Femininities and Sexualities

This paper seeks to develop a theory of subversive femininities or femme theory. It argues for the inclusion of femmephobia in intersectional analyses and provides the theoretical groundwork necessary for feminist theorists and researchers to incorporate an analysis of femmephobia into their studies of oppression.

"One of the central aims of Ringrose’s new book is to create a more nuanced way of understanding how young girls and women are located within a knotted array of entanglements and ‘assemblages’, embodied by the cultural figures of the successful girl, the mean girl and the sexy girl. First, the ‘successful girl’ seems to underscore all three figures, as the (white, middle class) girl who is deemed to have benefited too much from the feminist movement. She is a girl whose success, while located at the perfectly neoliberal individual level, has resulted in a broader feminisation of cultural space, to the point where sexism is now a problem faced by boys. In the second figure, Ringrose develops previous work in Feminism and Psychology (Ringrose, 2006), expertly demonstrating the classed bias of the ‘mean girl’. The middle class mean girl’s psychological and indirect aggression has been normalised, so that this normalisation is placed in contrast to the assumed working class violent girl, with Ringrose drawing into this analysis the 2011 London Riot’s media focus on ‘Riot Girls’ (yet another media recuperation of a feminist movement) as symbols of femininity gone wrong. Finally the ‘sexy girl’ is a figure who is pathologised within the saturating rhetoric of the ‘sexualisation of culture’, which requires girls to maintain an image of white middle classed innocence, and yet these girls are at the same time provided with opportunities for their bodies to become a locus of desire and erotic capital. On the one hand girls are seen as the citizens of the future, and yet their sexuality is regarded as dangerous and devious, so that any real discussion of female pleasure (in for example sex education) is regulated and rendered
invisible through calls to roll back misplaced feminist notions of ‘sexual liberation’."

The spectrum of practices termed “Female Genital Mutilation” (or FGM) by the World Health Organization is sometimes held up as a counterexample to moral relativism. Those who advance this line of thought suggest the practices are so harmful in terms of their physical and emotional consequences, as well as so problematic in terms of their sexist or oppressive implications, that they provide sufficient, rational grounds for the assertion of a universal moral claim—namely, that all forms of FGM are wrong, regardless of the cultural context. However, others point to cultural bias and moral double standards on the part of those who espouse this argument, and have begun to question the received interpretation of the relevant empirical data concerning FGM as well. In this article I assess the merits of these competing perspectives. I argue that each of them involves valid moral concerns that should be taken seriously in order to move the discussion forward. In doing so, I draw on the biomedical “enhancement” literature in order to develop a novel ethical framework for evaluating FGM (and related interventions—such as female genital “cosmetic” surgery and non-therapeutic male circumcision) that takes into account the genuine harms that are at stake in these procedures, but which does not suffer from being based on cultural or moral double standards.

Since the 1970s social science researchers have documented the cultural devaluation of femininity and its impact on experiences of discrimination among sexual and gender minorities. Yet, despite the continued and accumulating evidence demonstrating the role of anti-femininity (or femmephobia) in these experiences, little research has specifically examined femininity as an intersecting component of discrimination. Using in-depth interviews with sexual and gender minorities (N = 38), the current study explores the intersecting role of femmephobia in experiences of discrimination. Under the global theme of “femininity as target,” 5 key subthemes were identified: femininity and passing, regulating sexualities, masculine right of access, biological determinism, and the feminine joke. Participants illuminated femmephobia as a regulatory power within LGBTQ+ communities and society at large, as well as how femininity itself operates as a target in their experiences of gender policing and discrimination. By turning attention toward femininity, the current paper provides a clearer understanding of what may possibly lay at the heart of many social issues surrounding discrimination and violence. These findings have implications for the study of social inequalities, as well as strategies for remedying the pervasive devaluation of femininity.

