"Gender Trouble"
When I first thought about the concepts of sexuality and gender, I was deeply impressed by Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble. The way society teaches us to be trapped by our gender, the distinction between men and women, and our disappearance into definitions and distinctions... Since I have focused my dance life on "feminine energy," there is something I have encountered even more: the general judgment about my teaching of "femininity." I have expressed this many times in every article, every video post, and in my daily life. However, established perceptions are so rigid that it’s hard to penetrate them. Let’s expand this perception a bit.
The idea that gender is a social construct, not a biological assignment, and that the roles gender brings are sociological impositions, has been increasingly discussed. While this is not widely debated in Turkey yet, awareness of queer theory is growing worldwide. The point here is not just to discuss queer theory as a concept, but to incorporate it into life and everyday practice—freeing our actions from the constraints of gender. It’s about living life from a place of a more authentic "self."
Of course, I don’t reject gender, sexual orientations, or the labels we deem appropriate. I experience life as a woman, I see my body as a woman’s body; from the outside, I maintain my relationships within a heteronormative framework. But I know that this is not my only reality. I don’t define myself by being a woman or having a woman’s body. We do not own our bodies, we accompany them; our bodies mediate our experience of the world. Using a sexist perspective to defend certain rights is like tripping ourselves up.
So I ask myself: What is my gender, my profession, my age, how many children I have, the shape/type of my body... What is all of this? What is my true self, my true existence?
When I say, "Hello, I’m Buse, I’m a woman," am I not setting a boundary for myself? This is not a rejection of femininity; it’s the understanding that there is no gender in essence. My essence may be manifesting as a woman in this world, but if I cling to that too much, if I give too much meaning to being a woman, femininity starts to weigh me down.
The world is gradually evolving toward a more genderless space, and I believe that in the not-too-distant future, our gender stereotypes will become more permeable, and we will expand to a place where we no longer define ourselves through sexual orientation. We can all agree that with the acceleration of consciousness in Generation Z and the Alpha generation, the focus is shifting.
Gender begins to appear as we descend, but since we no longer experience the world from an animalistic consciousness but from a higher one, we will enter into realms of sexual and transgender awareness. We will carry our animal nature with us, we will accept it, but we cannot resist transformation. The sooner we free the yin-yang duality from its male-female entanglement, the better.
What I write may seem strange coming from someone who teaches you lessons on belly dancing and feminine energy, but if you try to understand it deeply, if you feel beyond the words, you can sense that the world will evolve far beyond the male-female dilemma, into dilemmas such as organic intelligence versus artificial intelligence.
Duality, opposition, and complementarity will always reveal themselves here. From this duality, we will come to know unity, oneness. If the most important feature we cling to is our gender, the future will test us with it, as it seems we remember gender as a plague of the past.
***Further reading: Judith Butler - Gender Trouble