Abstract
Femininity in European Journal of Women’s Studies
In her editorials in this journal, legendary editor Kathy Davis has frequently asked crucial and hard questions. In her last one, ‘Swan song’ (2017), Davis boldly argues that feminist theory is no longer directly and primarily relevant for feminist activism, that it has become less concerned with (empirical studies of) everyday life and instead turned into posturing of what one knows. What is almost worse, Davis contends, feminist theory has become a bit boring. For Davis, ‘doing theory should be a creative enterprise which requires imagination, a sense of adventure and, above all, a willingness to take risks and embark on journeys that cover previously untraveled paths’ (2017: 112). Working on this editorial and special issue of European Journal of Women’s Studies where we return to one of the most central – and controversial – topics of feminist theory, we take our cue and inspiration from Davis’s provocation. We are delighted to present seven original research articles and a round table in which doing theory around femininity has required risk-taking and aimed to point us in the direction of new paths.
We must of course begin by asking: why a special issue on femininity, and why now? One might assume that in a journal such as European Journal of Women’s Studies, has been frequently discussed, and to perhaps be exhausted. Yet, searching the journal’s archive, we find that whereas the term ‘woman’ appears in the titles of about 300 articles and book reviews, the term ‘femininity’ only appears in about a dozen article titles, and as a keyword in an additional seven. Given that femininity has been the object and subject of so much work and critique within feminist theorizing and activism, this is a curious discovery.
What do these articles on femininity previously published in the journal tell us about how the concept itself has been used and understood? Let us give a couple of brief examples. For Sbisà (1996: 367), who investigates discourses around childbirth, femininity is used to discuss ‘stereotypical features’ such as ‘weakness, fragility, unreliability, passivity, self-sacrificing motherly love’. Several articles (Dilley et al., 2015; Kvande, 1999) use a classic ‘doing gender’ approach to study how femininity operates in various professions, frequently focusing how norms and normativity are negotiated. 1 Soley-Beltran (2004) draws on Butler (1990) and approaches femininity as both artefact/ual and as an ideal intimately tied to and manifested in the bodies of fashion models. Budgeon (2015), Dilley et al. (2015) and Gerodetti and McNaught-Davis (2017) all formulate critiques of ‘postfeminism’, and for them, femininity itself is entangled with neoliberal fantasies and becomes a kind of (consumer) choice which frequently masks growing class inequalities and individualized pressures. Voelà (2011) hones in on the specific question of feminine sexuality within a heterosexual framework and offers a review of how femininity has been understood theoretically as well as in classic literature. While diverse in approach, among EJWS authors femininity frequently appears to be synonymous with womanhood and to be understood as a pressure to conform, as something stereotypical and limiting. Moreover, femininity emerges as a singular concept, frequently cast in terms of an unobtainable ideal, with very little discussion on the relations between femininities (for an exception, see Berick-Aharony, 2013). 2
Of course, this brief overview cannot do justice to the excellent work presented in each of these articles, and we certainly hope that readers who have turned to this issue will return to some of the journal’s previous articles to assemble their own archive of femininity studies. To introduce an issue which aims to revisit femininity and make a contribution to what we are calling critical femininity studies, we would however like draw attention to a number of moves that we think are rather symptomatic of how femininity figures in feminist and gender scholarship.
First, and almost unanimously, femininity is understood as ‘socially constructed’ or as a form of ‘doing’ tied to cisgendered heterosexual female bodies. Second, and not surprisingly, the most frequently cited authors are Judith Butler (1990) and Angela McRobbie (2009). These are of course crucial theorists in gender and feminist theory in this time and place, and their work on the heterosexual matrix and on postfeminism respectively have opened up for important analyses of how femininity is performed and produced within distinctly heteronormative and late capitalist frameworks. Yet, it is curious that other theoretical frameworks are so rarely used. Above all, as queer fem(me)inist theorists with commitments to intersectional thinking, we cannot help but wonder why, and despite the potential of Butler’s approach, we still seem to be caught up in the idea that femininity is always and only tied to oppression, subordination, sexualization and objectification. We are left with a feeling that femininity cannot be conceptualized outside of heteronormativity, false consciousness, and ultimately, that it remains tied to a sense of being subordinated, limited and stuck.
If the ‘enemy’ of femininity in the 1970s was patriarchy, in the 2000s it is neoliberalism and from this there is no escape. Indeed, as coined by Angela McRobbie (2009), the term postfeminism describes a cultural sensibility that centrally features femininity as a kind of bodily practice which involves a shift from an understanding of femininity as tied to objectification to one of subjectification, individualized consumption and empowerment through autonomous choice. Any form of celebration of femininity, many thus argue, must be understood within a neoliberal framework that emphasizes not only a different form of self-surveillance, but also a constant need for self-improvement and regulation (cf. Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2009; Riley and Scharff, 2012). Several critiques of this understanding of femininity have been made, including one which questions not only the perpetual link between femininity and appearance, but how the very idea of autonomy and choice itself is tied to an idealized femininity of whiteness, slimness, and middleclass-ness. It is easy to feel choked by such collars. In this issue, both Enderstein’s article on women’s leadership, and Gálvez-Muñoz and Laura Martínez-Jiménez concept of ‘employable femininity’ presented in the round table, we think, push the discussion about femininity under neoliberalism in new directions.
