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This picture was taken of my sister, Stephanie, in the early 2000s in my grandmothers house in Tijuana. When my sister was born, my mom entrusted my grandmother and her siblings to help collectively raise Stephanie. Prior to reading Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila's, "Latina Transnational Motherhood", I was completely unaware that this concept had a specific term and that this type of migration was common in latino households and countries. However, unlike described in the reading, my mother did not do domestic or live-in work. She worked in the Los Angeles Jewelry District during the time Stephanie was in Tijuana. Stephanie and I often discuss about how my mother leaving her in Mexico severely affected their relationship and continues to to this day. Because my mother did not do nanny-related jobs when she left my sister in Tijuana, she never learned how to properly parent, resorting to excess use of force and violence, whether verbal or physical. Even though she went through the hardship of pregnancy and held the term "mother" the need to immigrate in search of a job to help support the family resulted in the stripping of her experience in motherhood. Although our mother did make an effort to visit her every weekend, despite being exhausted from work, my sister knew it meant that she would get punished by her for the way she acted in Tijuana while not under her supervision. My sister knows that our mother did this out of necessity. the reading states, "Latina transnational mothers are improvising new mothering arrangements that are borne out of women's financial struggles, played out in a new global arena, to provide the best future for themselves and their children" This statement rings true because when my mother gave birth to me, Stephanie moved back to the United States into a new home. My mothers efforts over 8 years paid off in the opportunities given to me and my sister. She is now in her fourth year of Medical School at UCSF and gaining her Masters at UCLA. This reading really helps support and understand why my mother did what she did for the sake of necessity.

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I took in this kitten, Canela after my close friend found her abandoned in a park at only 2 days old. I chose this picture after my sister crocheted her a vest and specifically chose to use pink yarn. I asked her why she chose a pink vest, and she stated that she should receive a pink one since Canela is a girl. Lorber 1994's "Social Construction of Gender" describes the author seeing a father with his baby on the subway. They note that the baby has a white crocheted hat on, making it difficult to see whether it is a boy or a girl. Once the father was exiting the subway, the father put a Yankee's cap on the child and the author deduced that the child was a boy, but at a closer look, the author saw that the child had frilly socks and ear piercings, which contradicted the author's original assumption. This observation relates to my sister making a pink vest for my kitten to highlight her gender, demonstrating that using clothing and accessories to signify gender is a practice that transcends species, extending from humans to animals as well.

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This is a picture of me and my friend Jason in 2022. He has been out since 2018 but began to become more comfortable in dressing and expressing himself in a more feminine way in 2021. This caused him to receive derogatory insults from the boys in our grade. Because of this, he found himself with a friend group composed of only girls. Pascoe's, "Dude, You're a F*g" took me back to my time in high school with Jason. To the boys in my grade, that word was tossed around in a teasing, "friendly" conversation, maybe one of the boys said an innuendo on accident. It had no meaning or depth to it, as the boys knew that word did not apply to them. To Jason, this word weighed heavily on himself and his identity. To him, it meant that he would never be seen as an equal in the eyes of the straight boys in our school. If they interacted with Jason, they were considered "f*gs" by proxy, and the "hot potato" described in Pascoe's reading would be passed to the boy who would interact with Jason.

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This is a picture of me with my friend, Eliza, who I met earlier this year through our environmental justice organization. We attended a banquet for a short movie showing. We posed for a picture and this was uploaded to Instagram. I noticed how both me and Eliza do gender differently, despite both of us identifying as female. We had a deep conversation regarding how we present ourselves and reading Nguyen's, "Patriarchy, Power, and Female Masculinity" further validates her rejection of femininity and the patriarchy as a whole. One of her biggest reasons for dressing and presenting as "butch" is that she is not interested in men, therefore she has no reason to wear clothes or present herself in a way that appeals to the male gaze. By presenting herself as butch in a public space, she challenges the societal norms that dictate that men should dress masculine and that women should dress feminine. The line, "The butch body signals a woman’s unavailability to men, her attraction to women, her as being attractive to other women and her

displacement or replacement of men in sexual encounters" (Nguyen 677) sums up our conversation, she poses a threat to men by indirectly stating her disinterest and necessity of men in her life. Hilariously, we found common ground when talking about shaving legs. While she does it to challenge the "infantilization of women’s bodies that occurs through the removal of all body hair" (Nguyen 673), I don't regularly shave my legs because my leg hair is very thin and I get too lazy.

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I was given the opportunity to see non-binary comedian Alok live for the "Netflix is a Joke Fest" along with Tiktok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney. They are advocates of deconstructing gender and identity and their outfits and presentation of themselves do exactly that. Alok wears some feminine items: a leather skirt with pink and green flames paired with (not pictured) snakeskin platform heels. With this, Alok sports a Dragon Ball Z tee with black and pink puff sleeves. Alok also wears makeup, earrings, and does not shave any hair. This line from Lorber's, "Social Construction of Gender" resonated heavily with me when thinking about Alok's set, "Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced. Gender signs and signals are so ubiquitous that we usually fail to note them - unless they are missing or ambiguous" This is very important because Alok is purposefully presenting themselves as ambiguous by combining both feminine and masculine elements to themselves and how they dress. Alok states in a podcast, "That’s why people like me who are visibly gender non-conforming, who are both feminine and masculine and none of the above." By challenging the two established genders and identifying as neither, Alok creates a powerful statement that encourages his audience to question colonial perceptions of gender and identification. His ambiguity disrupts society's norms and establishes ways of thinking to create more inclusivity in a rapidly evolving world.