Objectives: To help students: (1) think critically about how they perform gender through clothing choices; (2) recognize how different cultures define masculinity and femininity.
Courses: Communication Theory, Gender and Communication, Popular Communication, Rhetorical Theory, Visual Rhetoric

In this chapter I address the relationship between the social space of
online SNSs and schooling, focusing on how girls’ representations online relate to their experiences in ‘real life’ at school. According to Ofcom statistics, in a survey of 5000 adults and 3000 children 49 per cent of those aged between 8 and 17 have an internet profile on social networking sites (SNSs) such as Bebo and Facebook (Waters 2008). Boyd and Ellison (2007: 11) suggest that they ‘constitute an important research context for scholars investigating processes of impression management, self-presentation, and friendship performance’. This is particularly
true for researchers exploring issues of peer networks, friendships,
intimacy and gendered and sexualized identities, subjectivities and power dynamics formed through the social context of schooling. Social networking sites are an important bridge into understanding social relationships at school, because contrary to the notion that young people are making many new contacts in cyberspace, Livingstone (2007), Boyd (2008) and the research drawn on in this chapter, suggest that young people are mostly communicating with their school friends online. SNSs mainly work to extend and amplify school-based relationships, as young people use them to communicate with school-based contacts when outside (but
also when possible inside) the physical school space. However, schools are faced with difficulties in understanding and addressing SNSs, as many view online engagement as happening mostly outside the bounds of schooling (Selwyn 2008). Consequently, schools have also not addressed the specifically gendered and sexualized aspects of student’s engagements with SNSs, nor how these impact on students’ experiences at school.

This petition argues that erotic comics are an important cultural record of the way in which diverse sexualities are understood and portrayed, and sexual fantasies explored. An Erotic Comics Anglophone Archive (ErotiCAA) will preserve these works for research by scholars in many different disciplines.

One of the biggest problems facing anyone researching pornography/erotica or comics, and therefore doubly so for anyone researching erotic/pornographic comics, is finding and gaining access to primary materials. So we have decided to have a go at establishing an archive in the UK to collect and catalogue English-language porn and erotic comics.

We intend to approach a number of libraries and research institutions to host and/or fund the archive. Persuading them to support us will be a lot easier if we an show that there is a need for this archive, so to help with that we’ve started this petition.

We’ve already got this kick-ass logo designed for us by Alison Lucy Stone and meetings set up with a couple of big libraries. Help us out by signing the petition? And if you’d like to be more involved, please tweet Dr Anna Madill @UKFujoshi or Dr Jude Roberts @tangendentalism - we’d love to hear from you!

Using femme theory, Foucault, and queer failure as analytical frameworks, the current paper demonstrates the role of feminine failure in resisting and subverting systems of oppression, subsequently providing the minute shifts in power necessary to expand the terms of patriarchal femininity. More specifically, the current paper draws on contemporary modes of art and aesthetics to examine the productive potential of failing to embody patriarchal femininity, positing this failure as a form of femme resistance. By hijacking cultural signifiers of adornment, femme and feminine failure celebrate that which is culturally shamed (queer, fat, disabled, variant, poor, and racially minoritised bodies), expose systems of erasure, challenge binary systems of meaning, and promote feminine growth. Examining each of these themes in turn, the current paper argues that feminine failure challenges the pillars of patriarchal femininity and discursive systems of normativity. To this end, femme as a theoretical framework demonstrates the freedom of failure by exposing the heterogeneous multiplicities of femininity, and offering possibilities that normativity never could. This critical discursive essay contributes to the emergent application of femme as a theoretical framework.

An essay is presented on rhetorical strategies used to create relationships between people. It offers the views of a cultural outsider observing waitresses at a Southern United States Waffle House restaurant, where staff often use the epithet "honey" when speaking to customers. The author describes a shift in power where the restaurant staff are in control rather than the customer and the psychological implications, sexual aspects, and relationship defining results of his being called "honey" by the waitstaff.

