Commentary : Columns : Radically reread
Femininity is fucking fierce
The feminine shouldn’t have to bow before the masculine
T he Montreal queer community is often heralded as a hotbed of gender fucking, fluidity, and acceptance. It’s imagined as a place where oppressive gender norms go to die painful (and fabulous) deaths. And if the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies is invoked on the queer scene, it’s to position it as retrograde politics, made reference to only to congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come. When this bolsters a claim to a feminist identity that only seems to require tits and a desire for women as pre-reqs, you know something’s gone awry.
I have an affinity for challenging queers’ (mis)conceptions of femininity. I’m over being called androgynous as a compliment, being told that people don’t see masculinity or femininity, and having my gender presentation read and treated as normative and apolitical. Meanwhile, my lips are smeared with bright pink lipstick, my ass is hanging out of my black satin skirt, and I talk queer and gender politics a mile a minute. The worst, though, is when folks arbitrarily femme it up to celebrate the boundlessness that is the gender galaxy, only to deride femininity as backward and vacant in the next breath.
Let me offer a few caveats to start. Ensuring the “natural formation” of proper femininity in girls is an ongoing societal project. It is annoying at best, and violent at worst. When something like femininity is considered to be developmentally natural in women, it follows that biological aberrations will always be possible. And they must be avoided at all costs. This expectation and enforcement of femininity can feel suffocating, unchosen, and incredibly disempowering. I’m not interested in denying the harsh ways that this can go down and play out in someone’s life. What I am interested in is thinking about the variability of folks’ experiences with femininity.
The century prior to the second-wave women’s movement saw generations of sexologists, psychoanalysts, and biomedical scientists “discovering” and “proving” the naturalness of femininity in women. Combined with the resurgence of the repressive domestic ideal of the fifties, white middle-class women began reacting to these institutionally supported and culturally expected roles with a vengeance. And they did so in droves. One of the most fundamental signs of a feminist consciousness became the enlightened recognition of femininity as inherently oppressive. Tool of the patriarchy? More like a program instituted to establish the complete colonization of women by men. The deployment of femininity as the primary and overriding target of the feminist movement hinged on a strict distinction between sex and gender. While claiming sex (femaleness) as a natural, discrete, and immutable category, they claimed gender (feminine expression, behaviour, and values) as a socially constructed and imposed phenomenon.
This claim had destructive implications and disastrous effects. And let me tell you, the reverberations are palpable. Two broad lines of thought came from the assertion of femininity as an enforced, top-down program used to keep women subordinate. On the one hand, some feminists advocated for a return to the pure, natural, and androgynous femaleness that the patriarchy had butchered and silenced. Sounds a lot like today’s cult of andro queers that snub my unapologetic femme styles. Others sought the explicit rejection of femininity in place of masculine values and behaviours that were imagined as superior and more humane. Reminds me of the bois, butches, and (trans)masculine heroes greeted by oodles of lusting respect in queer spaces. All in all, femininity was conceived of as an oppressive and elaborate mask that could, and should, be taken off – without hesitation. Blush, heels, and miniskirts? Say goodbye to your liberation.
In fighting for a liberalist bastardization of equality – where freedom for women meant being like hyperprivileged men – feminists failed to engage in the strenuous work required to empty the vat of negativity that femininity was soaked in. They reinforced it as inherently weak and inferior, its expression as artificial and confining, and lambasted it as definitively infantilizing, incapacitating, and debilitating. This failure to interrogate the cultural connotation and denigration of femininity proves to be especially problematic when “in its broadest sense, femininity refers to the behaviours, mannerisms, interests, and ways of presenting oneself that are typically associated with those who are female,” as Julia Serano defines it in her book Whipping Girl.
Insofar as a large amount of women are feminine, most women come to stand as anti-feminist victims who are affected by a false consciousness imposed by patriarchal society. Ironically, despite the women’s movement’s keen interest in empowering women, they reproduced the notion that most women are, in fact, uncritical, masochistic, and unresisting dupes. If anything, these sentiments seem quite sexist and misogynistic for a movement that claimed to fight the oppression of women.
In feminist evaluations of femininity, the invisible norm that has and continues to plague the analyses of these arbiters of oppression is the middle-class, cis-gendered, thin, and white abled body. This body cannot serve as a model upon which all experiences of, and relationships to, femininity can be productively judged. Patriarchy is not a uniform and discrete system of power. To isolate patriarchy from other systems of privilege and oppression is to efface and misunderstand the complex ways people interface with society. If misogyny is differentiated and complicated by its interaction with other systems of domination, then how can we even continue to hold onto a critique of femininity that treats it as inherently patriarchal, regressive, and apolitical?
