The ‘problem’ with single women

Abstract

Despite increased acknowledgement of gender equality as a social good, there are some areas where the practice of women’s autonomy is apparently inconsistent with the normative prescriptions of a new ‘empowered’ form of femininity. Sexuality and personal relationship status are sites where women are positioned within neo-liberal and post-feminist discourse in such a way that their choices are subject to questioning. A model of gender hegemony is useful for understanding how and why choosing to be single may still constitute a ‘problem’ for women, despite the intensification of messages which also address women as autonomous, sexualized subjects. In cultures dominated by an ideology of marriage and family life, single women’s identity work resolves contradictions in the current gender order and in the process reinstates heteronormativity.

Keywords

Femininity gender relations heteronormativity heterosexual couple ideology of marriage and family neo-liberalism post-feminism single women women’s choices

Recently a newly imagined form of femininity has been the focus of debate and deliberation within the study of gender relations and social change. This particular construction is defined by the values of independence, self-sufficiency and confidence. The ‘empowered, autonomous woman’, which this ideology references, is noteworthy because she embraces and practices attributes conventionally associated with masculine subjectivity. Within the contexts of neo-liberalism and post-feminism, this form of femininity is endorsed by some as evidence of feminist success as it seems to indicate that women now have increased options for living their lives outside of the constraints associated with conventional gender roles and norms. This article will examine how the exercise of liberated choice central to this construction does not fully apply, in practice, to women’s personal lives which are governed by heteronormative gender norms that place the couple at the heart of the social order.¹ Despite increased acknowledgement of women’s right to autonomy, choosing to remain single continues to be, as it has in the past, interpreted as a problem for women. The state of being unpartnered may be granted the status of a legitimate and empowering choice, but it is ultimately time contingent. When women maintain independence beyond a specific period of the life course, they are often subject to social stigma.

The analysis undertaken here explores sexuality and personal relationship status, as sites where women are positioned within contemporary gender relations in such a way that their choices are subject to social expectations and constrained as a result. These dynamics reveal the contradictory nature of contemporary femininity and illustrate how choices pertaining to women’s personal lives are not wholly autonomous but regulated and subject to accountability according to heteronormative gender norms which are being reconstituted against a backdrop of wider social change. The aim is to contribute to our critical understanding of the structure of current gender relations and their impact on individual agency and the ordering of key social institutions such as the family and personal life. When choosing singleness is deemed irresponsible or a failure of self-management, this reflects specific historical and structural circumstances governed by post-feminist and neo-liberal rationalities.

Femininity, as a cultural construction, orients social action and sets expectations for conduct. It is important to question the role gender norms play in challenging or reproducing singlehood as an acceptable alternative to partnering. Therefore, a model of gender hegemony will be discussed in order to give critical insights into why choosing to be single may still constitute a ‘problem’ for women, despite the intensification of messages that address women as autonomous, sexualized subjects (Budgeon, 2014; Schippers, 2007). Contemporary gender relations involve shifts in the meaning of both femininity and masculinity with multiple versions of each available (Carlson, 2011). ‘Empowered femininity’, as one particular ideal presented to women, and its relationship to the ideology of marriage and family, will be theorized here. This analysis contributes to the study of personal relationships by offering an explanation for how prescriptive gender norms structure singlehood as a possible way of life for women.²

