WHY FEMINITY IS MADE AND DREAMED BY MAN
an extract:
In a recent work on American media culture andpsychoanalysis called _Enjoy Your Symptom!_ (1992), Slavoj Zizek asks in the title of one chapter, "Why is woman a symptom of man?"
What he alludes to in this intentionally humorous question is a proposition within contemporary psychoanalytic theory (and feminism) that character traits and social roles associated with women come from what are basically male fantasies. Women, in other words, did not themselves invent the idea of "femininity"; rather it was invented for them by men. While the definition of "femininity" changes depending upon historical period and geographical location, generally the term refers to those talents and
shortcomings which make women "best suited" to perform domestic labor -- and perhaps renders them incapable of doing anything else.
Clearly, the idea of femininity is ultimately more beneficial to males than females: it guarantees men freedom from domestic work and grants them the privileges of public authority.
I find Zizek's question useful because it implies that gender division is itself a form of "illness" which generates symptoms.
Furthermore, the question reminds us that the fantasy which is "femininity" tells us more about men than it does about actually existing women. What I want to contend is that transgender is a symptom, just as woman is a symptom, of the social disruption caused by gender division. While "woman" is an ancient and enduring symptom of gender division, transgender is perhaps the most historically recent one; it is, as I will argue below, what might be called a post-feminist symptom generated by the slow withering away of what we know of today as "woman".
American culture experienced the heyday of the women's movement just two decades ago, at which time many real women fought to be appreciated for their professional skills and intellectual capabilities rather than their beauty and vulnerability. To a certain extent, the women's movement is changing the roles available to women in American culture generally. Women have gained more social power in the past few decades than ever before in history, but they still have relatively little power when compared to their male counterparts. Nevertheless, men are aware of the threat women pose to their jobs and social prestige. It seems to me no surprise, then, that a post-feminist culture has found out a way to reinvent
the woman as she once was: socially dis-empowered, largely unemployed and eager to appear physically attractive. And this woman is just as much man-made as ever--in fact, she is a man who has simply altered his physical appearance in order to be "female".
When a middle class American slums, she experiences a heightened sense of her own power and importance on the basis of her national, ethnic and class identity. But slumming is not about feeling powerful. It is more precisely a controlled dosage of impotence -- a temporary identification with the disempowered, oppressed or underprivileged which allows the slummer to enjoy slum culture without having to confront the material consequences of life in the real slums. It should go without saying that the slum means something very different to someone who was born and grewup there. Slumming implies *choosing* to live in poverty, and one can only make this choice if there already exist groups of people and places where poverty is not a choice, where poverty is *imposed*.
Earlier I discussed how an identity like transgender gets produced when particular actions and choices are represented in dominant culture as expressions of a person's "soul". Likewise, the identity of the slummer suggests that living in poverty is a choice people can make because they are naturally inclined to a life of marginalization, disempowerment and material scarcity. To a certain extent, slummers fantasize that real members of the underclass have *chosen* their identities too. Their easy downward mobility becomes "proof" for the ease with which one might become upwardly mobile.
Slumming is therefore the perfect compensatory fantasy for the middle class in regards to class division. It perpetuates the myth that class is merely a state of mind. When a middle class person dresses up in underclass drag, she convinces herself that the line between economic classes is fake, just a kind of masquerade. Of course, it is masquerade for the slummer, but rarely is it so for real underclass people.
Acts of slumming justify the division between the middle class and the underclass, just as acts of transgendering reinforce gender inequality. The middle class maintains its privileged position by
inventing an underclass to do its dirty work -- to perform manual labor, salaried domestic labor and menial service jobs. Man, as I have already contended, invented woman for much the same reason.
What gender division shares with class division at this point in history is a structure of domination which is maintained through the deliberate effacement of the difference between fantasy and reality.
Transgendered people and slummers are two identities generated, like symptoms, by unresolved class conflict. Both are identities predicated upon the use of fantasy to cross and even protest social
divisions without actually dismantling the divisions themselves.
However, the transgendered person and the slummer reveal to us that "forever" is sheer fantasy. Transgendered people and slummers are historically *specific* forms of identity -- that is, they
could only have come into being contemporary with late capitalism and post-feminism. One could not have transgender-as-identity without feminism (or gay rights), which came along only a few years
ago. And one could not go slumming without living in multinational capitalism, which was invented in this century. Gender division andclass division as we know them have not gone on "forever", nor do
they have to continue into the future. The idea that social division is "natural" because it has "always" been there is a fantasy people have at their own expense. It is a fantasy that benefits some powerful
people -- for they can claim that their power has "always" existed --and leaves the rest of society trapped, immobile and divided.
by: Annalee Newitz BAD SUBJECTS #7, SEPTEMBER 1993
