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sabinafys-blog · 5 years

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A Conversation With Now

High heels, red lipstick, a form fitting dress, Chanel perfume, and dainty necklaces; basically Carrie Bradshaw on a night out with Mr. Big. (For those of you who have not seen Sex and the City, my sincerest apologies. I highly recommend this show if you wish to be entertained by the problematic and frivolous complications of straight relationships in the very fashionable New York City of the 90’s.) When I think of what my grandmother thought of femininity, this iconic image comes into my mind. As a child I was never handed this idea of womanhood by my parents, they were careful to craft my notions of the feminine mystique as a unique thought of my own, something I had complete and undeniable control over. And yet as I grew and my impressionable mind began to stray from the confines of my family, this icon of the petite, beautiful woman sauntering around on the arm of a much taller, much wealthier man began to creep into my worldview. What was I supposed to be as a woman? When did I become a woman and not a girl? Why did material items seem to define me? What is a woman? Who am I? I felt these questions looming over me every single day, and I saw them illuminated in the lives of other women around me. I felt it when the playground became a defining factor between the boys playing sports and the girls drawing flowers with chalk. I felt it when I was suspended in middle school for wearing a “skimpy outfit” that was “distracting” to my teachers. I feel it today with everyone I meet. The notion of woman has divided our society, our gender ideals, our workplaces, and our homes. Today more than ever we are deconstructing this feminine mystique and rebuilding and reclaiming it as something powerful. Yet it begs the question; if the Carrie Bradshaw, Holly Golightly, and Scarlett O’Hara are left behind, where do the old concepts of femininity and femme aesthetics fit into a modern, progressive society? Can we rid ourselves of internalized gender norms and beauty standards and still embrace femininity?

It often seems that women are therefore left with two options; to fully embrace femininity and risk the degrading and lesser social status, or to completely reject feminine stereotypes and become feared, disliked, and even harmed. These options, however, assume that women even have the choice in whether or not they can express themselves, when often men are granted the ability to define them before they define themselves. In James Tiptree Jr.’s short story, “The Women Men Don’t See”, gender norms and femininity are addressed through the perspective of a man whose patriarchal views are highly internalized and suppressed. His misogyny is exhibited through his train-of-thought narration, defining the two women he interacts with in terms of his preconceptions of femininity before they have the chance to define themselves. As he narrates their motions this becomes clear, “I have [her] figured now; Mother Hen protecting only chick from male predators... The damn women haven’t complained once... They’re like something out of a manual.” (Machado 5) He views the women as products of his preconceptions of female attitudes and actions, and becomes so easily angered as he takes on opinions from such a patriarchal standpoint. The narrator delineates both women’s expression in terms of the oppressive state they operate within. He views the women as commodities, as women have historically been told to be. This state that he confines them to is not unlike the state that even women operating well under capitalism exist under. The women are defined in terms of how men can use them; in terms of their ‘objective’ beauty, their bodies, and their potential for being a wife and mother. Tiptree’s story enables us to understand the inherent oppression that comes with simply being women, these same notions of gender that make women into sex objects, in the most literal sense of the phrase. The way that men conform to patriarchy in turn affects the way women conform, and internalize the roles and characteristics we believe we are supposed to abide by. In thinking about the evolution of femininity this story further emphasizes how the female identity has been so deeply rooted in capitalist entities.

In a similar manner, in Audre Lorde’s essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, the concepts of feeling and emotion within the female identity are explored in terms of artistic means. Lorde discusses how conceptualizing our being has often been left to interpretation by men, and our gender constructs as women have been forced into a more emotional, unstable, even frivolous state. Lorde writes, “We see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality.” (Lorde 1) In this way Lorde suggests that we must embrace this realm that women have been subjected to, which often turns to self expression through materialism. She communicates that art can be a mode of self- expression for women, whether that be through fashion or poetry or painting. Even living within a patriarchal state these creative methods become ways to defy, ways to create an outlet for self- actualization. For some this may mean adopting the feminine style that is doctored specifically to cater to the female ideal, for some it means doing the opposite. As art and poetry are made into commodities in our capitalist system, the only way to claim them are to realize their states as inevitable, and hope to recreate them for ourselves. “For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive... But women have survived.” (Lorde 1) To think of this sentiment in terms of femininity as part of the women who have ‘survived’ we can account for and begin to understand the re-realization of the female identity. As women survive, their histories and multitude of identities survive and revive as our societies and ourselves evolve.

