Twenty-first Century Feminism

Forming and Performing Femininity

C. Nally, A. Smith, C. Nally, A. Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137492852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays considers the ways in which feminism is still an important issue in twenty-first century society. Looking at various forms of literature, media, and popular culture, the book establishes that contemporary images of femininity are highly contested, complex, and frequently problematic.

1

Introduction

Angela Smith

This edited collection explores many aspects of just what it is to be female in the twenty-first century. By studying the social, cultural and technological changes that have influenced this, these essays contextualize feminism and femininity in a range of global locations. Although this collection of essays will examine developments in femininity in the early part of this century, there are many links back to the emergence of second wave feminism nearly half a century before, and the huge technological and social changes of the twentieth century that continue to influence women’s lives, such as in the obsessive attention paid to the sexualized female body. While we can refer to the early twenty-first century as being part of the ‘postfeminist’ era, we can also see traces of an emerging new or ‘fourth wave’ feminist period coming through the use of Web 2.0 as women join up online to raise their voices to campaign for greater equality. In this collection, we will examine how women are open to ever-increasing scrutiny of their bodies and behaviours through the affordances of mass media, and while some exploit such attention for commercial gain, such as celebrities and artists, others find themselves open to humiliation, ridicule and even threats of physical violence such as found on Twitter. For example, the body that steps outside of stereotypes is celebrated, as found in the quirky world of Japanese pop music, the popularity of which has been disseminated globally through the reach of Web 2.0. The attention paid to female bodily performance is also analysed through a discussion of women in comedy, where parody and self-referentiality are in evidence to counter the criticisms of non-standard bodies as found in make-over shows. Mass media exploitation can be experienced by others as having a darker side, through unlicensed use of their images for negative effect. Film and literature also show changes in the representation of twenty-first century femininity, explored here through a study of neo-Victorian fiction. While neo-Victorian fiction often espouses a radical recovery of lost female voices (the criminalized woman such as the prostitute or the suicide, the lesbian experience, deviancy, disability), we might also note that some texts produced in the twenty-first century point to a less optimistic view of female empowerment.

Attention to the female body and the judgement of its perceived perfections and imperfections has a long history. In her study of classical Hollywood films, Laura Mulvey’s 1975 highly influential analysis of the psychodynamic relationship between spectator and text argued that priority is given to the masculine perspective both narratively and visually. The female characters are represented in terms of their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, a view which can also give pleasure to female viewers who can admire the dress or style of a female star (Gledhill, 1991). The various discussions relating to Mulvey’s argument nevertheless acknowledge that the female body is one that is looked at and judged more than the male body. Myra Macdonald (1995, p. 193) points to the fact that historically the body has been ‘much more integral to the formation of identity for women than for men’. It is not the body, she argues, but the codifying of the body into structures of appearance that culturally shapes and moulds what it means to be ‘feminine’. Women have long been encouraged to view their bodies as being intrinsically related to sexual desirability. If we look at paintings of women in various historical periods, we can see how the ideal female body has changed over the years, from the full and well-rounded Renaissance woman to the material roundness cinched into an hour-glass silhouette in the Victorian age. The corset has frequently been vaunted as an example of social constraints and the ways in which women’s bodies have been managed, but it is far from representing a monolithic practice. Indeed, as Valerie Steele has observed, ‘it was a situated practice that meant different things to different people at different times’ (Steele, 2001, p. 1). In contemporary discourses it is a slippery signifier: an ‘ironic, postmodern manipulation of sexual stereotypes’ (ibid., p. 176). Certainly the corseted shape gave way to more fluid lines as the constraints of women in society diminished after the First World War, with the boyish flapper image of the 1920s embodying the shifting roles of women in society. Conversely, the aftermath of the Second World War saw women who had gained enormous freedoms by taking on men’s work during the war being constrained once more by corsetry to produce the ‘New Look’ of the 1950s. This rapidly gave way in the 1960s to the more slender ‘Twiggy’ look, where corsets vanished from the everyday wardrobe of women to be replaced by a slender body draped in ever-diminishing lengths of fabric. This slender body has remained the ideal female shape ever since, and can be linked to an emerging culture of post-war affluence that ended the association between thinness and poverty. This can be aligned with the rise of the diet industry and gym culture. Weight Watchers was set up in the US in 1963, establishing itself in Britain in 1967, and eventually was followed by the Heinz food company developing a highly profitable diet food franchise in the 1990s. In Foucault’s theory of the body as a central location in the context of power (1980), we can see how the contradictory desires to indulge and pamper associated with post-war affluence are in conflict with the need to engage in bodily discipline through exercise. Women were persuaded that the traditionally male leisure activity of physical exercise was necessary to maintain their sexual attractiveness. Of the early proponents of female gym culture, Jane Fonda in the 1980s is the best known with her promotion of group aerobic classes. She promoted the soon-accepted notion of women working out in groups with other women. As Susan Willis points out, the celebrity gym culture that gave rise to such classes makes it difficult to separate the exercise routines from the rituals of appropriate dress and self-presentation. She says, ‘for women, poised body line and flexed muscles are only half the picture. Achieving the proper workout look requires several exercise costumes, special nosmudge makeup, and an artfully understated hairdo’ (1990, p. 7). This gym culture, with its emphasis on the sexualized body, is discussed in Chapter 2 by Heywood in her analysis of CrossFit, demonstrating that such focus has continued into the twenty-first century. She draws on the notion of gaze as being central to gym culture, with the female body continuing to be sexualized in a way that distinguishes it from the male body.

