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December 7 - December 13, 2018
Unruliness isn’t just calling attention to arbitrary expectations of how a woman should behave. It’s also a willingness to expect better for all other women—and better of oneself.
Like that of so many celebrities, Nicki Minaj’s Instagram feed is at once incredibly boring and incredibly beautiful to behold.
The tendency to label Minaj “too slutty” or sexually explicit is a symptom of a much larger anxiety: how to process a woman, and a black woman in particular, who has taken control of her body, her formidable talents, and the way they are marketed, monetized, and received.
“many black women singers, irrespective of the quality of their voices, have cultivated an image which suggests they are sexually available and licensed. Undesirable in the conventional sense, which defines beauty and sexuality as desirable only to the extent that it is idealized and unattainable, the black female body gains attention only when it is synonymous with accessibility, availability, and when it is sexually deviant.”
If women of all races have been objectified for centuries, what happens when one decides to do it herself? Is it liberating—and if she thinks it’s liberating, has she simply accepted the ideology of the oppressor? And how do the questions of empowerment function differently when applied to white women and women of color?
“Every woman is multifaceted. Every woman has a switch, whether she’s going to be maternal, whether she’s going to be a man-eater, whether she has to kick ass, whether she has to be one of the boys, whether she has to show the guys that she’s just as smart or smarter, she’s just as talented or creative. Women suppress a lot of their sides.”
“People who like me—they’ll listen to my music, and they’ll know who I am,” she later told Out. “I just don’t like that people want you to say what you are, who you are. I just am. I do what the fuck I want to do.”
“whenever black women own their own sense of sexuality and it appears to not be controlled by the hetero-male gaze, the whole world gets in a tizzy.”
women are far more complicated than others have come to assume.
Makeup is central to this transformation: a teenager who wears makeup declares her status as a sexual object; the grown woman who doesn’t wear makeup signals classiness; the aging woman who wears too much makeup becomes gaudy in her insistence on her continued objecthood.
In recent years, similar strictures have applied to the woman’s body: the most desirable form is that of a fourteen-year-old girl, down to the perky breasts, the lean arms, the slender, athletic legs. “Womanly” hips and ass might be theoretically fetishized, but they’re desirable only when the rest of the body remains that of the girl.
There’s a highly circumscribed performance of femininity expected at each stage of a woman’s life—a certain way her face and body should look.
Societal repulsion, like that directed at Madonna’s body, occurs not when a woman turns a certain age, but when some part of the body evades or otherwise rejects attempts to discipline it into a younger version of itself.
Work out, but don’t get arms like Madonna’s; work hard to keep your body ageless, but make that labor invisible. Put simply: you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t. Try too hard, and you’re disgusting; don’t try at all, and you’re invisible.
Madonna also embodies the ideologies of postfeminism, with its attendant privileging of the desires, power, and pleasure of the individual woman over actual equality and rights for women in general.
“There are very few women willing to fight the idea that beauty is the highest currency. That’s the problem: that women are scared to fight against that currency, fight against the idea of, ‘Does a woman have any worth past youth and beauty?’ I believe they do, and I will fight that fight until I die, but I think a lot of women feel they have to give up.”
When she writes on her blog that “for me pregnancy is the worst experience of my life,” she’s not just “keeping it real,” as she proclaims at the beginning of the paragraph; she’s working to mainstream the truly unruly idea that pregnancy—and, by extension, even motherhood—is not the pinnacle, or even defining purpose, of every woman’s life.
The most significant mother of Christianity, for example, is the Virgin Mary: asexual, idealized, immaculate. Mary is rarely represented while actually pregnant, only afterwards, when the child is safely born, both mother and child clean and content. This beatific mother is contained, pure—the antidote to the abjectly pregnant mother.
It’s the sort of contradictory messaging a pregnant woman receives: you’re hot, but on the border of obscene; you’re perfect, but you’re huge; don’t feel bad about yourself, but your thin body is better.
