Despite the (completely unofficial) change in the title, “Fierceness” is still very much a keyword for this class. Consonance aside, the “Femininities” of “Fierce Femininities” is a tellingly clunky word, both to speak and to spell–and this got me thinking. Perhaps the word’s awkwardness doesn’t stem just from the way that “femininities” repeats vowels, consonants, and closely related sounds (m’s and n’s; soft c’s and s’s–linguists, help me out here). Instead, I think it’s likely that part of the difficulty of “femininities” is that we simply aren’t used to thinking of genders as having plurals. The difficulty of “femininities” isn’t just phonetic or alphabetical; it’s conceptual as well.

Some Problems with Binarisms

Let me explain a bit. So, you may or may not come into this class familiar with the idea of the “gender binary,” and aware of how more-or-less troubling it is. The idea of the “gender binary” stems from the semiotic illusion that there are two discrete, polar “opposite” genders–“feminine” and “masculine”–stemming from two discretely different biological sexes–“male” and “female.” While this idea has a lot of real-world implications–as Beauvoir eloquently explains–it’s also bankrupt in a few ways.

First and foremost, the idea of the gender binary supposes that gender is a static thing, as though at every minute I were definitively “done” with my gender: I “am” masculine or I “am” feminine. But this really isn’t the case in terms of lived experience. Performance theory–stemming from the work of J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others–troubles this notion by suggesting that gender is a way of doing rather than being. So, only by performing masculine- or feminine-coded acts, behaviors, etc. repeatedly do I create the illusion that I “am” masculine or feminine. Gender’s “performance” in this sense is not theatrical, or even deliberate; it’s mundane, sometimes to the point of being boring, and often wholly unconscious.

In other words, the attribution of a binary gendered “self” adheres to us only by force of repetition–but only if our performances of gender “work.” So, if our performances of gender are perceived by both others and ourselves as convincingly masculine or feminine, then with enough of those performances we appear simply to “be” masculine or feminine, where that notion of “being” disappears all of the work that has gone into making gender happen. Moments of gender discontinuity or irrelevance (is gender immanent to how I take my coffee?) underscore how fragile this notion of “being” gender is.

Because of the presumption of a binary gender model, our genders–to adapt a concept from work by Sara Ahmed–get stuck to us over time. It can thus feel like a lot of work, of labor, to perform gender differently, illegibly, or with a critical edge. At the same time, we might feel very attached to the gender(s) that get attached to us; gender might enable forms of identification, relation, feeling, and knowing about the world that can be sustaining for us–and maybe even deeply pleasurable. In this way, gender’s stickiness is simultaneously both a problem and an opportunity.

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Welcome to the Class Blog for Violent Femmes! Here, we’ll be posting Object Lessons, Think Pieces, and Odds & Ends, as well as engaging one another in the comments.