Gender theory

Gender theory has established that masculinity and femininity are terms held together in a binary relation of complementarity. This binary organizes social interactions as it structures the norms that, when followed by individuals, bring gender into being. Gender is not something someone ‘is’ but something one achieves through ‘doing’ (West & Zimmerman, 1987). It is not an ascribed status but ‘an ongoing situated process’ (West & Zimmerman, 2009, p. 114). It ‘involves the management of conduct by sexually categorized human beings who are accountable to local conceptions of appropriately gendered conduct’ (Fenstermaker, West, & Zimmerman, 2002, p. 30). Identifying oneself as either male or female is a social process conducted through the outward performance of gendered appearance, behaviour and attributes. This is achieved by actors through an orientation to shared normative conceptions associated with those categories. As West and Zimmerman (1987, p. 136) write ‘societal members orient to the fact that their activities are subject to comment. Actions are often designed with an eye to accountability, that is, how they might look and be characterised’. Furthermore:
While it is individuals who do gender, the enterprise is fundamentally interactional and institutional in character, for accountability is a feature of social relationships and its idiom is drawn from the institutional arena in which those relationships are enacted. (West & Zimmerman, 1987, pp. 136–137).
When performances are consistent with shared norms, they are perceived to be expressions of ‘natural’ gender natures. Gender binaries create and ‘fix’ femininity and masculinity as a relationship of difference. The constitution of the conventional relation of the terms associated with each gender has particularly significant consequences for personal life and familial structures. Gerson (2002) argues, for example, that industrial societies since the mid-20th century have been structured according to a traditional ‘sexual division of moral labour’ whereby it has been expected that women ‘seek personal development by caring for others’, whilst men care for others ‘by sharing the rewards of independent achievement’ (Gerson, 2002, p. 8). Traditionally, a fundamental distinction that has structured gender in many societies has been the presumption of men and women inhabiting different emotional cultures. Masculinity requires that one ‘display courage, cool-headed rationality, and disciplined aggressiveness. Femininity on the other hand demands kindness, compassion, and cheerfulness’ (Illouz, 2007, p. 3). The gendered structuring of self/other relationality according to this definition underpins the traditional, male breadwinner model of family life characteristics of Western societies. The performance of gender roles within the institution of the family is defined by men and women having different capacities and roles differentiated by female other-oriented caring and male autonomous earning activity (Cherlin, 2004). This model is defined by an ideological code that configures and universalizes personal relationships and the activities of individuals across multiple and various sites (Smith, 1993). For instance, in North America, the dominant model of family life is defined as:
… a legally married couple sharing a household. The adult male is in paid employment; his earnings provide the economic basis of the family household. The adult female may also earn an income, but her primary responsibility is to the care of husband, household, and children. (Smith, 1993, p. 52)
Similarly DePaulo and Morris (2005) argue that an ‘ideology of marriage and family’ prescribes marriage and parenthood as central to a happy and meaningful adult life. Feminists have argued that the constitution of character and capacities according to a gender dichotomy is not an accurate description of feminine and masculine character but an ideological one that maintains social inequality by perpetuating the presumption that men and women are naturally suited to performing different social roles. This ideological arrangement underpins the social organization of intimacy and personal relations.
Women’s traditional role in the family has been to surrender their self-interest so that their husbands and children can attain their autonomous subjectivity. The constitutive terms of liberal political discourse and practice – individual, autonomy, self-interest – fundamentally depend upon their implicit opposition to a subject and a set of activities marked “feminine”, whilst effectively obscuring this dependence (Oksala, 2013, p. 42).

The social construction of single women

The ideology of marriage and family has historically channelled the female life course, making women’s actions accountable to gender norms taken for granted as expression of essential differences. Research has examined how, within social conditions which privilege heterosexual marriage and family life as a ubiquitous goal and marker of successful life course development, individuals who fall outside this category are marginalized and subject to harmful stereotyping, discrimination, economic disadvantage, interpersonal rejection and stigmatization. This negative sentiment, ‘singlism’, goes unrecognized and unchallenged because the favourable status enjoyed by marriage and family life is largely taken for granted as natural (Budgeon, 2008; DePaulo & Morris, 2005, 2006; Sharp & Ganong, 2007, 2011). This rests upon a number of unquestioned assumptions: that most people desire a sexual relationship; that this particular relationship will take precedence over others; and that those who have this one truly significant relationship at the centre of their lives are more ‘valuable, worthy, and important’ (DePaulo & Morris, 2005, p. 58). The stigma attached to those who cannot claim to belong to couple-centred culture is remarkably resilient in spite of evidence that indicates norms governing intimacy and personal life are becoming more varied. Even in the face of demographic data that reveal that the experience of singlehood is becoming more prevalent, the force of this ideology is maintained (Koropeckyj-Cox, 2005; Sharp & Ganong, 2011). Thus a ‘cultural lag’ is now a common feature of a variety of Western ‘pro-marriage’ societies, where ‘cultural images, public policies, and personal attitudes elevate the status and value of heterosexual marriage relative to single life’(Byrne & Carr, 2005, p. 87).

The status of ‘single’ and, more specifically, its potential stigmatization is contingent on numerous factors (Koropeckyj-Cox, 2005). Gender norms, in particular, are central to shaping how the status of singleness is interpreted. Compared with men, women experience greater pressure to conform to the ideology of marriage and family because conventional constructions of gender emphasize caring and dependence as a central element of successfully performed femininity (De Paulo and Morris, 2005; Sharp & Ganong, 2011). Historically, heterosexual romance and marriage have been central to the fulfilment of femininity and successful life course transitions, whereas goals such as independence and autonomy have been seen as inconsistent with the achievement of a complete feminine biography. The implication is that women would not willingly choose to remain unmarried, and this supposition in turn contributes to ‘cultural images of the unmarried woman as desperate and flawed’ (Sandfield & Percy, 2003, p. 476).

