To Be Believed...Revaluing Women and the Feminine

If you spend any time with young children, they invariably will tell you, one, two fibs. Their world of fantasy and fiction blur. Or so we think. We assume that they are not telling the truth.

Older children, youth, teenagers we really don’t believe them. Especially those who’ve acquired the unfortunate marking of “problem youth” because of being born into poverty, a racialized family, or are gender non-conforming. We don’t believe what they have to say.

A friend of mine, who has a chronic mental illness and a history of addiction, calls to tell me that once again “no one believes me, they think I’m making it up” in trying to receive medication for her severe shoulder pain.

Another friend, who’s African-American is going in to the clothing boutique that she co-owns, at night through the ally entrance and hears, “FREEZE. Put your hands up!” by a police officer pointing a gun at her. When she says, “this is my store,” he puts her in the patrol car and drives her to the station.  

Women identified people recounting details of rape, sexual violation, sexual harassment, incest, domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, they are not believed.

Why are certain people, particular identities not believed? One way of understanding it is to consider value, or the societal un-valuing of particular identities.

To be believed requires first being recognized as having an identity worthy of possessing value, and second as having accrued enough value so as to have the authority to speak.

To the first requirement: Why do some identities have value while others do not?

Class, race, gender, sexuality, ability are actually “classification systems” with different identities within them. They work by adding value to some bodies and not to “other” bodies. Meaning, that where one falls in the classification dictates how much value one has in society. For example, class as a classification system works in the interest of some, those who are middle or upper class, at the expense of others, those who are poor or working-class. The same can be said for race (white), gender (cis and masculine), sexuality (hetero), ability (typical/ ‘sane’). The identities in parentheses have value. This means that in a classification system, some people or bodies will be unvalued, negatively marked, irrespective of how they personally identify or what they personally think of their social location.

There is the case of Brooke Nevils, the former NBC news producer who has accused Matt Lauer of rape. It has been one year since Christine Blasey-Ford subjected herself to public scrutiny and humiliation in the Cavanaugh confirmation hearing. Fourteen women have accused Harvey Weinstein of rape and 87 others have accused him of sexual assault or harassment but he is going on trial in January for just 5 charges. The first two women in my example (and the vast majority of Weinstein’s victims) are wealthy, privileged, white women. And they are not believed. This fact should not be misconstrued to mean that gender as a classification system has some dominance in the ranking of oppression. No. Rather, what this highlights is the persistence and upholding of patriarchal masculine dominance by un-valuing and hating women and the feminine

This is how classification systems, gender in this case, work. Gender as a category was created to establish the dominance of men over women. Therefore, any fissures or disruptions to this structure will be met with force. Both literal force (violence against women) and symbolic force (the cultural un-valuing, disbelieving, and denigration of women and the feminine). Violence against trans women is a direct example of this. Trans women threaten male supremacy by “choosing” femininity. The backlash against women in response to the massive appeal of the #MeToo movement is another example.

As I frequently do here, in this forum, I write about the silencing of women when they speak out about the violence they’ve experienced and how this can be understood, and challenged, culturally.

Back to my thesis statement:

To be believed requires first being recognized as having an identity worthy of possessing value, and second as having accrued enough value so as to have the authority to speak.

In order to be believed one must have an identity seen as possessing value. Thus, recognizing which bodies or people do not have value, is a place to start. It is a place to begin the cultural shift required. As the British feminist theorist Beverly Skeggs writes, “…value comes from re-valuing that which is seen as unvalued.” Recognize who is unvalued in society, who is not believed, which bodies you do not value. This, directs action for social change.