Episode 141 - Femininity
Transcript
Ellie: 0:17
Hello and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:19
The podcast where we put big ideas in dialogue with everyday life.
Ellie: 0:24
I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:25
I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.
Ellie: 0:27
We are witnessing a major resurgence of traditional femininity today, especially among young women. And I'm not just talking about Sydney Sweeney and that whole discourse. TikTok is abounding these days with material on the divine feminine, trad wife content is huge. And cottage core, which we talked about way back in 2020, cottage core, sort of back to the land aesthetics are really popular among young women. Not just the aesthetics, but also I think increasingly the practices. While we're talking aesthetics, though, we have ballet core, we have the mob wife aesthetic, and we have a ton of other micro trends that signal a new wave of interest in what has typically been understood as feminine.
David: 1:12
Yeah, and a lot of this content, and a lot of these strengths are obviously nostalgic. They're backwards looking. I would say they are regressive also, and many of them, I would even highlight the trad wives as a particular instantiation of this are a response to the progress that has been made in feminist circles in the last decades. Right, the wave of feminism that we saw, especially in connection to the Me Too movement. And it's understood as a reaction to that. But I also would add that it's a reaction to capitalism because if you think about a lot of the content that is produced by like trad wives and you know, the return to domesticity, a lot of it hinges on a rejection of consumerism, of productivity culture, of hustle culture, because there is no better way to reject that than to just bake a pie very slowly using your ASMR voice at home, which does sound a lot more appealing in some ways than clocking into your nine to five job at an office. Right. Or at a factory building.
Ellie: 2:16
Yeah. And I think, you know, this idea that baking a pie, I'm not even a baker, but baking a pie does sound more appealing than like sitting in a freezing office building clicking away at my email. And I think this reveals sort of not only our dissatisfactions with capitalism, but also the way that femininity is traditionally construed as being outside of capitalism, and this has been a huge theme of a lot of socialist and radical feminist discourse, the way that women's labor and the kinds of contributions that they make are understood as outside of capitalism because they're not wage earning necessarily these traditional feminine practices. But I think too, you know, what we see there is this idea of femininity as associated with domesticity and with the home as an alternative to the workplace. You know, that's like a lot of the videos that we're talking about are located in the home and not just any home, but a beautiful sort of idyllic home. And so there's this return to the sphere of domesticity.
David: 3:17
To the cult of domesticity. And actually a lot of the appeals or the calls for that return that I see in social media, 'cause they come up all the time in my feed like on TikTok, on Instagram, even on Facebook. Even though I'm not on, I am a total millennial, but a lot of them are also coded as upper middle class, very specifically, right? Because if you think about the people who are making the pie, who make a video saying, my daughter wanted a twinky, but we don't consume store bought ingredients, so I'm making a twinky from scratch in the tradition of like whatever, you know, the way people used to make Twinkies back in the day. Often it's acts and behaviors that have nothing to do with the menial labor of keeping a home and what a lot of women do have to do in the home. Right? Like nobody's scrubbing a toilet. Nobody is like vacuuming. all these like glamorous hyper fetishized projections of what domesticity is that are idyllic, but that are also very class coded well.
Ellie: 4:19
And something that people often remark upon with the trad wife movement, especially the content creators who are known for their trad wife content, is that you also don't see them creating, editing, uploading the content, right, you don't see them like glued to their phones, editing their TikTok, so, okay. We've got this whole, you know, sort of trad wife movement happening, obviously very well known, been around for a while, and I think one of the things that, you know, I mentioned earlier too, the divine feminine, and that's been one of the things that has really surprised me in the past few years too. I think a lot of people have been more drawn to astrology and sort of like new age spiritual movements, and I personally have been seeing a ton of content praising the divine feminine. So in fact, we're gonna take a look at this TikTok together called Signs Your divine feminine is waking up, and we can think about what this means for femininity.
TikTok clip: 5:17
Signs that your divine feminine is waking up. You feel weepy for no reason, but you're not weak. You're just becoming water again. You feel rage towards systems that used to make you feel safe. You are no longer available for crumbs in love in work or in your self-worth. You are remembering that you are both soft and sacred, wild and wise. Your intuition is loud. Your body says no. Even when your brain says yes, you are not falling apart. You are falling into alignment. The divine feminine isn't chaos. It's the raw truth before it's been made Palatable. Welcome
David: 6:04
freaking
TikTok clip: 6:06
back. Don't forget to follow me for more Mary Magdalene, Lilith, and Divine Feminine so that we can all remember our divinity together.
Ellie: 6:15
So David, what are your thoughts on this?
David: 6:17
I think mine is still sleeping. I dunno, I don't think it's woken up by the standard.
Ellie: 6:24
You know, the divine feminine, everyone has it, the eternal feminine. Everybody, you know, everybody has that. So you can, even as a man, you can have it.
David: 6:31
I too am water raging water specifically the image of like, you become water, you're calm and flowing, but you're also raging against the machine. I kind of really like that image of the turbulent divine. But also just. I didn't understand one part, and I wanna know what you think about this. She emphasized these contrasts when she's like, your body says no, but your brain says yes. And then she also said, you are soft and divine. Do we often contrast those two terms?
Ellie: 7:00
Soft and sacred.
David: 7:01
Oh, so yeah. Do we contrast those? It's like the sacred heart.
