Queering Femininity

Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation

Hannah McCann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351717267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queering Femininity focuses on femininity as a style of gender presentation and asks how (and whether) it can be refigured as a creative and queer style of the body. Drawing on a range of feminist texts and interviews with self-identifying queer femmes from the LGBTQ community, Hannah McCann argues that the tendency to evaluate femininity as only either oppressive or empowering limits our understanding of its possibilities. She considers the dynamic aspects of feminine embodiment that cannot simply be understood in terms of gender normativity and negotiates a path between understanding both the attachments people hold to particular gender identities and styles, and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender norms and expectations. Topics covered range from second wave feminist critiques of beauty culture, to the importance of hair in queer femme presentation.

This book offers students and researchers of Gender, Queer and Sexuality Studies a fresh new take on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation that is not confined by the demands of identity politics.

1 The binds of femininity

Within feminist discourse, femininity has oft been imagined as a problem for women. Women are seen as beholden to expectations of femininity and, at times, physically bound by various items associated with femininity (corsets, girdles, and so forth). In other words, femininity is seen as a bind. In contrast, masculinity has been understood as an interesting gender phenomenon, not necessarily always theorised in relation to oppression or negative effects. As textbooks and encyclopaedias specifically dedicated to masculinity studies attest, masculinity has been considered in relation to such diverse topics as “Boy Scouts of America”, “cowboys”, “Hollywood”, “leisure”, “heroism”, and more (Carroll 2004). Though men are also bound to expectations of masculinity, masculinity has not always been assumed as a bind. How can we understand this history of the binds understood as specific to femininity?

Undoubtedly the understanding of femininity as a bind lies in feminist critiques which have been incredibly productive for pointing out that gender expectations stem from inequality between men and women. While there is not “one” feminist approach to femininity, I aim to historically map some dominant approaches within feminism in the decades spanning from the 1960s through the 1990s. However the aim here is to illustrate how femininity could shift from being seen as a social effect to an individual cause, leaving little room to consider the queer potential, value, or intrigue of femininity in a way that might equal discussions taken up in masculinity studies. This historical investigation is also useful to show how stories we tell about feminism past (following Hemmings 2005) have influenced feminist discussions in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the concept of “postfeminism” started to gain substantive critical currency. As such, I introduce postfeminism here, and the political assumptions underlying the use of this term, by placing it within a much longer history of feminist approaches to femininity. This contextual framing is intended to help illuminate how many contemporary feminist accounts continue to position ideas of postfeminism, or feminism “lost”, directly alongside references to the female body. As discussed in the next chapter, many feminist accounts that engender a sense of loss focus on the breast, rhetorically locating the “problem” of lost feminism in the flesh of women’s bodies. However first I examine the theoretical steps that led to this collapse of loss into feminine embodiment, and outline how such a metonym could – perhaps surprisingly – develop from the concept of “the personal is political”.

As an examination of the history of feminist engagement with femininity demonstrates, rendering the personal as political has led to a collapse of the political into the personal, where self-presentation is understood as a key site for effecting change. The damage here – as I unpack in the remaining chapters – is that gender presentation is imbued with a significance only ever determined as either empowered or disempowered. This is a severely limited binary that renounces both the social basis of gendered embodiment and the significance of personal attachments developed in relation to gender. Many contemporary feminist texts treat feminine styles of the body as ultimate signifiers of an era of postfeminism where the gains of feminism past are enjoyed but also forsaken.

We need not limit our analysis to the binary of empowerment/disempowerment or only to concerns of objectification. The aim is not to suggest how people ought to negotiate gender. Rather, the intention is to reflect on major ways that femininity has been critically engaged with, to show how the feminine body has frequently and inadvertently been re-inscribed with meanings of loss, danger, deception, stupidity, and other negative connotations. Ultimately, the point of this is to show the pressing need to ask different kinds of questions about femininity than the dominant ones that have been on offer to date.

A note on masculinity studies

Before turning to examine the history of feminist approaches to femininity, it is helpful to consider the ways that the field of masculinity studies considers masculinity, to highlight how different kinds of questions about masculinity versus femininity are currently being asked and why. Even a brief look through key gender studies textbooks and guides reveals that femininity is a concept rarely addressed in the same way as masculinity. While gender or women’s studies texts often focus on girls, women, men, and masculinities, the term “femininity” is generally excluded (Scharff and Gill 2011, 2). For example, Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies (Pilcher and Whelehan 2017) includes sections on “Masculinity/Masculinities” in addition to “Men’s Movements/Men’s Studies” and “Women’s Studies”. Femininity/femininities is, however, absent. This demonstrates the way that a complementary “femininity studies” has been slow to emerge alongside masculinity studies, and how consideration of femininity has historically been located under “women’s studies”. Limited attention has been given to this lacuna. As Scharff and Gill discuss:

There has been, to our knowledge, no investigation of “hegemonic femininity”, yet a wealth of writing about “hegemonic masculinity”. What new questions, we wondered, might the notion of femininities allow us to ask? What new insights or possibilities might it open up?