Within the wider study of personal life, there is now a body of research that focuses on the normative expectation that women’s life course should, and will, be formed around the key milestones of partnering and parenting. This research reveals a number of patterns with some accruing greater social recognition than others (Addie and Brownlow, 2014, p. 424). Empirical research has investigated how the status of singlehood impacts upon women’s identity (Lewis & Moon, 1997; Reynolds, 2006; Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003; Sandfield & Percy, 2003; Sharp & Ganong, 2011). Because successfully performing femininity according to dominant cultural norms means having a sexual connection to a man, single women confront the knowledge that their identities are ‘tainted’ by their unpartnered status. Furthermore, this ‘deficit identity’ becomes heightened at particular times of the life course (Sharp & Ganong, 2011; Reynolds & Taylor, 2005). Women who are deemed to be at an appropriately ‘marriageable’ age, ideally under 30 with an upper limit extending to around 35, are subject to the normalizing force of marriage ideology because finding a partner and building a committed relationship is normatively prescribed as a key goal for this stage of the life course (Kaiser & Kashy, 2005; Sharp & Ganong, 2007). By ‘missing’ the culturally expected transition to partnering, and thereby not orienting their identity to gendered life course norms, unpartnered women regularly face gender accountability, which requires them to develop strategies for explaining their status.

Norms associated with the ideology of marriage and family render single women both more and less visible because this dominant ideology positions them as outsiders who always potentially don’t fit into a specific setting. These social interactions must be ‘managed’ in light of disrupted normative expectations (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 140). The violation of routinized gender norms interrupts the taken-for-granted ideology of family and marriage, making single women accountable for their nonconformity. Empirical research by Sharp and Ganong (2011, p. 974), for instance, highlights the heightening of women’s visibility at particular ‘trigger’ moments when awareness of their non-normative status is sharply amplified and their sense of vulnerability intensified as a result. Rituals associated with wedding ceremonies, such as the bouquet toss, are examples of social practices that openly differentiate single women in public settings from those who are partnered. In other situations, single women are made invisible by dominant patterns of relationality that centre upon the heterosexual couple and exclude the experiences of unpartnered women thereby rendering their lives unintelligible. Simpson’s (2006) research into spinsters’ personal relationships, for example, demonstrates these women maintained significant connections and relations outside of the convention of heteronorms but that their relationships were often not accorded social significance by others and generally lacked cultural validation and institutional support.

In cultures where ideologies of marriage and family are dominant, heterosexual coupledom is privileged over other relationships, and this limits the possibility for organizing intimacy along alternative lines including attaching value to non-sexual relationships and placing these at the centre of one’s life (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004). Sandfield and Percy (2003) note that when navigating stigma, women may construct their unmarried status as a temporary stage in their progress towards marriage to alleviate a sense of failure or they may concede their status as a sign of personal failure to find a partner or maintain a previous relationship. Other studies also show that the mark of ‘failure’ haunts women’s negotiations leaving them feeling ambivalent and uncertain about their identity (Sharp & Ganong, 2007). Failure, as a recurring feature of these accounts, reveals a deep and constant heterosexism that privileges those lives most closely resembling a particular ideological model of love and intimacy, a lifestyle that in practice no longer solely represents the ways individuals understand their identities (Jacques & Radtke, 2012). Potential alternatives to a deficit identity do exist (Addie & Brownlow, 2014). For example, research on the interpretive repertoires women have available to them – that is, the ‘recognizable routines of arguments, descriptions and evaluations found in people’s talk’ – encompass deficit, as well as, empowerment themes (Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003, p. 496). Although the discourses women drew upon included idealized values such as autonomy, in practice women in this research did not have sufficient resources to securely occupy that position. Ultimately this research concluded there were relatively few stable discursive routes that allow women to claim singleness as a positive choice.

Significance accorded to relationship status establishes what kinds of lives women should aspire to, which lives are granted more social recognition and value, what kinds of ‘choices’ are deemed more worthy than others and which are to be materially rewarded by public policy. When women are held to be personally responsible for choosing or creating what is perceived by others as a deficit identity, they receive far less social support (Lahad, 2013).³ The following discussion considers claims that gender relations have been reordered by a shift in the norms which regulate femininity. An emerging form of femininity that is constituted by values of choice and empowerment is now present in popular culture, media representations and public discourse. Because the significance given to remaining unpartnered is mediated by gender, it is important to consider whether new ideologies of womanhood impact upon the accountability unpartnered women are subject to.

