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. Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bandura, Albert. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. World Health Organization. Gender and Women's Mental Health. Geneva: WHO, 2002. Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019.