Ellie: 7:04
I know. It's like you are these union of opposites that aren't really opposites. No, I don't think we do necessarily contrast the soft and sacred, but I will say, historically speaking, the divine feminine or the eternal feminine has been understood as something that people of all genders have. But I actually do think there's a weird way that the divine feminine content, now it is on social media, is targeted specifically towards women and it's often leveraged in sort of anti-trans rhetoric and like really essentialist ways. And so, you know, that's kind of a background here. This video isn't articulating that specifically. So we can go back to that. But did just wanna mention that. For sure. I do think that's important, and it's part of this like regressive movement that you were talking about. Okay, so you are not weak, you're just becoming water. Again, I mean, very often in this kind of rhetoric, water is associated with femininity, largely due to the nature of the menstrual cycle. So we have this kind of like biological appeal to the way that, you know, the menstrual cycle echoes the
David: 8:02
the moon cycle
Ellie: 8:03
and the, you know, cycle of the tides, et cetera. Water, of course, has a kind of soft strength and I think that's often associated with femininity. Yet you feel a rage towards systems that used to make you feel safe. That's just strange to me because maybe it's like the non divine feminine accepts systems because
David: 8:24
it's submissive.
Ellie: 8:25
like as we'll talk about, femininity is very often associated with docility or obedience. And so this is against that, I think the divine feminine, it's like, oh, this is a kind of wild femininity that is raging against those systems that you, in your capacity as like a non divine feminine, we're taught to accept?
David: 8:43
Yeah, the non divine feminine does not ask for a race. But I also, I mean that's a joke, but it's also kind of serious because this does seem to use the notion of the divine feminine, not only to tap into a kind of essentialism about women in a biological slash spiritual sense, as you said, but it's also an apologetics for sort of throwing yourself into the world of capital without having to excuse yourself, because whatever your desire is, if that is career advancement, whether that is the acquisition of wealth and power, then your divine feminine should not be limited. As she said, the divine feminine is accepting. No crumbs in love or in work. So like it, it really does have an acquisitional character.
Ellie: 9:29
The Divine Feminine is apparently still going to the office, not just baking pies. And one final thing I wanna note too is the association with intuition. This idea we've, we've broken down an intuition TikTok before and in our intuition episode, and I think this idea of women's intuition goes really, really deep. And the way that that is often contrasted with a rational or explicit form of knowledge that's evident here in this video.
David: 9:58
Yeah, and once you make the transition, you are fricking welcome to the divine feminine. Today we are talking about femininity.
Ellie: 10:10
How does its ideology foster women's subordination?
David: 10:14
How do contemporary beauty standards shape feminine aesthetics?
Ellie: 10:18
and is there a uniquely feminine style of writing? Women are not born feminine, but become feminine, we might say, following Beauvoir's claim that women are not born but made so in the second sex. I think if we're talking about processes of feminization, her 1949 book, the Second Sex, which has like over 700 pages of descriptions of the way that women are present in society.
David: 10:50
We've turned every page, come on,
Ellie: 10:52
We have turned, every page. This is true, is a really great place to start because one of Beauvoir's main concerns is the way that processes of feminization are crucial to girls becoming women. And so I wanna think about here, obviously. Processes of feminization are not limited to those who are assigned female at birth, certainly, and that's like part of Beauvoir's main point too, right? Is that it's like a much broader sort of process than that. But certainly those who are assigned female at birth are most often in our society, expected to go through this process of feminization and sort of put in that enforced position of subordination, which for Beauvoir is the position of femininity. Beauvoir thinks that the myths surrounding femininity and this idea that girls and women should be feminine is one of the crucial ways that a sexist society keeps us ignorant of our condition as subordinated. So femininity is not a biological feature. Neither is womanhood. It's not a biological feature of an individual, but it's rather a situation and people have to be taught to adapt themselves to the situation from a young age. The process of feminization is not only not natural, but it's also not neutral. Like I said before, it's this process of getting girls and women used to their status as inferior. To have your very humanity inhibited really, and to accept that to become feminine for Beauvoir is to become mutilated. And so how and why does this happen on her view?
David: 12:34
I mean, the way I sometimes talk about this with my students is that women are not feminine. Women find themselves in femininity. It's a situation or a condition or a state that they then have to navigate. And to understand this notion of mutilation, I think it makes sense to think about the features that we associate with femininity. Why would those be mutilating per se to a particular subject? So what do we associate with femininity? We associate behaviors like nurturing, caring, being docile, something that we mentioned earlier. We associate it with certain values also, like creativity, life giving. We also associated even with certain bodily postures, Pierre Bourdieu talks about this in his book, masculine Domination. He says that the bent position of the body, sort of folding over with folded arms, closed knees is emblematic of the feminine position in our society, and that that should be contrasted with the upright position of the masculine male. So from behaviors to values to literally the way we carry ourselves in terms of our bodily dispositions, it's always already gendered from the start.