Reconstructing gender and sexuality

Social theorists have charted how, during the latter part of the 20th century, structural changes in key sectors of society, including the family, education and work, and the legal system, impacted significantly upon norms which allocated different capacities and, therefore, roles to men and women (Giddens, 1992). The traditional definition of femininity as an orientation to the care of for others, and masculinity as an orientation to autonomy, can no longer be taken for granted. Illouz (2007) has argued that emotion and reason – traditionally polarized terms in a gendered binary mapped onto different social spheres – now mutually shape each other. Affect has become an essential aspect of economic behaviour, whilst emotional life is shaped by the logic of economic relations and exchange (Illouz, 2007, p. 4). This is evident in the way emotional skills are promoted as a form of capital within many workplace cultures, thereby introducing qualities, modes of communication, experiences and models of selfhood, traditionally associated with the feminine/expressive, into guidelines for managing human relationships. In a parallel development, within the private sphere, instrumental rationalities have worked in tandem with the influence of second-wave feminism to install the value of independence alongside nurture in women’s self-identities. This challenge to woman’s natural passivity and dependence has constituted a key element in women’s personal and political emancipation. Theorists of reflexive modernization emphasize the particularly transformative effects of the deinstitutionalization of marriage and family on the structure of women’s lives stating that ‘what gender is, and how it should be expressed, has become a matter of multiple options’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 217). These theorists suggest that to some degree the female biography has been remade with new ‘values of autonomy, independence, and personal space’ accentuated to a much greater extent than ever before (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. 102).

There has been a proliferation of interest in studying the constitution of contemporary femininity and a level of scepticism regarding the claims made about the role choice plays in shaping women’s agency (Baker, 2008, 2010; Budgeon, 2011, 2014; Carlson, 2011; Gill & Scharff, 2011; Gonick, 2004; Harris, 2004; McRobbie, 2009; Rich, 2005). This is a significant development within gender studies because the scholarship which interrogates the social construction and performance of masculinity has not been matched by research dedicated to questioning the structure of femininity. Yet such an endeavour is central to understanding how the social construction of gender regulates and shapes the lives of girls and women by orienting their actions, beliefs and desires towards culturally authorized norms reproduced through acts of social accountability (Budgeon, 2014). Recent research has traced alterations in the characteristics of gender norms over time to reveal that an intensified language of choice, strongly associated with liberal individualism, has come to constitute a form of idealized femininity decoupled from associations with social inequality (Baker, 2008; Braun, 2009; Budgeon, 2003; Gill, 2007; Harris, 2004; McRobbie, 2009; Moran & Lee, 2013; Rich, 2005; Stuart & Donaghue, 2011). This is a version of femininity unmoored from traditional associations with passivity and dependence in favour of themes that accentuate agency and self-empowerment.

Given that heterosexual relations are structured according to gender norms, this reordering potentially has substantial relevance for the choices unpartnered women are able to exercise in their personal lives. The dominant discourse of heterosexuality has dictated distinct, and opposite, positions for masculine and feminine desire that shape subsequent identities and practices according to a binary logic in which women are ‘sexually passive, experience less desire, are less easily pleasured than men, and value relational aspects of sex over physical aspects’ (Muise, 2011, p. 415). Representations of masculine sexuality, on the other hand, emphasize active desire, the prioritization of embodied pleasures over emotional closeness and an often essentialized natural and unstoppable need for sexual activity (Allen, 2003). Studies of women’s sexual identities have repeatedly noted what Fine (1988) perceived when researching school-based sex education programmes – an active and positive discourse of female desire was missing. In its place, female sexuality was characteristically constructed through discourses of victimization, disease and morality (Gill, 2008b; Muise, 2011). Researchers have observed that ‘women’s lives, their experiences and their relationships have evolved in the shadow of this powerful but often tacit set of regulations about appropriate forms of desire and intimate partnership’(Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003, p. 489).

However, emerging constructions of female desire as active and even instrumental have been noted (Attwood, 2011) and depictions of empowered femininity increasingly incite women to take up a more assertive and expansive position within sexual relations (McRobbie, 2013, p. xix). More specifically, it could be expected that the restructuring of gender role expectations and heterosexual norms will affect the negative status attaching to singlehood. A more active and autonomous femininity may enable women to orient their actions, attitudes and identities towards a non-heteronormative ideal which does not place coupledom at the centre of social life but grants recognition to other forms of personal relationships; potentially validates the choice to remain single; and endorses the pursuit of a life course not built around privileging a relationship to a man. Increased female sexual agency may in these ways affect the destabilization of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. Furthermore, it may be the case that the norm of heteropatriarchal coupling, which has tended to cast suspicion on women who ‘fail’ to secure a long-term partnership, is losing the legitimacy almost always automatically granted to it. The evidence so far, however, reveals a more complicated picture. Greater instrumentality on the part of women is encouraged by many discourses, but ultimately this directive services the reproduction of heterosexuality rather than expanded opportunities for autonomous self-definition. Gender norms, whilst reconstituted in some ways, continue to draw boundaries around acceptable expressions of female heterosexual agency.