As queer fem(me)inist scholars – that is, as scholars interested in the queerly feminine dimensions of feminist theory – we find the ways in which Butler’s work is frequently reduced to arguments about the ‘constructedness’ of gender quite interesting. Despite Butler’s complex theories of how bodies materialize in gendered ways through the heterosexual matrix and the persistent presence of queer subversion, it seems that Butler is used to understand femininity as surface, ornament and ‘performance’ in ways that are theoretically reductive and politically limiting. Tracing queer lines, we cannot help but notice that the number of articles in the journal that address lesbian and queer femininities is more or less null, as is the number of articles that draw on theories of sexual difference. Given the centrality of femininity and feminine sexuality in the theories of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva, it seems to us that more remains to be said. In this issue, Sofia Varino argues that Cixous’ liminal politics is particularly useful as an antagonistic force for the marginalized and excluded in opposition to both patriarchal and colonialist logocentrism. Varino’s reading suggests an opening of the feminine in ways not reducible to an essentialist idea of ‘female’ reproductive functions. What this might mean for thinking, for example, transmale pregnancy in terms of theories of femininity, is for future articles to address, but sexual difference here turns out to be rather queer.
Tracking the travels of femininity across feminist, queer, postcolonial and critical race scholarship, it is clear that the question of the relationship between feminism and femininity remains a sore point. Understood as an (unobtainable) ideal and heavily dominated by an unmarked white, middle class and heterosexual norm, the very femininity that feminist analysis and activism has dismissed is, of course, far from universal. Indeed, it appears to be something limited to those privileged subjects whose main obstacles are expectations of marriage, motherhood and reproduction imposed by compulsory heterosexuality within the middle class. Of course we know that the femininity assigned to racialized and colonized subjects, not to mention working-class subjects, has never quite ‘measured up’ to this ideal. In this issue, Frances Hatherley zooms in on femininity as a concept steeped in class differences (cf. Skeggs, 1997). She explores how working-class femininities have been negatively constructed as ‘grotesque’ and argues that such a ‘fall from grace’ has consequences for both visual culture and lived experiences of women already cast as negative.
In order to challenge the hegemonic status of white femininity as femininity implicit in so much canonical work, we argue that postcolonial and critical race scholarship must be placed centre stage. As black feminists from Sojourner Truth and onwards have consistently argued, the femininity that has been the subject of endless (white) feminist critique is always already a white construction. Indeed, as Raka Shome (2001: 323) has argued, drawing on the work of Anne McClintock and Laura Ann Stoller among others, ‘white femininity constitutes the locus through which borders of race, gender, sexuality and nationality are guarded and secured’. For Shome, the term white femininity does not refer to an ontologically defined body, but rather an ideological construction that naturalizes the place of white women in a postcolonial order. Tied to domesticity, motherhood and marriage, white femininity serves a powerful function, not only in terms of a beauty ideal, but as a symbol of the (white) nation. According to Shome (2001: 328), ‘the subject of white femininity emerges in, and through, its subject/ification in white patriarchy’ in ways that lose its meaning outside of a heteronormative framework. We thus would be cautious of projects, however imaginative and political, that suggest that white femininity can be re-figured without attending to this legacy.
We should know this. In fact, in an EJWS editorial over a decade ago, Gail Lewis (2006: 93) pointed to this very question and argued that we need to ‘conceptualize the relations between women inhabiting different femininities and differentiated by ethnicity and class as themselves gender relations’ (2006: 93). Like Shirley Anne Tate underlines in this issue and other publications, (along with many other Black feminist theorists) Lewis points to how histories of racism and imperialism have accorded femininity only to some (women). For us as editors, like the contributors of our closing round table, for critical femininity studies to be a viable and relevant feminist knowledge formation, both historical and present articulations of racial, colonial and imperial dynamics must be at the centre of its enquiries.
Yet, for both Lewis and Shome, femininity appears to be primarily ‘a practice of relations’ and ‘inhabited by women’. Our own research on queer femininities point to the need to continue to consider what it means to understand femininity as a kind of residence, an occupation of a place where someone, generally a subject called woman, dwells. To our queer minds, theorizing femininity as inhabitable or despicable not only by and to women but a wide range of subjects is another central dimension. To that end, we find trans and queer theorizing of femininity to be crucial to conceptual development. Several articles in this special issue touch on this question in different ways, most notably McCann’s discussions of Australian queer femmes and her reconsideration of the question of visibility, and Tomás Ojeda and Sadie Hale’s discussions of gay male culture and of how a misogynistic and anti-feminine form of hegemonic masculinity is upheld and celebrated, through a contempt for and disavowal of queer femininities, including effeminacy in gay men, trans femininities and various forms of lesbian and queer femaleness.
