Those who are labeled are reduced, as signifiers become identities; there's always more — they're always more
I like this quote: "Those who are labeled are reduced, as signifiers become identities". It goes to show the power of labels and the effect they have on our psyche and society. They may seem arbitrary, but they affect how were perceive others and how they're treated.
Many Asian parents, most especially those who rear their children to be academically successful,tend to label “dating” and “romantic relationships” in school as distractions that could preventtheir child from studying effectively. I
My parents did the same thing, actively discouraging me from seeking relationships as a younger kid. I'm not sure if that's something that's distinctly Asian, but all it made me do was want to seek out relationships. I find labelling relationships as distractions or a waste of time to be a very dated concept. School is as much about education as it is about building relationships and sharpening your people/communication skills. I find that people who can endure school while maintaining relationships(whether they be romantic or not) will be much better off than those who only focus on school and neglect their social life.
In terms of coming out, I suppose I never necessarily “came out” as a whole event. I feellike in the early 2010s, a lot of people viewed coming out as one huge thing in your life. Iwould say that perception comes out as this huge shocking thing. But when you’reactually LGBTQ+, you’re potentially coming-out whenever you meet someone new.(Ngo, 2022)
"Coming out" is seen as a one-time big thing you do for your friends and family and is seen as a big milestone in one's life. I hadn't really considered that it's something that you "have" to do constantly as you meet new people, as we live in a heteronormative society where anything but heterosexuality is different. The fact that it's seen as something you "have to do" is a bit odd, too.
Me~bers o[ school communities may believe that sexuality is not anappropriate topic for young people. However, there are significant numbersof LGBTQ and ally students in schools, as well as significant numbers ofsexually aware heterosexual students. Ignoring the issue of sexuality meansneglecting to provide LGBTQ students with representations of themselvesthat enable them to understand themselves, and to provide examples ofways to counter bias and work toward respect for those who initially maynot be willing to respect LGBTQ students.
The notion that sexuality is not an appropriate topic for young people is completely ridiculous. If anything, it's one of the most important topics for young people who are in the midst of discovering themselves. For it to be completely ignored in curriculum and school discussion is a failure on the part of the school.
She suggests that this uncer-tainty indicates not only a complex understanding of gender but also a rec-ognition that children are looking to adults for some signal about gendercorrectness, a point that also reinforces Thorne's (1993) observation thatstudents make binary gender differences more apparent in a context wherean adult is present
This is a really important point in my opinion. The strict gender binary that is baked into our society is not something that is instinctual, it is a learned concept we have developed. Children can be taught to understand gender in a number of ways, and I think it's best if it's taught as a spectrum. This broadens their understanding of gender in a way that allows them to be more open and tolerant to different identities and lifestyles.
While Thorne (1993) argues that young people's play opens the pos-sibilities of ambiguities in meanings of gender and sexuality, giving spacefor young girls to be athletic or boys to sit at the "girls"' table or play inthe "girls'" area of the playground, she also shows that such occasions ofplayful attempts to cross the gender divide can be met with hostility and thatteasing can cross over the line of play and into harassment.
This is an interesting excerpt. Due to gender norms, children tend to separate themselves by gender and do things that align with their gender (boys will go play sports and girls will talk for instance). When someone crosses this unspoken rule and plays with the opposite gender or participates in an activity that doesn't align with their gender norms, they can be met with hostility. I wonder ig boys or girls are meth with more hostility.
Then she learned that this girl was spreading rumors about her, and she was upset and angry. Next she got her chemistry test back and bombed it. She was depressed and wouldn't talk to anybody. After school she and a group of her friends went to McDonald's; they were so happy and having the best time. I can still see her face as she asked me, "How is it possible to have so many different feelings and be so many differ-ent people in such a short time? Sometimes I don't even know who I am!"
High school drama and bullying can be such a detriment to the learning experiences. I've had a couple of experiences in high school socially that was devastating to my success academically. Everything that happens can feel impactful and often the end of the world. High schoolers generally don't have too much of a perception of life outside of high school, so everything feels impactful and life altering.
High school can be a pressure cooker where teenagers are shoved into close quarters with twenty-five or thirty others of their age whom they may love, hate, care little about, or hardly know. Rushing from class to class, adolescents create a world of unique norms, rituals, and vocabulary, a place where even time is trans-formed from hours and minutes to periods. Adults are rarely allowed into the high school culture, but if we listen closely, we can learn a lot about how students see their world.
High school is such a contained experience that is so different from the real world and even college honestly. In high school, you're surrounded by people your exact age, learning and doing the same things as them. It's more a social bubble than college is, because in college, people come from completely different backgrounds, can be different ages, and are all working at different things.