Not like this is the first time I’ve posted about this.

But see, this is the thing. Natalia wrote in response to Twisty’s comment that women should repudiate femininity if they can, because they will never have equality unless they are de-otherized.

Because butch women are apparently never raped or treated with sexist scorn. Because I’ve never had my ass grabbed when I was wearing pants or not wearing makeup. I mean, should we all transition in order to get rid of Class Woman? Well, wait, clearly that’s not allowed either.

I have breasts. I have curvy hips and an ass that next to no one is going to confuse for male. Should I lose a bunch of weight in order to make my body as boyish as possible, in order to repudiate femininity and more easily what, pass as a man?

I know I’ll be accused of oversimplifying, so I’ll pull out my own Advanced Blamer card here and quote Susan Bordo, talking about anorexia.

“On the other hand, even as young women today continue to be taught traditionally ‘feminine’ virtues, to the degree that the professional arena is open to them they must also learn to embody the ‘masculine’ language and values of that arena–self-control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery, and so on. Female bodies now speak symbolically of this necessity in their slender spare shape…Our bodies, too, as we trudge to the gym every day and fiercely resist both our hungers and our desire to sooth ourselves, are becoming more and more practiced at the ‘male’ virtues of control and self-mastery. The anorectic pursues these virtues with single-minded, unswerving dedication…
Explored as a possibility for the self, the “androgynous” ideal ultimately exposes its internal contradiction and becomes a war that tears the subject in two–a war explicitly thematized, by many anorectics, as a battle between the male and female sides of the self…
Protesting the stifling of the female voice through one’s own voicelessness–that is, employing the language of femininity to protest the conditions of the female world–will always involve ambiguities of this sort…
As her body begins to lose its traditional feminine curves, its breasts and hips and rounded stomach, begins to feel and look more like a spare, lanky male body, she begins to feel untouchable, out of reach of hurt, “invulnerable, clean and hard as the bones etched into my silhouette,” as one student described it in her journal…
Through her anorexia, by contrast, she has unexpectedly discovered an entry into the privileged male world, a way to become what is valued in our culture, a way to become safe, to rise above it all–for her, they are the same thing…
To reshape one’s body into a male body is not to put on male power and privilege. To feel autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive body-practice is to serve, not transform, a social order that limits female possibilities. And, of course, for the female to become male is only for her to locate herself on the other side of a disfiguring opposition…
For if femininity is, as Susan Brownmiller has said, at its core a ‘tradition of imposed limitations,’ then an unwillingness to limit oneself, even in the pursuit of femininity, breaks the rules.

The fact is that since “masculine” has been constructed as the neutral form for so long in ‘patriarchal’ society, for women to “repudiate femininity” doesn’t give them a neutral option. It mostly leads to the embrace of masculine bodily and clothing signifiers–thus, you catch women comparing how long it’s been since they’ve shaved, when body hair has been socially constructed for so long as a signifier of manhood. Women congratulate themselves for not dressing in a feminine manner, when the opposite is to adopt clothing gendered masculine.

So to “repudiate femininity” is not at all to do away with a gender binary. It is instead to adopt the other half of it–the masculine half.

I know there will be people who read this and say “That’s not what Twisty meant!” And of course a certain picture of femininity is valued in our culture above others. I have written and linked above about the changing creation of masculinity and femininity across (Western) culture, and how maintaining masculinity requires as much discipline as femininity.

But I am merely illustrating the fact that policing women’s bodies is NOT a feminist act. Policing women’s femininity is not helping women. It is still playing into the same double bind that Bordo is talking about when she writes of anorexia. Being able to dress and look how we want and still be respected as intelligent individuals capable of all the things men are capable of–THAT would be liberation.

Of all the options out there, all the drag I could wear, I choose several options. My closet is a costume chest full of personae for me to play with. Today I have to meet my students for the semester for the first time–the rest of the semester they will see me in the lab and so in jeans and clothes that I won’t be too sad if I get photo chemicals on. So today I put on a skirt and a nice shirt and I play teacher. Later I’m going out for drinks with a friend, so I will play pretty. Right now I’m writing, so I am lounging in my PJ’s. All these things are options for me. Options. Some are feminine, some are not. And I require people to treat me with respect and listen to me no matter how I am dressed. Which, to me, seems to be a better way of teaching them that feminine /= stupid or unworthy, rather than having to disavow anything sparkly or femme because it might make them take me less seriously or “other” me.

After all, isn’t repudiating femininity what patriarchal culture was all about?

Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” From Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, taken here from Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Columbia University Press, 1997

Posted: September 5th, 2008 under Feminism.
Comments: 9

Marie Antoinette, as Sofia Coppola imagined it, is all about beauty, ‘sparkle’ and femininity as the only pleasures available to a woman in a society where she is just a bargaining chip to be bought and sold—even by her mother, a political force in her own right.