(2011, 2)

Furthermore, accounts of femininity generally render it as necessarily subordinate. Indeed, while Scharff and Gill propose a new investigation of femininity, they continue to locate it in terms of neoliberalism and postfeminism (2011, 1), and femininity remains problematic, rather than offering queer possibilities. In comparison to this, masculinity studies approaches do not always centre on theories that see masculinity only as the subordinating correlate to the subordinate feminine position.

Understanding the different academic origins of masculinity studies and women’s studies helps to shed light on why these two fields have engaged with questions of gender in different ways. During the second wave of the feminist movement, women’s studies first emerged within North American universities (Boxer 2002). The aim was to address the gap in considering women’s lives in disciplines such as history, literature, and politics (Wiegman 2002). As Marilyn Boxer writes, “the generation of women who founded women’s studies acted out of intellectual and emotional needs too powerful to repress” (2002, 42). Thus women’s studies arose within intellectual research and teaching enterprise directly related to the theories, demands, and practices of the feminist movement of the time. In turn, the history of women’s studies has largely been a history of analysing the oppression of women (McCann 2016, 226). Necessarily investigations of femininity have most frequently fallen along an axis of considering its disempowering/empowering effects in relation to women’s oppression.

In contrast, masculinity studies in the academy has its origin in the “men’s movement”, which emerged as a way of addressing a perceived gap in the consideration of men in theorisations of gender (Hearn 2013, 151). This can be considered a rather different gap to fill compared to the gender discrepancy in the academy writ large that women’s studies sought to amend. However, while men’s studies nominally began in the mid-1970s, mainly in the United States, it was during the 1980s and 1990s that men’s studies faced major critique for lacking feminist or other critical clarity (Flood et al. 2007, viii). Responding to this criticism, men’s studies made way for masculinity studies. As Jeff Hearn notes, “Masculinities theory developed from the late 1970s at the same time as feminist auto-critiques of the concept of patriarchy” (2013, 150). The 1990s saw a rise in masculinity studies as reflected in the launch of the first journals, the publication of the first readers and encyclopaedias, a growing number of texts, and a huge increase in the number of works published on the topic (Flood et al. 2007, viii–ix). During this time, theorists like Halberstam also extended the investigation of masculinity across gender, to include female masculinity (1998). This history illustrates that masculinity studies developed within a very different milieu than women’s studies, alongside reflexive critiques of feminist theory and emerging queer theory and postmodernist accounts.

This is not to say masculinity studies dismisses conceptions of patriarchy and power altogether – rather, the opposite has occurred historically. However, insofar as masculinity has been studied in relation to patriarchy, many accounts consider the benefits of inhabiting masculinity. As Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell argue, there is a “considerable amount of power enjoyed by men who fulfil their culture’s ideal of masculinity” (1995, 144). As Connell also writes: “‘Masculinity’, to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture” (1995, 71). Connell proposes that we consider a three-part model for understanding gender, with a focus on power relations, the relationship between gender and modes of production, and relations of desire (1995, 73–74). Though, according to Connell, few men in reality meet the hegemonic ideal, she writes: “The public face of hegemonic masculinity is not necessarily what powerful men are, but what sustains their power and what large numbers of men are motivated to support” (1987, 185). Under this famously taken up theory, femininity is always subordinate to masculinity, and the product of patriarchal domination is the ideal of “emphasised femininity” (Connell 1987, 183). Connell argues that society’s prevailing hegemonic masculinity positions women as the Other, but states that there is no corresponding form of dominant femininity that can be described, since any expression of femininity is always within a context of oppression relative to masculinity (1987, 183).

Femininity is figured in terms of the extent to which women are complicit in a masculine regime, with greater conformity equalling more exaggerated forms of femininity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 848). Accordingly, alternative femininity is suppressed by both masculine forms and emphasised femininity: “Central to the maintenance of emphasised femininity is practice that prevents other models of femininity gaining cultural articulation” (Connell 1987, 188). Connell suggests that this dominant masculine paradigm obscures a history of alternative female identities such as “spinsters, lesbians, unionists, prostitutes, madwomen, rebels and maiden aunts, manual workers, midwives and witches” (1987, 188). Here, Connell’s suggested model presumes a patriarchal structure as fundamental, which necessarily defines femininity as always subordinate even as there may be forms of femininity that do not conform to social expectations.

However, where Connell theorises that “[a]ll forms of femininity in this society are constructed in the context of the overall subordination of women to men” (1987, 186–187), the ability to give time to considering femininity in depth is precluded. Hence, rather than see femininity only as a problematic subordinate position, we might investigate ways that femininity is lived and how it might be imagined radically into the future. As Serano argues, “[T]he idea that femininity is subordinate to masculinity dismisses women as a whole and shapes virtually all popular myths and stereotypes about trans women” (2007, 5–6). Although various analyses have critiqued and adapted concepts of patriarchy theory since Connell’s work on gender, as the following discussion elaborates, femininity continues to be cast not only as a negative effect, but indeed a cause of women’s subordination.

