Abstract
In Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation, Hannah McCann argues that much discourse regarding femininity suffers from an overly narrow focus on a politics of representation that is concerned with what the feminine body means for the future of gender oppression. Against this political-representational focus, McCann offers affective questions around what the feminine body (can) do and how it feels, through which she aims to “queer” femininity by exploring it beyond its relationship to gender normativity.
McCann reviews six feminist texts in the first part of the book, tracing contemporary feminist understandings of the feminine body as necessarily enrolled in a politics of representation to a neoliberal distortion of the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” McCann argues this distortion risks two major errors: first, it falsely locates the problem of sexism in women’s bodies, and second, it overestimates the capacity of gender presentations to effect resistance against structures of gender inequality. In the second part of the book, McCann analyzes 12 interviews with queer femmes, many of whom feel invisible in both queer and heterosexual communities because of their apparently gender-normative embodiment. Given this concern with (in)visibility, many queer femmes distinguish themselves from heterosexual feminine women by arguing that queer feminine body styles are more mindfully adopted. McCann convincingly argues that this perspective ironically further marginalizes femininity by rendering feminine embodiment problematic to begin with. She concludes that focusing on the self as a site of politics precludes acting effectively against structures of gender inequality.
The two-part structure of the book is well organized but leaves some of McCann’s arguments feeling unmoored: without shared terms of engagement, the two sections of the book sometimes feel like separate echo chambers. McCann’s early claim that femininity is inherently neither problematic nor good is rendered tenuous throughout the rest of the book, as her goal of “making feminine lives more livable” (13) seems to stem not from an intellectually curious position regarding femininity’s capacity to do harm and/or good, but rather from a predetermination that femininity indeed has value, and further that “utopian femininity” (7) is something that should be figured into “radical possibilities for the future” (37). While such positions may indeed withstand future analytic scrutiny, in this book they often appear more ideological than analytic, based on a predetermination that femininity should be recuperated. Thus, in shifting questions of politics toward questions of affect, McCann does not altogether defend why an affective analysis of femininity is incompatible with a simultaneous analysis of femininities as always political and implicated in systems of gender oppression.
In analyzing femininity beyond its relationship to gender normativity, McCann acknowledges that experiences of femininity are often influenced by other forms of social difference, including race and sex assigned at birth. However, while McCann makes the crucial point that “female femininity” is rarely studied because it is assumed, the feminine body is frequently universalized in Queering Femininity as cisgender and white. While demographic characteristics are not provided for the queer femmes McCann interviewed, the universalization of femininity as cis and white becomes evident when the transness and/or race of trans femmes and femmes of color are explicitly marked in the text. For instance, McCann identifies feelings of invisibility as “one of the fundamental conundrums of femme” (132) and uses this claim as a bedrock of her critique of a political-representational focus on feminine embodiment, even as the two femme interview participants who did not cite invisibility as a problem were trans and/or of color. These two “alternative perspectives” (92) are remarked upon briefly to add nuance to a much more sustained conversation about the purported centrality of invisibility to the experience of queer femininity. Because one of McCann’s goals is to make (all?) feminine lives more livable, the universalization of femininity as cis and white in the analysis merits reconsideration.
Because the book contains an extended literature review of certain strands of feminist and queer theories of femininities, it will appeal to both students and researchers. McCann’s approach of considering six primary texts leaves space for scholars to put these theories into further conversation with other genealogies of thought, particularly those of black queer feminists who have considered the lived experience of femininity beyond its relationship to normativity. McCann’s analysis is timely and necessary, as the scholarly conversation around femininities has begun to grow after an explosion in masculinities studies. However, while McCann makes a persuasive overall case for her affective turn, there is a danger of further misapprehending what femininities (can) do in the world if these affective dimensions are universalized as cisgender and white. Therefore, a more sustained consideration of the intersections of feminine embodiment with race and sex assigned at birth could be a crucial bridge between understanding both the political-representational and affective dimensions of femininity in concert with one another.
