Not Skin Deep
I had another feminist click moment this morning, and it helped me articulate one of the things I find immensely frustrating about the recurring debates over female characters in fandom, especially the ones that center on labeling certain female characters as "feminine" or "girly-girls" and labeling others as "unfeminine," "rejecting or hiding their femininity," or "men with breasts." One of the baseline assumptions that both of the two most vocal sides of the debate start from is that a fixation on fashion and make-up is inherently feminine, girly, and womanly and that a female character who doesn't care about or take pleasure in playing with fashionable clothes, accessories, and cosmetics is more like a guy and more distanced from typical women and their concerns than a female character who does. And I just realized that I fundamentally disagree with that assumption.
Look at world history. There have been many, many times and places-- even within modern European history!-- in which men were just as fashion-conscious as women. There have been--and in some places still are--cultures in which both men and women use make-up and other cultures in which neither men nor women do that. There have even been times in the not-so-distant past when white Americans and Europeans considered wearing make-up improper for "good" women. There have been and still are some non-Western cultures in which it's the men who use cosmetics and elaborate clothes and accessories to attract attention to their appearance, while the women's traditional dress and grooming styles are more practical and low-key. The emergence of the current Western popular gender schema, in which women are highly ornamental and men are much less so or not at all, emerged along with certain shifts in economic structure and cultural values, including women's work being disappeared from public view so that married women were increasingly regarded as ornaments and economic drains to their husbands rather than household managers and economic assets, and fashion being considered less a luxury that upper class people enjoyed and more a waste of time that frivolous people enjoyed.
So the conversations I'm seeing now about whether certain characters don't get enough respect because they're feminine, where feminine is defined as highly focused on and invested in fashion and make-up, are really bugging me. I mean, I used to be uncomfortable with those kinds of conversations because I could see that both sides had some good points. But now it has become really clear to me that the very terms of debate are more full of problems than I had consciously recognized. In addition to the issues that are entirely about gender in and of itself, it also bothers me that these conversations completely erase the matters of class and poverty. All of this really settled for me while I was thinking about recent commentary on The Hunger Games, in which people asserted that the series is anti-femininity because it's about people who are too poor to pursue fashion as an end in itself rebelling against an oppressor class that revels in ever-changing fashions because they have the time and material resources to do so thanks to a sociopolitical structure that takes away resources produced by the former group. Supposedly, this valorizes the main character's so-called rejection of femininity (she was too busy keeping her little sister from starving to death to care about clothes and make-up) and disparages "girly things" (literally defined as "fashion and make-up") and the people who like them. Way to completely ignore all the themes, especially the entire issue of poverty and exploitation on which the whole story hangs.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/60394.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Look at world history. There have been many, many times and places-- even within modern European history!-- in which men were just as fashion-conscious as women. There have been--and in some places still are--cultures in which both men and women use make-up and other cultures in which neither men nor women do that. There have even been times in the not-so-distant past when white Americans and Europeans considered wearing make-up improper for "good" women. There have been and still are some non-Western cultures in which it's the men who use cosmetics and elaborate clothes and accessories to attract attention to their appearance, while the women's traditional dress and grooming styles are more practical and low-key. The emergence of the current Western popular gender schema, in which women are highly ornamental and men are much less so or not at all, emerged along with certain shifts in economic structure and cultural values, including women's work being disappeared from public view so that married women were increasingly regarded as ornaments and economic drains to their husbands rather than household managers and economic assets, and fashion being considered less a luxury that upper class people enjoyed and more a waste of time that frivolous people enjoyed.
So the conversations I'm seeing now about whether certain characters don't get enough respect because they're feminine, where feminine is defined as highly focused on and invested in fashion and make-up, are really bugging me. I mean, I used to be uncomfortable with those kinds of conversations because I could see that both sides had some good points. But now it has become really clear to me that the very terms of debate are more full of problems than I had consciously recognized. In addition to the issues that are entirely about gender in and of itself, it also bothers me that these conversations completely erase the matters of class and poverty. All of this really settled for me while I was thinking about recent commentary on The Hunger Games, in which people asserted that the series is anti-femininity because it's about people who are too poor to pursue fashion as an end in itself rebelling against an oppressor class that revels in ever-changing fashions because they have the time and material resources to do so thanks to a sociopolitical structure that takes away resources produced by the former group. Supposedly, this valorizes the main character's so-called rejection of femininity (she was too busy keeping her little sister from starving to death to care about clothes and make-up) and disparages "girly things" (literally defined as "fashion and make-up") and the people who like them. Way to completely ignore all the themes, especially the entire issue of poverty and exploitation on which the whole story hangs.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/60394.html. Please comment there using OpenID.