Media representations of women which incorporate sexualized imagery and an accompanying message that women are now sufficiently ‘empowered’ to practice a consciously active sexuality are structured in deeply contradictory ways (Gill, 2008b). These depictions challenge conventional representational codes which position women as the objects of male desire – a construction that tells women to experience their sexuality through the desire they elicit from men – by presenting women as fully sexual subjects whose choices centre upon self-satisfaction through acts of individual empowerment. However, these constructions place the responsibility for satisfactory intimate relationships squarely upon women, insinuating traditional norms of gender and sexuality no longer apply, therefore releasing women from previous social and/or material constraints. As such, these representations are structured through the logic of post-feminism (Taylor, 2012).

A recent study of women’s magazines highlights how themes of empowerment are used to construct successful heterosexual relationships for their readers and form part of wider network of social accountability for one’s personal life (Gill, 2008b). Firstly, an instrumental approach was emphasized encouraging women to skilfully manage men and their relationship to them. Secondly, women were instructed on how to respond to men’s needs as part of that strategic management, and thirdly, they were advised to take responsibility for remaking their own interior lives in order to produce a more desirable subjectivity which would allow them to become more active and confident sexual agents. All of these directives communicate to women the onus is upon them for changing themselves in order to become more effective sexual beings – a precursor to claiming a liberated and autonomous sexual identity. Women are told be more active and yet at the same time the definition of sexuality which they are being oriented towards, and held accountable for, is still narrowly prescriptive. Muise’s (2011, p. 416) research on women’s sex blogs similarly indicates it is possible for women to take up a masculinized version of sexuality in writing about their sexual experiences and desires by ‘rejecting traditional feminine language and behaviour, while pursuing individual pleasures’. The analysis of these writings, however, suggests that practicing a more masculine mode of sexuality does not destabilize conventional gendered constructions of normative heterosexual sexual desire organized in opposing terms of emotion/reason, passive/active, and relational/autonomous, and as such, there is no indication that a feminine sexual desire defined in autonomous terms results.

Many feminists call for a critical interrogation of these ‘new’ empowered femininities and offer sceptical analyses of the consequences they have for female identity (Gill & Scharff, 2011). The problem is ‘this focus on autonomous choices … remains complicit with, rather than critical of, postfeminist and neoliberal discourses that see individuals as entrepreneurial actors who are rational, calculating and self-regulating’ (Gill, 2008a, p. 436). Individuals express their autonomous identity through their choices and ‘are not merely ‘free to choose’ but obliged to be free and to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice (Rose, 1999, p. 87). No longer limited to a political or economic rationality, neo-liberalism has extended to the choices women make in their intimate lives but just because rational, ‘masculine’ values like instrumentality and self-sufficiency have entered into the lexicon of femininity, it is not the case that greater autonomy for women in everyday life follows. Two issues flow from this discussion. Firstly, that sociocultural emphasis on ‘choice’ does not equate to women having more agency per se in their personal lives as their choices within a post-feminist and neo-liberal gender order are sites of intense scrutiny and that secondly, more choice does not necessarily equate with resistance to dominant heterogender norms (Carlson, 2011).

In practice, ‘modernized’ empowered femininity is structured in inherently inconsistent ways. Femininity is presented as a site of individualized possibility, yet at the same time, this must be performed within specific parameters.
… women are hailed through a discourse of “can-do” girl power, yet on the other their bodies are powerfully re-inscribed as sexual objects; on the one hand women are presented as active, desiring social subjects, yet on the other they are subject to a level of scrutiny and hostile surveillance that has no historical precedent.…notions of autonomy, choice and self-improvement sit side-by-side with surveillance, discipline and the vilification of those who make the “wrong” “choice”. (Gill, 2008a, p. 442)
The choices women make about sexuality and relationships have become sites of gender accountability. Following the theoretical framework set out by West and Zimmerman (1987, 2009), gender is ‘done’ jointly in interactions where social actors orient their actions and interpretations to a shared set of expectations. Women are expected to act as ‘choosing subjects’ (Budgeon, 2003), but in practice specific choices are regulated and circumscribed for women, despite the emergence of a self-sufficient, self-governing, sexually unbound femininity. Baker (2008) for instance has found that there are indeed particular choices that young women in her research could not easily make without facing social sanctions. These included embracing a pro-feminist identity, declining delayed motherhood or rejecting heterosexuality. Women’s choices, organized through hegemonic gender relations, continue to be a site of regulation. Although an empowered, sexually agentic femininity now permeates post-feminist, neo-liberal culture men are still granted more right to choose singlehood than women (Palmore, 1997).