Ellie: 13:51
Something that Beauvoir Scholar Manan Garcia writes about in her book, we Are Not Born Submissive is a way that this posture of submission is something that in very subtle ways, girls and women are encouraged to adopt. And so it doesn't seem like something that's imposed from the outside but becomes part of the very structure of the psyche. But Beauvoir says, when we take a look at actually how we conceive of masculine and feminine, aside from whether or not we consciously find it appealing to adopt these norms, right? Because she thinks like whether or not you find them consciously appealing to adopt or not doesn't really matter because we're living in a situation in which you're taught to desire your own subordination. But masculine and feminine are not symmetrical terms or categories. So even though we often align them with seeming opposites, masculinity, strength, femininity, weakness, masculinity, reason, femininity, emotion, masculinity, light, femininity, darkness, masculinity, projecting yourself into the world through activity, femininity, passively accepting the situation you've been given. We see that those oppositions aren't just like equally good, like one is the good side and one is the bad side. And so Beauvoir says masculine and feminine are not only not symmetrical terms, but, the masculine is taken as the human type, so it's associated with the things that we want, like the good traits, and it's seen as the ultimate human type. It's seen as the essential, whereas the feminine is defined as the inessential, and so this is where her famous claim woman is the other comes from, it's defined in contrast with those things that we associate with masculinity, which are also associated with goodness.
David: 15:39
Yeah, and I mean in terms of thinking about the figure of the other, right, that it's this position of inferiority and difference from that which is normalized and gendered male from the get go. In thinking about that, Beauvoir is really interested in considering how the relegation of women to the position of the other ultimately negates women's humanity. Yeah. because for her, when she's talking about humanity, she really means, as an existentialist transcendence, right? It's a negation of women's capacity to raise themselves above that condition that they may find themselves in and assert themselves by claiming a destiny in their own voice, in their own language, on their own terms. And when you think about what it means to be the other, it really means to be derivative, to be a reflection of somebody else's substance or activity. If you're just a reflection and a distorted one at that, it means that you lack substance of your own. Right? There is no ground to stand on, hence that contrast between maybe the bent position of somebody who falls over as opposed to somebody who stands their ground in order to face the world resolutely and with a project. And so ultimately this is really a denial of women's destinies.
Ellie: 16:59
Totally. And so you can see how this would be a process of mutilation on her view if it's taking us away from what makes us human. And Beauvoir's story of how this mutilation happens is both a story of how individual girls in the present day become women, a sort of phenomenological lived experience account. And it's also a historical account of the conception of femininity changing over time and how that changes. So the individual more phenomenological story is one of how girls come to see themselves as objects. She says girls see other people treating them and treating women especially as objects. And so they come to see themselves as objects. They reflect this gaze back on themselves. They also come to understand their worth and value as endowed by men.
David: 17:51
Yeah. And so I think especially the notion of the receiving of value from without is really important for understanding this position of subordination and mutilation because it's not even that women get value when they manage to achieve something or a value that they themselves have determined that they want for themselves? actually value that is given to them by men on men's own terms, by men's own criteria and on men's own time. It's sort of this very strange thing that is kept behind closed doors that men have access to that they can like bestow upon women whenever they decide, and to make this concrete, it reminds me of that trend from a couple of years ago, I believe it was of women sharing on social media their memories of the first time they were catcalled. Because I think catcalling is a really good instantiation of this, of men, I mean, it is a kind of value judgment on the part of men, right? Yeah. It's the determination that a young woman is a sexualized object and that she therefore is accessible to their advances. But the cat calling happens when men want, when they decide, and it's not even something that women want. It's something that men want women to want from them. And so they give it and take it when they choose.
Ellie: 19:13
Yeah. It's a sort of forcing of attention onto the man. Actually, that's something that Kate Manne talks about in her account of cat calling as well. And what it shows too is you're being praised as an object, right? And so I think that's part of Beauvoir's Before's problem with the idea that the value is bestowed on you by the male gaze, what we would now call the male gaze. It's not like a value of, oh wow, you're so good your job, your value qua woman is your value as a sexually desirable object. And that limitation, I think, you know, we take for granted that that's sort of what f femininity is characterized by, but that's like a very limited way of understanding what women's value is. Maybe the divine feminine on TikTok is better than that. We'll come back to that in a bit though. But I think, you know, this sexualization here is central. It's not just like it's as an aesthetic and a sexual object.
David: 20:09
No. That's right. And that sexualization that women undergo, rather than make happen is the process of feminization for Beauvoir, right? To be a woman means to be subject to this social and cultural and historical logic of becoming an object for a male gaze, without really feeling like you have control over how that logic plays out in your life, and ultimately that generates that subjective position that for her is emblematic of being a woman as something that you aren't, but become.
Ellie: 20:45
And I will say, you mentioned before that Beauvoir thinks that the process of feminization strips us of our humanity, and that's fair. But you said that that's because it strips us of our transcendence, and that is not incorrect. But I wanna slightly qualify that because. Beauvoir doesn't think that understanding ourselves as objects is just like straight up, wrong and bad. To understand ourselves only as objects, especially as objects that are endowed with value by others is a problem. But she thinks that humans are defined by what she calls the condition of ambiguity, which means both to be free or transcendent and to be an object for others. And so she also has these really interesting passages in the second sex where she talks about how women are in some ways closer to their own status as humans than men are, because men are taught to disavow their own status as object, whereas women are taught to identify with that. Of course, we just said like there's an over-identification, a narrowing identification of just like as a sexual object, but simply to recognize ourselves as objects isn't a problem for Beauvoir. It's actually a recognition of the way that we do show up as objects for others. And so in that sense, there's a small silver lining to this process of self-objectification, which is knowing that you are a social object.
