Femininity

Femininity is the quality of being feminine or the trait of being female. The term femininity in particular evokes the normative assumption that women should[Page 154] embody and reflect feminine qualities such as being private, domestic, gentle, graceful, delicate, ladylike, passive, sensual, and emotional. These qualities depend on a defining opposition to masculine traits such as public, professional, strong, powerful, hard, aggressive, and rational. Broadly, gender differences and the definition of male and female depend on the distinction between femininity and masculinity and on an abiding heterosexuality between men and women that further emphasizes male and female traits; without femininity there would be no masculinity and vice versa. Feminine traits such as those just listed also are coded through Western race and class politics that emphasize whiteness, refinement, education, and wealth.

Importantly, feminists have noted that qualities of femininity derive from devaluation of women in patriarchal sexist societies. Although femininity relies on its binary relationship to masculinity, this binary is at once qualitatively unequal and essentially false. It is unequal because femininity reflects weakness and thus is depreciated in relation to the strength and superiority of masculinity. It is essentially false because such categories of difference do not hold up to scrutiny; binaries cannot encompass the diversity and difference of actual attributes and identities of women and men. The variability of women's identities illustrates the precarious condition of femininity given that femininity never exists purely or ideally in the material world.

Feminists insist that because femininity is idealized, it is not essential or biological to women. They argue that women reproduce femininity, albeit imperfectly, through their identification with feminine ideals and representations and through the daily practices of feminine identity. This reproduction of femininity is itself normative as it relates to idealized and socially sanctioned gender categories, symbols, practices, and representations. Feminine girls and women gain social, economic, and political recognition and reward that masculine women do not. This is evident through practices and attitudes regarding homophobia, violence against women who do not properly take on feminine identities or symbols, and the devaluation of effeminate men or androgynous individuals. Psychoanalytic approaches insist that the reproduction of feminine identity even entails the unconscious adoption of feminine gender norms by women through disciplining spaces of masculine power. Psychoanalysis also suggests that subjects must take on gendered symbolism to form psyches in the first place and thus to enter the social world.

During recent years, reactions to stereotypes of second-wave feminists as butch, antifeminine, rough, and aggressive have led to new embraces of femininity. So-called power feminists, in addition to some third-wave feminists and women more generally, insist that girls and women can be both strong and feminine. Mainstream movements such as “girl power” movements reflect these goals to redefine femininity as powerful and valuable.