Critical femininity studies
Given the diversity of theories of gender, some may wonder what a focus on femininity itself does and why it might matter. We would like to argue that without attending to the very centrality of femininity for feminist theory and activism, we run the risk of reproducing some of the very core tensions that have characterized the past decades and that we only briefly touched on above. In our own work, femininity has often been posed, not so much as a problem that needs to be solved or fixed, or as a residence, but rather as a question that requires both empirical and theoretical reflection. While questions of femininity have figured in our writing in a number ways, for the purpose of this introduction, we would like to briefly mention three of these: femininity as affective embodiment (Dahl, 2017; Sundén, 2013), femininity as a set of technologies (Dahl and Sundén, 2013; Sundén, 2015a), and femininity as a temporal figuration with intimate and tactile links to deeply racialized and racist pasts (Dahl, 2014; Sundén, 2014). While we build on trajectories outlined above, to our minds, Critical femininity studies can also do the work of imagining femininity otherwise.
In close conjunction with the fields of affect theory and affect studies, the question of femininity is written through a set of powerful, sometimes violent affective forces which differently press upon or shape bodies. If attention to the cultural mechanisms of regulatory constructions and representations of femininity circles around what femininity might mean, this line of enquiry partly shifts the attention towards how it might feel (and what that might mean). In Sundén’s work on the critical potential of steampunk countercultures, affect is used as a way of thinking differently about femininity through an emblematic attire within steampunk: the corset (Sundén, 2013). Turning to affect, here, is a way of complicating the notion of the corset as either liberating or oppressive, and instead to think corseted femininity in terms of relational variation, power, rhythm and pace. The corset works on the physical body in a sense that simultaneously reinforces and disrupts ‘normative’ femininity. It composes with the relations of the body in ways that break down, decompose, make submissive, while in and through moments of breathlessness also compound with it in ways that can be powerfully sexual, as well as queer.
In a contribution to ongoing discussions about vulnerability, Dahl (2017), who builds on and contributes to femme theory, argues that if vulnerability is to be understood as a fundamental human condition, we must attend to its feminine connotations and to its feminizing qualities. Building on Sara Ahmed’s (2004: 69) contention that vulnerability refers to a ‘particular kind of bodily relation to the world’ frequently tied to a notion of corporeal openness and permeability, to softness and to being subjected to penetration, Dahl considers what she calls femme shapes of vulnerability as part of femmebodiment. This term, Dahl argues, might be used to capture a queerly feminine corporeality where openness is not (only) being subject to violation, where skin is simultaneously a surface boundary, a canvas for femme-inine expression and the body’s largest sensory organ. Extending her previous work on femme as a feminist figuration assembled around femininity, Dahl takes a somatechnical approach to understanding the reciprocal bond between soma and techne, matter and technology, and thus between subject and object. Dahl’s notion of femmebodiment, then, also emphasizes the imbricated, open and always incomplete and ongoing relationship between ideas and materialization. Differently put, a feminist subject as a body of flesh and knowledge, is an orientated subject for whom femininity is more than a residence and situation, a figuration that assembles ideas, events, relations and desire.
Femininity as something deeply or densely technological can also be understood in terms of a machinery of failure. In Sundén’s work on gender, femininity and digital media, the fundamental brokenness of our digital devices becomes something which not only shapes our relations with others (humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects), but also forms the backbone of gendered bodies (Sundén, 2015a). Beverly Skeggs (1997: 82) discusses how ‘respectable’ (and heteronormative) femininity is based on such a radical bodily transformation that virtually every ‘woman’ is deemed to fail. The default mode of ideal femininity is failure, and such ways of failing have everything to do with class, as well as with race. The further away from white, bourgeois, de-sexualized modesty, the harder the fail. In our understanding, such failures also need a technological framing. Digital technologies are fundamentally unstable, the binary logics of the zeros and ones of machine code everything but reliable. What happens if we transpose such binary instability onto the highly volatile binary divisions of gender? What happens to the analysis of gender in general, and femininity in particular, if the whole system is based on faulty binaries? When femininity as something inherently broken and incoherent forms the starting point, the analysis which follows will be quite different from one which invests in neoliberal ideals of perfection and wholeness.
Finally, the question of femininity can also productively be asked within a temporal framework. There is a discussion within queer theory about queer times and temporalities, how queer lives and experiences put pressure on a linear understanding of time and sexuality as merely a matter of (re)production and longevity. What happens if we instead turn our attention to questions of time and femininity, more specifically? In which ways does present tense femininity turn towards the past, or experience the past as an echo or a form of pressure? And how may femininity in turn be (re)oriented towards the future?