David: 22:06
That's a really good clarification, Ellie, because if we think about the plight of women, let's say under patriarchy, it is their reduction to immanence by society, the association of the feminine, with the body, with the material exclusively. On the other hand, we might think that the association of men with recent, with language, with the world of symbols with God, right the masculine coding of God, that it's somehow elevates men, and it does because of the social value that we put on transcendence. But there is also that dehumanization of men in society that comes from the disembodiment that also plays out as a not being an object for others. It's almost like men get plucked out of the social field, whereas women get fully submerged in it. And that duality is what's really essential for a genuinely existentialist analysis of the human condition.
Ellie: 23:04
And Beauvoir thinks that one of the consequences of that is that women treat men unfairly because by leaning in to the fact that their value is bestowed on them by the transcendence or freedom of men, women also fail to treat men as human too, right? She says they're seen sometimes as gods who have the power to, to revoke or bestow value, and that's not a fair situation for them either. And I think too, okay, so if we're talking about the sexualization here and the identification of women with their status as sexual objects. We're also failing to recognize the sexuality of women, and I think that's something that is important to highlight in a discussion of femininity as well. We mention our episode on masculinity, that masculinity is often associated with aggressiveness, including aggressiveness in the bedroom, whereas femininity by contrast is associated with a sort of passive absence of sexual desire. And I wanna note, that's pretty new. In fact, femininity for centuries was associated with an aggressive lustful sexuality. You see that, for instance, in the work of Chaucer, and it's only really in the past couple hundred years that we have started to see the absence of sexual desire as characteristic of women, especially in the Victorian period. And so I think this is also important to put in the context of a discussion of Beauvoir because Beauvoir is writing in France in the 1940s in a resolutely, bourgeois, and white environment. You know, that means that her account has limitations, but it also means that it highlights some of the specificities of femininity because it is very much the bourgeois white conception of femininity that we still take for granted as the standard of femininity, you know, in the US today, in the 2020s.
David: 24:47
Yeah. And maybe I would even say that happens before the Victorian period, because I'm thinking here about the emptying out of women's sexuality and of the feminine sexual. If you look all the way back to. Some anatomical treatises from like the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, when for the first time, women's anatomy is starting to get represented very frequently. Female anatomy, like women's genitalia is represented and described as an inverted form of male anatomy. And so you have there already this sense, this departure from the Chaucer sense of a rich, positive sexuality that is proper to the feminine body. And then you also find a version of that, of course, in psychoanalysis, right. With the idea that feminine sexuality is a lack rooted in castration.
Ellie: 25:39
Yeah. Well, and that idea of lack brings us to the notion of femininity is essentially mysterious. Was it Freud who said women's sexuality is a dark continent?
David: 25:49
Yeah, and we'll talk about this when we talk about Sue, but yeah, the horror of nothing to see.
Ellie: 25:56
So we're sort of running roughshod right now over femininity versus womanhood and sort of like these gendered categories versus sex categories and stuff like that. But I wanna say, you know, when it comes to this sort of gendered expectation of femininity as mysterious, Beauvoir has significant issues with that because the historical story, so we've been talking about sort of the individual phenomenological story of women's subordination. She also gives a historical story of it that very much has to do with the institution of these bourgeois norms of domesticated femininity over the past couple of centuries, she thinks, and again this is speaking from a sort of Western European context, she thinks that the domestication of femininity, the association of it with passivity is relatively new in comparison with say, ancient cultures that treated the feminine as divine, that associated it with goddesses, with a kind of unruly emotionality, but then also fertility, right? You think about like the ancient sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf for other fertility sculptures. That's a really different picture of femininity. Than the one that we have today. So she says, you know, there's been these huge changes that have happened going from the sort of maternal goddess, divine feminine, to the nice, neat, docile feminine of the 1940s.
David: 27:17
Yeah. the person who's cooking and raising kids. So who knows, maybe that talker is right, that the divine feminine is taking a long nap and it's time to reawaken her. Again, although obviously Beauvoir would say no to that project because it's not as if Beauvoir is pointing to the sexualization of the feminine or like the domestication of the feminine and responding to that with a demand that we go back to a divine, mysterious, mystical feminism that is rooted in the other worldly knowledge of women, right? Like the menstrual cycle or you know, the astral influences, whatever that might be for her, the project of feminism is something completely different from that.
Ellie: 28:02
Well, yeah, because to recognize women as goddesses and to treat them as divine, she thinks is also not to treat them as human. And so the appeals of the divine feminine would be completely worthless according to Beauvoir because it has this regressive element, and even aside from the regressive element, it's just like her view is treat people as people, and that means
David: 28:25
radical leftist,
Ellie: 28:27
but that means give them access to material conditions where they can actualize their freedom in tandem with other people. And so if you think about like the cult of the divine mother, for instance, that person is not working the job to, in spite of the tiktoks saying you're not gonna take crumbs at work, she thinks like that divine feminine figure. Is equally removed and equally objectified in a sense as the wife who is removed from the working sphere altogether and sort of confined by the husband to the trad wife existence. A central aspect of femininity in our culture is its aesthetic aspects. To be feminine in our society is to have no body hair, to smell good, to have soft skin and full lips. And feminists for decades have been drawing out the way that these expressions of femininity do not come easily. Like women are not born hairless, but made hairless.
David: 29:46
Women are not born with beautiful lips all the time.
