Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

by Anne Helen Petersen

As I told audiences across the country during my book tour, the history of feminism is two steps forward, one step back—so how can we make that step back smaller?

Hollywood fancies itself one of the most progressive places in the world, even as it reveals itself—as both an industry and a producer of art—to be one of the most regressive and conservative.

But to actually solve these problems—to right these inequities, to transform qualities that are viewed as “too much,” whether as concerns class or race or sexuality or behavior—requires a deeply introspective and intersectional feminism.

Through this lens, unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

As Brittney C. Cooper of Crunk Feminist Collective points out, “these narratives about Black bodies as ‘naturally athletic,’ ‘more powerful,’ ‘more wild,’ ‘less thoughtful,’ and ‘less strategic’ and black female bodies as ‘(un)naturally strong, invulnerable, and unattractive’—are central to Western narratives of white racial superiority.”40

the USTA has long tolerated outbursts from white men, including Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. As critical race scholar Brittney C. Cooper puts it: “White anger is entertaining; Black anger must be contained.”

But what remains, amidst it all, is the excellence: as Rankine declares, “The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine.”

In Western society, fatness is interpreted as failure: a failure of control, of societal expectations, of will. It’s a health issue that’s transformed into an ideological affliction, manifest through a continuous stream of diets, a culture of exercise fanaticism, and compounding shame when these myriad approaches don’t lead to a thin, acceptable body type.

The political power of drag resides in its ability to draw attention to just how performative gender can be. By amplifying characteristics of femininity or masculinity, it highlights their absurdity, their arbitrariness, and just how easily they can be applied and abandoned.

Asserting that women are more interesting than their size or what they put on their body shouldn’t be a radical or unruly idea. But that doesn’t mean, in today’s society, that it isn’t.

The privilege to fuck around intertwines with the privilege to only accept labor that makes you feel good.

A woman navigating the world with the confidence of a man is a beautiful, magnetic, and periodically unnerving sight to behold.

To study these women is to consider larger questions of power, self-objectification, and false consciousness: 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?

This approach to thinking about women’s bodies and their representation falls under the broad umbrella of “intersectional feminism,” which suggests that the only way to talk about the lives of women under patriarchy is to also consider the ways in which those lives are constructed at the nexus of race, sexuality, class, religion, ability, and nationality.

What others might perceive as a maddening insistence on obliqueness doesn’t just blur lines; it calls the very need for them into question.

It’s contradictory, of course, but that’s the guiding structure of any ideology: no matter how emancipatory it might seem for the pregnant body to be visible, that visibility means subjugation to regimes of respectability and regulation under patriarchy.

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.

There will certainly be backlash; it will again expose the ugliest, most enduringly misogynist aspects of our society. But such are the wages of change—the wreckage before the rebuilding.

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. Many of those desires have become cornerstones of the gay rights movement, but they’ve also incited criticism, as they do little to interrogate the systems (marriage, parenthood, capitalism) to which gays desire free entrance.

The less a queer person challenges the gender binary, the more assimilated they are into straight behaviors and lifestyles, the more acceptable and palatable they become.

Reina Gosset, activist-in-residence at Barnard College, puts the situation in stark terms: “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.”

Take a step back and remind yourself: over the course of two years, a prized athlete and avatar of American masculinity became one of the most visible trans people (and, for that matter, women over sixty) in popular culture and then placed herself in situations that forced her to reconsider her world, to examine her various forms of privilege, to face the textured ways of life that are not her own.

There’s a hierarchy within the world of books, deeply rooted in accumulated understandings of class, commerce, and gender. It goes something like this: The more popular, the more marketable, the more visible and readable a book is, the less worth it has within the cultural hierarchy.

In Masscult the trick is plain—to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.”

To be worried about financial success, or readership numbers, is to declare yourself midcult, if not worse.

Weiner herself admits there are tweets she wishes she could delete, soften, or modify: ones that went too far, where she said too much. But that’s the hallmark of unruliness: by surpassing the boundaries of respectability, she was able to yak and tweet and brag loud enough, about topics and ideas in which women have a real stake, for others to hear it.

It’s one thing to argue that you belong—it’s another thing to actually believe it.

few things enrage, confuse, and repulse audiences more than the suggestion that the primary visual purpose of a woman’s body is not the pleasure of men.

The process of representation is from subject to object—and, nearly without exception, through the brush, hands, or eyes of men.

The Code is generally recognized as a means of curbing depictions of violence and suggestions of sex, but almost all of its prohibitions were related to bolstering white, straight, American patriarchy increasingly under threat. For the first few years of its existence, the code was largely for show, but as fears of boycotts grew in the early 1930s, the code’s “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” list, enforced by William Hays and his deputy, Joseph Breen, effectively became the moral guidelines of the moving image.

Questions of representation—who controls it, and who says where and at what point it becomes “too much” in any capacity—have served as the foundation of this book, whose premise is predicated on the small yet significant ways that women have either resisted or wrested control of the way that men have represented them.

Unruliness can be liberating, but within our current cultural climate, it is also endlessly exhausting.

To refuse others’ understanding of yourself and your capabilities doesn’t just feel like self-determination: it’s moving from being the object in someone else’s narrative to the subject of one’s own.