Femininity is an incoherent and non-cohesive set of connected characteristics, behaviours, values, mannerisms, and embodiments. Many of them can be dominated by patriarchal meanings. Many of them are deeply imbued with constellations of inferiority and powerlessness. Many of them are categorically denied to those who are people of colour, working class, fat, disabled, trans, male-assigned, and/or male-identified. If this is a transgressive feminist community chock full of queers, we need to start living up to that title with something substantive.
The most salient point is this: femininity is not a stable or singular entity. If we’re going to call ourselves feminists, we need to recognize that there is always room for resistance and that everyone can engage in it. Taking on femininity when you’re not supposed to is an act of power. Embodying femininity in a culture that disparages it is an act of power. Loving femininity when you’re taught to hate it is an act of power. Doing femininity with a confrontational, take-no-shit attitude is an act of power. These actions arm femininity: they make it political, they make it critical, and they make it fucking fierce.
Lisa Miatello writes in this space every other week. She’ll be returning after winter break. If you miss her, tell her: radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.
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Miatello Fan wrote:
"This thing I refuse to define is disparaged by people I refuse to identify in ways that I refuse to quote, so... yeah. I'm radical. You should be radical too."
You tell 'em, sister.
Who on Earth is this column for? The vagueness of her prescriptions and unreadable post-modernist jargon makes me think that Miatello's less concerned with identifying the crimes of "the man" or "the system" than with proving to her professors that's she's done her Women's Studies course readings for the week. The repeated use of "us" in this column, not to mention her repeated attacks on the "not quite us" that she usually pitches her arguments against (the "queer scene" here, "hippies" in her previous column, "do-gooder college students" before that) makes her seem more concerned with defending and justifying the boundaries of her own self-appointed "radical" clique than in expanding it.
It doesn't belong in the Daily - it's not even trying to address even a largish fraction of the Daily's readership. It belongs in a McGill Campus Radical's newsletter, next to report on the Mao muffins fundraising bake sale. At least then Miatello would be speaking to the only audience she appears to want.
Nov 19, 2009 at 06:04 PM
Danielle Bakhazi wrote:
You go girl!
Nov 20, 2009 at 04:39 PM
erika wrote:
stay amazing. <3
Nov 20, 2009 at 06:43 PM
another person wrote:
It appears that a lot of effort has gone through preparing this article. But what is it trying to say? I've read it 5-6 times and I am still not able to get through the jargon, and the loops of argument etc.
Nov 21, 2009 at 03:30 AM
another person wrote:
the other articles by this author have been awesome though, so i'm a bit surprised...
Nov 21, 2009 at 03:34 AM
alumna wrote:
This message isn't about the content so much as the structure of this article. There are several salient points in this article, however at several points I felt that the author was abusing her thesaurus for all its worth. This creates some rather tedious sentences throughout. Essentially, this reads as a sociology essay. My advice? Simplify your writing and it'll make your work much more accessible.
Nov 21, 2009 at 08:35 AM
Mike wrote:
For me, all Miatello's points (which if we're being honest, I refute with near unanimity) are lost through convoluted syntax. I don't understand the need (or desire, for that matter) for prose that is so immediately alienating that you lose the majority of your audience. It seems Miatello is attempting to fit into a post-modernist style without realizing one of her own.
I would argue this article is self-negating; the writing is completely inaccessible and fails in trying to reach and influence a larger audience. Though tempting to emulate the likes of the Foucault's/Butler's/Harraway's, it's important for all journalists to return to fundamentals of writing: simplicity and direction are virtues in themselves.
Nov 24, 2009 at 10:40 PM
Mishki wrote:
Does Lisa Miatello actually know what she's talking about? Because I'm a 4th year cultural studies student and I sure don't...
Nov 24, 2009 at 10:44 PM
Amy wrote:
"...let me turn to the accusations of "inaccessible" language. More often than not, this claim is made by those who do, in fact, have the resources available to them to explore the ideas, words, and meanings behind language that seem distant. It does not take more than the tools utilized in elementary schooling, or even their art school education, to translate foreign tongue.
But this is a digression from the more important mechanism of distraction that is entailed by their intellectual laziness. What remains remarkable is the fact that those who voluntarily denounce the insubordinate words on the basis of language cleverly relieve themselves of the responsibility of actually addressing the substance, thereby determining the average recruit, or aspiring artist, that something so seemingly difficult is just not worth a closer look. By dismissing it on such grounds, these critics reveal their accusation to be functional, which is of great importance, for there is no innocence in their buffoonery, as they are the king's jesters. And this instrument of rhetorical diversion is used to cloud their intelligentsia position as the foreman's dog.
When language is put to the test however, it no longer dissimulates the misrepresentation and thus it provokes the crisis of participation." -Anonymous
Nov 25, 2009 at 02:48 PM
Miatello Fan wrote:
Ah, an appeal to authority, citing that well known thinker, Anonymous.