The 1980s was not only a time for the redefinition of the female body through disciplined diet and exercise; it also saw the arrival of new freedoms for women to experiment with dress and personal style. The second wave feminists of the 1970s had largely followed Simone de Beauvoir’s description of female fashion as a form of ‘bondage’ (1972, p. 548) which effectively subjected women to lives as sexualized beings who were governed by the sexual desire of men. Thus 1970s feminists who rejected fashionable ‘feminine’ attire came to be characterized as dungaree-wearing, asexual beings who were open to anti-feminist mockery in the popular press that continues to be a legacy into the twenty-first century. By the 1980s this view had shifted, with critics such as Rosalind Coward arguing that any woman who rejected fashion was essentially marking herself as being sexually conservative (1984). The emergence of ‘postfeminism’ in the late 1980s is coupled with youthful playfulness of dressing with ‘a self-conscious awareness of the dislocation between image and identity epitomized also in the 1980s’ female music performers such as Bananarama or . . . Madonna’ (McRobbie, 1989, p. 49). This collocation of youth and playfulness tied to celebrity is something we continue to see as a positive aspect of fashion in the twenty-first century, as we see in Anyan’s discussion of fashion blogs and Iseri’s analysis of Japanese kawaii.

The period following the main activism of second wave feminism has eventually emerged in the rather tangled, often contradictory discourses of postfeminism from the late 1980s. Postfeminism has been seen as signalling a generational shift in feminist thinking and in an understanding of the social relations between genders beyond the traditional feminist politics which saw a supposed threat to heterosexual relationships. As Judith Stacey (1987, p. 8) identified early in this process, we can see postfeminism as a cyclical process of feminist rejuvenation, emerging after the momentous and systematized ‘waves’ of feminist activism and politics of earlier in the twentieth century. This, she argues, can be discussed as a ‘post revolutionary’ shift away from the collective mobilization that characterized first and second wave feminism towards a more individualized discourse. In this moving away from the shifting advances in feminism in the 1970s and early 1980s, postfeminism can thus be seen as feminism’s ‘coming of age’ (Brooks, 1997, p. 4), where by the early part of the twenty-first century the lucrative 18–34 female market comprised

a generation that had grown up taking for granted the feminist victories won by their mothers and thus for whom feminism exists at the level of popular commonsense rather than at the level of theoretic abstraction. This is a generation who have found that despite the best efforts of feminists, you cannot just wish femininity away, relegate it to the dustbin of history as the ‘bad other’ of feminism. This is the generation for whom ‘having it all’ means not giving things up but struggling to reconcile our feminist desires with our feminine desires.

(Moseley and Reed, 2002, p. 238)

Stéphanie Genz (2009), in her discussion of postfeminism, describes the common threads that run through this as promoting the notion of female ‘empowerment’ through ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’. As Sarah Projansky has shown, there are many strands to postfeminism, strands which often appear contradictory as the ‘girl power’ ladette (or, in Angela McRobbie’s term, the phallic girl (2009)) stands in opposition to the neo-traditional feminist domestic goddess. Initially, the ‘girl power’ strand was dominant in society and in the media in the 1990s where it was embodied by the Spice Girls. As Rosalind Gill points out, ‘femininity is a bodily property; the shift between objectification and subjectification, the emphasis on self-surveillance, monitoring and discipline’ (2007, p. 149) and simply sees female bodily maintenance as continuing, but with the gaze more readily attracted in a knowing way. In her discussion of postfeminism, Angela McRobbie comments on the view that by the late 1990s advertisers regularly drew on familiarity with ‘political correctness’ in appearing to respond with sexualized images of women that ‘reacted against the seemingly tyrannical regime of feminist puritanism’ (2009, p. 17). As she observes, such images ‘seem to suggest it is permissible, once again, to enjoy looking at the bodies of beautiful women’. In this way, younger viewers of such adverts, whether male or female, are generationally separated from the second wave feminists who drew attention to such sexualization and, educated in irony and visually literate, these viewers are not angered by such sexualization but instead can appreciate its many layers. Thus anyone who finds such sexualized imagery offensive is liable to be labelled prudish.