Regulated choice

The ideology of marriage and family retains its influence on the structure of the female biography, despite the transformations many social theorists suggest are allowing women greater independence. The rhetoric of choice cannot easily be reconciled with an ideology of marriage and family that renders some choices appropriate while marginalizing other lifestyles. The conditions under which women may construct singlehood as a legitimate choice requires investigation as it is possible that in some instances women may be able to occupy that status more comfortably than in others (Addie & Brownlow, 2014).⁴ For the purposes of the following analysis, one specific area will be considered in order to assess how women are addressed by images of self-governing social subjects alongside judgements that carry clear messages regarding suitable choices for women entering into the so-called ‘late singlehood’ – that is, they have left the stage of the life course, where being single is socially acceptable (Sharp & Ganong, 2011). Lahad’s (2013)⁵ analysis of various Internet texts, such as online advice columns, reveals a significant amount of ambivalence surrounding the kinds of choices ‘empowered’ woman may make when it comes to their personal life. The message that emerges is that women who inhabit late singlehood have misused their freedom and, as a result, are living in a state of ‘failed’ femininity. As noted above, neo-liberalism promotes the ideals of enterprise, self-responsibility and self-determination. Lahad (2013) notes that these ideals are equally applicable in the workplace, as they are in the realm of personal life thus echoing Illouz’s (2007) argument that we have witnessed values once associated with the organization of separate social spheres operating across an increasingly blurred boundary. Single women are expected to manage various components of their life course including educational attainment, career progression, developing social networks and forming sexual relationships. For women who are still normatively single, that is at the stage of life when they ‘should’ be pursuing education and career advancement, the demonstration of selectiveness is consistent with post-feminist and neo-liberal discourses of skilfully managed choice, however, it is a ‘short-lived privilege’ dependent upon age. Once the time of normative singlehood – a time in which women are encouraged to approach their work and intimate lives instrumentally to ensure ‘good choices’ – ‘has passed’, they are likely to be held to account for being overly selective or ‘too choosy’. This implies they have mishandled their freedom and squandered their chance for a happy personal life and endorses the conventional prejudice that single women are unfulfilled and incomplete. The contingency of ‘empowered’ singleness shifts away from an ‘asset identity’ towards a one marked by deficit. The assumption that women are indeed empowered makes their choices a site of accountability communicated through the circulation of neo-liberal themes of self-responsibility. Here we see how ‘the discourse on selective single women, like the discourse on self-governance and enterprise culture, reflects the myriad contradictions and paradoxes embedded in the current regime of the self’ (Lahad, 2013, p. 25).

Successfully performed empowered femininity, therefore, does not imply unbridled freedom to choose. The message is that single women should avoid being excessively ‘choosy’ in favour of responsible self-management. A failure to exercise choice wisely implies the need for self-rehabilitation to ultimately rid or cure oneself of this ‘selectivity malfunction’ and maximize one’s potential for a happy and fulfilled life. Lahad (2013, p. 24) argues, ‘postfeminist, neoliberal and therapeutic presuppositions formulate selectiveness as an indication of emotional deficiencies and accordingly prescribe remedies to eliminate selectiveness and place the single women back on the maternal heteronormative life track’. Advice given to women in these texts reveals how heteronorms are protected and reproduced with the effect of curtailing women’s autonomy.

Hegemonic femininity

The discussion presented in this article highlights how gendered binaries, built upon separate qualities and capacities, have been reformulated in the past couple of decades. Increasingly women are encouraged to think of themselves as autonomous individuals and to expect to be able to exercise choice in their sexual relationships but choosing to be single is granted legitimacy on a time contingent basis. How can women be incited through neo-liberal and post-feminist discourse to assume autonomy, exercise self-control and pursue self-fulfilment, as men have conventionally been encouraged to do, only to find themselves subject to gender accountability as expressed through the judgement that they have misused their freedom? To understand these dynamics, it is useful to apply a theory of gender hegemony which enables us to understand how gender difference is structured relationally (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Schippers, 2007). I have argued elsewhere (Budgeon, 2014) that a reordering of the terms constituting gender binarism does not necessarily effect the hierarchical structuring of contemporary gender relations which define the boundaries of socially recognized gender performance and maintain structures of privilege. Definitions of femininity and masculinity have adjusted to be consistent with contemporary regimes of neo-liberal selfhood, however, the association of conventional male attributes such as self-assertiveness and independence with femininity does not imply that the regulatory structuring of gender relations and the heteronorms which tie masculinity and femininity together have been invalidated.