Ellie: 29:50
Yeah. These expressions of femininity are hard won. They're often very expensive and they tend to require teams of professionals. And so a standard line of feminist critique of beauty standards is that they distract women from the things that they should really be paying attention to. They take up a ton of their money, especially their hard-earned money if they're in the workplace
David: 30:11
They are expensive. It's shocking.
Ellie: 30:13
Oh yeah. No, I mean, I will say personally as like a somewhat feminine woman who enjoys these things, we'll get back to the enjoyment of it later. I spent thousands of dollars per year on haircare, skincare, makeup procedures combined, and I'm not even doing the hair removal.
David: 30:29
Yeah. I don't know. I grew up, as, you know, in a beauty salon. My mom was a beautician. And so I grew up surrounded by this hype around beauty, even as my mom had a relatively measured approach to it in her own life, but it was her business. And so part of her job was to like constantly sell it. And I remember as a kid when I was like seven years old, just spending my time at her salon, helping her convince women that they needed all these procedures.
Ellie: 30:59
What's your favorite procedure to convince women they needed?
David: 31:03
I really like giving, well, I didn't give women acrylics, like, but I was in charge of moving them into the little oven and putting their hands in. Yeah. Well, nowadays when I get my nails done, I do gels.
Ellie: 31:18
I actually don't get my nails done much, hat's something that I, not because I'm like above it like I do way more time intensive things, but that's not something I usually do. But I think one thing that really bothers me is when women's preoccupation with these kinds of procedures or practices is treated as superficial or materialistic. I mean, obviously this is like something that I think any feminist would be already familiar with, but you still hear it a lot. I think especially among men. Why are they so obsessed with this stuff? And when you look actually at how beauty standards have an impact on your wage earning abilities and the workplace, you know, your success,
David: 31:57
marriage prospects.
Ellie: 31:58
Yeah. Yeah. No, it just like doesn't reveal, it reveals itself not to be particularly superficial. And I think that's especially the case when we take an intersectional analysis that takes into account, class and race. So one of the texts that I really like most when we're thinking about a feminist analysis of feminine beauty standards is an essay by the feminist phenomenologist, Sandra Bartky. And the essay is called, I always Forget the title, Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power. And in this essay, Bartky takes Foucault's ideas of docile bodies. This idea that like disciplinary power makes certain bodies docile. And she says we need to add a gender analysis to this. Because what is femininity? It is the production of docile bodies. Take for instance, the thinness ideal and the way that it encourages intense regimens of exercise and dieting. That's a production of docile bodies. Expectations that women wear conventionally quote, attractive clothing that in effect constrains their movements such as high heels or slim pencil skirts, production of docile bodies. Also, I felt really called out by this one. She says she talks about skincare
David: 33:14
Oh yeah. I think she had you specifically in mind. We better check the footnotes to the article.
Ellie: 33:19
Well, and this was before like the rise of Korean skincare, the rise of the Reddit community. I think it's like 30 plus skincare or I've spent a lot of hours on that one. But she says that expectation that women have soft skin and specifically be wrinkle free suggest that our norms of femininity don't want women to show any sign of deep thinking or experience. So it's like if you have wrinkles because you have experience and a lot deep thoughts, you gotta get rid of those you can't just smooth brained. You also have to be smooth skinned.
David: 33:52
Gosh, my crow feet are just like giving away all my experience. Can you see my thoughts from over there?
Ellie: 33:59
A little here and there A
David: 34:01
little kind of telepathy happening through the crow's feet.
Ellie: 34:05
But so there's a way. Yeah. So then you have to like enlist the professionals. Right. And you have to do a bunch of research. Skincare, she says, requires specialized knowledge that's developed over time, as does haircare. And so that also takes us back to this point that, you know, a lot of feminists are concerned about the time, not just the money, but also the time that women are spending trying to adhere to these beauty standards. And yes, as somebody who has sunk many hours into these Reddit forums, which I actually really think are fun. So again, there's like an enjoyment, there's a libidinal investment, I think, in feminine beauty standards that I very much experience myself. You know, her concern from a sort of Foucauldian social criticism perspective is that this actually just produces docile bodies.
David: 34:50
Yeah, and I think one thing we can say about the production of those docile bodies is that because we see them everywhere and we see the docility sort of quote unquote coming natural to those bodies that perform them because they've been performing them for so long. It gives us the impression that we're seeing the performance of something natural, right? You see a lot of women walking naturally in high heels, in pencil skirts, you know, with like modern day versions of corsets, whether that is makeup or clothing, or just other expectations of beauty.
Ellie: 35:22
Or literal corsets.
David: 35:24
Yeah, or literal corsets. Because to bring back Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the masculine and the feminine as a relation of domination, he says that, once this becomes widespread, it shapes what he calls the logic of vision and division. It changes how we perceive others and how we divide the world such that we come to see the makeup as more real. He doesn't talk about makeup, he's talking about femininity more generally, other practices of feminization, we almost come to see the makeup as like the essence of femininity. Even as, as you mentioned, we also devalue it as purely superficial. One of the things that's been surprising to me is that sometimes I have this unreasonable expectation that younger generations, especially Gen Z, are gonna just like throw the chains of tradition out the window and come up with new ways of relating to one another
Ellie: 36:21
A millennials dream 2020. 2021, gen Z was gonna save the world.
David: 36:25
Yeah.
