Gender and Power: Constructions, Structures, and Constraints

• In Event: Challenging Gendered Spaces: Super/Heroes and Colonialism

Abstract

If power is seen as exercised forcefully, resolutely, to try to tame fortune per Machiavelli’s instructions, or, less abstractly, to implement order and clarify governmental policy, then when power is used or performed “differently” or seen in non-normative hands, there is often a need for adjusting, for perspectival shifts, for re-imaging what power looks like, how it is used, and who has it. But the architecture around power and how it is used and performed is also problematic if those who are using it do not fit within the physical structural spaces and places where power is most often implemented, such as executive offices, legislative bodies, judicial benches, corner offices. How do these two aspects of gendered power, the actual use of it and the place where it is activated, contribute to the problematic itself, the gendered constraints that remain around political power? The discussion of often focused on the performance of political power, less on the place or structure where that performance takes place, but this leaves half of the potential problem without interrogation. This paper explores not only the issues and complexity that surround the performance of power by non-normative individuals, but also the emerging consideration of the difficulties faced by those who take on positions of power within already-existing structures, and how “outsiders” are compelled to conform to the structural requirements of the office itself, the space, expectations, and norms of a place where power is held and used.

Author

• Lilly J. Goren, Carroll University