Coppola gives us Kirsten Dunst, a star we are familiar with precisely for her lack of uber-glamness, her waifish build and glowing skin with little makeup, and transforms her before our eyes into the Queen, powdered white and perfect, hair not just styled but turned into a living sculpture on her head, seizing her pleasures where she can.

Marie Antoinette is, after all, denied even the freedom to dress herself in the mornings, and her husband is incapable of sexual performance, so she is denied not only pleasure in sex, but her very identity. It must be her fault, after all, that he cannot perform.

Beauty is both a millstone round her neck and the thing that saves her, at least for a time. She is dressed in the clothing of her new country—the forcible public removal of her clothing happens more than once in this film—and presented to her new husband as a cake upon a platter. The same as the cakes she so gleefully crams into her mouth later, and like the one she is mistakenly accused of telling the people to eat when they have no bread.

The aunts are jealous of her beauty, and they turn her against the one woman who might have helped her gain any freedom and happiness, Madame Du Barry, the old king’s mistress, played lushly by Asia Argento, all blacks and reds to Marie’s pastels and blonde. Du Barry is of course the ‘whore,’ yet she wants nothing more than to be friends with Marie, and is only angered when she is spurned. The simple pleasure on her face when Marie speaks to her is telling—and leads directly into a scene contrasting her lively sex life with the aging King and Marie and Louis’s bedtime conversation.

Later, of course, Marie takes up with another woman of questionable virtue, and it is then when she starts to have her own life.
Read more »

Posted: August 22nd, 2008 under Feminism, Lipgloss, Movies, Sex.
Comments: 2

me.

John McCain. (Thanks, Sondra! You rule. you have a blog you want me to link?)

Posted: August 20th, 2008 under Lipgloss, Politics, Shameless self-promotion.
Comments: 3

I have decided that glitter eye makeup will save the world.

I said in an email conversation:

And to think about whether or not the world would be a happier place if EVERYONE wore glitter eye makeup (or was free to without any sort of gender policing.)

Picture the construction worker on the corner with glitter eye makeup. Picture your fourth grade teacher. Picture John McCain. Come on, isn’t that a happy thought?

And I’m sticking to it.

Could you declare war in glitter eye makeup? Could you punch someone in the face? Think about how much happier the world would be if everyone spent just a few minutes in the morning playing around with pretty things for themselves.

Look at Siouxsie. Isn’t she fabulous? How could you not smile and laugh things off if you had this much sparkle and shine going on

Makeup like this isn’t some patriarchy-pleasing dollops of blush and red lip gloss just bright enough to make you look postcoital but not bright enough to rub off on the man who might kiss you.

And glitter drawings on your forehead combined with eye-lengthening liquid liner and lipstick–on a man? Oh, Bowie, you blur those lines so deliciously.

Makeup and clothing can be so much more than just means of attraction. They can be means of subversion, but most importantly, a means of celebration.

I used to draw exaggerated eyes on myself back in my goth days. Now I buy mineral shadows in every color of the rainbow (dollar samples from this site, BTW. love them!) and paint my eyelids with streaks of shimmer and shine.

I put on makeup for myself. Clothing gets noticed by others, but sparkle makeup is something I do for me, my time in the bathroom in the morning before I see the rest of the world, where I dip into my palette like the artist I’ll never be and paint myself a face.

I can’t find any pictures from A Game of You (which used to be one of my least-loved of the Sandman stories, but which I keep quoting lately), but in that story Barbie, who in A Doll’s House was a typical blonde pretty girl, has decided to use makeup in a completely different way. She draws a chessboard or a veil on her face, obscuring her pretty-girl features and making the idea of makeup front and center, the illusion that it is.

And Courtney Love, whose entire existence can be seen as one huge subversion of femininity, used and abused makeup throughout her career, but always pointed out the very obviousness of it as a device.

And that’s what’s so fabulous about it, after all. To quote Ms. Love, “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.” What’s wrong with artificial? Artificial was always set up as the “good” side of the debate when it was man vs. nature and women were nature. (See, oh, eleventymillion feminist theorists.) Why is artificial so bad when it comes to gender?

Perhaps because by making gender artificially exaggerated, we point out that it is, after all, a performance. A game of you.

And so. Glitter makeup will save the world.

Ten points to the first person to post me a photoshopped pic of John McCain in glitter eye makeup.

(This post brought to you by the department of Sarah woke up too early and is caffeinated. Now I’m off to download Hole videos. And have I really not posted that Courtney Love essay I wrote weeks ago? Goodness! Must rectify.)

Posted: August 20th, 2008 under Feminism, Lipgloss, Love, Rock'n'roll.
Comments: 17