On the Invisibility of Being a Woman
Yes, this can be extended to all marginalized identities. Being a part of a marginalized group generally entails systematic erasure and obfuscation.
Unless you are blindly, ignorantly benefiting from the patriarchal system, you would likely agree that we live in a patriarchal system that privileges the voices and realities of cis, hetero-, white, wealthy men. Times have changed! you may naively argue. To that, I offer the counter-point of the greater burden and cost of being a woman in this society.
I offer up these facts:
- Women face greater challenges navigating either how to choose between family and work or how to balance the two.
- The nuclear/monogamous family model isolates and alienates women more than men.
- Women still are less likely than men to be hired for jobs in more competitive positions and industries; and women are still systematically paid less than men.
- Women still have to systematically fear for our safety, often on a daily basis, in ways men generally don’t.
As a cis woman, I faced otherness growing up principally not because of my femaleness, but because of my generally unkempt appearance, my unruly hair and larger features, my clothes that tended to be either hand-me-downs from my brother or thrift-store and flea-market finds, and my inability to fit in religiously, socially, or ethnically with the other kids.
As the child of a non-practicing, Jewish, and neurodivergent (but undiagnosed) mom and an atheist Uruguyan-American academic dad, I was given a staunchly secular upbringing. It would be many years before I developed myself spiritually and consciously and gained the tools or the language to understand or process the effects of the othering of me by my peers, for looking and acting different, for having a skin condition, for not understanding their religions, and for being so painfully shy.
Yet the effect of all of this othering was to give me a sense of both invisibility and hypervisibility.
I always had some innate sense that all these judgments made of me were not exactly about me personally, though I also long struggled to shake off a sense of inferiority, from my perceived inferior genetic nature, from my perceived poverty and neglect, and from my extreme social self-consciousness. Transmuting our pain is the strongest thing we can do, to use all of our pain and traumas as fuel for our growth and expansion; it takes self-compassion, patience, and an unwavering commitment to do so.
Extricating who you are from what others think about you is extremely challenging; it takes facing your own trauma, learning how to re-wire your self-beliefs and re-write your story, learning to become accountable, and being able to reparent yourself and embrace your healing and transformation.
While I’d long assumed that adulthood would free me from the othering I had endured in my youth, all-too-quickly I learned otherwise, as I very viscerally experienced how thoroughly men and this society objectify and infantilize women, rendering us as overall less than.
In her latest memoir, Memoirs of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit wrote, “The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do” Solnit, 2020, p. 4). Solnit articulates in her book how universal the experience is, as a woman, not only of being rendered invisible, but of how often the rendering of her invisibility and even annihilation becomes idealized and eroticized in popular culture.
It is against this backdrop that women are protesting, that women are finally en masse becoming less likely to settle for or stay in unhealthy relationships, and that we are leaving toxic workplaces and even countries that do not support our well-being.
As Solnit discussed, the systematic oppression of women still is legally enforced in some places: “Until a few decades ago, wives throughout much of the world, including the United States, lacked the right to make contracts and financial decisions or even to exercise jurisdiction over their own bodies that overrode their husbands’ ability to do so; in some parts of the world, a wife is still property under the law, and others choose her husband. To be a person of no consequence, to speak without power, is a bewilderingly awful condition, as though you were a ghost, a beast, as though words died in your mouth, as though sound no longer traveled. It is almost worse to say something and have it not matter than to be silent” (Solnit, 2020, p. 230). This is the curse and the legacy of invisibility that women and many marginalized people are forced to confront and reckon with today.
The violence inherent in the normalization of patriarchal systems, dominator culture, individualism, materialism, consumerism, and the fast-paced nature of industrialized society all speak to a suppression of feminine and spiritual forces. So it is no surprise that, as these various systems are breaking down in this time of late-stage capitalism, that there is a call toward remembering and returning to pay homage to the divine feminine, to greater consciousness, and toward a more matriarchal way of living.
Sources:
Solnit, Rebecca. (2020). Recollections of My Non-Existence. Penguin Books.
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