As West and Zimmerman (2009, p. 114) argue gender is an accomplishment achieved when ‘done’ according to ‘current cultural conceptions of conduct becoming to – or compatible with the “essential natures” of – a woman or a man’. Gender is a managed property of conduct performed ‘with respect to the fact that others will judge and respond to us in particular ways’ (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 140). Accountability is a feature of social interactions and institutions. The expectations expressed when individuals are made accountable for norm violation are not grounded by a static or fixed set of specifications pertaining to either gender and, therefore, performances of gender may exhibit a fluid character over time. However, it would be mistaken to see these instances as an ‘undoing’ of gender which implies the abandonment of gender as something to which we are no longer held accountable. As stated by West and Zimmerman (2009, p. 117), the oppressive character of gender rests not just upon constructed difference ‘but the inferences from and the consequences of those differences’ which are ‘linked to and supported by historical and structural circumstances’. Changes to these circumstances can affect the terms of gender accountability and challenge the grounds for male hegemony thus the potential for change. The example of late singlehood demonstrates how the redrawing of boundaries of gender accountability represents a ‘re-doing’ of gender but a doing nevertheless which is consistent with a normative system that ‘cannot be regarded as “free floating”’ (West & Zimmerman, 2009, p. 118). It has been argued here that when choosing singleness is deemed irresponsible or a failure of self-management, this reflects a gender order organized by historical and structural circumstances shaped by post-feminist and neo-liberal rationalities.

Theorizing the dynamic drawing, and redrawing, of symbolic boundaries that demarcate the normative constructions of femininity and masculinity helps to explain how choices women are able to make in their personal lives are regulated. In the research conducted by Lahad (2013) for example, ‘labelling the single woman as overly selective functions as a classificatory mechanism that designates clear guidelines for discerning the normal from the excessive, the successful from the unsuccessful, and the emotionally competent from the incompetent’. The classificatory process can be conceptualized as follows.

Firstly, gender is constituted by shared norms, associated with the competent performance of femininity and masculinity. Secondly, the meanings which define these norms are structured as a binary relation of complementary difference. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the heterosexual matrix, Schippers (2007) argues that the construction of gender difference is naturalized by the normative definition of appropriate sexual desire as the desire for difference. This ‘does the hegemonic work of fusing masculinity and femininity together as complementary opposites’ (Schippers, 2007, p. 90). Thirdly, to sustain hegemonic relations, masculinity and femininity must also be fixed as hierarchical. Heterosexuality is normatively constituted as a naturalized relation of male active dominance and female passive receptivity (Jackson, 1999; Richardson, 2000). Because this model establishes the specific structure of relationality it can be deployed to assess the extent to which various performances of femininity align with this normative definition, and therefore, it becomes possible to assess their role in sustaining hegemonic gender relations. Unlike Connell’s (1995) original theory of hegemonic masculinity which conceptualized femininity as uniformly subordinate to masculinity, this model considers femininity in the plural and seeks to account for the role different forms play in maintaining dominant gender relations. In this revised model, ‘hegemonic femininity’ is defined as the expression of feminine characteristics that ‘establish and legitimate a hierarchical and complementary relationship to hegemonic masculinity and that, by doing so, guarantees the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’ (Schippers, 2007, p. 94). Any performance of femininity which breaches the authorized practice of hegemonic gender relationality is accorded the status of ‘pariah femininity’ and placed outside the realm of legitimate gender performance. Refusals to complement hegemonic masculinity such as exhibiting sexual desire for other women, openly promiscuous behaviour, sexual inaccessibility or overtly aggressive conduct are often branded as being excessive and outside the norms of propriety (Schippers, 2007, p. 95). It has been argued here that late or non-normative singlehood can be added to this list because it is an excessive (mis)use of choice which threatens to destabilize heteronormativity. The limited positive status associated with female singlehood highlighted in the work of Lahad (2013) and others can be understood using this model. Remaining single beyond the stage of acceptability, particularly when perceived as an ‘active choice’ that women knowingly exercise, violates the norms of gender complementarity secured by the heteronormative ideology of marriage and family as a compulsory order.