Ellie: 36:25
2025 gives a a kind of different perspective
David: 36:28
Gen Z really fucked up there. No, but I think about the reemergence of the beauty standards that we're all very familiar with. In a new form, for example, in Gen Z, understandings of beauty. I'm here thinking about that trend from 2021, which was the that girl trend. You know, which is the girl that is waking up early to go exercise in her really expensive yoga Lululemon pants.
Ellie: 36:56
The canary in the coal mine of Gen Z not saving the world. Always blaming social demise on trends among girls. Classic Anyway, continue
David: 37:07
I mean like somebody who takes vitamins, who is very health conscious, who takes care of their skin, drinks plenty of water, and becomes that girl by maintaining an eternally youthful, energetic look.
Ellie: 37:20
Yeah. Yeah.
David: 37:21
That doesn't fatigue and doesn't age. And so in that sense, that girl is both nameless and anonymous. The only thing that she can do is aspire to basically that anonymity, not by emulating a particular influencer, but by like cutting out the middleman of the person who is an influence. Right. Like she's authentic, but she's authentically generic.
Ellie: 37:48
Yeah. That girl is a really interesting trend to me because I feel like those of us who are feminized from a young age, we all have that girl we, there's that girl. For me, it was like the older girl at Christian camp who just had the shiniest hair, the most glowing skin, had like the cool lip gloss that you wanted, you know, and I think this is the social media version of that, and, but that sort of way that I think a big part of girl culture and femininity is aspiring to be somebody who's like a little bit older and cooler than you. And one of the, that girls for me, actually not so anonymous now is like a pretty popular influencer. So I'm like, oh, she's now that girl to other people too. But I mean, I hear you talking about sort of how it's anonymous, but I think there's an aspirational quality to the, that girl phenomenon that you also see in girl culture in general. This idea like, oh, if I were just like her, then I would be good, then I would be cool, then I would be healthy, better, et cetera.
David: 38:49
And desired. Right? Like this is the erotic libidinal dimension of it
Ellie: 38:53
Well, yeah, and so that's also something that Sandra Bartky talks about in her essay is the way that my relation to that girl seems unmediated by men. And so often you'll also hear like women dressed for other women, or were like getting Hailey Bieber's new lemontini special summer lip gloss for other women. And then we all like pull out our lemontini on the girls trip. Like, I got it too. Or like, you could borrow mine, but Bartky suggests that is still mediated by the male gaze because ultimately the implicit recognition is that all of these things are done in order to be more appealing to a man. And I think, you know, there are gonna be a lot of queer women who are like, no, that's not, who are femme, like, no, that's not how I experience it. And I think Bartky's claim is that we have to understand this within the overall context of the subordination of women, and so it's not enough to be like I individually get outside of that.
David: 39:52
And I'm thinking about this in terms of the fact that many trans women find themselves trapped between their feminist commitments to feminist liberation, feminist justice, uprooting old stereotypes, and also their desire to be perceived by other people as feminine. Which requires subjecting oneself to a regimen of feminization, which can include things like changing your clothes voice training, makeup, et cetera. In some cases also more invasive procedures that are surgical in nature, like FFS, facial feminization surgery.
Ellie: 40:32
And I think not just the desire to be perceived by others, but also sometimes to be perceived by themselves, right. And to overcome dysphoria sometimes by changing the way that their face or their appearance looks, of course. So, yeah, I mean, I think I am pretty comfortable as a feminist in the space of accepting that we're aiming for an overcoming of gender depression, while also on an individual level, often finding ourselves invested affectively and libidinally in some of these beauty norms. I mean, I think this is the case not only for beauty norms, but also for norms around intimate relationships and a lot of things that have to do with gender liberation. Some people would probably have issues with this, but I'm very much like a live and let live type of person when it comes to individual choices around your own appearance, while also recognizing that those choices are shaped in broader context. And so like, you know, in my case, would I spend a lot of money getting skincare, doing makeup, you know, a lot of money on clothes, including heels sometimes, if we didn't live in a sexist society, probably not, but am I gonna stop? Do I have a problem with continuing to do those things? Am I gonna stop doing those things? No, I absolutely love those things. And so, yeah, I think I was just like introducing a trans friend to lip liner a few weeks ago, which was so fun. I did actually a horrible job, but I, yeah, I think, I don't know. I'm curious what you think about that, David.'cause this is obviously a topic that I discuss a lot with other feminist colleagues, but I think it's also because maybe it's a cop out. Maybe it's like a live and let live, but also we should be fighting for gender justice. But I think. The live and let live needs to be the most important thing, especially when we're talking about trans women because their choices have been so severely constrained. If to be identified as feminine is to have your choices constrained to be a trans woman is to have your choices, all the more constrained, given the way that you're caught in double binds of very different and incompatible gender norms. Does that make sense?
David: 42:42
It does make sense. And you know, I will never tell a trans woman. You should do feminization. But like, I am agreeing with you that seems like the last thing on my mind when having this discussion to have a concern about this particular aspect. But it does crystallize that tension that is more general. It's just lift more intensely in this particular case potentially. And the worry that it raises and that I've seen articulated by a number of feminists is that it reduces feminism to what is called sometimes choice feminism, the function of feminism is perhaps, and I'm here trying to give the description of choice feminism a fair account where feminism becomes about helping us understand the difficult decisions that women have to make in society, even when those decisions are unideal, without passing judgment on them. The concern about that strand of feminism is that then it does ignore how the logic of choice and individualism gets very easily co-opted, of course by neoliberal and capitalist modes of production. But it doesn't resolve the fundamental issue. Right, of like, should we, should women throw away their bras? Should those of us who use beauty products also throw them in the trash? Yeah. It's very difficult.
