Sexuality and Gender Ambiguity

The event I attended for this blog post was the 2017 Commitment to Justice Panel: Sexuality and Justice Beyond Rhetoric discussion last Thursday. This discussion consisted of four young people speaking upon their struggles with their sexuality and how they have gotten to the point they are at today. Relating to this, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night touches upon sexual identity and gender roles as well. While the play is lighthearted, it still raises questions about how different males and females, as well as heterosexuals and homosexuals, really are.

Each of the panelists spoke about difficulties that I can only imagine enduring, but the person whose story stood out to me most was Kathleen Ball. She identifies as asexual, and decided to use her time telling us that there we probably do not know as much as we think we know about asexuality. Even under official manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, her sexuality has been considered a ‘mental disorder’ for part of her life. She explained that this caused a lot of confusion and hardship for her as she grew into her identity, which made me think about how we, as a society, perceive anyone who is different from us and how that affects their perception of themselves. Likewise, the characters in Twelfth Night often speak about Cesario’s femininity in a negative way which exemplifies the disdain that people feel towards those who are different. Yet, by the end of the story, Orsino finds himself falling for Cesario due to what he sees as similarities to Viola, who has been disguised as Cesario the entire play. Furthermore, Olivia also becomes attracted to Cesario because of ‘his’ womanliness. This speaks to the ambiguity of gender, and how it may not mean as much as society thinks.

What I take away from the panel, and my subsequent reading of Twelfth Night, is that we often allow ourselves to get wrapped up in the social constructs of gender roles and sexuality. The people who spoke to us told us that we should be concerned with leaving Loyola “better than we found it”. While I have not come across any instances of discrimination against people because of their sexuality at Loyola, hearing so much about young people coming to accept their identity makes me feel ardently about protecting their right to be the person they want to be if I ever must.