Week four
In Alice’s life she is given two points of view of her gender’s status. One is from her mother and another from her neighbor. Her mother is the view of someone being strong and standing up for herself. Her neighbor is all based on beauty and how to attract a man. So she wonders on how she is to act towards society. She wonders how she is to perform her gender correctly. This confuses her and makes her unable to decide who she is. It is the contradiction of the everydayness that was mentioned by Henri Lefebvre. It is the contradiction that confuses Alice and the other girls in her generation. They observe the world and see it in two different ways; one side of a loving couple and one side of a couple fighting. One example of contradiction was the fighting of the couple. They had both accused each other of cheating. The girl was angry with her boyfriend for cheating on her and the boyfriend had accused of her past cheating on him. The contradiction here seems to be that it’s okay that I cheat but it’s not okay for you to cheat. Another contradiction is Alice’s friend who seemed to have had a dislike of the supposedly popular girl in the beginning. In the end though she became the best of friends with that same girl and ended her relationship with Alice. All this seemed to have confused Alice. Making her possibly wondering which the true performance of her gender was. Was it the passive way or the fighter’s way? In the end she choose the fighter’s way and knowing who she really was and not worry about what her gender performance was because it was just too confusing to understand.