Ellie: 44:04
Bartky's gonna come back and say it is going to produce shame no matter what, because all of these standards are ultimately producing docile bodies. Not to mention the ways that adhering to beauty standards help one succeed. And you know, for many trans women live in the world.
David: 44:26
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Ellie: 44:51
We've talked about Simone de Beauvoir, whose 1940s version of feminism has been a hugely influential in philosophy. A couple of decades later, a new generation of what are known as French feminists come along. Funnily enough, not all of them are French, but they were writing in French.
David: 45:07
Actually, a minority of them are French.
Ellie: 45:09
So it's mostly associated with Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, whom we spoke about in another recent episode, and Julia Kristeva
David: 45:16
and Monique Wittig.
Ellie: 45:17
Monique Wittig, but I would say Wittig less with what we're about to talk about, which is this specific contribution of French feminism starting in the 1970s, what is known as ecriture feminine, feminine writing. They like to keep it in the French, in part because the word ecriture or writing is feminine in French. And these thinkers are basically striving for a way to do philosophy and a way to write that is grounded not in the traditional expectations of a clearly legible mode of understanding that is rooted in norms of reason. But instead that engages the body in a more fundamental way that engages subjectivity, and that essentially is breaking open our very expectations of what philosophical writing is
David: 46:06
And what meaning more generally is.
Ellie: 46:08
Mm-hmm.
David: 46:08
it's not just about writing in the literal sense of the term as inscriptions on paper or on a surface, but as expression and the externalization of subjectivity. Right. Like how we produce meaning to be legible to others. And so we are gonna chat about Hélène Cixous's The Laugh of the Medusa, which is an essay in which Cixous lays out her vision of what ecriture feminine is. And she writes it almost like a manifesto. There's a manifesto like character to her writing that begins with an injunction for women to write. She encourages women to write, to write in their own voice in a feminine voice, hence the use of feminine as an adjective for and to do so as a way of overcoming the phallocentric norms of expression that have ruled philosophy, literature, and also poetry for a long time. So, Ellie, what stands out for you about this really wonderful piece? I mean, I've read it many times. I've also given presentations about it, not in a while, but it's been very influential for me.
Ellie: 47:19
Yeah. She says that women have been driven away from writing as well as from their body. So she thinks that we're alienated both from writing and from the body, and she wants us to reclaim the relationship with those things. And so for her writing, specifically writing theory or philosophy is not some abstract endeavor, but something that engages the whole body. And so the reclamation of writing in the body, those aren't two separate reclamations. They're actually part of the same reclamation for her. And the reclamation is also a writing of one's self, the invention of a new, and what she calls insurgent writing that allows the unconscious to spring forth. So I think oftentimes when we think about writing theory, we think about kind of wrangling ideas and making them legible in a traditional sort of subject predicate syntax. And Cixous wants to disrupt that. She wants to say, yeah, we don't wanna repress or suppress all of the unconscious and bodily elements of writing. We actually want them to shine forth. And so let's embrace a kind of unruly form of writing. And I think that Unruliness has traditionally been associated more with femininity than it has with masculinity. And so the wrangling mode of theoretical writing, she associates with the masculine and she wants women to speak not in the language of men or phallogocentrism, but instead to write in their own voice.
David: 48:43
Yeah. And so one question that we might ask is, what exactly is this feminine writing? Is it writing by women? Is it writing in a feminine voice or in a feminine style? What exactly is, what work is the adjective doing? One thing that she's very clear about in the essay is that feminine writing is undefinable to a large extent because the very act of defining belongs to the history of phallogocentrism because a definition is precisely that wrangling of a concept at its most fundamental level. Right? It's like giving you a crisp account of the essence of something in language. And so, on the one hand, she wants to move away from that expectation of defining your terms, especially when it comes to feminine. But on the other hand, she also recognizes that she is writing, right? She is using the French language. Yeah. And so feminine writing involves a sort of inner coup where you use the tools that you have available to you in order to stage a revolution of writing at the level of writing, because she says women have been excluded to a large extent through the masculinism of writing, which is really ironic because writing is supposed to be that which enables subversion. so let's do that.
Ellie: 50:04
Well, and a lot of what, not only this text, but also the movement of French feminism that we're talking about. Inaugurated was a revaluing of traditionally feminine attributes that were undervalued. So things like darkness or mystery emotion. I was very enamored of this movement when I was in college, in part because I felt like it helped me to revalue personally some of the things about myself that I had been taught to undervalue as you know, a smart philosophy student. But I have to say, I think you like this essay More than I do.
David: 50:39
More than you. Yeah.
Ellie: 50:40
Because I don't find this idea of reclaiming the quote, feminine as a reclaiming of the sort of individual self of the body of like emotion or intoxication to be all that liberating. I worry a little bit that it's actually relegating us to a regressive idea of what women are, and I think part of that is because Cixous is writing before the sex gender distinction had really been established, that distinction emerges in the US context in the 1970s, but doesn't trickle into France until a couple of decades later. And so there is a real kind of illision of what we might consider a sex gender distinction. And so sometimes the French feminists are accused of being essentialist, and I don't necessarily think that's a full picture of what's going on, but I do think there's a way that like when she talks about writing, having been run by a masculine economy and us like needing to reclaim it by doing like this kind of trippy wild writing, like there's a little bit of the divine feminine TikTok.