She should be assertive but not bossy, feminine but not prissy, experienced but not condescending, fashionable but not superficial, forceful but not shrill. Put simply: she should be masculine, but not too masculine; feminine, but not too feminine. She should be everything, which means she should be nothing.
“Shrillness” is just a word to describe what happens when a woman, with her higher-toned voice, attempts to speak loudly. A pejorative, in other words, developed specifically to shame half of the population when they attempt to command attention in the same manner as men.
“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” she said. “But what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”
“I’m a big believer in women making choices that are right for them,” Clinton had continued. “The work that I have done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed at trying to assure that women can make the choices they should make—whether it’s a full-time career, full-time motherhood, or some combination . . .”
Hillary “forces them to ask questions about themselves and the choices they’ve made that they don’t necessarily want to ask.”
it didn’t matter if one’s rhetoric was sexist, after all, if the explicit complaint had nothing to do with her gender.
Andi Zeisler, cofounder of Bitch magazine, explained “bitch” as a word “we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men . . . We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it. We use it for a woman who doesn’t back down from confrontation.”
The word “charisma” comes from the Greek khárisma: “favor freely given” or “gift of grace”—more specifically, from the gods or God. Someone who is touched, in other words, by good favor; a person whom everyone, even and especially God, just likes.
Charisma knows no party affiliation; it doesn’t correlate to intelligence, or skill at governance.
“the tendency to yell on the campaign stump is not gender specific, but the public is much less accustomed to hearing a woman’s voice in such settings.”
“Sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting”—a
CNN commentator Erica Jong explained that “we don’t know how a female president should sound. We’ve never had one before . . . And men’s voices are so much more familiar.”
“Presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being ‘manly’—physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume.” When a woman fails, in essence, to be a man, she also fails as a candidate—if she tries to emulate masculine behaviors, she’s too severe; if she leans in to feminine ones, she’s simply unsuited for office.
her understanding of her worth is so strong that she’s refused, at every point in her life and career, to let men define her.
This country, after all, largely values such attributes only when they apply to men.
interactions that suggested that no matter how skilled, contained, and intelligent a woman was, a man still had license to speak over her, to hover menacingly behind her, to criticize the moderators of the debate as unbalanced when they attempted to prevent him from interrupting her.
“for every person cheering your courage, there are others wishing you were a bit more of a coward.”
Transnormativity can be loosely defined as the notion that a “successful” trans person is a person who does not appear to be trans.
Trans people who had the most privilege in society before transition often become the ones with the most privilege post-transition: their ability to pass makes it easier to live and work in the world, to be “pretty” enough to deserve to be photographed, to live with less fear.
By making people forget that someone is trans, it also means they don’t have to confront the anxiety, fear, or anger that arises when someone destabilizes the binary understanding of gender.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, a trans person is four times as likely to live in extreme poverty, 90 percent of trans people have been harassed on the job, and 2015 marked the highest number of trans homicides—at least twenty-two—in history.
Put simply, to be homonormative is to desire all the privileges and rights that straight people have—including marriage, the right to have children, the ability to be thought of as a consumer.
Female to male trans characters are largely invisible on-screen, as are trans women who don’t fully embrace or desire hyper-femininity.
Many men look masculine; others exude a look of Americanness.
when you’re trans, at least in this cultural moment, the personal is always political.
Nearly one in five trans people are victims of domestic abuse. Far more are cut off, alienated, or otherwise affected by transphobic members of their close circle.
“Cait’s experience of coming out is singular. I don’t think anyone’s ever been so welcomed.”
“trans women are disrespected and treated terribly when they don’t pass, but if they do pass they’re called out for upholding the gender binary and cis standards of beauty. It is an impossible bind.”
“So often, visibility uses the lens of respectability to determine who, even in the most vulnerable communities, should be seen and heard. I believe that, through the filter of visibility, those of us most at risk to state violence become even more vulnerable to that violence.”
“You can’t hate someone whose story you know.”
Because when hate and fear become the status quo, the simple act of trying to understand others who don’t live and act the same as you do—an attitude Jenner has now modeled for millions—becomes a profoundly unruly act.