Discussion: The ‘management’ of gender and change

Femininity is no longer strictly defined by conventional terms which have been central to the structuring of women’s sexuality and personal relationships. However, the reordering of gender binaries hasn’t been fully accompanied by the dissolution of gender’s regulatory effects within many key areas of social life. The complex negotiations involved in redoing gender are exemplified by the identity work women undertake when accounting for their sexual relationships. Studies of singlehood show, repeatedly, that women who are not normatively partnered are required to account for their deficit identity. They often struggle to present themselves as ‘empowered’ or ‘liberated’ at these moments, despite such a position being more widely available. Women are increasingly ‘free’ yet called upon to monitor their choices, so they are consistent with the heteronormative ideology of marriage and family. The ideological dilemmas which women encounter are illustrated well by the analysis of the contrasting sets of cultural meaning which attach to singlehood and are available to women when called to account for their single status.

Statuses associated with personal deficit circulate in wider culture alongside idealized ones which emphasize independence and self-development (Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003, p. 501), but studies indicate that single women rarely, if ever, fully attach a positive narrative to their self-identity. The choices they are offered do not facilitate contradictions, therefore, embracing a positive single identity cannot allow simultaneously for the complexity or ambivalence that constitutes the performance of contemporary femininity.
Singleness is a troubled category … on the one hand they [women] can choose to construct singleness very positively through repertoires of choice and independence and self-development and achievement and then it becomes difficult to talk about any move out of the category. On the other hand, women can talk unashamedly about their desire for a relationship and risk being constructed as deficient and “desperate”, and marked by their failure to already have a man. (Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003, p. 506)
What is striking in many of the studies of single women is the highly individualized nature of their identity work, as it is conducted in accordance with gender accountability (Lahad, 2013; Reynolds, Wetherell, & Taylor, 2007; Sandfield & Percy, 2003). This process of self-management might be different if alternative norms were available to women that allowed for celebrating a single identity. In a post-feminist climate, women are encouraged to pursue their goals as individuals, and this obscures the collective character of the dilemmas they face as women situated in a culture that privileges the couple as the primary social unit (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004). If the social nature of their positioning was more fully evident, it may be easier to resist the implication that their status is the result of personal failure. For singlehood to be coded as a positive choice, further research needs to investigate the contingent nature of empowered femininity in order to more fully understand who the women are who have sufficient cultural resources to lay claim to a positive, unpartnered identity (Reynolds, 2006). When does choosing to be single become labelled as an excessive expression of empowerment and when is it deemed ‘normal’ and natural?

When woman take on an individualized responsibility to account for, and resolve contradictions at the level of self-identity, they are managing wider paradoxes associated with a neo-liberal gender reordering. As Gill (2008a, p. 442) argues, women are hailed through discourses which position them as active and desiring subjects who can exercise choice in the pursuit of self-development. These constructions sit, however, alongside practices of historically unprecedented levels of surveillance and scrutiny of women’s choices. McRobbie (2007) suggests that the ‘new sexual contract’ which structures women’s lives is underpinned by the injunction that women must remain ‘reassuringly feminine’ in the face of new forms of social power accruing to women on the basis of their economic capacity lest this power undermine or compromise their positioning within heterosexual economies of sexual desirability. It has been argued here, based upon a theory of gender hegemony, that continuity in the performance of some aspects of femininity are key to the reproduction of gender complementarity and hierarchy. In this context, performing conventional femininity as defined by the ideology of marriage family allows women to avoid stigmatization. This performance reproduces heteronorms and reinforces distinctions between normal femininity and ‘pariah’ femininity – a division that is central to labelling some women as irresponsible in how they conduct their intimate relationships (Schippers, 2007). McRobbie argues that in light of this tension some women may perform traditional femininity as a type of masquerade to avoid stigma – ‘a highly styled disguise of womanliness now adopted as a matter of choice’, which ultimately works to take the ‘edge’ off of female empowerment and reinstate heteronormativity while stabilizing the heterosexual matrix (2007, p. 725).

Various cultural texts combine narratives of empowerment with the reassertion of natural sexual difference grounded in the heteronormative ideas about gender complementarity (Gill, 2009). Sexual agency is presented to women increasingly as an essential component of empowered femininity, but the terms within which this is constructed are thoroughly heteronormative and not an open-ended choice. Choice is contained through self-management, whilst empowerment is used as a means to accepting individual responsibility for the quality of one’s sexual relationships and undertaking whatever remedial measures are necessary to make a ‘good’ relationship with a man work. There appears to be a lack of alternatives presented to women either through non-normative heterosexualities, same-sex sexualities, bisexualities, queer sexualities or celibacy. To embody hegemonic femininity, that is a socially legitimated and privileged performance which does not destabilize heteronorms, one must learn to direct new found sexual freedoms ‘responsibly’. The hidden influence of the ideology of marriage and family facilitates the resolution of contradictions which the language of choice has introduced to women’s identity work, naturalizes particular social arrangements, reproduces heteronormative privilege and ultimately contains women’s potential.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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