Baby, You Were Born This Way (Not a Trait but a Task) - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Baby, You Were Born This Way (Not a Trait but a Task)

She was assigned "girl" before she was given a name. Years later, her gender reveal video went viral—for the irony, not the joy. This essay follows the machinery behind gender, from performativity to punishment, ritual to recursion. It refuses clarity, not out of evasion, but as method. Across Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Gayle Rubin, and Gayatri Spivak, it opens a philosophical field where failure is strategy, ambiguity is resistance, and gender is not identity—but orientation across time.

We interrogate visibility as control — drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power, the essay explores how systems enforce gender not through overt law but through the demand to be legible. Surveillance, repetition, and social correction form a diffuse architecture in which visibility is granted only when performance aligns with normative scripts. To be seen, then, is not liberation—it is submission to a gaze that categorizes, polices, and regulates the self.

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