and "mail man" to gender neutral ones like, "fire fighter" and "mail carrier." Likewise,  many women have started using terms like "womyn" and "herstory" to take the androcentrism out of common language. While these phrases have only caught on in small communities, they are on the rise.

                I tend to disagree with some of Butler's ideas of female representation. While I am in total agreement that intersectionality is extremely important in feminism and female representation, I disagree on her other ideas about the seeming impossibility of proper female representation. I think as long as women are representing themselves in contexts that are not filtered through a male lens, they should be able to create female subjects, identities, and representations that are successful. These opportunities rarely present themselves in patriarchal societies, but they are not unheard of.

                Proper female representation is rare. As we saw in Mr. Burke, Meet Helen Keller by Ann Georg, Keller and Burke actually had extremely similar rhetorical theories, yet only Burke is recognized for his status as a rhetorician and Keller is instead remembered as the woman who overcame blindness and deafness. Keller has always been considered a "strong female rolemodel," but not in the way she should have been. Instead of seeing her as a rolemodel for overcoming hardship, she should have been a rolemodel for her ideas on feminism and rhetoric and for her work towards bettering the world at large. It initially seems positive the way Keller is remembered in history currently, but it is actually detrimental since she is being remembered for only a fraction of what she has one and the bulk of her work is ignored. However, there are rising feminist communities working to solve the issue of improper female representation. Online artist communities have created solid platforms for women to share art, poetry, literature, music etc. about the female experience with a focus on intersectionality so that women are not excluded regardless of their sexuality, race, ethnicity, or the sex they are assigned at birth. Such communities have been growing on websites like tumblr and etsy and they have managed to spread into pop culture, promising a bright future for female representation on a large scale. 

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