David: 51:42
I agree with you that she walks a very thin line. I do like this essay probably more than you, but there are elements that maybe don't work for me as they did when I was a graduate student. And this tiptoeing the line, is that an expression, towing line? Towing, not tiptoeing. This towing the line with essentialism is something that I hesitate about, so for example, the closest that she comes to describing ecriture feminine is when she says that it's something that restores to women their native strength, and that's like that TikToker, right? Like it's the waters, the turbulent waters. It's the awakening of the eternal feminine. But then she does say that what she means by it is an act of self-expression and self-affirmation on the part of women that marks women's entry into history. And so it is about women writing for women as she sees it about their own experience. Where I do disagree with you is on your claim that this is an individualist project. I think at least she says that the project of writing in white ink Uhhuh, which is the essence of feminine writing, which is an illusion also to breast milk and to like a kind of ink that only women have. She says it transcends the individual and it also transcends questions of nationality in class. She wants it to be something that fosters solidarity beyond the eye and beyond the nation state, whether or not it succeeds, of course, it's a difficult question
Ellie: 53:17
Yeah. So I was drawing that from the idea of writing oneself and that is a response to the fact that she thinks that women have been driven towards self-hatred or what she calls an anti narcissism.
David: 53:28
anti love.
Ellie: 53:29
yeah, so she thinks that a sort of focus on the self can be a necessary antidote to that self-hatred. But she also says women must write women. And there's a way that I think there's perhaps an emphasis on identity of, there's a conflation between like gender identity as a woman with femininity that again, I mean, some of that is just a limitation of this having been written in the seventies, but I don't think that it's like that helpful for us in 2025.
David: 54:02
Yeah, but I mean, the only example, the only concrete example that she kind of gives of feminine writing is actually a male author. It's Jean Genet.
Ellie: 54:10
So maybe also a problem in itself.
David: 54:12
Well, why? So you can't have it both ways. You can't say this is essentialist and then criticize
Ellie: 54:18
saying it's the absence of more than one example. That's the problem. Not that it's a man.
David: 54:22
Yeah. But that example already moves us away from an essentialist reading by necessity. And so we might want to think more than about the identity of the writing subject, the features of the writing that might qualify a text for, you know, this category of feminine writing. And that's also difficult to answer in the text, but it seems to me that for Cixous, the key verb here is the French voler, which has a double meaning in French voler means to fly. And there's a lot of references to women taking wing, soaring, liberating themselves. This kind of upward movement of liberation where you take language and you fly with it. Taking it in directions that are unexpected by traditional meal standards. At the same time, and this goes to the insurrectionist kind of inner coup that I was talking about, voler in French also means to steal to pilfer, to defraud. And so there is both, it's like steal what you can and run with it.
Ellie: 55:31
Well, and in that sense, I mean this is part of what, why ecriture feminine has been so influential there is. Emphasis on reclamation through subversion of the existing material that we have. So, it's a bit different from the perhaps overused and sometimes misunderstood, but beautiful nonetheless, Audre Lorde quote, the Master's tools will not dismantle the Master's house because I think what Cisoux is trying to say is like, these are actually the tools we have available to us. And so the point is to subvert them to sort of break the system from within rather than to reinvent new tools.
David: 56:05
And I'm curious what you make of the title. The laugh of the Medusa, the significance of that 'cause she only mentions Medusa once in passing in the essay, the first time I read this, I thought it was gonna be a closed reading of the Myth of the Medusa, and then it was really disappointed that it wasn't at all. It's just a description of the explosive power of writing in a feminine voice. But it does seem like the image that she wants women to have of themselves is the image of a, as she puts it, a beautiful laughing Medusa. I look at Medusa and she is beautiful and she is laughing. I'm curious what you make of that image.
Ellie: 56:42
I'll be honest, I think it's so corny. You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
David: 56:52
You just think it's corny?
Ellie: 56:53
Yeah.
David: 56:54
I don't know. I like it in part because if you think about the figure of Medusa, I mean, obviously there is the uptake of Medusa in like psychoanalytic circles with castration. But even beyond that, in Greek mythology, I mean, Medusa is twice a victim in Greek mythology, right? She's violated by Poseidon. Then at the Temple of Athena, and then Athena gets mad at her and blames her for what happened. And so it's then Athena, another woman who turns her into a gorgan. And so she's a violated woman who also suffers from this sense of woman on woman jealousy. And so I like the reclaiming of that.'cause for me, the image of a beautiful laughing Medusa points to a new relationship to the body that is not rooted in the shame of violation. And also that is not defined by the past because there's a lot of references here about breaking from the past and begin something new in order to fly.
Ellie: 57:56
Well, and certainly this idea of Medusa as laughing. Rather than as like turning somebody into stone invites a new understanding of meaning as well. To go back to something you said earlier where the laugh is not ex, it's, it is not like a linguistic expression, but it's still meaningful.
David: 58:14
Yeah. And it's convulsive, right? It's embodied, it taps into the unconscious and releases it.
Ellie: 58:20
The feminine meaning without logic. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended episodes, community chats, and other additional overthink content.
David: 58:35
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Ellie: 58:50
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