A knife is a girl's best friend

[truepenny]

I am, as I have said, reviewing Joanna Russ's The Country You Have Never Seen for Strange Horizons. This is going to be challenging for a number of reasons, including the fact that it feels hubristic to be writing a review of a reviewer who can write rings around me, but that's not my point here.

In her review of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, Russ write:

I could not at first understand Daly's insistence that femininity has nothing to do with women, that femininity--what a bizarre assertion!--is a male trait, and yet she is right. We're still all too prone to talk as if "femininity" were produced by the selective obliteration of some natural female traits and preservation of others or the exaggeration of some traits at the expense of others. But Daly is more perceptive: Femininity is a male projection of a solution to problems in the male situation, which is then imposed on women. That is why Daly states that she will no longer use the word "androgyny." Femininity is not an incomplete part of anyone's character but a man-made mess from the word go.
(p. 158)

Granted both book and review are nearly thirty years old (the review appeared in 1979), this paragraph, this idea made me ring like a bell. I have never been comfortable with my own "femininity" (and it's a great relief to be able to put that word in quotes and just leave it there), and Russ and Daly between them have just explained why. Because "femininity" is something I don't necessarily have to have. It's not just that "feminine" is a gender role, it's that it's a gender role that has no necessary connection to anything inherent in myself. Or, alternatively, since I am a woman, anything I do is "feminine," regardless of cultural conditioning and social opinion. (Somewhere else, in a throwaway line, Russ remarks that we never talk about "race roles" or "class roles" in the way we talk about "gender roles," and she is utterly correct. In point of fact, the idea is almost comically offensive.) In either case, the word ceases to have meaning.

Or, to put it another way, the fact that "femininity" doesn't fit me isn't my fault. It's not that I'm deficient or not trying hard enough; it's that nothing about being a woman has any necessary correlation with being "feminine." I can own my own performance of gender and it's right because it's mine.

I figure reaction to this post is going to be pretty evenly split between people disagreeing with me and people wondering where I've been all this time that I've only just figured this out. (The thing about consciousness raising is, everybody has to do it for him- or herself. And you can't do it to a timetable, either.) But I am talking very specifically about myself, and about the feeling I've been struggling with since puberty that I'm doing it wrong, that I'm at best a fake girl (D cup not withstanding), that I got socialized wrong and am gauche and maladroit and really not fooling anybody ...it feels like Joanna Russ handed me a knife and I've cut myself free of the painful, entangling wreckage.

Not, of course, that it's that simple. But I like this knife. I'm hanging onto it.

And for the first time since puberty, writing female protagonists feels like an adventure instead of an obligation. And you can bet your ass I'm not sending them out without a knife, either.

Comments

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I encountered this concept when I was around 20- probably via Daly- and for a while my mantra was "I am a woman; therefore anything/everything I do is womanly." I kept saying it until I believed it, and it's been a great help and comfort. To a considerable extent, it's made me somewhat oblivious to gender roles, especially as they pertain to me. (It's also helped me in teaching- I teach metalwork, an "unfeminine" thing to do, and just assuming this makes it easier for me to encourage women to get past the stereotypes.)

When I do occasionally behave in a very "girly" way, my husband is appalled! So I do it sometimes to tweak him. :) I also consider normal female-wear as drag, erven though I generally wear skirts myself for practical reasons.

But it is very freeing- and I think it's been freeing for him, too. I can do stereotypical feminine things, followed by stereotypical masculine things, and not feel any particular cognitive dissonance. That does make life easier.

Of course, there's always a ways to go- but it's a good path, I think.