Amy, if the writer is alienating or not being understood by her intended audience, she has failed as a writer. It isn't incumbent on the reader to discern what Miatello could possibly have meant by "When something like femininity is considered to be developmentally natural in women, it follows that biological aberrations will always be possible." (Social norms cause biological aberrations? Or is it just the consideration of as-yet undefined "femininity" being natural that causes biological aberrations? It this a genetic cause and effect? Does the faculty of medicine know about this?)
Second, if anyone is hiding their inability to say something of substance behind the writing style, it's Miatello. It's charming that you think people here are criticising the crappy writing as a means of avoiding the substance of the article, but you're making the assumption that the article puts forward any argument worth challenging. Insofar as I can tell, Miatello is saying that despite the alleged distaste of dozens of "queer scene" habitues and "feminists" - none of whom she quotes or names, but appear to be, judging from the tone, members of the author's peer group with whom she is settling scores - that dressing like a stereotypical girl is not a bad thing, and can in fact be a feminist statement. Of what, we are left to guess.
That's it? Yeah, fine, whatever. To judge by her columns so far, Miatello's radicalism takes the form of over-written essays in favour of inaction: she claims dressing conventionally is a statement, that trying to take action on the ground in developing countries is a bad thing, and that there is nothing in the rich, Western world's obesity epidemic for those in the radical community to be concerned about, despite its relation to over-consumption and poverty. The piece de resistance on this theme was the one that argued that "radicals" shouldn't judge themselves so harshly for not trying hard enough (as a bonus irony, that column opened with a judgmental rant against those damned pot-smoking hippies. My grandfather loved that bit).
All of which is great: as someone with a developing beer gut who has no desire to dirty my chinos in the third-world and who likes a chick in a skirt, I'm apparently as radical as they come. As a bonus, I can say so without once writing anything so self-contradicting yet redundant as "Femininity is an incoherent and non-cohesive set of connected characteristics, behaviours, values, mannerisms, and embodiments."
Nov 25, 2009 at 09:11 PM
miatello Fan wrote:
On reflection, both of my comments, but especially the first, were just mean-spirited. Having one's writing critiqued in public is hard to endure, and there was no call for me to be so harsh. While I think both the writing and subjects of Miatello's columns could be improved, my tone was uncalled for and unhelpful, and I apologize.
Nov 26, 2009 at 02:09 PM
anonymous wrote:
Actually, miatello Fan, I found your critiques much more accessible than the actual article. While I did not have trouble getting through the language, I too found some circular argumentation. I also feel as though this argument is for a specific audience only; those in the queer community. I found "Taking on femininity when you’re not supposed to is an act of power" a bit problematic. I think her argument is that a feminist is not supposed to perform femininity, so when they do it is empowering. However due to the repetitive name-dropping of the "queer community" I felt like this point was addressed simply to those in the community, and that those in the community are the only ones capable of making a statement by performing femininity. As an outsider of the queer community and as a feminist who also happens to perform femininity, I felt excluded from this argument. Performing femininity is not strictly for queers. It is a performance of identity and while it has been criticized as being a patriarchal construction it can be empowering to those who embrace it. One can be a feminine feminist, queer or non-queer, and I do not think this article realizes this. Instead it excludes groups which goes against the Montreal queer community's value of "acceptance." I get the idea, and I'm glad you think you're powerful wearing a satin skirt, but I think you missed the mark a bit.
Nov 26, 2009 at 10:22 PM
Lisa wrote:
Hi anonymous,
Thanks for your response. I came into thinking critically about femininity through writings on femme in queer contexts. Herein, it's definitely implied that femininity can only be performed radically/politically when the person in question is queer. Like you, I also have a problem with that, and it seems I've failed to make this more explicit. On the one hand, I tried to avoid talking too much about queer femme because I didn't want to exclude straight and/or non femme-identified people... but on the other hand, I'm coming from a queer community where I identify as femme- that is my standpoint. I think it's a given that femininity is devalued in general society. What I wanted to address was the treatment of femininity in a scene/community that purports to be feminist and gender-conscious- aka where more insidious forms of sexism manifest.
And yes, I was partially directing this article at queers. But, in saying that, I was hoping that this article would have access points for anyone doing femininity, regardless of gender or sexuality. I have a lot of thoughts on the subject and a lot of things I would have liked to include/elucidate... but my focus and the space constraints prevented that. Soooo if you want to keep talking about it, drop me a line at my mcgill daily email address.
p.s. "Performing femininity is not strictly for queers. It is a performance of identity and while it has been criticized as being a patriarchal construction it can be empowering to those who embrace it. One can be a feminine feminist, queer or non-queer"- I completely agree with this. Maybe reread my article?
Nov 27, 2009 at 03:34 PM
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