This paper challenges post-feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible
ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools and beyond. We map how girls negotiate contradictory neo-liberal discourses of girlhood that dominate in popular culture; what McRobbie calls the new ‘post-feminist masquerade’, which portends that girls can be/come anything
they want, so long as they simultaneously perform ‘hyper-sexy’, the new aspirational feminine ideal. Drawing on individual case studies from four qualitative research projects with teen girls in urban and rural working class communities across England and Wales, we explore how specific ‘working-class’ girls struggle to
negotiate this contradictory terrain of girlhood through imaginary ‘lines of flight’ in their narratives. Specifically, we are interested in applying Deleuze and Guatarri’s writings on immanence and the productive, social status of desire and fantasy through an analysis of girls’ (violent, aggressive or utopian) fantasies in ways that move beyond the binary of ‘real/not real’, and thus reject a reading of fantasy as futile, ‘escapist’ or ‘pathological solutions to working class life’. We suggest fantasy might operate as a space of survivability, political subjectivity and resistance to girls’ subordination within Butler’s ‘heterosexual matrix’.

Narrative-works are the lifeblood of femme scholarship. Through this medium, femmes write themselves into existence. In this article, I begin with my own story of femme and examine the backdrop of patriarchal femininity that positions pieces of me as being at odds, disjointed, and something needing to be reconciled. Indeed, many current frameworks and dominant framings for understanding femininity create disjunctures needing to be reconciled and fail to include diverse feminine perspectives in ways that constitute epistemic and hermeneutical injustices. Using my own femme becoming as a guide, I offer this process of femme reconcilement as a framework that can be applied to dislodge feminine normativity and challenge the assumptions researchers make about femininity within their work. In this article I highlight the importance of femme epistemologies; the importance of valuing feminine knowledge, and how the absented femme highlights the continued god-trick of objectivity. Here, I discuss how femme narratives can be used to bolster femme as theory and critical analytic. This situated knowledge holds the possibility to inform novel methodological frameworks and to substantially shift the way researchers think about femininity and feminine people.

"In this chapter I address the relationship between the social space of online SNSs and schooling, focusing on how girls’ representations online relate to their experiences in ‘real life’ at school. According to Ofcom statistics, in a survey of 5000 adults and 3000 children 49 per cent of those aged between 8 and 17 have an internet profile on social networking sites (SNSs) such as Bebo and Facebook (Waters 2008). Boyd and Ellison (2007: 11) suggest that they ‘constitute an important research context for scholars investigating processes of impression management, self-presentation, and friendship performance’. This is particularly true for researchers exploring issues of peer networks, friendships, intimacy and gendered and sexualized identities, subjectivities and power dynamics formed through the social context of schooling. Social networking sites are an important bridge into understanding social relationships at school, because contrary to the notion that young people are making many new contacts in cyberspace, Livingstone (2007), Boyd (2008) and the research drawn on in this chapter, suggest that young people are mostly communicating with their school friends online. SNSs mainly work to extend and amplify school-based relationships, as young people use them to communicate with school-based contacts when outside (but also when possible inside) the physical school space. However, schools are faced with difficulties in understanding and addressing SNSs, as many view online engagement as happening mostly outside the bounds of schooling (Selwyn 2008). Consequently, schools have also not addressed the specifically gendered and sexualized aspects of student’s engagements with SNSs, nor how these impact on students’ experiences at school."

This paper uses close analysis of two couples to examine the micro-practices and processes of gendered power within middle-class young people's intimate partner relationships. It is based on in-depth interviews with 14–16 year old young people in an affluent area of England. The paper argues that intimate relationships can be spaces of intense pleasure, as well as providing a site of calm and escape from the peer surveillance of the broader social network. However, they can also be oppressive sites of constriction and control, and reproduction of traditional gendered narratives; in these couples, the young women were rendered responsible for the “emotion work”. The young women, though, often disavowed and downplayed inequalities, negotiating the contradictory and schizoid nature of contemporary girlhood.

