Week 8 - Femininity

Performing femininity

  • Women tend to have more freedom to partake in femininity and masculinity, as there isn’t much social status to loose

  • doing femininity is somewhat compulsory

  • women must balance femininity and masculinity

    • it’s okay to dabble in masculinity, because that is valuable, but can’t abandon femininity all together

Gender for women

  • androcentrism

    • parents are less worried about masculine girls than feminine boy

  • but still be feminine

    • girls who perform too much masculinity will be policed similarly

  • it’s all about balance

    • doing femininity as an account

    • feminine apologetic

      • use performance of femininity to counteract their masculinity

      • so they don’t get critiqued for what they are doing that is masculine

    • balance of masculine achievement and feminine performance

What happens to women

  • able to get some rewards associated with masculinity

  • limited because of the negative association of all things feminine

  • different women have different access to femininity

    • lesbian, black women, ect.

    • because we already see these identities are already seen as masculine, they have to overcompensate

Right balances and wrong ones

  • there are, in practice, wrong ways to be a woman

  • pariah femininities: ways of being a woman that, by virtue of directly challenging male dominance are widely and aggressively policed

    • aggressive: bitch, ballbusters, nags

    • not attracted: dykes and hag

    • sexual/not sexual: sluts, whores, teases, prudes

    • not homemaking: spinster, old maids

  • these women don’t balance, but defy

  • they refuse or cannot perform conventional femininity

  • being attracting is often the nonnegotiable part of striking a balance

Doing more, winning less

  • some of the things women are expected to do simultaneously detract from our evaluation of them

    • makeup

    • childrearing

    • scrapbooking

    • fashion

  • power is gendered

  • thus the emphasis on doing femininity is to encourage powerlessness

  • sexism, androcentrism, and subordination

  • benevolent sexism: attribution of positive traits to women that, nonetheless, justify women’s subordination to men

  • can also leave women economically dependent

When being a woman gets dangerous

  • both doing and no doing femininity can be dangerous

  • aggrieved entitlement: men feel they are owed access to women and women’s bodies

  • misogyny: men’s fear and hatred of women with power

  • misogynistic murder: the killing of women by men who are motivated to punish women for attempting to exercise that power

  • Trans women are four times more likely to be killed

  • examples

    • mass shootings

    • sexual violence

    • “incels”

  • hostile sexism: the condemnation of women with negative stereotypes and use threats of violence to enforce women’s subservience

Bargaining with Patriarchy

  • can maximize autonomy and well-being in the face of sexism, androcentrism, and subordination

  • what behavior can people engage in to avoid being at the bottom of the hierarchy

    • managing risks and benefits

  • men can have one bargain

  • women have three types

    • emphasized femininity: an exaggerated form of femininity (interests and desires of men)

      • using femininity to balance out masculine traits in order to avoid policing

    • emphatic sameness: just one of the guys

      • not calling out sexist behavior/participating in sexist behavior because it could be safer than being seen as a girl

    • gender equivocation: using both strategies when they’re useful and culturally expected

Double bind

  • a situation in which cultural expectations are contradictory

  • for women: the idea that to be powerful is to fail as a women and to succeed as a woman is to give up power

Hegemonic femininity

  • no type of perfect femininity because all femininity is devalued

  • there are idealized femininity

  • the requirement to do femininity, combined with androcentrism and subordination, means that women are actively encouraged to

Feminism

  • the belief that all men and women should have equal rights and opportunities

  • particularly concerned with gender inequality

  • new focus on intersectionality

  • matrix of domination: a structure in which multiple hierarchies intersect to create a pyramid of privilege

    • one individual can experience disadvantages and privileges and where do those intersections place you in society

Big picture

  • feminism is also about changing men’s lives for the better

  • serious backlash

  • contemporary gender relations are not ideal for women

  • stalled revolution: increase in women in men’s fields stalled in the 1990s

  • sweeping change in gender relations is stuck halfway

Gender inequality harms men more individually, and women more as a group