However, Imelda Whelehan warns of the dangers of such behaviour, where ‘vulgarity and sexual objectification of men is supposed to pass for sexual self-determination [and] there are knowing lampoons of traditional feminine concerns such as dieting, personal adornment [and] pleasing men’ (Whelehan, 2000, p. 9). She goes on to warn, the ‘ladette offers the most shallow model of gender equality; it suggests that women could or should adopt the most anti-social and pointless of “male” behaviour as a sign of empowerment. The Wonderbra, unsurprisingly, remains the essential style statement for a wannabe ladette’ (ibid). Whelehan’s rather pessimistic view of the ladette is one that is tied into the visual appearance of the women involved, particularly as Whelehan states, the sexualized body. As Anne Burns’s article in Chapter 5 of this collection shows by drawing on Mulvey’s work, the celebration of the female body through sexualized ‘selfies’ can be used in highly damaging ways when there is a refusal to see these images as empowering or even knowingly ironic.

By the early part of the twenty-first century, this playfulness with the male gaze, whether empowering or delusional, had shifted in its dominance with the resurgence of a more traditional form of feminism which favours the cult of the perfect housewife who chose to stay at home or juggle childcare and domestic bliss with one of the career roles that the second wave political activism had ensured would be available to her (see Smith, 2013). Susan Faludi had identified this ‘back-to-the-home movement’ as early as the mid-1980s, describing this as ‘a recycled version of the Victorian fantasy that a “new cult of domesticity” was bringing droves of women home’ (1992, p. 77). This new traditionalism, Genz and Brabon suggest, ‘centralises a woman’s “choice” to retreat from the public sphere and abstain from paid work in favour of family values. Severing its previous associations with drudgery and confinement, the domestic sphere is redefined and resignified as a domain of female autonomy and independence’ (2009, p. 58). However, just as the cult of the ‘Angel in the House’ in the Victorian period or, more recently, the 1950s saw the housewife as a repository of serene beauty, the neo-traditionalist woman is likewise characterized as the ‘yummy mummy’ or the ‘domestic goddess’ as personified by the incredibly glamorous television cook Nigella Lawson. Thus what is remarkable about all the strands of postfeminism, particularly the ‘ladette’ and its generationally different ‘neo-traditional’ strands, is the continued emphasis on female sexualization. The twenty-first century re-imagining of Victorian female heroes in film and literature is considered here in Sturgeon-Dodsworth’s discussion of the Sherlock Holmes films of Guy Ritchie and the various neo-Victorian novels (Chapter 8). She offers an analysis which reveals the tension between the empowered, active female of the twenty-first century and the more traditional female containment that is at the heart of much neo-traditional femininity.

Where second wave feminism was characterized by the impetus to remove sexual desire from the female appearance in order to gain a more serious, earnest equality with men, postfeminism strongly promotes the idea of feminism and femininity not being incompatible and thus sexualization of the female body being a viable choice. As Whelehan and others have argued, this choice is often something that emerges from celebrity culture where female body image is governed by male executives, and is found in Iseri’s discussion of Japanese kawaii (Chapter 7). When this is co-opted by mainstream culture, the sexualized image becomes a ‘choice’ by way of emulation. Those who do not make this choice are regarded as being unfashionable, labelled frumpy or dowdy. When this is linked to body image, the woman who does not maintain her body is likely to be labelled as frigid or, at best, unsexy, as Smith’s chapter here shows (Chapter 3). By the early part of the twenty-first century, this had further been linked to commercialization. Where the 1970s saw the rise of female aerobic classes and then gym culture, the quick-fix to the imperfect body came in the form of easy access to cosmetic surgery, particularly breast enhancement or, as it is more commonly referred to in British culture (in an attempt to make it appear less medical), the ‘boob job’. Who needed to follow a boring, tyrannous diet when you could simply have excess fat removed by a process known as liposuction, or more radically a ‘gastric band’ could be fitted to stop you from eating? In fact, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reported in February 2014 that there had been a 17% rise in the number of cosmetic procedures carried out in the UK in 2013 compared with the previous year and that in the UK alone the cosmetic surgery industry went from being worth £750 million in 2005 to a forecast £3.6 billion by 2015 (Gallagher, 2014). The multiplicity of such quick-fixes to the body is also found in the unstoppable rise of consumer culture elsewhere, with cheap clothing being readily available on the high street and online. Both bodily perfection and clothed attractiveness are dealt with in the chapters in this book. For example, the shift to a discourse of choice coupled with increased commercialization has led to the large number of make-over shows emerging on our TV screens in the early twenty-first century, where individual women (90% of cosmetic surgery cases in the UK are women) are seen to have ‘failed’ if they do not live up to expectations of female attractiveness. The development of Web 2.0 has also...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘Strange Borrowing’: Affective Neuroscience, Neoliberalism and the ‘Cruelly Optimistic’ Gendered Bodies of CrossFit
• 3. Big Sister TV: Bossiness, Bullying and Banter in Early Twenty-first Century Make-over Television
• 4. Boredom and Reinvention for the Female Gaze Within Personal Fashion Blogs
• 5. In Full View: Involuntary Porn and the Postfeminist Rhetoric of Choice
• 6. Miranda and Miranda: Feminism, Femininity and Performance
• 7. Flexible Femininities? Queering Kawaii in Japanese Girls’ Culture
• 8. ‘Whatever it is that you desire, halve it’: The Compromising of Contemporary Femininities in Neo-Victorian Fictions
• Index