"This paper examines the growth and some of the disputes
surrounding “masculinity” as a legitimate category for both social
and more traditional scholars seeking to understand Late
Antiquity. It shows how investigations of masculinity often serve a
political purpose. Some researchers delve into a topic such as
“homosexuality” as a way of revealing how particular societies
such as ancient Greece and Rome had greater tolerance towards
same-partner sex than their modern counterparts. This agenda
helps to explain why many studies on Late Antique masculinity
focus on men as sexual beings. It might also account for the
reluctance by some academics to accept social history as a
legitimate historical tool.
"

Passing and failing: passing as that with which I disidentify, failing to approximate norms of cultural intelligibility. Through an exploratory personal essay and autoethnography, the current paper addresses the co-existence of seemingly contradictory identities, and the complications of passing and failing. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature on identity formation and nuanced categories of identity.

This PhD thesis contributes to sociological understandings of how femininities are understood and experienced by Australian heterosexual women, and develops language for conceptualising the hierarchies within femininities, and femininities and masculinities. Furthermore, through analysis of gender maneuvering this research provides insight into the intricacies of the relationship between structure and agency in expressing one’s gender. Motivated by a lack theoretical works on multiple femininities, this thesis uses focus groups with different communities of practice to understand how female gender expressions are constructed hierarchically, and to examine the complexities around embodying various forms of femininities.

Understanding how men express ‘being a man’ and their masculinity has been of considerable interest in sociology in recent years. However, female gender expressions have received less attention, and much of the work that has occurred within this field has examined the experiences of queer women, leaving heterosexual gender expressions a relatively under explored area. I argue that dominant female gender expressions can be understood as being constructed through three key dimensions of femininity: the physical (body), the malleable (appearance) and the restrictive (demeanour). Non-dominant and pariah femininities manifest when these dimensions are violated in some way, attracting stigma and significant social penalties. By focussing on how my participants collectively group together and rank particular forms of female gender expression, a hierarchy through which to analyse femininities is proposed.. Within this, the intragender relations between female gender expressions highlights not only the relationality between the feminine and masculine, but also between the feminine and unfeminine. Through examination of the multiplicities of femininities and their relationships, I demonstrate how the lack of linguistic alternatives for heterosexual female gender expressions results in a reinforcement of binary constructions of gender that maintains not only a position of subordination to men, but also privileges femininities that maintain this relationality.


I explore the ways that women find spaces where they are able to challenge dominant ideals of female gender expressions and reconstruct femininity on their own terms. Relations within particular communities of practice demonstrate that violations of the dimensions of femininity do not always attract the same stigma but instead can enable alternative gender relations to develop through gender manoeuvring. However, once out of these spaces, pressures to embody feminine characteristics are felt throughout women’s lives, exacerbated by dating, relationships, co-habitation and child rearing.

"The aim of this article is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective ethical and political relationalities that circulate in, through, and outside empirical research. We explore research processes as “intra-acting” drawing upon Barad, and develop Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “assemblages,” “intensities,” “territorialization,” and “lines of flight” to analyze research encounters. Taking inspiration from MacLure’s notions of data “hot spots” that “glow,” we explore methodological processes of working with “affective intensities.” In particular, we draw upon our research with teen girls, mapping out how the discursive-embodied category “slut” works as an affective intensity that propels our feminist research assemblage––from the co-creation of “data” in the field to the “data” analysis and beyond."

In an increasingly visual society, beauty may seem only skin deep. This chapter considers the ethics of cosmetic surgery through the lens of posthumanism, a stance that suggests that defects of the body can be overcome through technology. Cosmetic surgery, with its reliance on prostheses and promise of reshaping
the body, is, at its heart, a posthuman enterprise. Although many have engaged in cosmetic surgery, actress Heidi Montag became an exemplar of reshaping the body by undergoing ten different plastic surgery procedures in one day. Using Montag as foil, this chapter examines four ethical dimensions of cosmetic surgery: the ethics of the medical professionals who perform and advertise these procedures, the ethics of the individual making the decision, the ethics of the media structures that promote a homogenous
ideal of beauty, and the ethics of those who tacitly approve of such procedures.