Coding femininity as oppression

Certain stories of feminism past that are continually returned to entrench the idea of femininity as an effect of gender oppression that also perpetuates this oppression. While the stories I explore here centre particularly on White North-American contexts as key to the genealogy of second wave feminism, the task here is not to offer rival origin stories which for example might start with a history of class struggle or the fight for civil rights, rather than “feminism” per se. Indeed, as Robin Morgan proposes in the introduction to the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful published in 1970, the women’s movement in the United States largely had foundations in student, civil rights, and anti-war activism (xxi–xxiv). As Clare Hemmings also warns, there is a particularly monolithic story often recounted in the telling of Western feminist history, that suggests a move from a radical past that was centred on discreet categories, to a post-modern future less encumbered by fixed identity (2005, 115). I take heed of Hemmings’ point, that feminism has always involved complex and competing strands. However the aim here is to interrogate how dominant feminist narratives have been integral to a persistent orientation within feminism that has coded femininity as oppression. I repeat these stories in order to question their ramifications, and their limitations.

As alluded to in the introduction, during the period of so-called second wave feminism, the term “femininity” was not necessarily used to refer to gender presentation, but rather often described in terms of traits, values, and behaviours (Hollows 2000, 1). However, in many texts from the time that are still drawn upon today, femininity has also often been referred to as a normative style of the female body inseparable from the dictates of beauty and fashion. For example, we see this conflation between femininity as both role and presentation in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which is frequently cited as a key text for the movement:

Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children … how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting.

(Friedan 1963, 15)

For Friedan, the “feminine mystique” was “the problem that has no name”, the feeling of secondary status and dependence on men that women felt as wives and mothers. Yet as we see in her discussion, this secondary status was intimately tied with norms around appearance: “how to dress, look”. Friedan also argued that femininity stopped women from flourishing, “keeping most women in the state of sexual larvae, preventing them from achieving the maturity of which they are capable” (1963, 77). According to this perspective, conforming to perceived norms of femininity signified complicity with a repressive system. In other words, looking to Friedan we see that feminine styles were seen as a way to uphold oppression and not merely reflect it, with appearance therefore central to the project of liberation.

Even in early texts about the rights of women prior to the advent of second wave feminism in the 1960s, we see references to fashion and beauty not as effects but as key contributors to female inequality in society, where preoccupation with beauty and fashion is seen as a dangerous activity. As Mary Wollstonecraft writes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, men spend little effort on dressing, while women become mentally debilitated through the activity of dedicating time to fashion. She suggests: “It is not indeed the making of necessaries that weakens the mind; but the frippery of dress” (2003, 153). Similarly, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – a key influential text for the emergence of the second wave – suggests that women are imprisoned by their dedication to fashion:

The goal of the fashion to which [woman] is in thrall is not to reveal her as an autonomous individual but, on the contrary, to cut her from her transcendence so as to offer her as a prey to male desires: fashion does not serve to fulfil her projects but on the contrary to thwart them.

(1953, 572)

As Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton explain, the study of fashion (and by extension, beauty) is specifically taken as essential for feminist analysis because it is seen to signify cultural constructions of the representation of femininity: “If we see women’s fashion as a field of representations of the female body it then becomes a significant text of how culture constructs femininity and how it addresses that representation to women” (1991, 49). In other words, though one might argue that femininity is also related to roles, behaviours, desires, and relations, the extensive feminist critique of fashion and beauty also suggests the inseparability of femininity from appearance and surface. While earlier women’s liberationists focused on the limitations imposed by the impracticality and distraction of fashion, many second wave feminists shunned “constructed” femininity in favour of “naturalness” signified through cropped hair, flat shoes, dungarees, and un-made faces (Negrin 2008, 33).

A key example of this is the infamous protest at the Miss America pageant in 1968, which is often depicted as a (if not the) crucial moment in the beginning of second wave feminist activism (Siegel 2007, 49; Pilcher and Whelehan 2017, 133). At the pageant feminist protestors paraded sheep and held signs condemning the Miss America pageant and contestants. Inside, they unfurled a protest banner, and outside they threw magazines, bras, makeup, and other feminine accoutrements into a “freedom trashcan”, sparking the media myth of the feminist “bra-burner”. This action is reflected upon as revealing the feminist movement’s sentiments about liberating women from feminine accoutrements, reversing gender dress norms, and focusing on the “natural” body (Barnard 1996, 133–137; Negrin 2008, 37). The centrality of the Miss America protest in the story of the second wave demonstrates key ways in which the relation between feminism and femininity has been imagined. First, it suggests that a key target of feminist protest has been – and, where a “return” to the second wave is called for, ought to be – norms around feminine presentation. Second, it suggests that when targeting the aesthetic culture of femininity, individual women (such as the contestants themselves) should be made focus, even if there is a call for women to join the protest movement. On this latter point, what is striking about this example is that the “freedom trashcan” was never set alight, as a fire permit was unable to be obtained. As Deborah Siegel outlines: “Organizers were careful to follow the Atlantic City police’s request not to endanger the wooden boardwalk by lighting anything on fire” (2007, 49). In remembering the story of the Miss America pageant protest, this aspect is generally pointed out as evidence of how the media sensationalised the event after the fact, and made the protestors out to be a radical crowd of bra-burners (Paoletti 2015, 53; Bein...