In seeking to emphasize our own feminine personas or in the deconstruction of gender identity entirely, this action becomes largely dependent on fashion, beauty, and status. The masculine identity relies more heavily on the absence of these concepts, especially in the stereotypes of the cis straight man. As we have evolved to view gender as a spectrum of emotional and ideological self awareness, materialism maintains a symbol of how we stereotype and identify (whether accurately or problematically) our different identities. Queer fashion and androgynous style emerged as defined by these material items. Drag and gay culture further evolved these concepts, reclaiming femininity in a totally different, and totally fashionable lens. In this culture of commodification and gender-based hierarchy, the female identity has limited opportunity to escape the bounds it has been confined to. In a personal sense, a woman’s self expression is her first form of communication to the outside world; she is always judged first by her appearance, delineating her power, or lack thereof. Women live in an inescapable realm in which her entire identity is judged by her perceptions, from men, from other women, and from her own internalized self judgements. Whether she escapes this by fleeing the earth and being willingly abducted by aliens, as James Tiptree Jr. may suppose, or she uses aesthetic tools to voice her own expression and dissent to her predisposed position in this society as an act of rebellion, female expression and actualization is always a radical act. In claiming and reclaiming any form of a female identity, our reliance on these entities should be evolving with our evolution of gender and social normalcies. Therefore today when part of our country is still grappling with how to defy gender constructs and female subjectivity, and part of our country has completely rid themselves of these, how do we maintain any sense of unity or shared identity? Is that possible without deeming it political, and how can we reclaim our modern gender identities without relying on materialism?

I pose these questions not because I feel that we all have a responsibility to answer them, but because they are issues I grapple with and struggle to comprehend. By crafting them into a single sentence, culminating in a phrase that begs to be answered by nothing short of a doctoral dissertation, I feel that I can begin to explore their possible answers within my own life. I wrote the majority of this essay wearing a very pink, very bold outfit that would have made my childhood self gag. I kept remembering how I had detested the color simply because my conservative grandfather had once told me that I should wear more of it. I felt like a revolutionary nine year old wearing baggy jeans and my dad’s punk band tee shirt, when really I was defying feminine concepts just for the pride I felt in doing so. My material identity had overcome my idealized one, and with time I finally felt at peace embracing the femininity I previously felt so opposed to. I had never wanted to be defined by my gender, and hoped that in reclaiming the femme aesthetic I so loved I could still maintain the tenacious, bold persona I had come to admire within myself. If I was struggling so much in wondering how I could possibly speak my mind so that the people around me focused on my words instead of how I liked to match my lipstick to my outfit, how were others struggling? This thought may seem to some as just as frivolous as the relationship problems Carrie Bradshaw encounters, but I saw them as a universal trend in how we interpret one another.

Within these constraints of the male gaze and oppressive perceptions of women there maintains potential to experiment with and contradict these notions. Art and aesthetics as escapism allow women a way out of their inherent constraints, an outlet for defiance and rebellion. Materialistic culture will always be present within our lives, and the way we manage it may always be unstable and troubling, but it can also be a proclamation of our progressive, bold, and visionary self-identities. Though woman may now be interpreted as a notion, a thought, an ideology, or an outdated label, its application is timeless. The different female and feminine identities will change alongside our politics, literature, and art just as our world does, but we must continue to fight for our subjective identities as parts of who we are, and our gender as secondary. Defining humanity solely in terms of any dichotomous relationship was predestined to fail, but our concepts of femininity, queerness, aesthetics, and culture need not fail with it.

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