One point of departure for thinking femininity as something that, essentially, moves through time, is through gender transition. To think transition as a clearly delineated event in time in which one’s gender shifts reduces trans- to a movement between ‘man’ and ‘woman’. To instead approach transition as a continuous, unresolved open-ended process makes possible an understanding of gender as parallel and overlapping timelines. In trans-feminine narratives of femininity as a temporal form, femininity may become something of a temporal paradox: of having already arrived (she was always feminine) and of not being there yet (she is yet to be actualized) (Sundén, 2015b). If femininity is not primarily part of a binary, but rather something much more layered and complex, one way to recognize such layering is by acknowledging how the present is always haunted by bodily recollections of the past, vibrating through bodies in ways that might insist on or produce openings towards differently gendered futures.
To address the temporality of gender and sexuality, Elizabeth Freeman (2010) speaks of ‘temporal drag’: an embodied performance or experience of anachrony, a tangible pull of the past that questions the seeming radicalism of the present and the future. This is an attempt to explore the excess of historical signification of for example camp, or butch-femme, or (fe)male impersonation. There could, indeed, be important ways in which old-fashioned, or otherwise out-of-date femininities insist, or press upon the present easily overlooked if deemed restrictive already from the outset. But what does it mean to touch, to feel, to wear the history of for example white, bourgeois, imperialist femininity? For whom is this a pleasurable experience? And how does it feel to be out of sync with such history in terms of race, or class, or sexuality (see Dahl, 2014; Sundén, 2014)?
In her analysis of 1940s vintage and queer femininity within the femme movement, Dahl (2014) focuses on ways of embodying historical feeling through garments and finds intimate links between the feeling of vintage, whiteness and imperialist nostalgia. Dahl proposes that contemporary (femme) feelings of vintage as nostalgia are entangled with a particular white, bourgeois imaginary of the past, a longing for a past with ‘better’ values that wilfully ignore the racist and heterosexist orders on which they build. The white-gloved raised fist, for instance, is a contested symbol of femme union. Dahl points to how while it ‘can point to the strength of femininity, it also serves as a reminder of a second skin, the preciousness of whiteness and a colonialist and racialized order’ (2014: 618), which brings racial dimensions of femininity as a temporal question into sharp contrast.
Of course, these approaches are in no way all-encompassing or exhaustive of how to approach the subject at hand. Rather, we point to them here to allude to Davis’s call and to show that studying femininity involves creativity, imagination and both returning to old paths and embarking on new ones.
This issue
A lot of creativity and hard work has indeed gone into this special issue. We began with more than 30 abstracts and in the end had room for seven articles. This is promising for future issues on this topic! Several contributors turn to feminist art, writing and performance in search for ways to rethink femininity. Through autobiographic writing, by attending to comics, plays, Disney films and queer subcultural spaces, the authors included in this issue revisit old questions and theories, introduce new approaches and offer a range of new topics. We believe that these contributors boldly set out to chart new journeys. They show how we can ‘do’ theory, not only by analysing creative works in search for their queer or feminine expressions, but by viewing them as modes and styles of theorizing.
This issue shows that the grotesque is one path to queer femininity that has class-specific connotations and that the idea of gurlesque can hone in on the age-specific dimensions of girliness as well as on ageing. The authors remind us that we live in a time where we, the feminized, are both consumers and consumed, both stuck and free, both committed to leading and confined by gender equality. They call upon us to reconsider theories of sexual difference where femininity works as a kind of repository for tropes of alterity and otherness in ways that are always already embodied. They remind us that femininity is marked not only by gender, but also by race, class, ethnicity and sexuality. We are invited to imagine that a queer and intersectional écriture feminine might hold the possibility of a progressive movement away from realism and a strategy, whereby femininity can be understood as a differentially located liminal difference for feminist politics. Are we ready for a paradigm shift in feminist theories of femininity? The overwhelming majority of contributors to this issue, most of whom belong to a new generation of scholars, seem to think so. Together with our closing round table contributors, Clare Hemmings, Gayatri Gopinath, Shirley Anne Tate, and Lina Gálvez-Muñoz and Laura Martínez-Jiménez, all of whom in important ways have contributed to furthering theoretical discussions around femininity, all the articles in this issue make substantive contributions to rethinking femininity.
We want to extend our deep-felt gratitude to the editorial board of the journal, to all our reviewers, and above all to our contributors for making this addition to the field of critical femininity studies possible. As Hélène Cixous once wrote, ‘writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’ (Varino, this issue). It is with these words in mind, and with the promises that we believe that feminist scholarship on femininity holds for envisioning feminine difference otherwise that we offer you, dear readers, this long awaited special issue on femininity.