CW: Profanity, derogatory term for genitalia. 

How This Blog Post Came to Be

I fell into K-Pop rabbit-hole during high school and the primary way this interest of mine has come to fruition in college is through the K-Pop dance club here at UChicago (neXus). Something else I realized through my time in college is that there is a lot of gender related discussion in a variety of online spaces. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), discussion of gender and gender expression is quite prominent in K-Pop due to the androgynous nature of male idol groups in both looks and fashion. Notably, the idea of gender is also quite frequently discussed when considering the variety of dance choreography that is performed.

This is not an unusual idea though, recognizing that dance in general can be viewed as a gendered art form. A variety of different dance styles and moves are characterized as masculine, feminine or even both. Moreover, a lot of these dance styles are developed in a way that clearly relates to intersectionality as well. A great example is “voguing”. Wikipedia provides a nice summary for the gendered nature of such a dance style:

“Vogue dance presents gender as a performance. Drag queens pretend to apply makeup (“beat face”), style hair and don extravagant clothing through the dance moves. Depending on the competition category, participants may perform the traditional behaviors of their biological sex to demonstrate “realness,” or passing as straight. Although there are varying gender and sexuality classifications and categories, each fits into either Female Figure (FF) or Male Figure (MF). Female Figure includes trans women, cisgender women and drag queens, while Male Figure includes butch queens, butch women and transgender men. No matter the category, performances and competitions are camp, which embodies the spirit of extravagance and is exaggerated and artificial.”

With all this talk about gender within a variety of subjects, it is unsurprising that many gender-related slang has emerged across the internet and social media (for instance #nohomo). As someone who is not frequently online (to the extent that my friends call me a “caveman” for it), I end up getting to hear a lot of new slang through my association with K-Pop and dance as others adapt online slang into their real-word vernacular. I wanted to understand some of those phrases and ideas better with this blog post.

“Serving Cunt”

Earlier this week I promised a group of friends that I would learn a new dance with them, specifically ETA by NewJeans. This is a girl group choreography, which I am much less familiar with due to a general preference for learning boy group dances. Whenever I do need to learn a more traditionally feminine choreography, I often express the sentiment along the lines of “oh boy how am I going to move like them” due to the increased attention I have to give to my arms, hands and hips. Regardless, in the end it’s fun because I get to learn more dances with friends.

In the process debating whether or not to commit to the dance, my friend expressed the following statement:

“If you join, we can serve cunt together!”

I thought I had misheard them at first, but that was not the case. Mashable defines the phrase as “the ability to portray great realness regardless of gender.” Urban Dictionary has a variety of additional characterizations:

• Phrase used for when you’re absolutely slaying. (Where “slaying” is mostly used to express when someone does something really well, sometimes in the context of gender performance/achievement).
• Any gender is able to serve cunt. It’s a mindset.

Contrary to the original meaning of cunt (that of which has been considered one of the most heavily tabooed words of all English words), the phrase may have developed with the goal of reclaiming the word.

Here are examples I found on Twitter:

Here is an Instagram reel I was sent to further highlight use of the term.

“Gender Envy”

Hearing the phrase “serving cunt” was not the first time I had heard new slang related to gender performance and achievement. During my second year after one of the performances for neXus, a stranger came up to me and said that I gave them “gender envy”. I once again had to go back to my friends as resources to parse these new phrases. The phrases “gendering so hard” and “I want your gender” seemed to be adjacent to the idea of “gender envy” as well.

From the PFLAG LGBTQ+ dictionary, “gender envy” is defined as “a casual term primarily used by transgender people to describe an individual they aspire to be like. It often refers to having envy for an individual’s expression of gender (for example, wanting the physical features, voice, mannerisms, style, etc., of a specific gender).”

When I asked some of my friends who are more knowledgable of the concept this is what they said to break it down for me:

• “Gendering so hard” in conjunction with other phrases like “x is so gender” and “I want to steal x’s gender” is a piece of new pop-culture terminology that is, generally used reflexively to trends in queer performance as vanguard in internet humor and culture, especially with current fashion trends leaning towards a kind of indifferent androgyny in looks as a uniquely likable style.
• “Gendering so hard” is often used to react to photographic/video visual content of an individual (usually human) in a way that states the commenter is approving and admiring of the way that individual presents themself, with the relation to gender being what may be a soft allegory to the trans* experience of dysphoria (consider the phrase “transition goals”, comparatively) with the individual displaying what the commenter would ideally look, act, or be like.
• Often the commenter is a younger individual (often queer, given their affinity for observing gender as a more malleable term to use) who may be dissatisfied with how they look or are perceived (relating to doing gender and gender performance as a concept) and, in saying that an individual genders “hard” (read: intensely, well, the best) they are idealizing the individuals form in an aspiratory way.
• The encapsulation of one’s whole identity and presentation as “gender” (and especially something to be stolen or taken), though, can be uncomfortable for some, yet again this is mostly just internet slang for young people.

Conclusion

There is still a lot more slang to explore, terms that have emerged in semi-recent conversations with others include the following: “Girlboss”, “Girl math”, “Malewife”, and more. Like the examples we had explored above, these are phrases that have often been produced in the context of doing gender, gender achievement and performance. We saw above that phrases may be used in particularly empowering ways, or to better characterize the ideas surrounding the latest ideas of gender in the 21st century. The adoption of these phrases into day-to-day vernacular really highlights how discussions around gender are evolving and provide insights into the many ways we characterize and understand gender in the present time.

References

https://mashable.com/article/serving-cunt-meme

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/07/gender-envy-unpacking-term/

https://archive.ph/PIIMF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogue_(dance)

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=serve%20cunt