On the Feminist Lab Facebook page, we asked you to share some of the ways you perform your experience of living as a woman. Some further discussion of the motivations behind this request seems needed.
An obvious assumption behind the Wall topic is that people identified as (or identifying themselves as) women do something to encourage or perform a notion of femaleness. This is not going to be a popular idea to many women. Why? The conflation of gender with sex, the assumption that a social role is the same thing as biological potential, supports some essentialist arguments detrimental to feminisms, encouraging women to believe that the fact of their bodies defines their social potential. It’s just as obvious, too, that Feminist Lab assumes gender to be a structure of social control erected to define women in terms of their differences from men.
Still, the notion of womanhood as possessing “feminine” qualities, habits, traits, and interests persists. We need only look to our various popular cultures, or around our local coffee shops, to see expressions of femaleness. Some are aligned with normative expectations of the feminine, but the variation is what prompted the topic. Rather than encourage gender in-fighting, the nature of the question “What is a woman?” should be considered as an opportunity to validate our various performances.
Sampling the varieties of “womanhood” as they are performed by self-identified women should help us move away from simplified dualisms, especially those frightening categories of judgment which divide women amongst themselves.
Join in the experience on Facebook! Or, add to the discussion here.
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