Core Response #5 - Laura

 “Thus, the contemporary young woman, self-reflexive and gender-aware, finds herself ‘confined to the topographies of an unsustainable self-hood, deprived of the possibilities of feminist sociality, and deeply invested in achieving an illusory identity defined according to a rigidly enforced scale of feminine attributes’” (Butler, quoting McRobbie, 46).

Hoo boy do I feel called out. Reading these texts has forced me to do the thing I like least in the world: look back on my early adolescence, a painful era during which I was solidly in the postfeminist camp. When I was growing up, it was very important to my parents (who came of age during second-wave feminism) that I not wear makeup or heels or revealing clothing, both because those are classic things for parents to get upset over and because they are tools of capitalist patriarchy. But “liberated women don’t wear makeup” was a deeply, deeply unhelpful sentiment for insecure tween Laura who was surrounded by girls who did wear makeup and seemed confident and happy and drew the attention of boys. What I viewed as my mom’s feminism simply did not seem to describe my experience in the world.

I fully understand how twisted this mindset is: I was made to feel out of place because I didn’t meet mainstream beauty standards, an obviously feminist issue, and then I resented feminism for it. But I was in middle school, and the only thing I was thinking about was acceptance. Who cared about social justice? I was just trying to get through the goddam day. Thankfully, I grew out of it during high school, but I continue to feel that in discussions like this we sometimes fail to account for what it means to actually be on the receiving end of all of this shit, from both the feminist and post/non-feminist sides (and, for that matter, from all the other areas of discourse we’ve looked at in this class).

Butler says that “contemporary young women self-consciously participate in a highly stylized ‘postfeminist masquerade’ as a statement of personal choice,” that they buy skinny jeans or get pedicures “as a marker of their ‘progressive’ gender ideals…  because they have the freedom to ‘choose’ to engage in conventional femininity” (46). (Again, I just feel so called out.) This is an awful lot of generalization, isn’t it? These contemporary young women, have they truly bought into the idea that they don’t need feminism anymore? Or are they buying skinny jeans and getting pedicures because they have been made to feel deeply insecure about the way they look, and they know that taking these steps can help alleviate that insecurity even if it is ultimately reinforcing patriarchal norms? Besides, shopping is a fun and easy bonding activity with friends, especially female friends, and often the female friends I’ve gone shopping with are people with whom I’ve also had long and deep discussions about race and gender (there’s that feminist sociality for you, I guess). We do both.

I don’t fully disagree with Butler on any of this, to be clear; overall she’s clearly assigning more blame to the culture industry than to individual women. And I do really appreciate that she ends her piece by discussing Nicki Minaj as a potentially subversive figure. Part of my angst at these types of discussions is that very rarely do they offer a positive alternative to the problems they identify. If you’re going to tell me that every piece of film/television I consume is a neoliberal opiate, that’s fine, but I’m not going to just sit on my floor reading The Second Sex over and over until I die. You need to give me something to keep me going. I feel like it would be useful to identify more ways in which women, especially women of color, may be able to use mass media subversively instead of deterministically writing everything off as postfeminist.